Not exactly what you’re looking for and I haven’t fully read it, but a good place to start on understanding sexuality in socialist countries might be Ghodsee’s book. Just be aware that as a Yankee “leftist” writer she’s contractually obligated to perpetuate nonsense myths.

There was an academic work mentioned in a recent Cosmopod episode Between the Market and the Plan. It was a very brief mention in regards to the shifting sexual mores in the USSR.

Unfortunately the title of the work wasn’t very descriptive nor catchy so I can’t recall it now. And of course the episode is 3 hours long. I’ll try to dig up the reference and get back to you about it.

conservative compared to who and when? 70 years is a long time. the big ones i know off the cuff are:

the soviets decriminalized and then recriminalized homosexuality pretty early on, and then also abortion unbanned, re-banned for the more sympathetic than religious fascism but still gross reason of being desperate for population growth, and then unbanned again later before all the capitalist states.

soviets were better to the queer people liberated from nazi camps than the allies were, etc.

Then, I heard, when Stalin took power,

“Revolution was good, then Stalin [was/did bad thing] so USSR became [bad thing].” is pretty much the original radlib madlib. Whatever social and material conditions existed in the USSR at the time, you can be sure that Stalin was a reflection of them, not the cause of them.

The October Revolution happened in the country that barely climbed out of feudalism, some conservative backlash was inevitable. You can’t just make people all progressive out of the blue, it is a slow process. Poland was just more developed in 1917, so it had some headstart.

Might I suggest that you learn to identify hierarchies of authority and the ways they reinforce themselves using violence, mythology, pretense, and propaganda? Once you drop the labels, you’ll see that any organization that dictates narratives from a hierarchical position of authority looks identical in function, and only varies in degree. The USSR, like every other hierarchy of ignorance attempted to organize itself so that there was at least one government operative in every family, and reinforced that power structure through segregation and coercion. If the government can halt the progression of male maturity at puberty and then promise every man a wife and home to lord over, then it doesn’t have to worry about policing the women and children.