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11

C H APT E R

Socialism Meets

Social Marketing

Jump-Starting the

Commercial Contraceptive

Market in the Former Soviet

Republic of Kazakhstan

Donald Ruschman, Randi Thompson, and Tatiana Stafford

Each success only buys an admission ticket to a more difficult problem.
—Henry Kissinger

This chapter examines how a comprehensive, multipronged, short-term effort to mar-
shal, engage, and direct the considerable local talent and resources of the Republic of
Kazakhstan was able to make contraceptives widely available commercially; convince
women to adopt them as an alternative to abortion (helping to cut the rate in half);
and then become largely self-sufficient by transferring principal responsibility for
maintaining these newly found gains to the private, commercial sector.
The crash of the Soviet Union (USSR) in the early 1990s presented the West
with once-in-a-lifetime challenges and opportunities. U.S. foreign policy toward
the newly independent states was based on engagement and the provision of assis-
tance to aid in the transition from communism and a command economy to dem-
ocratic free markets (Tarnoff, 2002). Nowhere was the need more dramatic than in