I mean, not having women do higher education might bring up fertility rates -- I don't think that there'd a clear answer there. It's true that fertility rates were higher during a period in time when women were in college less, but there were also a number of other societal changes that happened.

But if one doesn't educate women, it runs the risk of probably cutting your GDP significantly, as it halves the size of the pool of people with higher education. That's a costly move.

EDIT: And one other point. If the experiment doesn't work, it's a policy that is hard to back out for a long time. Let's say that you adopt the policy for 10 years. If a woman doesn't get a college education, they're probably going to stay like that for the next ~50 years of their working lives; it's harder and less-effective to go back much later and do adult education. So you're kind of committing to that policy for quite some time to come, and if you don't like the results, you don't really have a lot of way to immediately revert back to the pre-policy environment.

If one wants to try restricting abortions -- also referenced in the article -- or oral contraception or something like that, those are policies that can be readily backed-out if you try them and decide that they don't work well. Not doing higher education for women would be a change to Russia that will be around for a long, long time.