This book is a brief history of all the women in all the Russias that existed on the far-eastern European plain during the past millennium. That history includes more than one hundred ethnic groups inhabiting what had become by 1800 the geographically largest country on Earth. Their lives across the centuries deserve telling, from the earliest times to the most recent, so this book begins with the Rus of the tenth century and ends in the present day. It concentrates on the Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Poles, Lithuanians, Estonians, Latvians, and Jews who made up the great majority of the population. It also attempts to bring into view the histories of women of smaller ethnic groups, particularly those who lived in the vast territories of Siberia, Central Asia, and the Caucasus that were annexed by the spreading Russian Empire.
Susan Armitage, a historian of women in the western United States, has written, “We do not wish to create a sweet little cameo version of western history that will slip right into the Hisland story. We want to change the way the story is written.”1 Historians who study women in Russia have the same goal. Over the last forty years, they have done much to uncover the realities of women’s lives in the Russian past, and thereby challenge the Hisland story. And yet, through no fault of their own, their scholarship remains somewhat ghettoized, resisted or overlooked by many who consider women’s history a lesser, didactic, even outdated endeavor. We who write the general histories seek to undermine that resistance by demonstrating that putting women into the history of Russia changes the way we understand the past of all the people of that great nation, women as well as men. Two historians, Barbara Alpern Engel and Natalia Pushkareva, have already done much in their surveys of the history of women in Russia to advance this enlightenment. I hope to add to what they have accomplished.2
The Focus of the Study
To that end, each chapter begins with a survey of the political and economic history of the period under examination. Each then poses two questions: What did women do in this time, and what difference did they make? Uncovering what they did requires telling the story of their history as a gender. How did gender values and practices structure their lives, how did they react to these influences, and how did both their reactions and the gender arrangements change over time? Women’s beliefs, their roles in their families, their work outside the home, their authority within their families and communities, and the variations in all of these produced by differences in age, ethnicity, marital status, religion, and social rank will occupy much of our attention. Each chapter will also highlight both politically significant women, such as Catherine the Great, and less prestigious individuals whose lives illustrate important themes. Sidebars include pictures and excerpts from primary sources about those women.
It is possible to undertake such a study now because historians and literary scholars have produced so much fine work on the history of women in Russia over the last several decades. Some of these were Soviet scholars, many were British and American, and now they are being joined by a new generation of Eastern and Western Europeans. Synthesizing their findings is a chief undertaking of this book. Included will be citations to English collections of translated primary documents and to translations of my own that bring the voices of the people studied into their own history. The last chapter relies as well on interviews with six Belarusian women, friends and acquaintances of mine whose insights enhanced my understanding of the years since 1991.
This is not a history of gender. Definitions of masculinity and femininity and the norms that followed from those definitions are important subjects in what follows, but this book does not treat women’s history as a lens through which to see something else, such as gender. Nor is it a modern variant on the oft-crooned lament about how difficult the lives of women have been across the ages, though it does document the manifold ways in which patriarchal institutions and the hardships of Russian history affected women. Instead it highlights women’s agency. All the subordinated people of the past must be approached this way, if their lives are to be understood and the historical significance of those lives is to be appreciated.
Changing the Narrative
Bringing women to the forefront changes the established narrative of Russia’s political, economic, and social history. Political history has been the dominant member of that triad, because the government has played a particularly important part in Russian history, and because historians in the European world are heirs to a historiographical tradition that viewed politics as the driver of history. This book puts women into the political narrative of Russian history by discussing their roles in elite politics and in mass movements and highlighting the contributions of important individuals. Tracing women’s participation in politics, which was limited by custom and law and yet was often consequential, yields a more nuanced view of political realities than the top-down, male-centered perspective that traditional historiography gives us.
Women’s history also teaches that one of the great political differences between Russia and the rest of Europe was the attempts by rulers, from Peter the Great onward, to engineer gender change in Russia. This intervention and public responses to it led in the later nineteenth century to an upsurge of political and social activism by women. Their activism drove revolutionary change forward before and during the Revolution and resulted in the implementation of a sweeping program of political, economic, and social emancipation for women in the 1920s. Soviet policies and women’s responses to them in turn made possible the massive industrialization drives of the 1930s and the successful mobilization of the nation in World War II.
Women’s history also sheds light on the history of the Russian Empire. Although scholars have studied the ways non-Russian women experienced conquest and colonization, their findings have not much affected the narrative of the colonial process, most of which still consists of discussions of government policy and of the responses of the male leaders of the conquered peoples. In fact, women mattered. Native women in Siberia mediated between their own people and the conquerors, resisting the colonizers in some cases, assisting them in others. Across the Caucasus, Central Asia, and Siberia, women kept ethnic and religious traditions alive. Women were also among the colonizers from the nineteenth century onward, sometimes representing the imperial power, as the wives of governors and communist officials did, sometimes working to improve the lives of native women, as did teachers and physicians, all the while transmitting the gender values of the imperial power. The people of the time recognized the importance of women to colonial interactions; historians have undervalued it.
The prevailing understanding of Russia’s economic history is also altered if one puts women in, for then the dependence of the economy on their work becomes a central theme. Throughout Russian history, women’s participation in subsistence agriculture was crucial to peasant survival, and therefore to national survival. When industrialization began, they flocked to the factories in greater numbers than did women elsewhere in Europe. Because gender assumptions structured their involvement, women’s participation differed from that of men, as did the effects of industrialization on them. The presence of so many women in the paid-labor force had major economic and political consequences, for it affected Bolshevik thinking before the Revolution and Soviet policies thereafter.
Women have been given greater consideration in social history than in other fields, because social history is about daily life and the mores and norms that shape it. Scholars have long recognized the importance of women to these topics, and so women are often included in discussions of Russia’s social history. The patriarchal character of gender values is usually commented on as well. Daily life and patriarchy are central themes in this book too. Here they will be considered relevant not just to family and community life, and hence to social history, but also, as the above paragraphs suggest, to political and economic developments. For gender values and norms pervade all human societies, ordering public as well as private worlds. And they have changed across time. So watching the development of gender ideas in Russia and comparing them to gender ideas elsewhere in Europe will illuminate far more than the quotidian. It will make the politics and the economics make more sense as well.
The European Context and Russian Particularities
This book will also fit the history of women in Russia into European women’s history. For that is where it belongs. The dominant culture across the centuries was Slavic and Christian, as were most of the people, and their gender values and customs were very similar to those of other Europeans. The significant differences arose from Russia’s geography and climate, its people’s take on pan-European gender values and norms, its autocratic politics, and its relationship to the rest of the continent.
Russia began on Europe’s easternmost frontier, in lands that were cold, vast, and difficult to farm. Frequent conflict among warriors competing for power and territory made life still more precarious. The Russian elite eventually overcame its fractiousness and constructed a centralized government, but it did little thereafter to help the peasants prosper. These enduring realities—a demanding natural environment, a self-aggrandizing ruling class, and a mass of people mired in hardship—meant that, until well into the twentieth century, most women had few opportunities to improve their circumstances.
One of the greatest ironies of Russian history is the fact that the autocratic governments were a major force in progressive changes for women. Beginning in the late seventeenth century, Russia’s rulers attempted to alter gender norms, because they believed that in order to make their nation a leading power in Europe, they had to modernize it, and that in turn required weakening patriarchal controls on men and women. To this end, Peter the Great and the tsars who succeeded him greatly expanded education for noble and middle-class girls and permitted women to enter the paid-labor force. Their communist successors proclaimed that women were men’s equals and opened up schools and jobs to women from the lower classes. Because so many of Russia’s rulers believed that changing women’s lot was essential to reform, and because so many educated people, among them many women, pushed the rulers to permit even more change, change, when it came, was extraordinarily rapid and substantial.
Central to that transformation were the interactions between Russia and the rest of Europe. This will be yet another of the major themes of this book. It is already a major one in Russian history, but usually attention is paid to the ways in which Western influence affected Russia’s political, economic, and intellectual development. Women’s history was also hugely impacted, as Western notions about femininity, domesticity, and women’s liberation from patriarchy flowed in, to be rejected, adapted, and fought over by rulers, revolutionaries, peasants, and urban folk. Women’s history also contains one of the most important instances of Russian influence flowing outward, for in the twentieth century, Soviet gender values and the government’s program of women’s emancipation influenced communists, socialists, and feminists around the world.
Conclusions
This book will sum up the scholarship on the history of women in Russia. It will explain the major developments in women’s history and the effects of those developments on the history of the nation. It will sketch the lived experiences of women across the generations. It will identify individuals of particular significance. And it will demonstrate how the behavior of individual women and great collectivities of them shaped the history of their land.
It would be impossible to create “a sweet little cameo version” of the history of Russia’s women, for most of it is a story of people struggling with poverty brought on by a recalcitrant environment and exacerbated by a rapacious government. But it is also a story of endurance and achievement. In their millions over the centuries, the women of Russia helped build the cultures that survived the hardships. The bravest and luckiest women accomplished extraordinary things—promoted the conversion to Christianity, governed estates, created great art, rebelled against governments, established charities and professions, designed programs to liberate women, built the tanks that rolled into Berlin in 1945, and flew the planes that strafed the retreating Wermacht. Other women exploited their serfs, worked for the secret police, supported whatever status quo prevailed at the time, doted on their sons, and taught their daughters to suffer in silence. The history of all these women, in all its daunting complexity, is a tale worth telling.