THE BEGINNING OF SOVIET REFORMS FOR WOMEN
Both the Menshevik and the Bolshevik factions of the Social Democratic party endorsed the German Social Democrats’ program for women’s emancipation. In 1917 the Bolsheviks were its more energetic promoters, due to the presence within their ranks of hundreds of Bolshevik feminists. These women rejected the title “feminist” because they condemned feminists as propertied women interested only in their own class, but feminists they were, if by “feminists” we mean activists seeking women’s emancipation. The Bolshevichki (the feminine plural form of “Bolshevik”) also had much in common with self-identified feminists. Most came from the middling and upper social classes and had completed high school. Many were teachers, librarians, and doctors. About one-quarter were working-class women from the factories of the major cities. All these women were better educated than most women of their class and better educated as well than the majority of male members of the party. Education had empowered them, as it did the feminists and all the other activist women of the pre-revolutionary generation, enabling them to work outside the home and develop their social confidence and consciousness.47
After the Bolsheviks seized power, they moved quickly to enact their program of women’s emancipation and thereby launched an assault on patriarchy. The Bolsheviks were, after all, revolutionaries. They sought to destroy all the old institutions—patriarchy, monarchy, church—and in their place construct a society in which the people as a whole owned and managed economic resources and shared the products of their labor. The economic equality of socialism would then make political equality possible, Bolsheviks believed, and would end prejudice, superstition, and all the other malign consequences of private property.
They began by issuing laws that established the principle of women’s economic, educational, legal, and political equality with men, and by designing social services. In January 1918, Kollontai, the commissar of social welfare, drafted plans for providing publicly funded maternity care and stipends to new mothers. The same month, a government decree, “On the Socialization of the Land,” asserted that women had equal rights with men to own and lease land. In the summer of 1918 the government issued a constitution that declared women’s political equality with men. The Family Law Code of the fall of 1918 made marriage a civil procedure, thus removing it from the Church’s jurisdiction, declared wives and husbands equal in the eyes of the law, legalized divorce, and granted children born out of wedlock the right to economic support by their parents. The Commissariat of Labor wrote regulations abolishing gender discrimination in hiring and mandating paid maternity leave. The Commissariat of Education reaffirmed the Provisional Government’s decree of April 1917 that had declared all public education coeducational.
While Bolshevik officials were drafting the new laws, Russia fell into civil war. From 1918 to 1920, the Whites, a loose coalition of anti-Bolshevik generals leading rag-tag armies, battled the equally rag-tag Bolshevik-commanded Red Army across Siberia and into European Russia. The Reds won, because they were more unified and popular than the Whites. They emerged from this trial by fire determined to achieve their socialist objectives by using all the power they could amass. And so the revolutionaries who had overthrown tsarist dictatorship built one of their own. The Communist Party (the Bolsheviks adopted this name in 1918) and the Soviet government, consisting mostly of tsarist ministries now headed by communists, were formally independent of one another, but the party dominated. Organized into a hierarchy that extended from the Politburo and Central Committee down through regional and local committees and administrators, the party set policy and oversaw the functioning of government departments.
The Bolshevik feminists responded to the civil war by arguing that the party should cultivate the support of working-class and peasant women. They pointed to working women’s activism since 1905 as evidence that they could be persuaded to support the Red side and to do volunteer work such as cleaning streets or assisting at hospitals. Party leaders agreed, and in 1919 authorized the creation of the Zhenotdel (Women’s Department) within the party. Inessa Armand, a veteran Bolshevik and close friend of Lenin’s, was its first head. When she died of cholera in the fall of 1920, Kollontai succeeded her. These women and the thousands who worked for them quickly built the Zhenotdel into an organization that publicized Marxist ideas of women’s emancipation, cultivated the support of poor women, and advocated for women within the party.
WOMEN RESPOND TO THE COMMUNISTS
They had their work cut out for them. The Revolution had begun in anger, grief, and hope. While hope for a better future continued to inspire millions throughout the civil war, grief and anger remained their constant companions, for the civil war completed the ruin of the economy that World War I had begun. Armies rampaged through cities and countryside; transportation collapsed and food supplies dwindled further; cholera, dysentery, influenza, typhoid, and typhus carried off first the old and young, then malnourished people in their prime. Millions of peasant women were widowed. Some had to leave their villages when their neighbors, also struggling, would not help them. They took their children to the cities, where they begged for food in markets and churchyards. “We are dying,” wailed desperate women in the streets of Ivanovo-Voznesensk in 1921. “The people are dying off.”48
Many city folk passed the beggars by, for they too were hungry. Even in Moscow, the capital of Soviet Russia from the spring of 1918 onward, food and fuel were scarce. People watched when wraith-like cart horses came down their streets, hoping that the poor creatures would drop dead in the traces and provide meat for the neighborhood. There was no heat because there was no fuel to feed boilers. There was no running water because the pipes had burst in the unheated buildings. People fled back to their home villages, and so Moscow’s population fell by more than 50 percent between 1918 and 1920, Petrograd’s by 72 percent.49 The returnees were mostly men because men were more likely than women to have close family in the countryside. Men also left the cities when they were drafted into the army.
For urban women of all classes, these developments were disastrous. It was difficult for an intact family to survive, and still more challenging for single women. The lucky ones were those working in the few factories that continued to operate. By 1918, women made up 45 percent of the much-shrunken industrial work force.50 Others took jobs newly opened to women in the arts, clerical work, the court system, education, journalism, medicine, the police, and social services. Wages were low when they were paid at all, many merchants and nobles were denied food rations, and inflation devalued the currency. Childcare became increasingly problematic, because of the difficulty of keeping schools open and hungry children engaged in learning. Soon thousands of runaways, mostly boys, were living on the filthy streets, where they begged and stole to survive.
The hardship alienated many working women from politics and from the communists. At meetings in the fall of 1918, they angrily demanded that the party make good on its promise to improve their lives by bringing home their husbands and getting more food to the markets. Had the party been able to ease these difficulties, more peasants and workers might have listened to the communists’ talk about women’s emancipation. Had the government not requisitioned the peasants’ crops, often without paying for them, peasant women might have been more welcoming. Instead many poor women in city and countryside came to believe that the people who had said they would make things better had only made them worse. So they rejected the communists’ overtures and drove the party workers away.
Some women did answer the communists’ calls. More than thirty thousand joined the Communist Party in the civil war years and thousands more participated in Zhenotdel conferences and programs. Sixty-five thousand women enlisted in the Red Army, making up 2 percent of that force and serving in a greater variety of jobs than ever before. They were clerks, couriers, drivers, nurses, spies, and political workers who propagandized the troops. A few women, following the precedent set in World War I, enlisted in combat units.51
The women who supported the communists believed that they were part of a righteous movement. Evdokia Poliakova, a factory worker who joined the party in 1917 at the age of seventeen, wrote in her memoirs, “In the Bolsheviks I saw people who had entered a decisive struggle with despotism and injustice, a struggle with a bright future for working people. I wanted to be with them and I was justly proud that they had taken me into their great, stern family.”52 Such women saw the Revolution as a liberation and the civil war as a struggle between good and evil, the future and the past. Less political women, the artists of the avant garde, for example, also were buoyed by the sense of limitless possibilities that the Revolution had fostered. When the civil war ended, these women hoped that a new world of peace and equality would be built on the ruins of tsarist Russia.