6
Joseph Stalin was one of the most successful tyrants of the twentieth century. His government built the Soviet industrial base, defeated the Axis armies, and pushed the Soviet Union into the ranks of the superpowers. Women were crucial to all these endeavors. They made up the majority of workers entering the labor force in the 1930s. One million of them fought in World War II, and millions more kept manufacturing going behind the lines. After the war they worked in the rebuilding effort. Women also did most of the housework and childrearing.
These decades saw the Soviet program of women’s emancipation reach the majority of Soviet women. Education grew rapidly, social services expanded, and the message that women were now men’s equals was insistently broadcast. Women moved into occupations previously closed to them and moved up within the sectors in which they had been working since the nineteenth century. Women’s activism—their participation in public institutions, particularly participation aimed at achieving social, political, or cultural change—continued, propelled by a new generation that took seriously the proclamations of women’s equality. Assertive women pushed past gender prejudice to claim a place in pioneering ventures in construction, frontier settlement, and aviation. As in the past, however, most women made lower wages than men and very few were promoted into the top ranks of the professions or the government. They were missing entirely from the highest ranks of the leadership.
Official gender values solidified in the 1930s as well. The regime propagated ideals of femininity that combined Bolshevik feminism with an updated cult of domesticity. Women were to be free and equal participants in the society, supportive wives, and nurturing mothers who taught their children to be model Soviet citizens. Some women from the younger generation found this vision empowering. Others, especially the old, tried to preserve what they had long believed in.
For most Soviet women, the 1930s were an ordeal. Those who lived in the cities coped with the perennial difficulties of low wages, unsafe working conditions, inadequate social services, shortages of consumer goods, and crowded housing. In the countryside, peasant women suffered the assault of collectivization and struggled to rebuild agriculture in its aftermath. Women in city and countryside also fell victim to the depredations of Stalin’s police. Then came the war. Men predominated among those killed by their own government and by the Axis powers, and the loss of so many of them intensified the hardship in women’s lives. It also made women’s work in the industrial construction of the 1930s, the maintenance of the economy during the war, and the reconstruction thereafter that much more crucial.
THE FIVE-YEAR PLANS
In 1928 the Communist Party launched the First Five-Year Plan, a blueprint for economic development that set growth targets and allocated resources. The plan emphasized the development of heavy industry—chemical production, defense industries, machine-building, mining, and steel-making. The government declared it a success in 1932 and immediately embarked on a second five-year plan that paid more attention to worker training, efficient use of resources, and production of consumer goods.
Initially the economists at Gosplan, the central planning agency, assumed that they could hire unemployed men to staff expanding industries, but they soon realized that there were not enough men available. Planners and party officials noticed that women, who made up 55 percent of the unemployed in 1930, were lining up to apply for the new jobs. So they once again ordered that training programs for women be established and that managers end discriminatory hiring practices. This time they enforced the decrees. They also encountered less local resistance than in the past, for many managers realized that they had to employ women if they were to meet the plan’s demands. Women, especially young ones driven by necessity and hopeful of bettering their situations, flocked to the new jobs. The result was that the vast majority of workers joining the paid-labor force for the first time in the 1930s were women: 4 million were employed between 1929 and 1935, 1.7 million of them in industry. By 1940, women made up 39 percent of the paid-labor force in the Soviet Union, a higher percentage than anywhere else in the European world. In the United States, by contrast, 25 percent of paid workers in 1940 were female. The percentages for France, Germany, Italy, and Sweden in that year were 37, 30, 28, and 28 respectively.1
Soviet women entered fields that had been predominantly male, such as engineering and press operating; they took jobs in new industries such as light-bulb manufacturing; and they increased their participation in sectors already heavily female, such as textile production. They also moved into the professions in record numbers. By the late 1930s in the Russian republic of the Soviet Union, 63 percent of physicians, 42 percent of economists, and 36 percent of faculty at institutions of higher education were women. Twenty-three percent of all journalists, writers, and editors and 30 percent of all visual and performing artists were women. By contrast, American women held 14 percent of professional and technical jobs in the late 1930s. In much of the European world, hard hit by economic depression, women were being laid off, not hired.2
Patterns of gender difference in the workplace, although considerably weakened, were not eliminated. Peasants just arrived in the cities were still going to work as servants, now in the households of the new elite. Most female workers were employed in clerical work, education, food service, and textiles, which were paid less than male preserves such as metalworking. Occupations that were judged detrimental to women’s reproductive health or beyond their physical strength, such as underground mining, were closed to them. Men harassed women entering previously male fields. The notions that men would lead and women would devote much of their time to family life remained powerful as well. Only 12 percent of the top jobs in the party and government of the Russian republic were held by women in 1939. In that year, women were 63 percent of physicians, but only 15 percent of the heads of medical institutions. Although the overwhelming majority of food-service workers, women led only 34 percent of food-service enterprises. To put this in perspective, it should be noted that similar gender patterns prevail worldwide today.3
COLLECTIVIZATION
As he set the First Five-Year Plan in motion, Stalin ordered the collectivization of agriculture. Marxists had long believed that private agriculture was a retrograde economic system that nurtured conservative values in rural people. In the early 1920s, the party had proposed to raise peasant consciousness and productivity by establishing collective farms. Villagers would own the means of production—tools, seed, and livestock—in common, but the land would be public property. Managers trained in modern farming methods would direct operations following plans made in Moscow. Party leaders knew that many peasants would not willingly give up the old ways, so they contented themselves with setting up demonstration collective farms until the late 1920s.
In 1929, Stalin ordered wholesale collectivization to begin, because he believed that it was essential to the success of the First Five-Year Plan that the government should manage agriculture as well as industry. Party workers recruited from the cities streamed into the countryside, where they seized control of crops, livestock, and equipment, rewarded those who cooperated with them, and punished those who resisted. Peasants branded “kulaks”—those with a bit more property than average, those who spoke up against communists, and those who were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time—were arrested and deported to “special settlements” in desolate areas far from their homes. Ksenia Dubovitskaia was ten years old when the collectivizers came to her family’s house in a village in Tambov province. “These people started confiscating our property, which consisted of two sheep and one heifer, and all the linens like our bedding and other village things and they even took off me… a yellow dress that my older brother Grigory’s wife had sewn for me out of my mother’s skirt. They loaded it all up and took it away and we were left ‘naked as the day we were born.’ A day later my father was arrested… and two days after that we were thrown out of our house.”4
The government expected that attacking the wealthier peasants would rally poorer ones to support collectivization. Instead, most peasants did as the Uzbeks had done during the unveiling campaign: they united against the outsiders. First they tried to avoid the collectivizers or put them off, and when that did not work, they turned to more direct measures—protesting, destroying property, and attacking government agents and their collaborators.
Soon police were reporting that the countryside was awash in babi bunty, a term that translates, very loosely, as “the grannies’ revolt.” Peasant women had turned on landlords and merchants in the past. Now they attacked the collectivizers. They broke up meetings held to cultivate their support by yelling out their complaints, a tactic working-class and peasant women had used against the Zhenotdel during the civil war. They refused to surrender their chickens, cows, and pigs. They marched on barns and tool sheds to take back what the collectivizers had seized. They prevented party operatives from arresting their neighbors. Sometimes they drove communists out of their villages and declared the collective farms dissolved. Many times they physically attacked the men they saw as persecutors. In Central Asia and Siberia, where resistance to collectivization was even more widespread than in the Slavic areas, women played a less prominent role, but there were some female-led uprisings there too. In volatile Uzbekistan in 1930, the leaders of a crowd of three hundred women tried to strangle several communist leaders, not an easy task when wearing robes and veils.5
Local party and police officials feared that sending armed police and soldiers against unarmed women would increase the unrest, and they shrank from using force on women, particularly older ones who reminded them of their mothers. They also thought that men, especially village elders and priests, were behind the protests, that they were sending the women out because they knew the police would be loath to move against them. There may have been some truth in this. When asked why the men were taking a back seat, one male peasant replied wryly, “They [the women] are equal now; as they decide, so we will agree.”6 The resistance built to a furious level, and in March 1930 Stalin published an article that condemned the collectivizers for abusing the peasants.
After a short pause, however, the government renewed the pressure, with disastrous results. The violent assault on the villages, coupled with massive disruptions caused by the cumbersome process of establishing new management, led to catastrophic declines in food production. The situation was exacerbated by continuing resistance: peasants across the Soviet Union, from the steppes of Ukraine to the forests of Siberia, preferred slaughtering their livestock and privately selling or consuming their crops to turning them over to the government. As grain supplies dwindled, still more animals had to be destroyed before they starved to death. The central government compounded the calamity by refusing to lower the amount of grain farmers were required to deliver to the authorities. By 1932, famine, this time created by Moscow’s policies, ravaged the countryside. “So many laid [sic] dead in the streets around the cities, in yards and in houses,” remembered Anastasia Serikova, a child when famine swept through her village in Krasnodar in the Caucasus. “A cart came around all the time with a white horse, took the dead to the cemetery and threw them in a ditch like dead dogs. They’d throw them in from up top and sprinkle some dirt on them.”7
As conditions worsened, peasant women gave up their protests and turned to trying to survive. Once again hungry mothers took to the roads. Maria Belskaia was eight when she set off with her mother Arina and five brothers and sisters to find food in 1933. Her father had been arrested and their neighbors, starving themselves, had driven the family from their village in the Altai region of Siberia. Belskaia later described their pilgrimage: “We knocked on people’s windows and begged in Christ’s name for a piece of bread or a potato. While we still had flour, Mother would mix it with cherry blossoms or hawthorn and boil it in our little pot…. But then the flour ran out, and we had to live on whatever good people could give us. In those hungry days, there were not many good people around.”8
Belskaia’s family survived; many others did not. Between 5 and 7 million people died tragically in the famine of 1932–33. More than 2 million kulaks were deported to Siberia and Central Asia; a hundred thousand more were imprisoned.9 By 1933, the famished peasants had lost their battle with Soviet power. The government made some concessions; it granted villagers the right to own their houses and gardens and to keep cows and smaller animals. In city markets, they could sell their produce. Thereafter, the peasants’ “private plots” became the main source of fruits and vegetables for townspeople.
RURAL WOMEN’S LIVES IN THE ’30s
The Stalinists’ subjugation of the countryside irrevocably altered the lives of the survivors. Millions of families were broken up by arrest or disease or out-migration. Among the migrants there were now many women: almost half the workers entering the urban paid-labor force in the 1930s were female peasants. The birthrate fell, as did the number of single women in the countryside. The power structure of the peasants’ world also changed. By ruthlessly attacking uncooperative village elders and empowering government officials and the peasants who worked for them, the government destroyed the networks that had bound older and younger men together. A party-dominated system of clientage and patronage took the place of kinship and age as the method of distributing power in the countryside. The control of older women over younger weakened as well.
Peasant women preserved some traditional ideas and practices, while questioning others. Medical services in the countryside, although expanded, remained seriously inadequate, so village midwives still attended most births. Many women continued to be religious, despite the regime’s propaganda against religion and attacks on religious leaders. They were more receptive than they had been in the 1920s to the criticism of patriarchy brought in by propagandists and periodicals. David Ransel has found that women who came of age in the 1930s believed that peasant custom gave too much power to men and oppressed women. Many girls demonstrated their rejection of the old ways by migrating to the cities. Those who remained in the countryside were more willing than older women to have abortions and to divorce.10
Women’s discontents grew from the fact that men’s power over women in the family and community was little changed by collectivization, despite the fact that women’s work was more important than ever. Because men were still more likely to move away than women, women made up 60 percent of the rural labor force by the end of the decade. This did not change the patriarchal principle that men should lead. Seventy-five percent of farm managers were men in the Russian republic in the late 1930s; women held 67 percent of the least skilled jobs. As in the industrial sector, women were most likely to advance in those areas long considered their province, such as dairying.11
Collectivized agriculture did have its benefits. Some of the women who had worked on the farms in the 1930s remembered in their old age that the workload was lighter than under the old system, and that the new bosses were less demanding. They appreciated the fact that in 1935 the government granted them two months of maternity leave at half pay; in the past pregnant women had worked until they went into labor and returned to the fields soon after they gave birth. Women also praised the Soviet government for improving rural education. Between 1926 and 1939, the literacy rate among rural females aged 9–49 in the Russian republic increased from 39 percent to 80 percent. Fifty percent of the students enrolled in rural secondary schools in the Russian republic in 1939 were girls.12
These improvements were part of a government effort to cultivate support among peasant women. Policy makers recognized the importance of women’s work to the building of Soviet agriculture, and so they improved benefits and funded services, albeit inadequately. They issued orders to promote women, which were derailed by the same resistance such orders encountered in the industrial sector. They instructed local officials to give highly publicized awards to particularly energetic female workers, hoping thereby to inspire other women and shame men into working harder.
The government also conducted campaigns to move women into better jobs, the most famous of which was the effort to sign them up as tractor drivers. Tractors were a potent symbol of the industrialization of Soviet agriculture, so teaching women to drive them, government officials believed, would expand the pool of qualified personnel and publicize the importance of women’s emancipation. The first decrees to recruit female tractor drivers were issued in 1930, to little effect. Local managers ignored the orders and harassed the women who tried to sign up for training. The government then decided to establish courses exclusively for women, and party officials in Ukraine found a young peasant eager to lead such courses. Praskovia Angelina, better known by her nickname “Pasha,” then became one of the most famous female activists of the 1930s.
PRASKOVIA ANGELINA (1912–59)
Angelina came from a family of ardent peasant communists. In 1930, when a male tractor driver moved out of her village, she volunteered to take his place. “At first people just laughed at me, but as… the tractor was sitting idle, I was allowed to give it a try,” she wrote in her autobiography. Like most female activists, Angelina was persistent. She persuaded her brother, already a tractor driver, to teach her, and after she was trained, she talked her way onto an all-male team of drivers. Although her mates came to accept her when she proved that she could do the work, her achievements did not change their estimation of women’s abilities. “Even my friends,” she remembered, “say, ‘Pasha may be doing okay because she’s so spunky, but basically a woman doesn’t belong on a tractor.’ This means that my example is not enough. I need to organize an all-female tractor brigade.” Local officials supported her, especially after Moscow sent out word to recruit more women. By 1933 Angelina had trained a group of female drivers, and they in turn were bringing in new recruits.13
Deeply committed to agricultural development and to women’s participation in it, Angelina welcomed the opportunity to become an advocate for both. She joined the Communist Party in 1937, was given a variety of honorary appointments, and earned an advanced degree in agriculture in 1940. Everywhere she went, she sang the praises of the government and of Stalin. She also called for more daycare and medical services in the countryside and criticized the sexist prejudices that she and her colleagues were struggling to overcome. She did not have great success in persuading women to climb aboard the tractors, perhaps because of the sexism, perhaps also because operating the primitive machines was very hard work. In 1937, the peak year of female enlistment in the 1930s, they constituted only 6.8 percent of drivers.14 Angelina did make it into the ranks of Soviet heroes, and her exploits were celebrated until the end of the Soviet period.
WOMEN IN THE CITIES
Throughout the 1930s, urban life was difficult. Food, housing, and public services had long been in short supply; now, with millions coming to the cities seeking work, the shortages worsened. No government could have met the needs of all these newcomers, but Stalin’s could have done more than it did, particularly during the First Five-Year Plan when it concentrated on building up heavy industry. So people crowded into already overcrowded apartments and dormitories, made do with limited running water, and ate plain food. Wendy Goldman has written that in 1932, “workers lived on dry rye bread and potatoes, a few seasonable vegetables (cabbage, onions, and carrots), and canned fish.” Legal peasant markets and a black market in scarce goods filled some of the gaps, but at prices higher than many people could afford. Wages fell during the First Five-Year Plan; in 1937, they were still only 66 percent of the 1928 level. The standard of living improved somewhat in the mid-’30s, then worsened again in the late 1930s, when the government increased military spending.15
A photograph of Praskovia Angelina taken in the 1930s or 1940s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Pasha_angelina.gif. Accessed June 27, 2011.
PRASKOVIA ANGELINA
In 1948, Angelina described a babi bunt against her brigade of female tractor drivers.
“Suddenly something terrifying occurred. At the entrance to the village we were met by a crowd of agitated women. They were standing in the middle of the road and shouting all together: ‘Get out of here. We’re not going to allow women’s machines on our field! You’ll ruin our crops!’
We Komsomol [Communist youth organization] members were used to kulak hatred and resistance, but these were our own women, our fellow collective farmers! Later we became friends, of course, but that first encounter was terrible.
You can imagine what a state we were in: we had been expecting a triumphant entry and now this…. My girls were on the brink of tears, and even I, normally quite feisty, didn’t know what to do. The women surrounded us in a tight circle, yelling, ‘One inch more, and we’ll tear your hair out by the braids and kick you out of here!’
[After they fetched a local communist official, the crowd dispersed and they began plowing.]
The festive mood was gone, of course. The girls’ faces were sweaty and angry. We felt like we were on a battlefield: one mistake and you’re dead.”
SOURCE: SHEILA FITZPATRICK AND YURI SLEZKINE, EDS., IN THE SHADOW OF REVOLUTION: LIFE STORIES OF RUSSIAN WOMEN FROM 1917 TO THE SECOND WORLD WAR (PRINCETON: PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2000), 313–14.
In the cities, as in the countryside, there were women who benefited from the Soviet system. Pasha Angelina had an urban counterpart in Valentina Bogdan, the daughter of a working-class family who traveled with friends to the city of Krasnodar in 1929 to take entrance examinations for the Institute of the Food Industry. Years later she remembered her feelings: “More than anything in the world, we wanted to enter [the institute] and join the elect. I said half-jokingly: ‘Girls, let’s pray to the institute, asking it to admit us.’ We waited until nobody was around and then raised our arms and said loudly, in unison, ‘Admit us within your walls. Admit us! Admit us!’”16
Bogdan was one of the millions of young, poor women who were admitted. By 1939, 56 percent of the students enrolled in secondary schools in the Russian republic of the Soviet Union were girls, as were 50 percent of the students in higher education.17 These remarkable statistics would have delighted the pre-revolutionary feminists. Furthermore, the government constantly declared that workers and peasants were the favored classes in the Soviet Union, and backed up those declarations by giving preferential treatment to such people. It also proclaimed that Soviet women were men’s equals and that they should improve themselves for their own sakes as well as for the public good. Lower-class women such as Bogdan and Angelina had reason to hope, therefore, that they could, through personal effort, earn better lives for themselves among the “elect.”
The “elect” they sought to join was composed of families, most of them from the middling and lower ranks of pre-revolutionary society, whose adult members worked in the leadership of the party, government, industry, and the military. These people were allocated comfortable apartments, had access to better-staffed and equipped medical clinics, sent their children to the best schools, and rode around in government-issued cars. They could afford to hire servants and buy the consumer goods that were available. Galina Shtange, the wife of an engineering professor, recorded in her diary in 1936 a glowing report on beautiful new stores in Moscow and concluded, “When you recall the first years after the revolution and the way things were back then, it’s just exhilarating to think that all this has been achieved in just 20 years.” Fruma Treivas, the wife of an editor at the party newspaper Pravda, wrote her memoirs years later, by which time she was more aware than Shtange of the differences between the elite and the rest of Soviet society in the 1930s. “We were so far removed from the lives of ordinary people that we thought this was the way it should be,” she remembered. “The way I looked at it, Vasilkovsky [her husband] was killing himself working long hours at an important job, all for the glory of the motherland and Stalin.”18 Among the Stalinist elite, hard work and dedication legitimated privilege.
THE NEW SOVIET WOMAN
The 1930s saw the completion of the process, begun in the 1920s, of blending the revolutionary gender ideas espoused by the Bolshevik feminists with liberal contemporary notions and older ones inherited from Russia’s past. The official results of this syncretism were the “New Soviet Man” and “New Soviet Woman,” icons of masculinity and femininity that were rolled out in the arts and mass media throughout the decade.
As we have seen, the New Soviet Man first surfaced in the 1920s. He was a competent, diligent, responsible, and self-disciplined worker; a modest comrade who worked well with others; and a considerate, faithful husband who provided for his family and disciplined his children. He was “cultured,” which meant that he dressed neatly, bathed regularly, appreciated the arts, read for pleasure, and did not swear, gamble, or get drunk with his pals every payday. The New Soviet Man strongly resembled both the respectable worker ideal of the pre-revolutionary era and still older paragons. He obeyed his superiors—a trait emphasized by Nicholas I, Peter I, and the author of The Domostroi. He was energetic and progressive, as Peter’s ideal nobleman had been. These resemblances emerged from similar circumstances. Stalin was as dependent on loyal servitors as Peter and Nicholas, and he too wanted to make the people of his nation into model, modern Europeans.
The New Soviet Woman required more remodeling to serve the priorities of the 1930s. The party continued to praise women such as Pasha Angelina who devoted themselves to building socialism. They were held up as model workers, whom lesser women were supposed to emulate, and as living proof of the success of women’s emancipation. Once women had been oppressed and backward; now they marched in the vanguard of the working class and, in so doing, freed themselves from the sexist traditions of the past and contributed to the building of a just society.19
The leadership also felt it necessary to address itself to the domestic side of women’s lives, and so its spokespeople began encouraging wives to create cozy homes, teach socialist values to their children, and provide emotional support to their husbands. A. M. Poliakova, the wife of a blacksmith, declared in a speech in 1936, “Now if a wife welcomes her husband home with love and tenderness, if she respects him and talks to him, then the husband will go back to work in a good mood and will think only about his work. It’s obvious that in this case his labor productivity will increase.” Women could also help their husbands become New Soviet Men by teaching them the virtues of kulturnost (“culturedness”). Poliakova said proudly of her own spouse, “I’ve trained him to the point where he brings home books himself.” She advised women to quiz their mates about movies they had just seen together, to make sure that the men had not nodded off during the show.20
The notion that women could teach men about the higher things in life had been around since medieval Europe. It was a theme in the cult of domesticity. Now in the 1930s, the age of the masses having arrived, Soviet communists taught that working-class wives could lead their menfolk toward kulturnost by supervising their drinking and making them stay awake in the movies. The accoutrements of domesticity enjoyed by the model wives featured in the press—the comfortable apartments, the good food, the movie tickets—testified to the accomplishments of their husbands, the New Soviet Men, who were making the money that bought such luxuries. Thus the idealized Soviet wife, like the bourgeois lady of the cult of domesticity, both nurtured and attested to male achievement.
The New Soviet Woman, indefatigable worker and civilizing wife, set standards and inspired emulation. She was no more out of touch with the reality of most women’s lives than the long-suffering saint or the dainty bourgeois housewife. What she shared with those archetypes was a responsibility to realize her true nature by serving her family and her society. She was an updated affirmation of the very old ideal of female self-sacrifice— justified now by the promise that, through all her work, she emancipated herself even as she helped to build a better world and repaid the state for freeing her from patriarchal bondage. Her liberation, unlike that envisioned by feminists later in the twentieth century, was not sufficient unto itself. It served the greater good of building the world’s first truly just and prosperous society.
VOLUNTEERING IN THE 1930s
The New Soviet Woman played a part in inspiring female volunteerism. The government had a prodigious need for people to help with a host of tasks, from cleaning streets to building dams, so it used every appeal it could fashion, including gendered ones. To reach women, it called out to both sides of the New Soviet Woman, the emancipated worker and the happy homemaker. Homemakers responded with the obshchestvennitsa movement.
Between 1934 and 1941, tens of thousands of unemployed wives of army officers, engineers, managers, and party officials became obshchestvennitsy, which roughly translates as “socially engaged women.” Organized into clubs, obshchestvennitsy donated supplies to workers’ cafeterias, childcare centers, dormitories, and medical clinics; they spruced up workplaces and neighborhoods; they planted flowers and hung curtains. Some obshchestvennitsy lectured workers, particularly female ones, on personal hygiene and housework and coached them on how to be supportive of their husbands. Others joined “control brigades” that inspected retail shops for cleanliness and good customer service, pitching in to dust the shelves when necessary.21
The obshchestvennitsy publicized the Soviet emancipation of women and organized projects for working-class women, as the Zhenotdel had done, but they possessed little of the zhenotdel’s feminism. They were more like the wives of nineteenth-century Russian governors who ran local charities. Empowered by their status as spouses of the new bosses, they saw themselves as bringing a woman’s soothing, beautifying touch to the workers’ world and setting an example of responsible citizenship, good taste, and good mothering to women less fortunate than they.22
The women who were most faithful to Bolshevik feminist ideals were the ones who answered the party’s calls to pioneering work in the countryside, in the cities, and on the frontiers. Angelina was such a woman, and like so many others, when she became a model worker, she was a member of the Komsomol. The Komsomol was the Communist Party’s youth organization, open to people in their late teens and early twenties. In the 1930s it and the secondary schools from which it recruited new members were nurturing a generation of ambitious, idealistic women who were eager to participate in the building of socialism and to realize in their own lives the equality the party promised. Women were a minority in the Komsomol; perhaps the girls who joined were unusually assertive and independent. There is no question that many of them took seriously the proclamations of women’s equality. They were often able to overcome male resistance because they were Komsomoltsy, that is, female Komsomol members, which gave them standing with party officials, and because they got support from managers eager to employ all the workers they could get. Once again, autocracy and need opened up possibilities that activist women were able to exploit.23
One of these women was Anna Egorova, a peasant who came from the countryside to Moscow in 1934 to work on the subway then under construction. The tall sixteen-year-old (she persuaded her employers that she was older) joined a unit of steel-fitters. When she heard that a flying club was seeking members, she eagerly signed up, and fell in love with planes and flying. Egorova ran into male hostility occasionally, but she managed to overcome it, and to build warm friendships with the other young men and women with whom she worked. She also found supportive male superiors, who encouraged her. As the great tunnels and stations of the metro came into being, as she learned to fly, as the government showered praise on the young volunteers, Egorova’s self-esteem grew. “I began to acquire a certain confidence,” she remembered in the 1990s, “a sense that I could do anything.”24
The largest single example of Komsomoltsy volunteerism was the Khetagurovite campaign, which began in early 1937 when Valentina Khetagurova, a Komsomol activist who worked in the Siberian far east, published an article urging women to come east and help build that region’s infrastructure. The response was overwhelming. In the next eight months, sixty-seven thousand women, most of them members of the Komsomol or of the party, wrote in to express interest. Elena Shulman has found that these people were idealistic patriots, drawn east by dreams of a pristine frontier where women were needed. Twenty thousand of them actually came in the next two years and found jobs as clerks, factory workers, medical personnel, party workers, prison-camp guards, teachers, and tractor drivers. Some Khetagurovites eventually moved back home; many made their peace with the rigors of the far east and remained.25
Among the Khetagurovites were women who spoke up against sexism. At conferences and in letters, they decried the refusal of managers to hire them, to pay them as much as men once they had hired them, and to assign them to skilled jobs. They also drew attention to sexual harassment. Pasha Angelina was making the same claim that gender barriers should not prevent women from taking equal parts in socialist construction. The willingness of all these women to protest against sexism spoke to the self-confidence they had learned as Komsomoltsy and pioneering workers, and portended the refusal of some of them, in 1941, to accept their exclusion from the military.26
THE FAMILY LAW OF 1936
To keep the economy developing and to maintain a strong military, the Soviet Union needed a growing population, so government officials were alarmed in the mid-1930s by the fact that the birthrate was falling. They responded with another revision of the marriage law, this one designed to encourage stable marriages and lots of childbearing. The Family Law of 1936 made it more expensive to obtain a divorce and required that both wife and husband attend a court hearing to dissolve their marriage. The law also increased child-support payments and imposed a two-year prison sentence on parents found guilty of non-payment. It raised state subsidies to new mothers, increased funding for maternity and childcare services, and established stipends for women who gave birth to seven children or more. These positive incentives to childbearing were paired with a penalty for avoiding it. The revised family law outlawed abortion except when the life or health of the mother was at risk or the fetus had a serious genetic disorder. Doctors could be sentenced to two years in prison for performing the procedure; women receiving it more than once could be fined.
As they had done in 1926, women of all classes welcomed the provisions in the revised law that were intended to tighten the bonds of marriage, but many, especially those from the European ethnic groups, opposed the outlawing of abortion. Working-class women did so because they said that they were too poor to support many children. Better-educated, more economically secure women argued that they should be permitted to limit their childbearing in order to work outside the home and thereby emancipate themselves. Such women were more likely than poorer ones to have had abortions.27
After the criminalization of abortion, the birthrate rose among Baltic, Jewish, and Slavic women for a year or so. (Women of the ethnic minorities of Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Siberia did not experience a similar rise because they had resorted to abortion far less.) Very soon, women of the European ethnic groups found ways to get abortions from medical personnel, from underground abortionists, or from their own self-applied methods. These resorts increased the number of women suffering complications that required hospital care or resulted in death. Nonetheless, women continued to terminate pregnancies. By 1940 the abortion rate across the Soviet Union was back to the level of 1935.
WOMEN IN THE CAUCASUS, CENTRAL ASIA, AND SIBERIA
THE CAUCASUS AND CENTRAL ASIA
After the upheavals in Central Asia in the late ’20s, party leaders across that region and in the Caucasus proceeded cautiously with women’s emancipation. Their construction of Stalinist political and economic systems cut the power of local elites, disrupted kinship networks, and undermined the customary authority of senior males over junior ones, and in so doing weakened the ability of traditional families to confine their women behind veils and walls. Education for girls and women expanded, women were enlisted to work alongside men on the collective farms, and the party continued to preach women’s equality. Family law was brought formally in line with the Soviet code, but officials usually did not enforce prohibitions on customary practices such as bride price.
FIRUZA KERIMOVA (1906–?)
There were young women in the Caucasus who joined the Soviet emancipation project as enthusiastically as Pasha Angelina, Anna Egorova, and the Khetagurovites, in spite of their own fears and the resistance they encountered. Firuza Kerimova, an Azeri who lived near Baku in Azerbaijan, is an example. Like Angelina, she came from a family with radical views; her people, unlike Angelina’s, were prosperous merchants. Before the revolution they had supported the revolutionary movement; afterward they were pro-communist. In the 1920s Kerimova ran a daycare center in her family’s home in Balahani, a city in the Azeri oilfields. Insisting on marrying for love, she chose a young official in the Soviet government, Agahan Kerimov. As the couple moved from assignment to assignment, Kerimova spread the call to emancipation among local women.
When the Five-Year Plans began, Kerimova signed up to study engineering. In 1932, she graduated. “There are days that cannot be forgotten,” she declared in a speech at the graduation ceremonies. “Today is such a day for me. Not very long ago I wore the chadrah [a veil], but today they call me the oil commander, an engineer-organizer.” Her euphoria faded when she began her new job. The men who were supposed to work under her command harassed her, at one point pouring oil on her head. “At first she cried a lot,” her daughter, Rabia khanum Sultan-zade, remembered. “The workers bluntly told her, ‘This isn’t a place for a woman. We used to get the oil out without you and we’re going to keep doing it. You should stay home with your family.’”28
Firuza Kerimova at her daycare center in the 1920s. http://www.gender-az.org/index.shtml?id_doc=2081. Accessed December 1, 2010.
FIRUZA KERIMOVA
Rabia khanum Sultan-zade, Kerimova’s daughter, wrote this account of her mother’s first encounter with unveiling:
“Despite being quite young, my mother had been chosen a delegate to the First Non-Party Congress of Azerbaijani Women [in the early 1920s]. Standing at the podium making an important speech, she did not notice the rapt attention of S. Kirov, the first secretary of the Communist Party of Azerbaijan, who was sitting on the stage. The pretty, ardent girl with the burning turquoise eyes had wrapped herself in a chadrah [a veil]. Probably Kirov was trying to send a message when he came up to her during her speech and dramatically tore the chadrah off her and threw it into the audience, where the women tore it to pieces.
Scarlet with embarrassment and confusion, she stood on the stage, fingering her thick braids, and Anna Sultanova [a Zhenotdel leader], wise with experience, said, ‘Such a beautiful face shouldn’t be hidden under a chadrah.’ The euphoria in the hall passed, the women went away, and Mama sat and cried, ‘How can I go back to Balahani without the chadrah?’ In those days one could not walk down the streets of Balahani without a chadrah. And then Kirov gave Firuza a scarlet silk scarf.”
SOURCE: AZERBAIJAN GENDER INFORMATION CENTER (HTTP://WWW.GENDER-AZ.ORG/INDEX.SHTML?ID_DOC=2081). TRANSLATED BY BARBARA CLEMENTS. REPRINTED BY PERMISSION.
Kerimova managed to win over some of the men by refusing an appointment to a managerial position and instead doing manual labor alongside them. When she felt that she had proved herself, she moved into the ranks of the engineers, and within a few years had become the first woman to hold a top administrative position in the Baku oilfields. More than seventy years later, her daughter’s proud story of her mother’s struggles and triumphs was posted to the Azerbaijan Gender Information Center’s website.
SIBERIA
In Siberia, the campaign to emancipate native women, which began in earnest in 1929, had the familiar components—outlawing bride price, dowry, and polygamy, publicizing the evils of traditional patriarchy, and encouraging women to exercise their new rights and take advantage of educational and employment opportunities. Because the native Siberians had a long history of negotiating with the Europeans and because their cultures were less patriarchal than those of Central Asia, reforms for women advanced rapidly.
Education expanded, as did women’s participation in the political process. Women eagerly enrolled in the teachers’ colleges set up to train Buryats, Koraks, Tatars, Yakuts, and others. Primary and secondary schooling for girls and women grew, as did literacy. Among Buryats, female literacy rates increased from 21 percent in 1926 to 66 percent in 1939. In that same year, girls made up 49 percent of Yakut elementary-school students. Women’s involvement in politics expanded as well. By 1931 one-quarter of the delegates to soviets in the autonomous regions of Siberia were female. This percentage was far higher than the percentage of female delegates to Central Asian soviets and to some Russian ones. Probably the long-standing practice of Siberian women playing leading roles in their communities made politics less intimidating.29
Collectivization struck very hard in Siberia. In that land of nomads, the popular reaction was even more outraged than in the Russian heartland, for collectivization meant not only turning animals over to the government but settling down to become farmers. The Buryats, the Turkic peoples of the southwest, and the Koraks in the far east killed their livestock rather than surrender it to the government. The reindeer herders of the far north and east and the mountain people of the Altai region retreated into still more remote areas beyond the government’s reach. After the worst excesses of collectivization receded in the mid-1930s, Soviet programs of improving health care and education made some headway, and supplies of food and manufactured goods increased.
Increasing also was the migration to Siberia of Europeans, for the Soviet government worked as assiduously as had the tsarist to entice settlers to move east. We have already noted the successful Khetagurovite campaign. The establishment of an “autonomous region” in Birobidzhan, set aside for Jews, also drew immigrants. Tens of thousands of other women came to Siberia involuntarily in the 1930s, for another tsarist practice that the Soviet government continued was the use of the east as a place of imprisonment.
THE TERROR
From the beginning of communist rule, the party filled the jails it had inherited from the tsars with people whom it labeled “enemies.” It also sent such people into exile in remote areas or sentenced them to labor camps, as the tsars had done. The Soviet government under Stalin expanded the “enemies list” and hired many more police and jailers. The result was a police state comparable to Nazi Germany’s, but longer lasting. Only Stalin’s death in March 1953 brought this reign of terror to an end.
The Terror came in waves that swept up millions of people. They began in 1929 with collectivization, when unfortunates who had been branded kulaks were sent to the special settlements in the far north and Siberia. Local authorities then shipped more peasants accused of a variety of crimes off to labor camps throughout the 1930s. In 1934, the government criminalized workplace infractions such as lateness. Sodomy, which was not a crime in the early Soviet law codes, became one in 1933–34 and gay men (but rarely women) were arrested thereafter. In 1934, the police also began picking up communists who had criticized Stalin. The purge of the party grew into a full-fledged assault on Soviet officialdom that peaked in 1937 and subsided in 1939. Thereafter, Stalinist persecution rose and fell spasmodically, according to the dictator’s whim. Anne Applebaum has estimated that as a consequence 18 million people served time in labor camps between 1929 and 1953.30
This brutal repression had multiple causes. Stalin and his inner circle ordered and directed it, because they believed that they had to root out opposition to their policies. The peasants had risen up against collectivization; workers struck from time to time; ordinary people grumbled about the hardships of everyday life. They also flouted the government’s many rules, regulations, and directives. The black market flourished; factory managers falsified production data; orders issued by Moscow were ignored; party chairmen energetically feathered their own nests.
The leadership could not accept the fact that the system functioned only because people broke the rules. The five-year plans were poorly conceived and executed, which led to manifold foul-ups and privations. Without local officials filing bogus reports, without administrators burying demands from higher-ups under heaps of paperwork, without workers stealing from the factories, without a black market that supplied communists as well as ordinary citizens, Moscow’s unrealistic directives and witless oppression would have driven the Soviet people to collapse or rebellion. Tragically, the fudging on the rules fed Kremlin paranoia. For it was easier for Stalin and his lieutenants to believe that disappointing economic figures and public discontent were the result of sabotage than to face the massive failures of their own leadership. They reasoned that arresting corrupt officials, malcontents, and scofflaws would remove real and potential “enemies” from the general population and frighten that population into compliance. As an added, and important, benefit, they could use the arrested people as a giant convict labor force. They did not care that the vast majority of those who fell into the net had done nothing to warrant imprisonment. Perhaps some of them even convinced themselves that there were millions of implacable foes out there working in secret to undermine them.
Gender ideas and practices affected Stalin’s Terror, as they had the attacks on the lishentsy. The great majority of the police and party officials who carried out the persecutions were men, although there were a few women among the purgers. The most notorious of these was Rozalia Zemliachka, a veteran communist who had shown her lethal side as a political officer during the civil war. Then she had ordered soldiers executed for desertion and had participated in ferocious assaults on non-combatants in the Crimea. In the 1930s, she worked as an official of the government and party commissions that investigated accusations of wrongdoing. Zemliachka became notorious as a merciless inquisitor.31
Probably most of her victims were men. Eighty-nine percent of those prosecuted in the late 1930s were men, and men made up more than 90 percent of labor-camp inmates in the 1930s. In 1940, for example, there were 1,235,510 male prisoners in the camps and 108,898 female ones. The Terror targeted men because they held most of the leadership positions and because the authorities assumed that men, not women, threatened them. We have already seen such assumptions at work in the purge of the lishentsy and in police responses to the babi bunty. As in those operations, women were most likely to fall prey to Stalin’s Terror when their husbands did. After the authorities crushed a strike in the textile town of Vichuga in 1932, for example, they arrested only those women who were related to male strikers, even though many women had participated in the unrest. The same male-centered selection process was at work when female peasants were exiled with their kulak husbands in 1930, and when the wives of arrested male communists were picked up in 1938.32
The government was able to maintain the Terror for more than two decades because it had learned valuable lessons from the peasant uprisings against collectivization. Thereafter the police avoided direct assaults on communities, preferring to pick off a few people at a time and striking without warning, for the most trivial of reasons. Women were hauled away for gleaning grain without permission, for making derogatory comments about communists when an informer was nearby, for being a few minutes late for work, for taking a pencil home from the office, or for walking by a police station when the men inside needed more victims to meet their monthly quota of arrests.
The government also took great pains to disguise the scale of the Terror. Radio broadcasts and newspapers talked a lot about how the party was keeping the country safe by rooting out evildoers, but they did not say how many people were falling into the net. Victims were taken away in the middle of the night and locked up incommunicado. Prisoners were transported in trucks disguised as delivery vans or in freight cars. The bodies of the executed were buried, late at night, in unmarked mass graves outside the cities. People learned to ask no questions about missing neighbors or upturned dirt in nearby forests. If they were lucky, they could believe the government’s lies and go on with their lives.
When the NKVD, the agency charged with hunting down political enemies, turned its malignant attention to party members, those people proved to be as vulnerable as workers or peasants. Most took refuge in the official explanation that the police were hunting down enemies, and therefore that they, who had done nothing wrong, were safe. Inna Shikheeva-Gaister, the daughter of imprisoned communists, remembered years later, “We believed all the slogans. They screwed our heads on any way they wanted. I believed everything—completely and sincerely…. I believed everything I was supposed to about the enemies of the people and about all the arrests!”33
Fruma Treivas, who had once taken her status as the wife of a high-ranking communist for granted, found her faith crumbling in the summer of 1937. “From our balcony,” she wrote years later, “we could see all the other balconies in the courtyard. If no one appeared for a while, and the balcony was sealed, it meant that those people had been taken away. What a state we were in! At night, when the vans [of the NKVD] would arrive, you would think, ‘Oh, God, are they coming for us or someone else?’ On the night of July 17, they came for us.” Treivas’s husband Grigori Vasilkovskii was executed in prison; she was sent to a camp for female relatives of arrested men.34
WOMEN IN THE GULAG
The first stop on the journey to the camps was a prison where the arrested were interrogated, tried, and sentenced. They had no legal rights and no defense attorneys. The purpose of interrogation was to persuade them to sign a confession composed by an NKVD interrogator, and to incriminate others. Those who refused to confess were tortured. The trials that followed were perfunctory exercises, the main purpose of which was to pass sentences that ran from a few years for petty theft to death for those convicted of being an enemy of the state. Statistics on the number and gender of the executed remain fragmentary; it is probable that far more men than women met that fate.
After sentencing, the prisoners were loaded onto trains and taken to labor camps, collectively known by the acronym “Gulag,” that were spread across the Soviet Union.35 Prisoners in the Gulag were required to work; indeed, they built some of the largest construction projects of the 1930s and they manufactured military equipment and consumer goods. Conditions in the camps varied. Those located in the western part of the Soviet Union were devoted to farming or light manufacturing. Prisoners there suffered from the chronic malnutrition that beset all Gulag inmates, but their work was less grueling and the climate easier than in Siberia or the far northwest. Women in the Siberian camps had heavier assignments. Hava Volovich, a Ukrainian journalist, later described her first attempts at cutting peat, which was used for fuel: “We were sent off into the bog to take off the top layer of vegetation. This layer was about eighteen inches thick and soggy with stagnant water. We had to slice it into pieces with our spades, then load it onto stretchers and, up to our ankles or knees in water, carry it forty or fifty yards off to the side.”36
Female and male prisoners were usually separated in the Gulag. Women lived in separate camps or in their own section within larger complexes and worked with other women, under the supervision of male and female guards. They wore ragged clothing that did not keep out the cold or wet, worked with primitive equipment, lived in dirty, poorly heated barracks, and rarely got enough to eat. They also coped with abuse from guards and from inmates who were guilty of real crimes such as assault, murder, prostitution, and robbery. The so-called criminals operated much as do gangs in U.S. prisons today.
Female prisoners were most likely to survive the Gulag if they were young and healthy, and if they did indoor jobs such as clerical work, cooking, nursing, and sewing. Gulag veterans also remembered that friendships with other female prisoners were crucial, because friends shared food and clothes and gave one another emotional support. Some of these friendships were probably physically intimate as well. It is impossible to say how common lesbianism was, because same-sex love was so stigmatized in Soviet society that Gulag veterans discuss it only as deviant behavior engaged in by criminals.37
Prisoners learned to take pleasure in simple things. “Our favorite pastime was storytelling,” wrote Vera Shulz, an actor from Moscow. “We would listen with bated breath, transported into another reality…. I heard stories by Chekhov, Gorky, Turgenev, Maupassant and others.” Tamara Petkevich, an actor in Leningrad (formerly St. Petersburg), remembered taking breaks from work in a hemp-processing plant. “I shall never forget those moments. We lay surrounded by the fantastic moonlit night of Central Asia. It was as if we were floating in the clamorous sea of the steppe, which hummed with the rustling of sand and grass and the chirping of the cicadas. No one spoke.”38
Survival required women to develop other skills common to concentration-camp inmates. They loafed on the job or faked illnesses to conserve their strength; they made small treasures, such as spoons; they stole needles and other necessities. Some women moved up in the Gulag hierarchy by becoming leaders of their work groups or qualifying for the more skilled, less physically taxing work. These “trustees” sometimes collaborated with the authorities by informing on fellow prisoners. Women also traded sexual favors for privileges. Some became camp prostitutes, servicing multiple partners among the criminals and the guards. Luckier women managed to establish long-term relationships with camp administrators. Some of the women who were sexually active became pregnant, a tragedy for them and their babies, most of whom died quickly in the camps’ poorly supplied nurseries.
Veterans of the Gulag believed that women coped better than men with its hardships, because they formed stronger bonds with each other, had greater disease resistance, and could get by on less food. Until the statistics on mortality rates within the various camps have been analyzed, it is impossible to know whether these perceptions were true. We do know that women were more likely than men to be assigned to less physically demanding jobs and to camps located in the more moderate climate zones. These facts alone could account for more of them surviving.
Women also rebelled. Occasionally groups protested, and from time to time, individuals escaped. The most persistent resisters were the so-called “nuns,” some of whom were Orthodox nuns who had been arrested after the government ordered all the monasteries dissolved, others of whom were devout Protestants. These religious women took time off from work to pray, and some refused to work on holy days. Veteran revolutionaries, particularly Socialist Revolutionaries, also defied the guards. Sometimes the nuns and the Socialist Revolutionaries got away with such infractions; usually they were severely punished. A few souls remained so adamant that they were executed, a fate some seem to have courted. Other women committed suicide in various ways, the most common being simply to stop struggling to live. In the Gulag, despair was often fatal.
There were free women who worked in the Gulag. Female guards patrolled women’s camps, female administrators supervised the guards, and clerks and cooks ran offices and kitchens. In their background and training, these women were probably very similar to male Gulag employees, that is, they were from working-class or peasant families and had elementary-school educations.39 Former inmates remember the female staffers as brutal, corrupt, and indifferent to the suffering around them. They often describe male guards and wardens in the same way, but it seemed particularly awful to them that women in authority could be as hard-hearted as men. The memoirists seem to have underestimated the capacity of a prison system, particularly one as cruel as the Soviet, to deform the characters of the people it employed.
The Gulag also threw its shadow over people who never came inside its barbed-wire fences. The NKVD rounded up children who had lost both parents to arrest. Liubov Stoliarova, the daughter of working-class people in Khabarovsk, in Siberia, met this fate in 1937. “They took me to a reception-distribution center in Kharkov [in Ukraine], where we lived for three months on starvation ration…. Since we were children of political ‘enemies of the people,’ they used to march us under guard with dogs.”40 The centers served as collection points, where the children were sorted by age (thereby separating brothers and sisters). Older teenagers were sent to the labor camps, younger children to miserable state orphanages. As the numbers of such children swelled, the government set up special orphanages to hold them. Oftentimes the authorities changed these children’s names, with the result that relatives who came looking for them could not find them.
Adult relatives of arrested people endured the anguish of being separated from loved ones and not knowing whether they were alive or dead. They also labored under the stigma of being related to “enemies of the people.” Former friends avoided them. They had trouble finding or keeping jobs. Anna Egorova, the construction worker on the Moscow metro and amateur pilot, was refused admission to an advanced pilot-training program in 1938 because her brother Vasili had been arrested. She did as many others did, and learned to lie about her personal history. She was fortunate in having valuable skills and a common name. So she managed to become an instructor at a flying club far from Moscow, where no one bothered to check her background.
Many wives, bereft of their husbands’ support and ostracized by people who feared to be associated with an “enemy,” endured enormous privation. The memoirs of survivors are full of stories of extraordinary pilgrimages over great distances to find food and avoid the authorities. Maria Novikova, whose parents were labeled kulaks during the collectivization in Belgorod, Ukraine, remembered, “How much suffering my mother endured all these years along with us! She dragged us through strangers’ houses, naked, hungry…. Three of us children died during those years of wanderings. When one would die, my mother would take the corpse and make the sign of the Cross, saying ‘Praise to You, O Lord, she’s not suffering anymore.’” Moving from place to place, Novikova and her daughter Maria stayed alive.41
Survivors also tell of mothers who, despite the odds against them, managed to be reunited with their children after they were freed from their own imprisonment. One such woman was Evgenia Ginzburg, who came out of the Gulag determined to record what she had witnessed. In doing so, she produced one of the great prison-camp memoirs of the twentieth century.
EVGENIA GINZBURG (1906–77)
The daughter of a Jewish pharmacist from Moscow, Ginzburg graduated from Kazan University in the early 1920s. After teaching in a school for workers, she became a journalist and Communist Party activist. When the NKVD came for her in 1937, she was married to the mayor of Kazan, Pavel Aksionov, had two sons, and was working for a local newspaper. She was sentenced to ten years’ imprisonment for alleged contacts with “Trotskyites.” After more than a year in prison, Ginzburg was sent to Kolyma, an enormous complex of labor camps in the far east. Released in 1949 but required to remain in the area, she and her partner Anton Walter, a doctor she had met in the Gulag, settled in the city of Magadan. Ginzburg found work as a kindergarten teacher, adopted an orphaned girl, and reunited with her son Vasili, who had survived internment in an orphanage. She learned that her older son had starved to death during World War II.
Ginzburg had long intended to write about the Gulag. “The collection of material for this book,” she declared, “began from the moment when I first crossed the threshold of the NKVD’s Inner Prison in Kazan.” She described friends who helped orphaned children, and guards who were sometimes merciful, sometimes cruel. She told of reciting poetry in the freight cars that carried the prisoners east and of felling trees at fifty degrees below zero. She chronicled her “cruel journey of the soul” from “naïve young communist idealist into someone who had tasted… the fruits of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.” Ginzburg came through that journey able to affirm the possibility of good, even in the midst of consuming evil.42
Unfortunately, she did not live to see her memoirs published in her homeland. In the 1960s, she circulated them in typescript among the intelligentsia, to great acclaim, but no Soviet press would touch them. Ginzburg finally sent them abroad, where they appeared as two volumes, Journey into the Whirlwind (1967) and Within the Whirlwind (1979). She died in Moscow in 1977. Her masterpiece was published in the Soviet Union in 1989.