WOMEN AND THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION

Author(s): Ziva Galili

Source: Dialectical Anthropology , 1990, Vol. 15, No. 2/3 (1990), pp. 119-127
Published by: Springer

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/29790341

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WOMEN AND THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION
ZivaGalili
One of the most moving testimonies by a
Russian revolutionary woman is a set of
interviews with Lydia Osipovna Dan, a veteran
member of the Menshevik party whose history
has occupied my interest for a long time. Lydia
Dan appears in these interviews as a bright and
sensitive person, as well as a committed and
resourceful revolutionary, whose prominence in
the party, nevertheless, had more to do with her
role as sister, wife, and lover.1 She was the sister
of two leading Mensheviks (Iulii Martov, the
party's main theoretician, and Sergei Ezhov), the
wife of the party's main strategist and organizer
(Fedor Dan), and the lover, later friend, of Iraklii
Tsereteli, the man who led the party through the
storms of the 1917 revolution. Her story has
much to tell us about women and women's issues
in the Russian revolutionary movement.
It is not that Lydia Dan was passive or
unadventurous. Born in St. Petersburg in 1878,
she was the fourth child of the Tsederbaums, a
middle-class, assimilated Jewish family
privileged to live in the capital. She took early
and passionate interest in the ideas of revolution,
and later socialism, which her brothers and their
male friends brought home from the gimnazium
and university. In 1894 she enrolled in the
special university-level Bestuzhev Courses for
women, like many other "democratic" students
attended the public debates between Marxists
and Populists at the Free Economic society, and
spent her Sundays teaching literacy to workers.
But already in those years (1895-96) Lydia went
further, undertaking to conduct illegal activities
among the young female workers of the Laferma
cigarette factory. She told the cigarette makers
about the life of European workers, drew up lists
of their grievances, and in this way helped to
organize one of the biggest strikes of the time. As
she confided to her interviewer more than six
decades later, the cigarette makers were for her
above all workers, though she could see that their
misery was greatly compounded by their gender.
Dialectical Anthropology, 15: 119-127,1990.
? 1990 Kluwer Academic Publishers.
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The great strikes of 1897 were followed by
many arrests, and Lydia, who was exiled to
comfortable but provincial Poltava, decided in
1900 to leave Russia as well as her
politically-moderate husband and their
three-year old daughter. In Zurich, she joined the
Russian Social Democrats (including Martov and
V. I. Lenin), who began publishing the newspaper
Iskram, in an attempt to guide the labor
movement inside Russia into a determined
political struggle against autocracy. Two years
later, she returned to Russia as an underground
agent for Iskra and was soon rearrested; it was
only in prison that she was able to meet her
daughter. Exiled to a remote Siberian village, she
escaped, made her way by sled and train to
Moscow, then to Vilno, where Ezhov arranged for
her to be smuggled across the border. She
rejoined Martov in Munich in 1904. By then the
Iskra group, and Russian Social Democracy in
general, had split into Bolshevik and Menshevik
factions, and among the Mensheviks who
congregated in Munich, Lydia met Fedor Dan.
From then on, until his death in 1947, she shared
with him periods of revolutionary work in Russia,
Siberian exile, and political activity in
emigration. Along the way, she served as
secretary to various editorial boards and the
Social Democratic faction in the State Duma, and
worked in many other capacities, though none of
them in the public eye. This is perhaps our good
luck, for she was as much an observer as a
participant, thus becoming an invaluable witness
of Menshevik history.
Scholarship on women in the Russian
revolutionary movement shows that Lydia Dan's
revolutionary career, while unique in many of its
details, was not unusual in its general contours,
at least not until the very eve of the 1917
revolution, when the Bolshevik opponents of
Menshevism began to organize women workers.2
Throughout the second half of the 19th century,
women were most commonly introduced to
120
revolutionary ideas and activities by older
siblings or cousins, often males. And just as
revolutionary involvement began in the family, so
did the revolutionary association tend to become
a reconstituted family. Moreover, revolt against
the social and political order was bound with, and
often preceded by, revolt against traditional
familial and sexual conventions. This was
generally due to the deep alienation of the
educated, idealistic youth from their society. But
among the first generations of the radical
intelligentsia, especially the Nihilists of the early
1860s, the preoccupation with personal revolt
was also the result of the rebels' social and
political isolation. Women became, as it were, the
first "oppressed" to whom males intelligently
turned their attention; the right to freedom and
equality in love was the first liberty for which
they fought. These preoccupations were then
captured and preserved in literature, most
notably in N. Chernyshevskii's novel What Is To
Be Done? (1863), whose heroine, Vera Pavlovna,
broke every sexual convention of her time in her
quest for social significance and freedom. Lydia
Dan's personal choices were prefigured in this
and other novels, as well as in the personal
conduct of radical women before her.3
Lydia's role in the wings of the Menshevik
party was also typical, if not of the earliest
generations of the revolutionary intelligentsia
(when women were prominent organizers of
Populist conspiratorial activities), then certainly
so of the Social Democrats. Women provided
crucial technical aid as well as general support
for the leading men of the movement, but rarely
did they formulate policy or appear as leaders.
Nor was there anything unusual in Lydia's
insistence on the primacy of "worker" over
"woman." Beginning in the 1870s, when Populist
socialism reigned among the radical
intelligentsia, through the 1890s, when Marxism
became the dominant radical ideology, to the
1905 revolution, Russian socialists paid only
sparse attention to the "woman question," which
had been so central to the Nihilist rebellion.
Socialism, they believed, would end all abuses
and inequities; it was useless to deal with the
"woman question" (or for that matter the "Jewish
question") in isolation.
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The written codex of European Marxism
provided Russian Social Democrats with a neat,
"scientific" formulation of this general belief.
August Bebel's Women Under Socialism (1879),
and Friedrich Engels' Origins of the Family,
Private Property, and the State (1884), explained
women's dependence, inequality, and
powerlessness in their exclusion from the sphere
of "social" production and their corresponding
enslavement to "domestic" production. Women's
liberation and equality, these works argued,
would be achieved in two stages: first, their
incorporation into social production, a task
already partially accomplished by capitalist
industrialization; second, and only under
socialism, the "socialization" of all domestic
tasks. Building on these assumptions, the
Russian Marxist Aleksandra Kollontai would
later theorize that under socialism the family
itself would disappear: with its economic
functions taken over by society, the family would
no longer be upheld by law and state, giving way
to "free unions" between men and women, unions
based on true love and equality.4
Russian Marxists, then, accepted as
indisputable women's ultimate right to equality
in every sphere of life, as well as their need for
special protection until socialism was victorious.
The Social Democratic platform of 1903 listed
women's suffrage, extensive protection of
women's labor, and special maternity provisions
among its goals for the first, bourgeois" stage of
revolution in Russia. Social Democratic practice,
however, centered almost exclusively on the
struggle for political freedom, to be followed in
the future by a transition to socialism. It was in
these general goals that real hope was thought to
lie, and in the meantime women workers and
their particular concerns were largely ignored.
The first departure from this pattern of
neglect came only during the revolutionary
upheaval of 1905-1907, and was dictated by
tactical considerations. Its immediate impact on
party work and women's lives was, at best,
negligible. Only in hindsight was the "first
Russian revolution" seen to have marked a
turning point in Social Democracy's relations
with feminist issues and, indeed, in the
respective self-definition of the Menshevik and

Bolshevik factions of Russian Social Democracy.
Yet it was the conclusions drawn by some from
the experience of 1905-1907 that eventually led
the Bolsheviks?but not the Mensheviks?to
involve themselves in organizing working
women. From this point on, the lives of
Aleksandra Kollontai and Inessa Armand, to
mention only the most famous of Bolshevik
women activists, become more symptomatic of
the fate of women in the Russian revolution than
that of Lydia Dan.5
As a wave of revolutionary feelings,
rhetoric, and actions rose in the spring and
summer of 1905, the Social Democrats made
every effort to mobilize working people for the
revolutionary attack on the autocracy; and even
after partial victory was achieved in the fall of
1905, and then gradually dismantled during 1906
and 1907, the socialist parties?now represented
in the State Duma?attempted to keep workers
politically mobilized. Two processes helped focus
the socialists' attention on women in particular:
first, the steady rise in the number of female
factory workers (from 192,000 in 1887 to 584,000
in 1907)6 and second, the emergence of a vocal
non-socialist feminist movement, which laid
claim to the support of all women, workers
included. In 1907, the non-socialist feminist
movement succeeded in collecting 26,000
signatures for its suffrage appeal, many of them
from working people.7
Responding to new opportunities and
exigencies, Aleksandra Kollontai, then a Social
Democrat loosely affiliated with the Mensheviks
and as yet only marginally interested in
feminism, began to organize among women
workers, speaking to their special concerns and
fighting against the influence of the liberal
feminists. In 1908, as one of the leaders of the
working women's delegation to the First
Ail-Russian Women's Congress, she rose
repeatedly to denounce "bourgeois" feminism.
Then, in 1909, at a time when the freedom to
organize and the workers' interest in these
activities declined to a new low, Kollontai sat
down to write The Social Bases of the Woman
Question, in which she formulated the theoretical
principles for a special socialist effort to organize
working women and fight for their goals.8
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121
These early ideological bridges later helped
Kollontai and several other women in the
Bolshevik wing of Russian Social Democracy to
convince the party's male leaders, in particular
V. I. Lenin, to direct resources and energies to
the organization of women workers. The
centerpiece of that effort was the Bolshevik
journal Woman Worker (1914). It is easy to see
that tactical considerations were again
paramount in the Social Democrats' appeal to
women workers. The two years preceding the
Great War were a time of unusual strike activity,
when Mensheviks and Bolsheviks were locked in
bitter political competition for control of workers'
activism. Moreover, women workers joined the
unrest in larger numbers than ever before,
though their participation was extremely spotty
and was not generally accompanied by
organizational activity.9 By addressing issues
that mattered to proletarian women most, the
Bolsheviks could enhance their influence.
And yet, the impact of these two early
episodes of Social Democratic involvement in
organizing women went further than their
utilitarian purpose. The 1913-1914 experiment,
in particular, proved crucial to Bolshevik policy
on women's issues in the early years of Soviet
rule. Not only had the Bolshevik party publicly
committed itself to a program of immediate
action on behalf of women's equality and liberty,
but the women involved in the daily work of
organizing and publishing had come to feel more
strongly and personally about that goal. Most of
these activists were again the sisters, wives, or
lovers of the party's male leaders and in the past
they had agreed on the primacy of workers' unity
over women's particular concerns. Now they were
given an opportunity to reverse their priorities,
and do so with Lenin's apparent blessing.10
There remained considerable ambivalence
among these women activists and more so among
their male comrades, but the commitment to
women both fed and was fed by the party's
experience during the revolutionary year of 1917.
Russian workers in general, and female workers
in particular, tended to oscillate between
quiescence in settled times and militant activism
during revolutionary upsurges. In 1917, women
workers, who made up one-third of the Petrograd
 122
workforce, were among the first demonstrators
on the streets, coming out in large numbers on
February 23rd to mark International Woman's
Day and to protest the shortages and high prices
of foodstuffs. Female participation in strike
activity, though again uneven and often
"spontaneous," rather than organized, remained
relatively high in the months leading up to the
Bolshevik seizure of power in October. Once
more, it was the Bolsheviks who capitalized on
women's activism by establishing special
women's sections in local party organizations and
championing women's issues everywhere,
especially in the restored Woman Worker. Their
public posture on the issue brought them the
support of women, and this success, in turn,
strengthened the party's interest in women's
causes. Tactical considerations and true
commitment reinforced each other.
The mixed motives of the Bolsheviks must
be born in mind when we turn to actual Soviet
policies and their impact on the lives of Russian
women. Indeed, one must resist the temptation to
use the Soviet experiment as indicative of the
general usefulness of socialism for feminist
causes. Not only was the Soviet experience, by
definition, historically unique, but the very
"socialist" nature of Soviet society is open to
doubt. What needs special emphasis, however, is
the deeply contradictory nature of the Soviet
record. Most of the historiography to date has
treated these contradictions as chronologically
patterned: the first decade of Soviet rule,
encompassing the otherwise very different
periods of civil war (1917-1920) and the New
Economic Policy (or NEP, from 1921 to 1926 or
1928), has been described as a time of
commitment to women's equality, of heroic attack
on old conventions, and of experimentation with
new forms; while the decade of the 1930's,
Stalin's decade, inaugurated a Thermidor on all
fronts. As I will try to show, the record for the
two periods is far more mixed than this
chronological division suggests, and the motives
for the change that did occur around 1928-1929
are highly complex.
The first decade of Bolshevik rule produced
many radical changes, and none more impressive
than in the area of legislation. Women had been
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granted full political rights already before the
Bolsheviks seized power, including the
enactment in law of female suffrage by the
Provisional Government on July 20th. The
legislation of the early Soviet period covered
other areas: extensive legal protection of women's
labor, including equal pay and the right to an
eight-hour workday, was declared in November
1917; a law of December 1917 removed all legal
restrictions on divorce; a new Family Law in
October 1918 made all marriages secular,
provided for the economic independence and
equality of women in marriage, and imposed
paternal responsibility for all children, whether
born in wedlock or not; abortion was legalized in
November 1920; the Land Law of 1922 gave
women ownership in their family's farm and
allowed them to receive their share of the
property upon divorce; and finally, a new edition
of the Family Law in 1926 made it, on the one
hand, easier to obtain divorce (the famous
"postcard divorce"), and recognized unregistered
marriages while, on the other hand, stating more
strongly men's alimony obligations. Even where
these provisions had the effect, as we shall see, of
burdening women, the legislators' intentions
were clearly different: not only to liberate women
from the legal fetters of the traditional
patriarchal family, but also to make it
economically feasible for women to live outside of
marriage at a time when their domestic tasks
still kept them at home.
Later on, I will discuss the impact of these
new legal norms on the actual experience of
women in marriage, divorce, and motherhood.
Naturally, employment opportunities affected
this experience and will be discussed as well. For
the moment, however, I would like to turn to
women's participation in public life, especially
party life, which was the second major area of
change. During the civil war, a small number of
leading Bolshevik women rose to conspicuously
prominent positions in the party and the state
administration, thus providing models for women
throughout the country. More important, a
practical channel for the political activism of
women everywhere was provided by the women's
sections of local Communist party organizations
and the central Women's Section (ZhenotdeD,
 123

which was established in 1919 in the party's until the destalinization of the mid-1950s), s
Central Committee. Under the guidance of women's legal independence curbed and their
Zhenotdel', the local sections sought to prepare to the family and children reaffirmed. To be
women for political, economic, and social with, Communism's stated commitment
equality: first, by providing communal dining special effort on behalf of women came to an
halls, creches, etc., to free women from their with the abolition of Zhenotdel' in 1930, and
domestic duties?an effort that was rendered disappearance of women's issues from
particularly difficult by the conditions of civil increasingly shrill rhetorics of the follow
war; and second, by raising women's political decade. Then the Family Code of 1936 outlaw
consciousness and participation?work that abortions, rewarded childbearing, and gre
ranged from literacy campaigns to the complicated divorces, though it also contin
establishment of women's Delegate Assemblies the trend set in 1926 of enhancing alimo
(by 1928, these involved 2.5 million women) and arrangements. A new Family Code passed tow
apprentice programs, through which women were the end of the war (1944) made divorce ne
to gain an understanding of political life and the impossible, and further sought to strengthen
confidence necessary for equal participation. institution of marriage by removing le
ZhehotdeP was also responsible for the campaign recognition from unregistered marriages
against patriarchal authority, especially among stigmatizing children born out of wedlock. T
the Moslem women of Central Asia. legal norms, and the literary conventions
But there was ample evidence already Socialist Realism, propagated a new model
during these early years that the remarkable women's personal and sexual behavior, wh
experiment of Zhenotdel', and the goal of some have described as a new bourge
women's freedom and equality, were at best of puritanism": a woman's first obligation wa
secondary importance to the party. The very her family; her paramount
initiative for the creation of Zhenotdel' came from function?reproduction. 11 No less ominous was
the handful of women in the party's leadership, the disappearance of women from political life,
not its male leaders. Much of the support it even as the scope of any permissible political
received was due to the earlier success of the initiative was drastically constrained under
local sections in mobilizing women's support for Stalin.
the regime. When the campaign against How are we to interpret these
patriarchal authority and its symbol in Central discontinuities? Critics of Communism, as well as
Asia?the veil?backfired and caused violent many feminists describe the pro-woman stance of
reaction, Zhenotdel' was ordered to withdraw. A the early decade as essentially hypocritical in its
more substantive objection was that the women's use of women's plight to mobilize support for the
sections only enhanced the segregation of women revolutionary regime. Other observers have
in the service sector. Indeed, it has been argued focused their critique on the Stalinist period:
that the Party tolerated Zhenotdel' only because Leon Trotsky described a new "cult of the
of its role in organizing vitally needed, if often family," which reflected both the values of a new
inadequate, social services at a time when the bureaucratic elite and its political need for a
very fabric of family and community was being stable hierarchy of relations; the historian
torn asunder by the chaos of revolution and civil Nicholas Timasheff wrote about the "Great
war.
Retreat" from revolutionary vision to traditional
All these qualifications notwithstanding, thevalues; Vera Dunham attributes the new
Russian
legislation, policies, and rhetoric of sexualthe
conventions to the search for totalitarian
revolution's first decade marked the high point ofof thought and emotions.12 Each of these
control
Soviet commitment to changing the status of
interpretations adds to our understanding of the
women in society and the family. In contrast, the
complex motives behind Stalin's reversal of the
next decade, from 1929 to 1939 (and Party's
indeed policy toward women. But it is in two
through the end of the second World War
moreand
recent studies, exploring the details of the

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 124
new policies and their formulations, that I find
particularly useful explanations for the direction
which Soviet policy toward women took during
the late 1920's and the 1930's. Consider the data
on women in labor and higher education during
the decade of industrialization which Gail
Lapidus presents in her study, Women in Soviet
Society. Between 1928 and 1940, the number of
women employed in the national economy rose
from 2,795,000 to 13,190,000, or from 24 to 39
percent;13 the percentage of women in higher
education rose from 28 to 58, and the rise was
particularly dramatic in educational institutions
specializing in industry, transportation, and
communications (13 to 40 percent), agriculture
(17 to 46 percent), economics and law (21 to 63
percent).14 Not only was there a radical
transformation in the economic status of women,
but Lapidus shows that this was a deliberate
policy, and one which was accompanied by some
groundbreaking measures to protect women's
labor. The influx of women into institutions of
higher education, for example, was due to the
extremely high targets set in 1930 for their
recruitment, and the affirmative action taken by
party and trade union activists in
"commandeering" women to meet these targets.
Also, in 1930, women's right to employment
according to their qualifications and with equal
pay, was written into the law. In 1932, a special
maternity law was passed, providing women with
a three-month paid leave and additional unpaid
leave for one year, during which their seniority
was to be protected.
Again, this remarkable effort was not
without its problems. There was, it is true, much
talk about socializing domestic services such as
cooking, laundry, and childcare. There was also a
ten-fold increase in the number of openings in
daycare facilities (from 107,000 in 1927 to
1,062,000 in 1932). But this increase came to an
abrupt end in 1932, and many other services
actually declined during the Second Five Year
Plan (1932-1937), when all resources were
channeled into the expansion of the industrial
plant. In 1937, at a time when many millions of
women had already joined the workforce, the
childcare system could accommodate only
1,045,000 children.15
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Indeed, under the conditions of Stalin's
breakneck industrialization, women and the
family were subjected to two contradictory
pressures. On the one hand, women were
practically pushed into the labor market.
Although the move was portrayed as presaging
the full "liberation" of women from the old
economic dependence?a claim which had deep
roots in Marxist doctrine?the recruitment of
women, especially wives of workers already
living in industrial centers, was also a boon for
the goal of rapid industrialization: it represented
very significant savings in housing and wage
payments. In fact, the number of dependents per
wage earner declined from 2.46 in 1928 to 1.28 in
1940, due only in part to a falling birthrate. To be
sure, Soviet economists argued that the savings
from women's work would benefit women as well:
they would pay for the socialization of domestic
services, in the "production" of which, according
to S. L. Strumillin, the average Soviet woman
spent 700 hours annually.16 These sorts of
arguments seemed to give a measure of realism
to the Utopian fervor that accompanied the early
phases of industrialization.
In fact, however, women were being
squeezed from another direction as well, and
increasingly so, as the 1930's progressed. With
millions of new working families crowded into
fast growing industrial centers, services fell far
behind, and it was to the family, mostly the wife
and mother, that the task fell of feeding, clothing,
and rearing present and future workers. It might
actually be argued that the reappearance of the
"cult of the family," and the new legal measures
to ensure its integrity, reflected these pressing
needs of the moment, rather than any cultural
values, be they the values of peasants-turned
-workers or workers-turned- managers. The
general dislocation associated with
industrialization, as well as women's recruitment
into the workforce, weakened the family. Yet, the
family had to survive because there was no other
network to provide the most basic services for the
industrial workforce. The irony of the Soviet
situation was that women entered the sphere of
"social" production at a time when their
"domestic" production could not be dispensed
with. As a result of these contradictions,

industrialization entailed even greater hardships
for Soviet women than for their male co-workers,
and these did not come to an end with Stalin's
demise. Even today, both working and
professional women must work a "second shift" at
home. Their choice of specialization, and their
chances of advancement, are severely affected by
their domestic duties. And while their share in
the national economy continues to be extremely
high (51.5 percent in 1976),17they are segregated
in the service sector (including education and
health) or light industries and agriculture. This
pattern of both horizontal and vertical
segregation (and the continued preference given
in Soviet economy to heavy industry) is at least
partially responsible for the significant gap
between men's and women's earnings.18
Finally, the general difficulties of everyday
life in a country where housing, goods, and
services were in short supply, also curtailed the
independence of women, especially mothers.
But if incorporation into "social" production
had not spelled the liberation idealized by
Marxist feminists (and here we should be
cautioned again that the Stalinist "revolution
from above" departed in many other ways from
the model of socialist transformation), neither
should it be portrayed as the undoing of the
heroic feminist project of the early period of
Zhenotdel'. This point is made amply clear by the
work in progress of Wendy Goldman, who looks
more critically at that early project and does so
through the eyes of the women most needy of
emancipation?working and peasant women.19
Goldman makes two important points: first,
she shows that the vision encapsuled in the
family legislation of the early period and the
work of Zhenotdel' was inconsistent with the
economic possibilities of the time. For example,
the principle of women's equality in property, as
applied to the countryside in the Land Law of
1922, clashed with the prevailing patterns of
farming, which were still communal and familial.
Even in the city, the norm of easily-dissolved
marriage and mutual independence of men and
women was an economic impossibility for most
people. Women's unemployment was rampant
throughout the years of NEP (women being the
first to lose their jobs and the last to be hired
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125
when economic activity picked up). When
employed, their wages could not support their
children; prostitution was all too frequently the
only way to do so. Equally important, male
workers' wages could in no way support two
households. Thus, though alimony was routinely
granted by sympathetic judges, and took a large
portion of a man's earnings, it could not provide
divorced women and their children with even
minimal existence. No other social problem of the
1920's was as tragic, pressing, and indicative of
the failure to provide an alternative to the
traditionally-enforced family than that of the
besprizomiki?the homeless children who by
1922 numbered 7.5 million. The problem was
caused only in part by the horrors of civil war
and famine. Many of the children had identifiable
living parents: fathers who had gone on to start
new families; mothers who could not support
their children, but the.besprizorniki were not
only a symptom of failure, they actually
contributed to it. For, as Goldman shows, the
homes and other services put in place to ease this
sore problem drained the meager funds available
for public childcare, funds that could have eased
women's path to work and economic
independence.
In another part of her work, Goldman
explores the views, complaints, and desires of
working women, as expressed in a Congress of
Working Women held in 1926. Two issues came
up again and again in the delegates' bitter
complaints: first, the way in which men have
used easier divorce procedures to shirk their
responsibility toward their families, leaving
wives and children to poverty, prostitution, and
homelessness; and second, the helplessness of
women to face this situation under conditions of
unemployment and extremely low pay. The
working women's demands?to hold men more
strictly to their duties toward their wives and
children, and to give women employment at a
decent pay?correspond to two principal elements
of the 1930's policy on family and female
employment.
I have not set out to argue in this essay that
the Soviet revolution, as it evolved under Stalin
in the 1930's, gave Russian women what they
wanted, needed, or deserved. As we have seen,
 126
Russia's economic backwardness, compounded by
the terrible devastation of war, revolution, and
civil war, distorted the Marxist feminist project
from the start. And Stalin's command
industrialization was carried out without any
regard for the suffering and deprivation of
working and farming people, men or women.
Because this policy depended on some stability
within the family, and for other more diffuse
cultural reasons, women continued to be the
main providers of domestic services even as their
time and energies were being channeled into the
spheres of production and public services.
What needs to be recognized, however, is
that for the majority of Soviet women in the
1920's, often living in appalling physical
conditions, the vision so eloquently articulated by
Aleksandra Kollontai and prefigured in the
life-style of the radical intelligentsia?the image
of women who are free in love and equal in the
public sphere?held little promise. A quote from
the 1928 Soviet play Inga should help make the
point. Here are the words of Somov, the wise
old-time Communist worker who had survived
years of underground activity to arrive at the
Soviet era and who now serves as secretary of the
Communist cell in a clothing factory; he speaks
about Inga, the factory manager, who must be
seen here as representing the kind of Communist
intelligentsia woman whose example was held by
the Zhenotdel' for all women to follow:
Notes
1. The original interviews with Lydia Dan are on deposit at the
Project on Menshevik History, Harriman Institute,
Columbia University; an abridged and edited translation is
included in The Making of Three Russian Revolutionaries:
Voices from the Menshevik Past, edited by L. H. Haimson,
with Ziva Galili y Garcia and Richard Wortman,
Cambridge, 1987.
2. Several works from this growing body of scholarship, all
published in the past decade or so, were used in preparing
this paper and could be used for further reading. See
Richard Stitcs, The Women's Liberation Movement in
Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism, 1860-1930,
Princeton, 1978; Gail Warshofsky Lapidus, Women in
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I admire Inga. I like her decisiveness, her firmness. She lives
audaciously, strongly. But, after all, she is?how shall I put
it??a laboratory product. She had to have a father exiled
abroad?a remarkable Bolshevik!?she had to grow up abroad.
But the millions? The millions are praying to God.. .the millions
are suffocating in kitchen stench, and carry bruises from their
beatings. . . .The millions have other problems. They need the
family. It's you the intellectual women of ripe age, who dream
about various kinds of free love. But they,.. .my God!.. .There
are so many other things of much greater importance! w
Here is a man speaking, but the sentiment is
very close to that recorded at the Congress of
Working women. Work, pay, and minimal
economic security, were essential for working
women. Freedom in love was something perhaps
not to be denigrated (at least not by the working
women who had been exposed to the ZhenotdeD.
Yet it was suspect because men were seen as
more easily capable of enjoying it. Women were
then left with care of children and no recourse.
The same sentiment pervades the last scene of
Avram Room's wonderfully wry film-comedy of
1926, "A Petty-Bourgeois Street" (better known
in the West as "Bed and Sofa"): Liudmila, the
unemployed worker's wife, who had been living
in a menage-a-trois with her husband and his
friend, has left them both and is train bound for a
destination where she would find work, be
productive and independent, and raise the child
whom the two men had wanted her to abort. An
appropriate scene with which to close this essay.
Soviet Society: Equality, Development, and Social Change,
Berkeley, 1978; Barbara Evans Clemens, Bolshevik
Feminist: The Life of Aleksandra Kollonai, Bloomington,
Indiana, 1979; Linda Edmundson, Feminism in Russia,
1900-1917, London, 1983; Barbara Alpern Engel, Mothers
and Daughters: Women of the Inetlligentsia in Nineteenth
Century Russia, Cambridge, 1983; Rose L. Glickman,
Russian Factoru Women: Workplace and Society, 7580
1914, Berkeley, 1984.
3. Stites, op. cit., offers a most comprehensive and insightful
treatment of the "woman question* * in the pre-revolutionary
decades.
4. Kollontai first formulated these ideas in her 1908 pamphlet
 127

(published in 1909) The Social Bases of the Woman
Question, but she returned to them in later years.
5. Lydia joined Fedor Dan and Iulii Martov in the political
exile that most leading Mensheviks accepted after their
party was defeated in 1917 and outlawed (1918). For over
40 yeras, she lived in Germany, France, and the United
States.
6. Glickman, 83; Stites, 162.
7. Stites, p. 210.
8. SotsiaTnye osnovy zhenskogo voprosa, St Petersburg, 1909.
9. See Glickman, 210-218.
10. Among the editors of Woman Worker and the organizers of
women's groups were Nadezhda Krupskaia (Lenin's wife),
Anna Elizarova (his sister), Inessa Armand (a personal
friend of Lenin), and L. Zinovieva (wife of another party
leader).
11. The term is borrowed from era Vera S. Dunham, Om
Stalin's Times: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction,
Cambridge, 1976.
12. L Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (1936), New York,
1972; Nicholas S. Timasheff, The Great Retreat: The
Growth and Decline of Communism in Russia, New York,
1948; Dunham, op. cit.
13. Lapidus, op. cit., table 11, p,. 176.
14. Ibid, table 6, p. 149.
15. table 2, p. 131.
16. Ibid, p. 102.
17. /Stable 11, p. 166.
18. Lapidus cites two estimates: one, which places women's
earnings at 87 percent of men's, a figure she considers too
high; the other, at 67 percent (pp. 193-94).
19. Wendy Zeva Goldman, "Women, the Family and the New
Revolutionary Order in the Soviet Union," in Promissory
Notes: Women in the Transition to Socialism, eds., Sonia
Kruks, Rayna Rapp, and Marylin B. Young, New York,
1989; "Working-Class Women and the 'Withering Away'
of the Family: Popular Responses to Family Policy," in
Culture and Society, eds., S. Fitzpatrick, A Rabinowitch, R.
Stites, Bloomington, Indiana, 1990.
20. The play was written by Anatolii Glegov in 1928 and had its
premiere at the Moscow Theater of Revolution in April
1929. The quote is from the English-language translation in
Six Soviet Plays, edited by E. Lyons, New York, 1934.

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