Suny R.G. (ed.) The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume 3: The Twentieth Century
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and large-scale enterprises that had been privatised were held by employees.
This proved to be the high-point of worker ‘ownership’. By June 1995,as
workers sold their shares to make ends meet and the second (‘loans for shares’)
phase of privatisation got under way, the proportion dropped to 43 per cent
and continued downward thereafter.
99
All the while, as the state reduced its
subsidies to industry and directors siphoned off funds for other purposes, wage
arrears mounted. By 1996, they comprised 7.7 billion roubles, or 131 per cent of
the monthly wage bill in ‘indebted enterprises’, and by August 2000 the total
wage debt stood at 40.5 billion roubles.
100
This disguised form of unemployment was accompanied by others: the
assignment of part-time work to wage earners interested in full-time employ-
ment, and the placement of workers on unpaid administrative leave.According
to the standard definition recognised by the ILO, there were 3.6 million peo-
ple (4.8 per cent of the active workforce) unemployed in 1992 but 8.9 million
(10 per cent) by 1998. Nearly three-quarters of unemployed men were listed as
workers, as compared to 53 per cent of women. Women were far more likely
to leave the workforce ‘voluntarily’, either because of declining employment
opportunities or curtailment of childcare services. Thus, the proportion of
women in the workforce diminished from 51 per cent in 1991 to 47 per cent in
1997.
101
Sectorally, there were 8.2 million fewer wage earners in industry in 1998 than
in 1991, a decline of 36.8 per cent. Other sectors showing significant declines
over these years included ‘science’ (which lost more than half of its work-
force), transport and construction. Net gainers included finance and insurance
(where employment rose by 73 per cent), and wholesale and retail trade.
102
Not
included in official statistics but also increasing significantly in numbers were
the self-employed, those involved in the sex trade and bodyguards.
Ethnographies expose dimensions of what workers have endured since the
collapse of the Soviet Union that official data and journalists’ accounts do
not reveal. ‘No newspaper report or set of statistics’, writes Rob Ferguson in
relation to the Kuzbass miners, ‘can convey the accumulation of privations,
99 Linda J. Cook, Labor and Liberalization: Trade Unions in the New Russia (New York:
Twentieth Century Fund, 1997), p. 70.
100 Goskomstat Rossii, Trud i zaniatost’ v Rossii, Statisticheskii sbornik (Moscow:
Goskomstat, 1996), p. 104; ‘Goskomstat Rossii soobshchaet osnovnye itogi o
sotsial’no-ekonomicheskom polozhenii Rossii (v 1 ianvare–iiule 2000 goda)’,
www.government.ru:8014/institutions/committees/gks2308.html
101 Goskomstat Rossii, Uroven zhizni naseleniia Rossii (Moscow: Goskomstat, 1996), p. 24;
Goskomstat Rossii, Rossiiskii statisticheskii ezhegodnik, Statisticheskii sbornik (Moscow:
Goskomstat, 1998), p. 182.
102 Goskomstat Rossii, Rossiiskii statisticheskii ezhegodnik,p.179.
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Workers and industrialisation
nor the mix of bitterness, anger, despondency and loss of self-esteem that
wage non-payment brings in its train.’ ‘The scale of injustice’, he adds, ‘invokes
rebellionand fatalism in the same breath: “Something must be done...Thereis
nothing one can do”.’
103
The contemporary factory (and mine) workerremains
an endangered species in Russia and the other former Soviet republics.
103 Ferguson, ‘Will Democracy Strike Back?’, p. 461.
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17
Women and the state
barbara alpern engel
By the early twentieth century, far-reaching changes had begun to challenge
Russia’s traditional gender hierarchies. Industrialisation and the proliferation
of market relations, the growth of a consumer culture and the expansion
of education, among other processes, touched the lives of Russia’s rural as
well as urban population. Economic change expanded women’s employment
opportunities, while new cultural trends encouraged the pursuit of pleasure
in a populace long accustomed to subordinating individual needs to fam-
ily and community. At the same time, patriarchal relations served as both
metaphor and model for Russia’s political order. The law upheld patriarchal
family relations, as did the institutions and economies of the peasantry, still
the vast majority of Russia’s people. Religious institutions governed marriage
and divorce, which the Russian Orthodox Church permitted only for adultery,
abandonment, sexual incapacity and penal exile, and then only reluctantly.
Marital law required a woman to cohabit with her husband, regardless of his
behaviour.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, this system encountered a
range of challenges. Liberal reformers sought to revise Russia’s laws, those
governing the family in particular, as a means to reconfigure the entire social
and political order.
1
Among the challengers were women, who also strove to
make their voices heard. Yet women were rarely in a position to influence
decisively the discourse on women, or to exercise authority decisively on
women’s behalf. Instead, as a revolutionary wave mounted, broke and receded,
women’s voices grewmuted, and a genderedhierarchyre-emerged that echoed
pre-revolutionary patterns while assuming novel forms.
1 William Wagner, Marriage, Property and Law in Late Imperial Russia (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1994), pp. 61–138; Laura Engelstein, The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for
Modernity in Fin-de-Siecle Russia (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992).
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Women and the state
On the eve
Women had established a significant presence in public life by the early
twentieth century. Nearly half a million women, mainly of peasant origin,
laboured in Russia’s factories, constituting almost 30 per cent of the industrial
labour force. Tens of thousands of educated women occupied professional
or semi-professional positions. Approximately 750 women physicians prac-
tised medicine in 1904, many of them employed in the public sector. Less
extensive and costly training as nurses, midwives and medical aides provided
employment to thousands of others. The number of women teaching in rural
schools grew from 4,878 in 1880 to 64,851 in 1911.
2
Although barred by law from
the civil service, ever-increasing numbers of women held clerical positions in
private and government offices. Women also took up their pens, becoming
novelists, poets, critics, playwrights, journalists and editors or publishers of
journals. By enabling women to earn their own living, employment oppor-
tunities eroded institutions that conservatives sought to preserve, such as the
patriarchal family.
The burgeoning marketplace had much the same effect, encouraging the
desire for individual pleasure and gratification, and fostering patterns of con-
sumption that could cut across social divides. The advertising industry enticed
women to consume the fashionable clothing and other items displayed in
windows of department stores and on the pages of popular magazines. New
pastimes such as bicycling enhanced women’s mobility and personal indepen-
dence. In fact, the ideology of domesticity that so dominated the world-view of
the middle classes of Europe and the United States had never gained hegemony
in Russia, despite support from the throne. To be sure, domestic ideas had cir-
culated since the early nineteenth century, and after 1905, liberal professionals
embraced a modernised version of them, according to which mothers, guided
by scientific precepts, would exert a disciplinary influence on society by appro-
priately raising the future generation.
3
Members of the middle class expected
respectable women to be good wives and selfless mothers, echoing Victorian
2 Rose Glickman, Russian Factory Women: Workplace and Society, 1880–1914 (Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1984), p. 83; ‘Alfavitnyi spisok zhenshchin-vrachei’, Meditsinskii
departament. Rossiisskii meditsinskii spisok (St Petersburg: MVD, 1904), pp. 416–31;Ben
Eklof, Russian Peasant Schools: Officialdom, Village Culture and Popular Pedagogy, 1861–1914
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), p. 195.
3 Diana Greene,‘Mid-Nineteenth Century Domestic Ideology in Russia’, in RosalindMarsh
(ed.), Women and Russian Culture (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 1998), pp. 78–97; Engelstein,
Keys,pp.248, 422.
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barbara alpern engel
ideals. Physicians campaigned to modernise motherhood in the countryside.
Prompted by exceedingly high infant mortality rates – almost half of rural
infants perished before the age of five – physicians sought to replace the tra-
ditional practices of village midwives with their own professional expertise,
much as physicians had already done in the West. Nevertheless, domestic dis-
courses faced considerable competition from others that endorsed women’s
productive role. Elite wives had long enjoyed the right to own and manage
property independently of their husbands. Members of the progressive elite
expressed scant sentimentality about the working class or peasant family, and
stressed women’s role in the workforce over motherhood. Socialists believed
that the family confined women, and that women’s workforce participation
provided the key to their emancipation. Prominent women rarely identified
themselves with the home. Marketing their own images, for example, women
writers never embraced the ‘rigorously domesticated’ womanhood still preva-
lent in Western societies.
4
The Revolution of 1905 briefly heightened women’s public presence, while
gaining them very little. Women industrial workers, clerical workers, profes-
sionals, even domestic servants, joined unions and walked off their jobs to
attend mass meetings and demonstrations that called for an end to autoc-
racy and representative government. Women’s movements re-emerged on a
substantial scale. Their primary goal was women’s suffrage and an expan-
sion of women’s legal and political rights, including reform of marital law.
The most active organisation, the Union for Women’s Equality, also sought
in vain to forge cross-class alliances. As one member lamented, to establish
circles among labouring women was relatively easy, but when their political
consciousness was raised, ‘they quickly join the ranks of one of the [socialist]
parties and become party workers’.
5
The October Manifesto enfranchised only
men.
The Revolution of 1905 demonstrated that no organisation or individual
could speak for women as a group. Undermined by political divisions, the
women’s movement lost membership and momentum in the post-1905 reac-
tion. Educated women activists only rarely succeeded in melding socialism
and feminism, and were more prone to join socialist organisations than fem-
inist ones. Women constituted some 15 per cent of the membership of the
4 Adele Lindenmeyr, ‘Maternalism and Child Welfare in Late Imperial Russia’, Journal of
Women’s History 5, 2 (1993): 114, 123; Beth Holmgren, ‘Gendering the Icon: Marketing
Women Writers in Fin-de-Siecle Russia’, in Helena Goscilo and Beth Holmgren (eds.),
Russia. Women. Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 341.
5 GIAgM, fond 516,op.1, ed. kh. 5,l.73. Report of the Third Congress, 22 May 1906.
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Women and the state
Socialist Revolutionary Party and 10 per cent of the Russian Social Democratic
Workers’ Party on the eve of the First World War.
6
War and revolution
The First World War set the stage for the upheavals to follow. It upset gendered
hierarchies and drew out to work hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of
women for the first time. Women replaced men on the factory floor, their
proportion in industry rising to 43.2 per cent by 1917. Thousands volunteered
as nurses. Women broke into new occupations such as the postal service
and transport; some even took up arms. Women’s vastly expanded roles in the
publicarenaenhanced their claims forcivilrights.Even soldiers’ wives (soldatki)
became assertive, gaining an unprecedented sense of entitlement to public
resources because of their husbands’ service. Mounting female dissatisfaction
contributed to the collapse of the autocracy. Although women workers played
a relatively minor role in the strike movement, women were prominent in the
subsistence riots that rocked Russia’s cities and towns, and sometimes spilled
over onto the factory floor. This is what happened on International Women’s
Day, 23 February (8 March) 1917, when angry working-class women staged an
enormous demonstration, summoning workers to join them. Their actions
sparked the February Revolution.
Immediately, women claimed citizenship rights in the new order. Feminist
leaders campaigned, successfully, for long-standing goals. In June 1917 women
lawyers gained the right to serve as attorneys and represent clients in court.
Women obtained equal rights with men in the civil service. On 20 July, all
adults over the age of twenty gained the right to vote for the forthcoming
Constituent Assembly. For lower-class women, economic rights appeared the
higher priority. Soldatki fought to raise their monetary allotment. In May, over
3,000 laundresses struck, demanding an eight-hour day and a minimum daily
wage of four roubles. They persisted in the face of employers’ resistance and
won a modest victory. Another strike of mainly female dye workers, lasting
four months, ended in failure.
Nevertheless, as a group, women workers were far less visible than men dur-
ing 1917. Many proved reluctant to strike, fearful that plants wouldclose, depriv-
ing them of the ability to support themselves and their children. Women’s fears
were surely heightened by the demands of male workers, when threatened
6 Beate Fieseler, ‘The Making of Russian Female Social Democrats, 1890–1917’, Interna-
tional Review of Social History 34 (1989): 204–5; Barbara Evans Clements, Bolshevik Women
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 1.
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barbara alpern engel
with lay-offs, that women be let go first. Lower-class women were poorly
represented in the trade unions, factory committees and soviets that upheld
workers’ interests. Women were also marginalised by revolutionary rhetoric,
which reflected an intensely masculinised working-class culture. For decades,
swearing, telling dirty jokes and boasting about sexual adventures with women
had demonstrated the masculinity of ordinary male workers, while politi-
cally and socially ‘conscious’ men forged a community of brothers. Women
family members served both as figures against which to define themselves.
7
In 1917, this masculine brotherhood assumed symbolic significance. Images
of male workers were ubiquitous, ‘either as the brother of the male peas-
ant and/or the soldier . . . or else as the liberator of the world, breaking
chains and crowns’.
8
Working-class women might themselves adopt the lan-
guage of brotherhood and identify themselves with the family. ‘Let us, Russian
women and mothers, be proud knowing that we were the first to extend our
brotherly [sic!] hand to all the mothers the world over’, reads one socialist
proclamation.
9
The Bolsheviks seize power
During 1917, the Bolshevik Party made only half-hearted efforts to attract
women. As membership burgeoned, the proportion of women dropped to
2 per cent; few were workers.
10
After October, the Bolsheviks suppressed the
autonomous women’s movement, condemning it as ‘bourgeois’. For the next
seventy years, the party’s view of women’s emancipation would determine
its parameters. As Marxists, they regarded working-class men and women’s
interests as identical and women’s full and equal participation in waged labour
as the key to their liberation. Thus, they proposed to equalise the relations
between the sexes by socialising housework – that is, entrusting child-rearing
and other household tasks to paid workers, enabling women to work full time
for wages. Once free of the need to exchange domestic and sexual services
for men’s financial support, women would encounter men as equals. The
7 S. A. Smith, ‘Masculinity in Transition: Peasant Migrants to Late-Imperial St. Petersburg’,
in Barbara Clements et al. (eds.), Russian Masculinities in History and Culture (New York:
Palgrave, 2002), p. 99.
8 Orlando Figes and Boris Kolonitskii, Interpreting the Russian Revolution: The Language and
Symbols of 1917 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), p. 110.
9 Mark D. Steinberg (ed.), Voices of Revolution, 1917, trans. Marian Schwartz (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2001), p. 98.
10 R. C. Elwood, Inessa Armand: Revolutionary and Feminist (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1992), pp. 234–5.
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Women and the state
family itself would eventually wither away as society assumed its functions;
thereafter, women and men would unite their lives solely for love.
Initially, the Bolsheviks attempted to legislate social change. In 1918, the
government produced a family code that equalised women’s status with men’s,
alloweda marrying couple to choose either the husband’sorthewife’s surname
and granted illegitimate children the same legal rights as legitimate ones.
Marriage was secularised. Divorce became easily obtainable at the request of
either spouse. Labouring women gained eight weeks of paid maternity leave
before and after childbirth; women engaged in mental labour gained six. In
1920, abortion became legal if performed by a physician. The law promised
equal pay to women whose work equalled men’s ‘in quantity and in quality’.
Whenever possible, new decrees used language that was deliberately gender-
neutral. ‘Spouses’ could retain their nationality upon marriage. A ‘spouse’
unable to work could request support from the other.
11
Co-education became
the rule.
Yet gender distinctions persisted, enhanced by the militarised atmosphere
of the civil war. When the authorities decided against obligatory military
service for women, the Red Army, the crucible of citizenship in the new order,
became identified as a masculine domain: ‘I, a son of the labouring people,
citizen of the Soviet Republic, take on the calling of warrior in the Worker and
Peasants Army,’ pledged all new recruits (my emphasis).
12
Women experienced
difficulty acquiring the toughness demanded of party members in brutalising
circumstances. In any case, women’s toughness evoked an ambivalence that
men’s did not. Moreover, even as it tried to efface distinctions of gender, the
leadership emphasised the uniquely feminine contribution that women could
make to the war effort. Women’s independent citizenship was undermined
by propaganda and entitlements based on a woman’s relationship to a man.
13
Slogans that addressed working women as mothers reinforced the notion that
women’s responsibility was to care for fighting men and men’s, to protect
women and children: ‘Proletarka! The Red Army soldier is defending you
and your children. Ease his life. Organize care for him.’
14
Post-revolutionary
iconography consistently portrayed the heroic worker as male, at the centre
of action, battling the opponents of revolution or refashioning the world.
11 Elizabeth Wood, The Baba and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), p. 50.
12 Ibid., p. 53.
13 Joshua Sanborn, ‘Family, Fraternity and Nation-Building in Russia, 1905–1925’, in Ronald
Grigor Suny and Terry Martin (eds.), A State of Nations: Empire and Nation-Making in the
Age of Lenin and Stalin (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 102–6.
14 Ibid., p. 59.
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barbara alpern engel
Thus, proletarian domination, connected rhetorically and visually to male
domination, confirmed a gendered hierarchy.
15
Women occupied the margins of the new civic order. They were identi-
fied with private life and family, spheres denigrated by a post-revolutionary
culture that privileged public life, the collective and the point of production.
The leadership viewed lower-class women as inherently more ‘backward’ than
men, more attached to the family, religion and traditional values and, conse-
quently, as a potential threat to the revolution. (Formerly privileged women
the leadership dismissed altogether, apart from party loyalists.) Women’s his-
torians argue that it was women’s alleged backwardness, more than concern
for women’s emancipation as such, which convinced the leadership to autho-
rise efforts to mobilise them. Thus, concern over women’s lack of support
during the civil war led the party to approve the first All-Russian Conference
of Working Women, which took place in November 1918, and in September
1919 to authorise a Women’s Bureau (Zhenotdel) to co-ordinate the party’s
work among women. Inessa Armand was designated its first director; after her
death in 1920, Aleksandra Kollontai, the party’s leading advocate of women’s
emancipation, replaced her. The party conceived of the Zhenotdel as a trans-
mission belt from the top downwards to mobilise women to support party
objectives and inform women of their new rights.
Instead, some Zhenotdel activists became advocates on women’s behalf.
Empowered as well as constrained by the Marxist vision, they regarded the
emancipation of women as an end in itself and the Zhenotdel as a means to
achieve it. Kollontai, the most radical, tested the limits of the organisation’s
mandate. Viewing women’s freedom to act on their sexual feelings as essential
to their emancipation, as head of the Zhenotdel she rhapsodised about the
future when everyone would live in communes and ‘women would be free
to choose whatever sorts of romantic relationships met their needs’.
16
Kol-
lontai’s efforts to link personal with political change won no converts among
the party’s leadership. And her aggressive advocacy on behalf of women’s
emancipation alienated other party members. Kollontai was removed as head
of the Zhenotdel early in 1922, following her association with the Workers’
Opposition. Subsequent Zhenotdel leaders proved more politically astute,
but also more tractable and willing to remain within the limits of their
charge.
15 Victoria Bonnell, Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), p. 77.
16 Clements, Bolshevik Women,p.227.
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Women and the state
How effective was the Zhenotdel as an agent of proletarian women’s
emancipation? Activists sought to mobilise lower-class women on their own
behalf, to keep women’s issues on the party agenda, to fight for the rights
of labouring women and to ensure the transformation of everyday life.
17
They fought an uphill battle. Zhenotdel-style feminism had little support even
among female party members; some of them actively opposed it. Zhenot-
del members themselves disagreed over tactics and goals. And in regional
and local organisations, prejudice against the Zhenotdel and its work was
endemic. Many party cadres resisted women’s emancipation and barely con-
cealed their contempt for the Zhenotdel. Trade union leaders, too, often dis-
liked co-operating with the Zhenotdel or providing facilities for its meetings.
In the course of the 1920s, Zhenotdel funding decreased: the organisation oper-
ated on a shoestring, many of its activists really volunteers. The Zhenotdel
found itself in an impossible position, dependent on party largesse and charged
with mobilising a group whose negative qualities (backwardness, ignorance)
justified their mission.
18
In any case, efforts to emancipate women were often ill-suited to material
realities. During the civil-war years, urban dwellers, now mostly women and
children, starved or froze to death. Millions of homeless children wandered
the streets. Instead of serving as shining examples of the socialist future, state-
sponsored efforts to assume domestic functions, starved of resources, repelled
those who used them. The New Economic Policy in some respects made
matters worse. Men returning from the civil war took jobs from women.
In an effort to protect their superior status in the workplace and monopoly
on skilled ‘male’ trades, male workers routinely sabotaged women’s efforts
to acquire advanced skills and upgrade their work status.
19
Managers often
preferred to hire men, who had higher skill levels and would not require
costly maternity leave and day care. Despite decrees that forbade it, managers
discriminated against women workers and dismissed pregnant and nursing
women on leave. They used laws banning night work for women as an excuse
to lay off women workers. To save money, the state cut back on childcare
centres. As a result, working mothers had no place to leave their children and
the largely female staffs found themselves without employment. Women’s
share of the labour force dropped from 45 per cent in 1918 to under 30 per cent,
17 Wendy Zeva Goldman, ‘The Death of the Proletarian Women’s Movement’, Slavic
Review 55, 1 (1996): 46–54.
18 Wood, Baba and Comrade,p.212.
19 Diane Koenker, ‘Men against Women on the Shop Floor in Early Soviet Russia’, American
Historical Review 100, 5 (Dec. 1995): 1438–64.
475