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Industrial Politics, Peasant Rebellion and the Death of the Proletarian Women's Movement in the USSR

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Wendy Z. Goldman
Wendy Z. Goldman*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Carnegie Mellon University
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Extract

In December 1927 delegates to the XV Party Congress of the Soviet Union adopted the slogan, “Face toward Production.” Over the next five years, as the Party embarked on a massive effort to industrialize the country and collectivize agriculture, this slogan came to define policy in every area of life. The Party daily exhorted the people to speed up production, increase the harvest, reconstruct agriculture. Workers erected behemoths of heavy industry as artists emblazoned the image of belching smokestacks everywhere, symbols not of pollution but of the transformative promise of industrialization. Stalin and his supporters purged the unions, the planning agencies and the Party of “rightists” who were seen as obstacles to the new tempos of production and the collectivization of agriculture.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 55 , Issue 1 , Spring 1996 , pp. 46 - 77
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1996

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References

I would like to thank Lawrence Goldman, Donna Harsch, Naum Kats, Marcus Rediker, A.Z. Vakser and members of the Pittsburgh Working-Class History Seminar for their helpful comments and suggestions, and the National Council for Soviet and East European Research for its support.

1. Historians have produced a considerable literature on the first-five-year plan period. A brief sampling includes Davies, R. W., The Soviet Economy in Turmoil, 1929–1930 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989 Google Scholar; Fitzpatrick, Sheila, ed., Cultural Revolution in Russia, 1928–1931 (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1984 Google Scholar; and idem., The Cultural Front: Power and Culture in Revolutionary Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992); Kuromiya, Hiroaki, Stalin's Industrial Revolution. Politics and Workers, 1928–1932 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988 Google Scholar; Lewin, Moshe, The Making of the Soviet System: Essays in the Social History of Interwar Russia (New York: Pantheon Press, 1985 Google Scholar; Rosenberg, William and Siegelbaum, Lewis, eds., Social Dimensions of Soviet Industrialization (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993.Google Scholar

2. The fullest treatment of the Zhenotdel is Carol Eubanks Hayden's “Feminism and Bolshevism: The Zhenotdel and the Politics of Women's Emancipation in Russia, 1917–1930” (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1979.) See also her article, “The Zhenotdel and the Bolshevik Party,” Russian History 3, part 2 (1976): 150–73; Stites, Richard, The Women's Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism and Bolshevism, 1860–1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978): 329–45Google Scholar; Farnsworth, Beatrice, “The Zhenotdel During the NEP” and “Socialist Feminism,” in Aleksandra Kollontai: Socialism, Feminism, and the Bolshevik Revolution (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1980), 284–308, 311–21Google Scholar; Clements, Barbara Evans, “Work among Women,” in Bolshevik Feminist: The Life of Aleksandra Kollontai (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1979), 149–77Google Scholar; and idem., “The Utopianism of the Zhenotdel,” Slavic Review 51, no. 3 (Fall 1992): 485–96; Lapidus, Gail, Women in Soviet Society: Equality, Development, and Social Change (Berkeley: University of California Press 1978): 63–73 Google Scholar. Gregory Massell deals with the activities of the Zhenotdel in central Asia in The Surrogate Proletariat: Moslem Women and Revolutionary Strategies in Soviet Central Asia, 1919–1929 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1974.)

3. This phrase is used by Stites, who notes that the elimination of the Zhenotdel “plainly marks the end of the Proletarian Women's Movement that had its dim beginnings among the textile workers and intellectuals of Petersburg in 1906” (344).

4. Anne Bobroff and Hayden differ strongly on why the Zhenotdel was created. Bobroff writes, “women's sections were created as a device by which to obtain a resource, women's labor power.” Hayden argues that “this view is much too simplistic” given the vast unemployment of women during NEP. See Bobroff, , “The Bolsheviks and Working Women, 1905–1920,” Soviet Studies 26, no. 4 (1974): 563 Google Scholar; Hayden, 134, 137–38.

5. Stites argues that “operational partnerships” between, for example, Aleksandra Kollontai and A.G. Goikhbarg, the jurist who drafted the first Code on Marriage, the Family and Guardianship, and Nadezhda Krupskaia and Anatoli Lunacharskii, the head of the Commissariat of Enlightenment, were instrumental in forging early policy (363, 418). Clements, “The Utopianism of the Zhenotdel,” 496.

6. The bolsheviks were opposed on principle to “feminism,” which they considered a bourgeois ideology. They were ambivalent about the idea of organizing working-class women separately from working-class men.

7. Viktor, , “Sostav deleg: sobranii uluchshaetsia,” Kommunistka 12 (1929): 28–29.Google Scholar

8. Prishchepchik, Z, “Zhenrabota na Krasnoi Presne,” Kommunistka 10 (1928): 24 Google Scholar; Liubimova, S, “Bol'nye voprosy,” Kommunistka 10 (1928): 62 Google Scholar; Kaganovich, L, “Perestroit’ rabotu sredi rabotnits i krest'ianok,” Kommunistka 14 (1929): 5 Google Scholar; Artiukhina, A, “Povorot k novomu, Kommunistka 14 (1929): 10.Google Scholar

9. Bobroff, 543–44.

10. Glickman, Rose, Russian Factory Women: Workplace and Society, 1880–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984): 156–205.Google Scholar

11. Ibid., 253, 273.

12. Bobroff, 545, 546; Glickman, 275–77.

13. Hayden, 119–28. Hayden notes, “The Bolsheviks were thus in the odd position of organizing a special women's conference in order to propagandize against the idea of a women's organization,” (121). See also Donald, M, “Bolshevik Activity amongst the Working Women of Petrograd in 1917,” International Review of Social History 27, part 2 (1982): 129–60.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14. Hayden, 128–39. The account of the congress is taken from her work.

15. Pravda, 19 January 1930: 3.

16. Goldman, Wendy, Women, the State and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917–1936 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See chap. 1. This vision also became the basis for early bolshevik legislation on the family.

17. Ibid., chaps. 2 and 3, on social conditions in the 1920s.

18. Hayden, 222–29; Farnsworth, 315–18.

19. Hayden, 262, 227–74. This is one of the central arguments of Hayden's dissertation.

20. Vsesoiuznyi s “ezd rabotnits i krest'ianok: Stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow: Izdanie TsIK Soiuza SSR, 1927). There is no evidence in the lengthy stenographic report of this mass meeting that concerns about byt had been preempted by other party goals.

21. See for example, S. Frederick Starr, “Visionary Town Planning during the Cultural Revolution,” in Sheila Fitzpatrick, ed. Cultural Revolution in Russia, 207–40.

22. “Zasedanie otdela rabotnits MK VKP i oblastnoi komissii,” RTsKhlDNI, f. 17, o. 10, d. 490, 19, 23.

23. Stites, Richard, Revolutionary Dreams: Utopian Vision and Experimental Life in the Russian Revolution (Oxford: Oxford Univeristy Press, 1989); 198–222; Davies, 146–47Google Scholar. Davies argues that the campaign for the socialization of byt reached its apogee in 1929–1930.

24. Pravda, 29 January 1930: 4.

25. Kaganovich (5) cites these attitudes.

26. Artiukhina, “Povorot k novomu,” 8.

27. Goreva, , “Voprosy zhenraboty na partkonferentsii,” Kommunistka 8 (1929): 28.Google Scholar

28. Tikhomirova, A, “Kak profsoiuzy vypolniaiut direktivy partii,” Kommunistka 6 (1928): 50–1.Google Scholar

29. Prishchepchik, Z, “Rabota profsoiuzov sredi rabotnits,” Kommunistka 6 (1928): 53.Google Scholar

30. Cherevadskaia, , “Trud i byt rabotnits,” Kommunistka 6 (1928): 63.Google Scholar

31. Krymskii, D. and K.N., , “Profsoiuzy na novom etape,” Partiinoe stroitel'stvo 2 (1929): 15.Google Scholar

32. Hayden, 351. Hayden notes that the department of agitation and propaganda had been trying to absorb the Zhenotdel for a decade.

33. Artiukhina, A, “Likvidatsionnyi zud nuzhno uniat',” Kommunislka 6 (1928): 3–4.Google Scholar

34. “O vydvizhenii zhenshchin kommunistok,” Kommunistka 8 (1928): 3. These positions included secretary of the guberniia party committee, representative of the guberniia executive committee, chairman of the guberniia council of unions and others.

35. Tikhomirova, A, “Itogi vsesoiuznogo soveshchaniia po rabote sredi zhenshchin,” Kommunistka 8 (1928): 65.Google Scholar

36. Il'ina, O., “O rabote sredi rabotnits na predpriiatiiakh s preobladaniem zhenskogo truda,” Kommunistka 8 (1928): 11–13.Google Scholar

37. Suslova, , “Samolikvidatsiia nesvoevremenna,” Kommunistka 10 (1928): 65–67.Google Scholar

38. Smidovich, S, “Chistka partii i zhenotdely,” Kommunistka 7 (1929): 24.Google Scholar

39. Liubimova, S, “Bol'nye voprosy?,” Kommunistka 10 (1928): 62–64.Google Scholar

40. Prishchepchik, “Zhenrabota na Krasnoi Presne,” 24–28.

41. “VTsK. VKP (b)—Massovaia rabota sredi zhenshchin,” GARF, f. 5451, o. 15, d. 362, 96.

42. E. Goreva, “Voprosy zhenraboty na partkonfeventsii,” 28.

43. See Lynne Viola's pioneering article, “Bab'i Bunty and Peasant Women's Protest during Collectivization,” Russian Review 45 (1986): 23–42.

44. Smidovich, S, “Tekushchie zadachi partii i rol’ zhenaktiva,” Kommunistka 10 (1929): 9, 12–13.Google Scholar

45. L. Kaganovich, “Perestroit’ rabotu sredi rabotnits i krest'ianok,” 3–6.

46. This manipulation of women in the 1929 elections to the village Soviets is a surmise on my part and needs further investigation.

47. “Ob ocherednykh zadachakh partii po rabote sredi rabotnits i krest'ianok,” Kommunistka 14 (1929): 43–8.

48. A. Artiukhina, “Povorot k novomu,” 7–15.

49. “Ocherednye zadachi Partii po rabote sredi zhenshchin v SSSR. Doklad na zasedanii Moskovskogo Partaktiva,” RTsKhlDNI, fond 17, o. 10, d. 490, 37.

50. “Protokol 112: Zasedaniia Politbiuro TsK VKP (b),” RTsKhlDNI, f. 17, o. 3, d. 771, 24–26.

51. Ibid., 25.

52. Pravda, 12 January 1930: 3.

53. Pravda, 14 January 1930: 3.

54. Pravda, 17 January 1930: 1.

55. Pravda, 18January 1930: 4. This article was republished in Kommunistka. See A. Artiukhina, “Zhenraboty vesti vsei partiei v tselom,” Kommunistka 2–3 (1930): 6–10. The quotes here are taken from Kommunistka.

56. Kaganovich, L, “Reorganizatsiia partapparata i ocherednye zadachi partraboty,” Kommunistka 2–3 (1930): 3–5 Google Scholar. This final issue carried a large notice to subscribers urging them to switch to the journal Sputnik agitatora which would henceforth cover women's issues among others.

57. Pravda, 19 January 1930: 3.

58. L. Kaganovich, “Ob apparate TsK VKP (b),” Partiinoe stroitel'stvo 2 (1930): 12

59. Ibid.

60. Moirova, V, “Rabota sredi zhenshchin v perelomnyi period,” Partiinoe stroitel'stvo 13–14 (1930): 21.Google Scholar

61. Pravda, 17 May 1930, as quoted by Davies, 152.

62. Moirova, 22.

63. Ibid., 22–23.

64. Ibid., 24.C

65. “Ocherednye zadachi raboty sektora,” RTsIKhlDNI, f. 17, o. 10, d. 490, 78–79. This document unfortunately was not dated. It was written sometime after the XVI Party Congress, which was held in June-July 1930.

66. “Postanovlenie TsK,” GARF, f. 5451, o. 15, d. 362, 66.

67. “VTsK, VKP (b). Massovaia rabota sredi zhenshchin,” GARF, f. 5451, o. 15, d. 362, 100.

68. “Ocherednye zadachi raboty sektora,” RTsIKhlDNI, f. 17, o. 10, d. 490, 68, 69, 70, 78, 73, 74, 75, 80.

69. “Stenogramma Vsesoiuznogo soveshchaniia po rabote sredi zhenshchin, torn 1,” GARF, f. 5451, o. 13, d. 357, 26, 27.

70. Ibid., 28, 31.

71. Ibid., 42.

72. Ibid., 44, 46.

73. Ibid., 50, 51, 52.

74. Ibid., 53.

75. Ibid., 36, 42, 63, 68.

76. Ibid., 72, 75.

77. “Stenogramma Vsesoiuznogo soveshchaniia po rabote sredi zhenshchin, torn 2,” GARF, f. 5451, o. 15, d. 358, 37, 40.

78. “Stenogramma, torn 1,” GARF, f. 5451, o. 15, d. 357, 210 obratno.

79. Ibid., 202.

80. “Zav, Sektorom po rabote sredi zhenshchin pri VTsPS-Tov, Safionoi,” GARF, f. 5451, o. 17, d. 294, 6.

81. Davies, 65, writes, “The need to enlist the trade unions as an obedient agent of this policy lay behind the struggle with Tomsky and his supporters. The subordinate and instrumental role of the Soviet trade unions continued throughout Stalin's lifetime and the decades beyond. ”

82. Ibid., 77. Davies notes the same connection: “In retrospect, the analogy is obvious between the policy pursued in 1927–1929 of eliminating private trade before the socialized sector was able to replace it, and the policy pursued in 1929–1931 of collectivizing agriculture before state industry was able to supply tractors and other machinery in place of peasant horses and implements.”