Women and structural inequality in Soviet labor

The problem of gender inequality in labor and women’s double burden became an essential part of the early Soviet modernizing discourse as a part of a repeatedly expressed desire to solve the so-called “women’s question.” Throughout the interwar period, the state’s discourse of gender equality went hand in hand with the numerous attempts to include women in previously restricted spheres. As Anna Krylova demonstrates, it was not just a matter of increasing the presence of women in different spheres of society but also a conscious breaking of the gender hierarchy in which women occupied a subordinate position, a conscious “attempt to change the very meaning of the feminine, that is, to detach femininity from its associations with weakness and debilitating frivolity.”Footnote ³ Indeed, in the 1930s, a cohort of women advocated for their place in labor relations outside of rigid binary gender oppositions.

Although based on the rhetoric of equality, women’s inclusion in the industrial sector led to a labor landscape based on persistent structural inequalities between men and women, as well as an increased double burden for women.Footnote ⁴ Contrary to the discourse of equality, the state promoted a highly gendered labor landscape through a variety of instruments—unequal access to vocational education, a labor protection system that limited the occupations for women, state policies regarding maternity and reproductive labor. As Donald Filtzer, Melanie Ilič, and Wendy Goldman show, a typical pattern of gender inequality in Soviet industry was women’s marginalization in manual, low-wage, unskilled labor that emerged while modernization, mechanization, and professionalization transformed industrial production.Footnote ⁵ Researchers link structural inequality to women’s double burden and reproductive labor, which is undoubtedly true, but does not definitely clarify the origins and background of Soviet structural inequality.

Women’s position in the logging industry and the perceptions of female branch cutters’ job as both the easiest and the hardest give us a good starting point to reflect on how gender distinctions in labor are formed and steadily transformed through the notion of power. The physical lightness (ease) and heaviness (hardship) of branch cutters’ work that those I interviewed discuss may conceal a social interpretation of physical strength as social power and of women’s particular position in the labor and social hierarchies. Here, I argue that the power that determines women’s ability or inability to perform prestigious, mechanized, and high-income jobs is not grounded in bodily and physical strength but in knowledge, skills, qualifications, and the ability to master machines that women did not have access to. In other words, by allocating and gendering jobs as easy, the workers qualified them as primitive and unskilled.

A closer analysis of the language underpinning the discourse on the easy nature of branch cutters’ work reveals the real nature of labor inequality. In discussing how the transition to a fossil economy changes hierarchies of power, not least by limiting women’s access to new modern mechanisms, Andreas Malm notes the dual meaning of the word “power” in English. “Power” could equally be used “as in a force of nature, a current of energy, a measure of work” and “as in a relation between humans, an authority, a structure of domination.”Footnote ⁶ Similarly, for a more accurate understanding of what is meant by easy (legkiy) and hard (tyazhyoliy) work in the Soviet configuration of power relations, it is necessary to better understand the nuance in their meaning. In Russian, both words have two opposite connotations: one pertains to the physical realm, where lightness or ease contrasts with something heavy in a purely physical sense. The other concerns intellectual or technical complexity, distinguishing between simple or even primitive and more intricate and sophisticated, requiring varying degrees of skill, knowledge, and qualifications. Thus, while mastering hard work in the first sense requires greater physical strength and endurance, mastering it in the second sense involves knowledge and skills acquired during training or by virtue of a particular position in the power hierarchy.

During the interwar and wartime periods, driven by forced industrialization, labor shortages, and the subsequent mobilization of men, a historically unprecedented number of women entered the labor force. Thousands of women received industrial training that enabled them to do semi-skilled work and even to replace men (including those in skilled positions) during World War II (WWII). While this was an uneven process, it allowed Soviet women in some areas to have a greater presence in industry than their contemporaries in other countries. Nevertheless, even with women’s significant access to technical education, the shift from the dominance of manual labor to modern production technologies failed to offset structural inequalities between men and women in Soviet industry. What’s more, it only further perpetuated them through labor protection regulations in the postwar period. At the same time, interpreting women’s work as primarily related to bodily experiences brings us back to the double burden problem, which eventually reinforced gendered labor segregation. Bodily labor, and above all, motherhood, and domestic labor, remained the primary responsibilities of women in logging settlements, as in other Soviet communities.

My analysis comprises more than seventy interviews, conducted from 2017 to 2019 in different logging settlements in Karelia, as well as those conducted in 2023 and 2024 in North Karelia, Finland. The oral history interviews are contextualized by archival materials (the State Archive of the Russian Federation [GARF] and the Muezersky Intermunicipal District Archives [MAMR]), Soviet labor legislation, technical documentation, Soviet-era newspapers, and popular culture representations of logging work.

The branch cutters in logging communities

While female loggers may seem a marginalized minority, they comprise a large and nearly unresearched cohort of women in the industry.Footnote ⁷ At the peak, in the late 1940s, more than 400,000 women were voluntarily working as loggers in the USSR. Until the late 1970s, women accounted for almost 40 percent of logging workers, serving as registering charge hands (accountants and measurers) and branch cutters.Footnote ⁸ At the same time, female branch cutters accounted for more than 50 percent of all logging accidents.Footnote ⁹ By the mid-1980s, there were still tens of thousands of women working in logging.Footnote ¹⁰ Unlike men, who mastered many types of advanced machinery—chainsaws, tractors, loaders, and haulers—women in the field worked manually and performed only one auxiliary operation—cutting branches from felled trees with an axe. While men were free to change occupations, study, and earn awards and large salaries, women had no such choices and opportunities. If they wanted to earn more than they could as record keepers, clerks, and teachers in a logging settlement, their only recourse was the hard and dangerous work of branch cutting at a logging site. And while the wages were higher than in other occupations available to women, they were still notably lower than those of male loggers who operated large machinery.

By choosing to work as branch cutters, women entered a daily life very different from that of other women in the settlement. Like other women, they were responsible for industrial, reproductive, and household labor. However, unlike other women, they worked in the forest at logging sites several hours away from any settlement. The work itself was physically demanding and frequently resulted in injury. After fellers cut down a tree, branch cutters had to clear it of boughs, branches, and knots. Once that was done, the choker and the tractor driver would stack the logs to be loaded onto a hauling truck. Each brigade was required to fill four logging trucks, each carrying about twenty-five tree-length logs, for daily shipment to fulfill their quota. As a rule, there were three branch cutters in each brigade. It was a backbreaking work—chopping large pine branches off of fallen trees with heavy axes, waist-deep in snow in winter, plagued by swarms of mosquitoes in summer, a job that left bloody blisters on hands and wounds on feet. The bus to the logging area departed before the kindergarten opened, so female workers had to leave their children in front of the still-closed nursery doors even in winter weather down to −30°C. At the end of the day, workers often returned after 7 p.m.; women branch cutters were the last to pick up their children. And they still had to stand in a queue at the store and buy groceries. “We never even saw our kids. They’d come home—no parents, no one there,” recalls Marina. “Try working all damn day, cutting off those damn branches—may they fall off the face of the earth! And then try standing soaking wet up to your waist in line at the grocery store after work,” adds fellow branch cutter, Zinaida.Footnote ¹¹

Although the marginalization of women into unskilled, low-paid manual labor was typical of Soviet labor policy, the essential difference from other industries was that some women sought to work in logging as unskilled branch cutters, even though they could have simply avoided working in the forest. Sue Bridger notes that there was a similar distribution of labor in agriculture, where handling farm machinery (tractors and combines) was considered a hard, male job, while the heavy manual labor of milking was women’s work and thought of as a comfortable occupation.Footnote ¹² Liubov Denisova and Irina Mukhina concur, stating that

Women “were under-employed in skilled jobs that implied higher training but also higher pay.”Footnote ¹⁴ However, a significant difference between agriculture and logging was that, overall, the gender ratio of workers in these industries was reversed. While more than half of the workers in the timber industry were men, in agriculture, most of the work was done by women. Moreover, in certain specialties, such as animal husbandry, women performed up to 98 percent of all tasks.Footnote ¹⁵ For women in agriculture, working as milkmaids was more of a necessity as the variety of work in this sector was low, and they had little choice. Moreover, as Caroline Humphrey notes, working as a milkmaid on a collective farm could serve as a way to get social recognition, fame, and awards.Footnote ¹⁶ However, women in Soviet Karelia found branch cutting work attractive and opted for it even when they could get lighter jobs, for example, as a clerk in a settlement. Their entry into the industry was determined primarily by their inability to support themselves and achieve financial stability through other means.Footnote ¹⁷

The range of professions in which women could work in forest settlements was limited, and most of the jobs that women could do required special training that was out of reach for women with children, especially single mothers. Therefore, despite the heavy physical exertion demanded, the lack of prestige and low pay compared to other forestry jobs, branch cutting was actually an opportunity for women to get a well-paid job not requiring education, and with the prospect of an early retirement in predominantly male timber production plots.Footnote ¹⁸ Also, unlike agriculture, the majority of female branch cutters were single mothers, spouses of alcoholics, and women in tricky life situations, meaning they had many responsibilities but no other way to provide for their families. It was more of an emergency measure than a dream job, allowing them to overcome the challenges of life and give their children brighter prospects. “Branch-cutting was slave labor (katorzhnaya rabota). Nobody wanted that job,” says Zinaida.Footnote ¹⁹ No wonder, women’s forestry labor was a one-generation job, unlike other forestry professions occupied by men.

How did labor protection lead to segregation?

The emergence of women in logging operations, and later, their relegation to the narrow niche of branch cutting, resulted from a long process that began in the 1930s and ended by the early 1960s. Historically, timber production was a rural industry reliant on seasonal winter work by peasants with neither special skills nor special tools. During the agricultural off-season, men could take off for extra work in logging, while women stayed home and performed household chores.

The situation changed during the 1930s, when the Soviet Government decided to radically increase the share of women in the national labor force under the first and second Five-Year Plans. Conducted through the discourse of gender equality, the move stemmed from the severe labor shortages that emerged amid forced industrialization. Unemployed urban residents (housewives) were the primary female target group for the forest industry, but their direct involvement in felling operations was limited by the remoteness of the main logging sites. Thus, only wood processing enterprises (plywood mills, paper and match production, sawmills, etc.) located in urban areas became new areas of employment for women in this industrial domain.Footnote ²⁰

Another reason women did not constitute a significant portion of the labor force in the timber industry was the sector’s low level of mechanization and professionalization. The lack of diversified roles limited opportunities to designate occupations as appropriate for women, revealing that the Soviet rhetoric of gender equality masked a deeply gendered labor structure. Moreover, although women gradually entered the timber industry in the interwar period, their participation remained constrained by systemic restrictions rooted in the idea of distinct male and female bodies. The Labor Code of 1922 introduced protective measures that partially barred women from physically demanding or hazardous work.

Over the following decade, the list of occupations prohibited for women expanded through a series of resolutions from the People’s Commissariat of Labor (Narkomtrud). In 1930, pregnant and breastfeeding women were restricted from felling, cutting, sawing, and carrying thick timber. In 1932, all women were restricted from felling, crosscutting, skidding, and floating, and from handling if working manually. In 1933, the Institute of Labor Organization and Protection (IOOT) conducted a comprehensive, year-long study to identify occupations deemed suitable for female workers. The analysis found that it was the lack of division of labor in logging that “almost completely prevented the introduction of women’s labor in the practice of timber harvesting.” Moreover, logging caused “a very significant muscle strain, forcing wrong poses, leading to a considerable static load on the abdominal muscles, back, and thighs.”Footnote ²¹ The IOOT divided all operations into three groups based primarily on the physical impact on the body. Women’s labor was acceptable in the first category, permissible under certain conditions in the second, and the third were deemed operations where women’s labor cannot be “applied in the present state of affairs.” The latter group included felling (undercutting, cutting, felling) and manual skidding.Footnote ²² Thus, the search for positions for women in the timber industry undertaken by the IOOT was based on the difference in physical stamina and strength of male and female bodies performing equally unmechanized work.

These policies reflected broader labor protection ideologies but effectively barred women from the core activities of timber production. Accordingly, by the mid-1930s, as the level of mechanization in the logging industry remained relatively low, the People’s Commissariat for Labor had restricted women from engaging in these primary timber operations, reinforcing gendered labor norms.Footnote ²³

However, in the late 1930s, this attitude changed entirely. As Melanie Ilič notes, “the growing threat of war towards the end of the 1930s, therefore, undoubtedly influenced the distribution of female labor in the Soviet economy and encouraged the recruitment of women workers to industries with military significance as preparations were made for women to take over the jobs of male colleagues.”Footnote ²⁴ This shift was cemented by the 1937 Resolution of the Council of People’s Commissars (CPC), which removed all restrictions on women’s work in logging and timber floating. The 1938 Decree of the USSR CPC and the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks further recommended employing women in critical logging roles, including as loggers, truck drivers, and tractor operators, “and to promote the rise of women’s professional qualification.”Footnote ²⁵ The task set by the decree to attract women to work as qualified drivers and tractor operators demonstrated that lifting the ban on women working in logging meant not only forcing them into hard physical labor through compulsory labor but also giving women the opportunity to improve their technical skills, to master and work on machinery that had previously been inaccessible to them.Footnote ²⁶ As a result, the number of women employed directly in felling works reached as much as 25 percent just before the start of WWII.Footnote ²⁷ It climbed to a record 90 percent in some regions during the War and systematically exceeded 50 percent. In Karelia, by 1942, women in logging made up 50–60 percent of the workforce.Footnote ²⁸

The first postwar attempts to restrict women’s work in logging date back to 1949. Based on the restrictions imposed by the People’s Commissariat for Labor in 1932, but by no means reproducing them, the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions (apparently in coordination with higher party authorities) initiated a ban on women felling by any method, as well as on heavy loading work, requiring that women be transferred to other, lighter types of jobs while maintaining the same level of pay and prohibiting their firing.Footnote ²⁹ A resolution of the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions published in February 1949 obliged logging enterprises to remove all women workers (both permanent and seasonal) from felling and heavy loading work by the beginning of the winter logging season. In fact, it meant transferring tens of thousands of women across the country to other jobs within 9 months.Footnote ³⁰

Although during 1948 and 1949 thousands of women in different regions made the switch to lighter jobs, the number of women who continued to work in the heaviest jobs, felling and handloading logs, remained enormous. In 1950, there were still thousands of permanent female forestry workers employed in prohibited heavy labor. Despite a significant decrease, women still comprised some 27–30 percent of workers in logging in 1957.Footnote ³¹ Women still accounted for 60–70 percent of the seasonal workers hired through forced labor and horse duty because the “existing balance of the labor force” did not allow them to find the necessary number of men.Footnote ³² Despite the demand of the trade unions and the Ministry of Timber and Paper Industry to maintain average salaries, the replacement occupations for women were mainly auxiliary and low-paid. Overall, this led to women working full-time at timber production enterprises as branch cutters after refusing to move to lighter jobs.Footnote ³³

Subsequently, until the end of the 1970s, prohibitions on women working in certain forestry professions gradually expanded. In 1953, after another ministerial decree, women were not allowed to work as loggers (manual or mechanized), manual loaders, or to drive large logging trucks and tractors.Footnote ³⁴ However, although many types of work remained formally not barred, in fact, women worked exclusively in branch cutting, which gradually became the only non-mechanized work in logging. The alternative was positions as accountants, timber makers, and quality inspectors, jobs which required training and were significantly lower paid. In 1978, a new “regulation on the list of industries, professions, and jobs with difficult and hazardous working conditions, where it is prohibited to use women’s labor” appeared, in which most felling-related occupations were restricted for women. That included jobs not previously mentioned, such as “a logger engaged in cutting logs, and digging up long logs, chopping firewood, stump resin harvesting and processing, as well as harvesting timber with hand tools; log chokers and log stackers.” At the same time, for some jobs, such as loading logs, formal restrictions applied only to non-mechanized manual loading.Footnote ³⁵ In reality, in the late 1970s, women in logging operations were working almost exclusively as branch cutters.

Thus, women’s participation in the forestry industry went through several stages from the 1930s to the 1980s. In the first stage, in the first half of the 1930s, when the level of mechanization in the logging industry remained low, labor safety regulators restricted the employment of women, reasoning that manual logging was physically demanding. In the second stage, from 1937 to 1949, all restrictions on women working in the industry were lifted. In the third stage, starting in 1949, when the industry’s modernization entered full swing, labor safety regulators returned to restricting women’s employment in logging, gradually expanding the list of particularly heavy work prohibited for women. The result was the segregation of women into the only lucrative work in the industry available to them—branch cutting.

The mechanization and division of labor in Soviet logging

Thus, after a period of widespread mobilization of women into the forest industry from 1938 until 1948, they were once again displaced from logging. As long as felling was manual, there was a certain logic in excluding women from the heaviest tasks in the early 1930s. However, later, particularly in the second half of the 1940s, the forestry industry underwent quite crucial transformations. While in the 1930s logging was almost entirely done by hand, a decade later saw deep labor restructuring and intensive mechanization of selected operations, especially felling, which was entirely mechanized by the 1950s. During this period, women not only largely replaced the men who had gone to the front but also actively mastered new machinery and production technologies, including chainsaws and the brigade method of work. So how exactly did women subsequently become relegated to physically demanding manual labor illogically labeled as easy?

Since timber was still considered a strategically important raw material, the logging industry underwent significant restructuring to quickly increase labor productivity after WWII. From 1946 onward, the forest industry shifted away from coerced labor, as physically weaker and unmotivated prisoners began to be considered less efficient compared to motivated, wage-earning workers.Footnote ³⁶ Hence, the industry reconfigured from unskilled, seasonal harvesting to year-round enterprises with professionally trained workers equipped with modern tools, first with electric and gasoline saws and later with more sophisticated, complex processing machines. Having managed to occupy a specific niche in logging since 1938, women were able to join men on an equal footing as the industry rapidly mechanized in the early postwar years. Women became actively involved in the primary operations of the timber industry as “motorist-fellers,” “motorist-cutters,” etc.; they worked with men on the brand-new electric saws, became production leaders and foremen of logging brigades. To name a few, in a 1947 article in Lesnaya Promyshlennost, female brigadier M.K. Volkova and her crew are listed as pioneers in the adoption of electric saws in the Urals, and their results are among the best of the mechanized enterprises in the region.Footnote ³⁷ In a 1948 article on the introduction of mechanization, a photograph shows young workers learning to operate electric motor saws, and three of the five students are women.Footnote ³⁸ One of the last articles of this kind, from August 1948, features Zykova, a female electric saw operator who “cut trees flush with the ground, and throughout the entire cutting site the stumps were left as low as the electric saw allowed” and also mastered the proper technique for felling trees for winch skidding.Footnote ³⁹ It is noteworthy that female motorists are portrayed in these publications as the norm, in contrast to later publications in which individual female drivers or mechanics are portrayed as those who overcame obstacles, rejection by society, and with great difficulty, fought for the right to be a motorist.Footnote ⁴⁰ Since 1950, women engaged in manual branch cutting as part of “male” brigades became a normalized vision of female workers in logging.Footnote ⁴¹

Besides this, as a part of the modernization efforts, a new production method was introduced in the late 1940s, namely the flow method (potochniy metod), in which felling operations were diversified, partly mechanized, and each worker received a specific production task.Footnote ⁴² Although various division-of-labor models, such as the brigade method, had appeared in logging earlier, the flow method differed significantly because it was technology-centered. In the brigade method (including the Dyukovsky method, introduced to her all-female brigade by logger Evfrosinya Dyukova during WWIIFootnote ⁴³), the division of labor was less strict, and each worker usually performed several tasks. A brigade performed the most challenging work jointly, and mechanization was minimal or nonexistent. Instead, with the flow method, logging turned into a stream of operations in which, similar to a conveyor belt, workers of different specialties sequentially passed logs to each other—loggers to branch cutters, branch cutters to chokers and skidders, and crosscutters to haulage workers. Splitting the logging process into distinct tasks enabled a more nuanced approach in classifying particular operations into primary and auxiliary ones, all of which were respectively paid, and needed a different pace of mechanization. Additionally, tasks were ranked according to the level of physical demand, professional training required, and suitability for men or women.

The flow method served as the official explanation and rationalization for the reintroduction of restrictions on women in 1949. In the explanatory note to the 1949 decree restricting women’s work in the forestry industry, the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions employed the same arguments that the IOOT used in the early 1930s to assess the possibility of introducing female labor in logging. However, whereas then the ban on women in certain professions was explained by a lack of technology and division of labor, here the same restrictions were justified by the presence of these factors. This is how the 1933 Institute report defined the rationale:

The rationale for the restrictions introduced in 1949 were as follows: “Currently, with the introduction of the flow method of work in logging, when tree felling, which accounts for 13 percent of the entire complex of logging operations, is separated from all other operations, it seems possible to free women from tree felling as the most difficult work.”Footnote ⁴⁵

Still carried out through labor protection legislation and driven by “concern for women,” the process of pushing women out of certain occupations occurred in an entirely different technological setting that had changed significantly since the mid-1930s. In the late 1940s, labor regulators introduced restrictions barring women from a range of occupations deemed too physically demanding, even though those occupations had undergone significant mechanization. As a result, the classifications of particular jobs as “unsuitable for women” no longer reflected real working conditions. In practice, the regulations lagged behind technological progress, preserving gender-based exclusions even as machinery had made the work safer and less physically burdensome. Also, unlike the 1930s restrictions that limited the stream of women into the industry, the new postwar restrictions sought to displace women who had already entered the industry between 1937 and 1948, voluntarily or through compulsory labor, and had access to various machines and mechanisms.

Easy manual work and hard mechanized work—A paradox of late Soviet gendered labor

The narratives of the workers I talked with (employed in the logging industry from the 1960s to the 1980s) persistently reproduce the contradictory definitions used in labor legislation, referring to heavy manual labor as easy and mechanized as hard and hazardous. In their stories about women branch cutters, they constantly switched their wording, referring to this work as exceptionally easy and therefore suitable only for women too weak for more serious work, or incredibly physically demanding and underpaid. One couple, Nikolai and Lydia, provide an excellent example.Footnote ⁴⁶ “If there is a feller in a brigade, he is considered the head of the brigade. Then comes the tractor driver and the branch cutters whose job was hard (tyazhelaya) and the wage was the smallest,” Nikolai recollected. I asked him why only women worked as branch cutters despite the difficulty of the work. Yet he hesitated to answer, and Lydia shared his doubts. “I don’t know why, he said. It was the most underrated work ….” At the same time, Nikolai said he considered women’s work in logging to be incredibly physically demanding. I asked whether branch cutters could have received the highest Order of Hero of Labor award. Both Nikolai and Lydia agreed that such an honor was only for fellers and haulers; branch cutters could only receive a certificate of merit. Nikolai continued, “Obviously, everybody wanted to be a feller, and there were nearly no men in branch cutting. The men did the most important work. If you’re a man, just pick up a chainsaw and start working hard.” I asked Nikolai if women could become fellers or tractor drivers. “Of course not! It’s only that nowadays, women are starting to drive machines, <but> working as a tractor driver in the field is easier than in the forest,” he answered confidently. Contradicting his previous comment that branch cutters’ work was the most physically demanding in the brigade, Nikolai turned the argument upside down, saying that women could not work in mechanized positions because they were not physically strong enough.

In the early 1930s, when tree felling was almost entirely manual, the term “hard labor” accurately reflected the extreme physical strain involved. Cutting, hauling, and processing timber required sustained strength and endurance, and the classification of such work as heavy was grounded in real bodily demands. However, as mechanization advanced, many of the most physically demanding aspects of tree felling were reduced or taken over by machines. Tasks that had once demanded brute force now required operating, maintaining, and coordinating quite complex equipment. In this new context, the work became physically easier, but at the same time more technically demanding. Yet the regulators and stakeholders continued to fill the term hard with a sense rooted in an unmechanized context. As a result, a notion of a virtual hardship imprinted the now mechanized tree felling, even though its literal “heaviness” now referred less to bodily exertion and more to the skills and responsibility associated with handling machinery. Accordingly, the forms of labor that had previously been considered less physically demanding, or “light” in comparison to manual tree felling, such as branch cutting and other auxiliary tasks, also retained this classification in regulatory discourse, although they remained hard in a pure physical sense. Under conditions of mechanization, these tasks often remained physically strenuous, and in some cases turned out to be more physically demanding than the newly mechanized felling.

As researchers have already noted, gender segregation, including isolated female works (bab’ii raboty) inside various production sectors, characterized Soviet industry and agriculture from the early 1930s.Footnote ⁴⁷ Yet, gender segregation unfolding within a technological stratification, and driven by a “power discourse” on women’s inability to master machine power, is an overlooked fact and an intrinsic feature of this story. As the case of the mechanized felling shows, in a post-WWII scene of fast-paced mechanization, occupational health and safety reasoning contributed to a regulated distancing of the “weaker” sex from brand new devices that provided greater strength, greater productivity, and higher social status, only partially. In fact, the logic masked the deeper setting where the “weak” and “strong” concepts underwent the social redefining beyond the physical sense. The notion of hard work began to lose its physical meaning, giving way to a social one, in which hardnes’ came to be defined as sophisticated, intellectually complex, and hierarchy-producing. The fact that women were banned from operating new electrical and petrol chainsaws, though in the 1940s most of these devices were already within the authorized weight range acceptable for women to use, provides strong historical evidence of how this “power discourse” worked. Although the weight of saws continued to decrease, there is no historical evidence that women used the equipment after 1950.Footnote ⁴⁸ The sad irony is that as machinery increasingly made it possible to eradicate older differences between light and heavy labor, the gender inequalities were not only perpetuated but accentuated. As easy work increasingly came to denote “unskilled,” women were barred from jobs that were considered hard, but which in fact relied on machinery and were therefore less difficult. This approach of classifying mechanized labor as especially hard and hazardous becomes even more striking given the fact that until the 1970s, the output norms in Soviet industries were not differentiated by gender.Footnote ⁴⁹ Thus, in terms of production output, male and female bodies were expected to complete the same amount of work in a given period.

The lag in mechanizing branch cutting compared to other tasks also helps us understand the process of technologically driven segregation. Although the development of special portable electric saws for cutting branches began at the same time as the development and widespread introduction of electric saws for felling trees in the mid-1940s, these technologies followed different paths. As early as the late 1940s, a piece in Lesnaya Promyshlennost expressed concern about the gap in mechanization between primary and auxiliary work, emphasizing the need for the rapid mechanization of branch cutting.Footnote ⁵⁰ By the end of the 1940s, electric saws were actively used in logging operations throughout the country. At the same time, the Ministry of Timber and Paper Industry made serious efforts to develop portable delimbing saws—various models were developed and tested but were limited to experimental prototypes.Footnote ⁵¹ The first 10,000 RES-1 series electric branch cutters (delimbers) were slated to come off the assembly line in 1953.Footnote ⁵² However, there is no evidence that the equipment was ever produced and used at logging sites. The first references to the use of portable branch cutters appeared in the archives only in the early 1980s.Footnote ⁵³ The machines were not in use in the settlements I visited, and delimbing was done manually until the late 1970s, when specialized delimbing equipment such as the LP-30B appeared. Remarkably, the new machines were operated exclusively by men.Footnote ⁵⁴ The fact that portable delimbers have seen nearly zero adoption cannot be attributed to a priority of highly integrated harvesting machines over selective mechanization of manual tasks. In fact, the feller’s assistants benefited greatly from selective mechanization during that period, using portable hydraulic felling wedges to adjust the direction of the fall of a felled tree trunk, a job they had previously performed with a long spear. In other words, the Soviet industry consistently introduced smart devices that greatly facilitated loggers’ performance, but this did not affect branch cutters. The available materials show that as soon as a particular operation became mechanized and required special training, it fell into the category of hard and harmful work prohibited for women.

One of the reasons women did not have access to mechanical equipment was because the machinery (motors, chains, etc.) needed to be regularly maintained, which required at least a minimum level of technical literacy or vocational education. While men gained extensive experience operating machinery and often even became professional drivers during their compulsory military service, women had to rely on vocational education to acquire a profession. However, as Katarina Katz notes, in the late 1970s, 600 of the 1,200 subjects taught in Soviet vocational schools were closed to women. Moreover, even in those specialties where women were eligible to study, they were often discriminated against in enrollment due to the influence of enterprises that did not intend to hire women for those positions in the future.Footnote ⁵⁵ Thus, despite a constant shortage of skilled repair crews, women often did not work in that profession, even though they were formally allowed to. At the same time, advertisements in regional newspapers in Karelia during 1960s and 1970s indicate that only male students were accepted for training as mechanics, electricians, crane operators, industrial equipment adjusters and operators at vocational schools in Petrozavodsk, Segezha, Pitkyaranta, and local technical schools, while girls were accepted for courses in finishing work in construction, office work, and other white-collar professions.Footnote ⁵⁶ Liudmila Vavulinskaya also notes that women in forest settlements were trained in technical professions unrelated to felling—timber markers, inspectors, electromechanics at mobile power plants, accountants, trade workers, cooks, quality inspectors, planners, etc.Footnote ⁵⁷

The restrictions on women’s access to technologies paralleled unequal pay for forest labor. The branch cutters were paid half as much as fellers and about two-thirds of what tractor drivers and chokers earned.Footnote ⁵⁸ Moreover, as noted by the audits of women’s labor protection, men’s and women’s labor was evaluated differently, even if they occupied the same positions (as masters or accountants). Men usually received qualifications for two to three grades higher than women, and their wages increased accordingly.Footnote ⁵⁹ But even with such discriminatory wages, women branch cutters still earned significantly more than all other women in logging settlements, which made this work more attractive to them.Footnote ⁶⁰

Although the Soviet labor regulation instructions for timber enterprises indicate that “upon mechanization for some occupations the ban for women was lifted,”Footnote ⁶¹ the existing lists of barred occupations did not show that any prohibited jobs became available to female workers. From the mid-1970s, based on the actual state of affairs, trade unions and other entities involved in occupational health and safety began transferring women from branch cutting to other occupations. However, given the existing labor structure, the more advanced logging methods became, the more difficult it was to move women out of cutting work, as modernized types of work were out of reach for them. Hence, by the end of the 1960s, the “easier work” category became equivalent to technologically inferior, primitive work that did not require special qualifications and training.

Notably, branch cutting was absent from the 1978 list of work prohibited for women, possibly because big delimbing machines had been put into production by that time. The absence of a direct ban on employing of women in this work created a kind of blind spot in the regulation of women’s labor, allowing enterprise managers to interpret the new norms more freely and, in turn, women to work as branch cutters, just like in early 1930s when the most heavy logging operations had not yet been mechanized, and branch cutting was considered more acceptable to women than felling and transportation. Overall, 40 years of intensive industrial modernization and state gender regulation of labor have not had a significant impact on the transfer of women to mechanized or, at least, less physically demanding jobs, whether logging or other equally paid activities. Regardless of all the efforts, the mechanization of branch cutting operations was no more than 5.8 percent by 1979.Footnote ⁶² By the mid-1980s, there were still more than 140,000 women in heavy and hazardous occupations in timber, woodworking, and pulp and paper industries, including more than 19,000 involved in manual branch cutting operations.Footnote ⁶³ It is worth mentioning that none of the actors involved in the negotiations (Ministry of Timber and Paper Industry, State Labor Committee, timber production enterprises, trade unions) ever suggested that men might replace women as branch cutters to work manually until sufficient quantities of complex delimbing machines were supplied. Still, when the machines finally became available, as in the previous stages of mechanization of logging, women did not gain access to mastering them.