FROM SHOCK WORKERS TO HEROINES: INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY IN THE STALINIST PRESS, 1930-1940
Logan Mae Smith
A thesis submitted to the faculty at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in the Department of Global Studies (Russian, Eastern European, and Eurasian Concentration) in the College of Arts and
Sciences.
Chapel Hill 2020
Approved by: Donald J. Raleigh
Chad Bryant
ABSTRACT
Logan Smith: From Shock Workers to Heroines: International Women’s Day in the Stalinist Press, 1930-140
(Under the direction of Donald J. Raleigh)
Interrogating the country’s two main newspapers, Pravda and Izvestiia, my thesis
examines how the Soviet press between 1930 and 1940 represented International Women’s Day, the major holiday celebrating women. Curating a certain idea of what roles women should play in society, these portrayals of women changed over time as the “Stalin Revolution” of
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
TABLE OF CONTENTS
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS………...…...viii
INTRODUCTION………...1
CHAPTER 1: THE “WOMAN QUESTION” AND THE ORIGINS OF INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY IN RUSSIA………...5
Marxism, the Bolsheviks, and the “Woman Question”………...…5
The Origins of International Women’s Day in Imperial Russia………...…….10
International Women’s Day and the Fall of Tsarist Russia………...12
The “Woman Question” and the Zhenotdel………...13
Soviet Law and Disorder...17
The Fight over International Women’s Day...19
CHAPTER 2: INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY IN THE SOVIET PRESS, 1930 – 1935...22
Introduction...22
The Stalin Revolution...23
The End of the Zhenotdel and the “Woman Question”...26
International Women’s Day and Soviet Women’s Identity...27
CHAPTER 3: THE RISE OF THE SOVIET HEROINE, 1936-1940...35
Introduction...35
The Restructuring of the Family...35
The Stakhanovite Movement...38
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
CPSU Communist Party of the Soviet Union NEP New Economic Policy
NKIu Commissariat of Justice NKT Commissariat of Labor NKZdrav Commissariat of Health
TsIK Soviet Central Executive Committee
INTRODUCTION
In 1910 Clara Zetkin (1857-1933), a leading German Marxist and feminist, declared at the Second International Conference of Socialist Women, which brought together socialist women from around the world to fight for the political and social emancipation of the female sex, that there should be a “special Woman’s Day.” This “special Women’s Day,” maintained Zetkin, was to be organized by socialist women and class-conscious organizations to “promote Women’s Suffrage propaganda.”1
Zetkin’s words did not fall on deaf ears. On March 18, 1911, European socialists celebrated the first International Women’s Day in Vienna to voice their support for women’s suffrage, while their American counterparts in New York celebrated women on February 23.2 On February 17, 1913 (March 2 in the Gregorian calendar),3 the Bolshevik Party observed
International Women’s Day in an effort to increase class consciousness and party membership among working-class women.4 Commemorating Women’s Day would later become a Soviet-era tradition, in part owing to the role that women’s demonstrations played in the February
Revolution of 1917 that toppled the Romanov dynasty. Protesting food shortages caused by inflation and war, Russian women took to the streets on International Women’s Day, articulating
1International Socialist Congress, “Second International Conference of Socialist Women,” Report of Socialist Party
Delegation and Proceedings of the International Socialist Congress at Copenhagen, 1910 (Chicago: 1910), 21.
2Temma Kaplan, "On the Socialist Origins of International Women's Day," Feminist Studies 11, no. 1 (1985): 166. 3It is important to note that the Russian Empire used the Julian calendar instead of the Gregorian or “New Style”
Calendar, which is widely used by most countries today. The Julian calendar was 13 days behind the Gregorian.
4Choi Chatterjee. “Celebrating Women: International Women's Day in Russia and the Soviet
political demands, including “Down with the Autocracy.”5 Prominent Bolshevik feminist
Alexandra Kollontai (1872-1952) in 1920 wrote of the protests: “On this day the Russian women raised the torch of the proletarian revolution and set the world on fire.”6 On February 27 (March 12 in the Gregorian Calendar), the tsarist autocracy ended in Russia.
After the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917, the Party’s leaders began the political and social transformation of Russian society. The Soviet state and the Communist Party held celebrations and mass festivals as part of a larger cultural-building campaign to change society and exercise political power. Yet, a battle ensued over International Women’s Day between the Women’s Section of the Communist Party (Zhenotdel), established in 1919, and top male leaders of the Party. Citing the holiday as essential to ensuring women’s support of Party goals, Zhenotdel leaders argued for the continuation of International Women’s Day during the Civil War; however, Communist Party leaders felt differently and found the celebration to be too costly in a time of dire national need.7 In an attempt to placate Bolshevik leaders who saw the holiday as a bourgeois feminist deviation from Marxist principles, Zhenotdel leaders asserted the holiday could be used as a way to liberate women from domestic responsibilities and to redirect their energy toward national and international goals, such as increasing literacy and political goals among women workers.8
Despite the importance of the holiday, scholars have devoted only limited attention to International Women’s Day.9 I seek to redress this imbalance by examining how the Soviet press
5Kaplan, “On the Socialist Origins,” 169.
6Alexandra Kollontai. Mezhdunarodnyi Den’ Rabotnits, trans. Alix Holt (Moscow: 1920),
https://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1920/womens-day.htm.
7Chatterjee, “Celebrating Women,” 145. 8Ibid., 62.
9There has been little English or Russian-language scholarship on the topic of International Women’s Day in the
between 1930 and 1940 represented the holiday. During Stalin’s First Five-Year Plan (1928-1932), millions of women entered the industrial workforce, forever changing the composition of the working class in the Soviet Union. With the shutting down of the Zhenotdel in 1929 and the mass entrance of women into jobs, 1930 serves as the starting point for my research. The year 1940 serves as the endpoint of this thesis because of the wartime mobilization caused by World War Two the following year, which temporarily caused massive upheaval in Soviet society.
I draw on two major Soviet newspapers to determine how the Communist Party
institutionalized International Women’s Day in press coverage of March 8. Pravda and Izvestiia
provide two main sources of news and propaganda for both the Communist Party and the Soviet government, disseminating information that reflected Party ideology and state policies. Pravda
(Truth) was the mouthpiece of the Communist Party. Izvestiia (News) acted as the official voice of the Soviet state. Both Pravda and Izvestiia covered the commemoration of International Women’s Day and sought to present a particular idea of the Soviet woman and her specific roles as worker, mother, and citizen of the revolution. I analyze how newspapers portrayed women on International Women’s Day and how these descriptions changed over time. Additionally, I tap the writings of prominent Bolshevik feminists, such as Alexandra Kollontai, on the significance of International Women’s Day celebrations in Russia and the Soviet Union.
My thesis is divided into three parts. In chapter 1, I examine Marxist discussions of the “woman question” and the emergence of International Women’s Day in prerevolutionary Russia. I further consider the creation of the Zhenotdel (1919-1929) and the development of the “woman question” in the 1920s. In chapter 2, I introduce the Stalin Revolution, the shutting down of the
CHAPTER 1: THE “WOMAN QUESTION” AND THE ORIGINS OF INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY IN RUSSIA
Marxism, the Bolsheviks, and the “Woman Question”
Originating in the mid-19th century in Europe and Russia, the “woman question” emerged as a debate over what roles women should play in society. Should women be able to study in university alongside men? Should women have the same political rights as men? Liberal and socialist Russian political thinkers and members of the intelligentsia hotly debated these questions and others as they attempted to agree on the position of women in the political and private spheres of life. Here, I examine the ideological foundations of Bolshevik theory and solutions to the “woman question.”
The conceptual building blocks to possible answers to the “woman question” emerge from the writings of Karl Marx (1818-1883), Friedrich Engels (1820-1895), and August Bebel (1840-1913). In the classic work that changed world history, The Communist Manifesto
published in 1848, Marx and Engels argued that human nature, creativity, and individuality are molded by the mode of production in a society, and that capitalism relegated the worker, the proletarian, to the level of a commodity. Capitalism constrains human nature, causing alienation of the proletariat and a breakdown in natural human relations, including the relationship between men and women.However, Marx and Engels stated that, under communism and the abolishment of private property, the class struggle would cease to exist, normalizing human relations.10 As a
10Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels, “The Manifesto of the Communist Party,” Marx/Engels Selected Works (Moscow:
result, the overthrow of the entire capitalist system was necessary to end all exploitation in society, especially the exploitation of women.
While The Communist Manifesto does not address gender relations, Engels and Bebel both tackle the “woman question” in later works. Bebel, a German socialist, writer, and one of the founders of the German Social Democratic Workers’ Party, in his famous Women and Socialism, published in 1879, contends that women are relegated to their “natural profession” in society as both dutiful wife and child-bearer. Accordingly, women have a “double yoke to bear,” relying on the male sex for both social position and economic dependence. The only way in which women could be liberated from the “yoke” of men was “to remove all barriers that make one human being dependent upon another, which includes the dependence of one sex upon the other.”11
Arguably, Engels provides the most complete overview of Marxist thought and women’s oppression, combining the ideals of The Communist Manifesto with ideological consideration of the role of the family in women’s oppression. Engels argues in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, published in 1884, that a woman’s position in the modern family has been degraded to that of a slave due to capitalism. Engels contends that there are multiple “stages” of the family, and the family under capitalism resembles the relationship between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat: the man, who has become the sole breadwinner of the family, serves as the “bourgeois” oppressor of the “proletarian” woman. In order to free women from their oppression, Engels writes that “the emancipation of women is [through] the reintroduction of the entire female sex into public industry,” resulting in the abolition of the family as an
economic unit in society.12 Women’s liberation could come in a postcapitalist society only where
11August Bebel, Women and Socialism, trans. Meta Stern (New York: Socialist Literature Co., 1910), Intro.,
https://www.marxists.org/archive/bebel/1879/woman-socialism/introduction.htm
women are primarily seen as a labor unit in the economy and where private household chores have been transferred to the state.
Marxism made its way into Russian politics in the late 19th century, transforming political dynamics within society by providing the newly emerging working class with significant political goals. The Social Democrats became the best-known and most politically effective Marxist group in prerevolutionary Russia. Even with the rising rates of women industrial workers at the turn of the century, Marxist groups and thinkers often neglected women’s issues because of Marxism’s emphasis on class relations. Since relatively little was written on the “woman question” by Marxists before 1917, Russian Marxists internalized the “orthodoxies” that Marx, Engels, Bebel, and Alexandra Kollontai, laid out in their earlier writings: the idea that capitalism created women’s inequality and that only through socialist revolution could women be liberated from their exploitation; women’s emancipation would result from their full introduction into the labor force; and women needed to be freed from “domestic slavery” through state
intervention in the private sphere.
Although armed with these theoretical foundations, several myths emerged about women’s liberation, producing negative stereotypes about Russian women that are seen in the ambivalence of many revolutionaries to include women in political movements. Their ambivalence, in turn, results from the idea that women, joining in the revolutionary struggle, would sabotage or divide the movement by focusing on women-specific issues instead of general working-class aims. The traits and attributes prescribed to all Russian women by both the Bolsheviks and the Russian population as a whole are based upon ideas of the Russian woman being “more backward” than men, keeping themselves tied to “traditional village life.”13 Hence, women are seen as
13Elizabeth A. Wood, The Baba and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia (Bloomington:
superstitious, illiterate, religious, and attached to the “older” way of life. These particular
characteristics are what make a Russian woman a baba (a backward, female figure), instead of a “comrade” like Russian men.
The most famous Russian Marxist and leader of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Party, Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924), theorized ways in which to reconcile Marxist foundations on the “woman question” with the political, social, and economic realities of imperial Russian life. Lenin, like Marx, Engels, Bebel, and Kollontai, saw women as being “double” oppressed under capitalism in both the home and at work. Lenin “gave full backing to the politicization of women since he saw this as leading to both women’s liberation and
successful revolution;” however, he strongly believed that a separate women’s organization within the Party would detract from the collective struggle of the proletariat.14 Furthermore, Lenin emphasized the role of the state in providing women with the opportunity for their own liberation, such as giving women equal rights and easing women of domestic housework through public services, but women would have to take responsibility by becoming politically conscious and involved in the economy.
Emerging as one of the most ardent supporters of Bolshevik feminism, Alexandra Kollontai fought for the creation of a separate political organization for women in the Bolshevik Party. Like Lenin, she believed that women could only achieve liberation under communism. However, her views were often seen as too radical or as “bourgeois feminist,” and she was often accused of feminist deviation from the party line.15 The Bolshevik Party took a hardline stance against feminism for two reasons: leading communists thought international feminist movements were
14Mary Buckley, Women and Ideology in the Soviet Union (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1989),
25.
15For more information on the feminist movement in Russia, see: Richard Stites The Women's Liberation Movement
“bourgeois” in nature, believing feminists would betray the Marxist program for the working class; and women workers would be drawn away from the class struggle into the feminist movement.16 Kollontai herself was an ardent antibourgeois feminist, heavily criticizing
bourgeois feminists for their “modest goals” of legal rights, education, and philanthropy because they left capitalism in place. Kollontai in a 1909 pamphlet The Social Basis of the Woman’s Question vehemently argued that feminists seek equality in a capitalist system that is inherently unequal, resulting in the division of the “women’s world” between classes–the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. Furthermore, Kollontai stated that proletarian women “do not see men as the enemy and the oppressor; on the contrary, they think of men as their comrades.”17 As a result, the feminists’ program of women’s equality does not go far enough because feminist issues do not represent working-class programs, and, therefore, cannot actually emancipate women. Socialism is the only answer to women’s equality.
Kollontai also saw current bourgeois family structures as a barrier to women’s liberation, oppressing women as both wives and mothers. “Free love,” the act of two consenting adults entering or exiting relationships without the contractual obligation of marriage, is possible only in a communist society where familial responsibilities are transferred to the state and society, allowing women to free themselves of the burdens of the family and childcare.18 These types of relationships would essentially make the modern family obsolete, fully emancipating women in the process.
16Wood, The Baba and the Comrade, 30.
17Alexandra Kollontai,“The Social Basis of the Woman’s Question,” Selected Writings of Alexandra Kollontai,
trans. Alix Holt (Westport, CN: L. Hill, 1977), 59-60.
The Origins of International Women’s Day in Imperial Russia
Before 1913, the Bolshevik Party remained theoretically committed to women’s
emancipation but failed to politically organize them into their ranks until the first International Women’s Day holiday in Russia. Although International Women’s Day celebrations had taken place prior to 1913 in other countries, the Russian Social Democratic Party had ignored these celebrations, despite Kollontai’s pleading that the holiday would be an effective way to mobilize women workers.19 However, as unrest overtook the industrial regions of the country in 1913 and 1914, the Bolsheviks decided to organize International Women’s Day events.
Bolsheviks P.F. Kudelli and Konkordia Samoilova were the masterminds behind the International Women’s Day celebrations in 1913, organizing a holiday commission and publishing articles in Pravda leading up to the event. The Bolsheviks, adamantly opposed to feminism, presented International Women’s Day as a way to usher women workers into the working class as a whole instead of solely highlighting women’s issues.20 Kollontai, a member of the Menshevik faction of the Social Democratic Party before 1915, wrote an article in Pravda
entitled “Women’s Day” one week prior to the celebrations. In the essay Kollontai notes that: “the paths pursued by women workers and bourgeois suffragettes have long since separated. There is too great a difference between the objectives that life has put before them. . . . Therefore, working men should not fear separate Women's Days, nor special conferences of women workers, nor their special press.”21 Kollontai’s writing in Pravda is a prime example of her and many other Bolshevik feminists’ struggles to include the wider proletariat into
19Choi Chatterjee, Celebrating Women: Gender, Festival Culture, and Bolshevik Ideology, 1910-1939 (Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002), 19.
20Ibid, 21.
International Women’s Day celebrations, while, at the same time, distancing themselves from any traces of bourgeois feminism.
The International Women’s Day events took place in Moscow and St. Petersburg on February 17, 1913, with the Bolsheviks providing police a false date (February 10, 1913) in an effort to avoid being shut down by the tsarist government.22 In St. Petersburg, the Bolsheviks held a meeting at the Great Hall of the Kalashnikov Exchange under the guise of a “Scientific Morning,” where a discussion would take place over the woman question (zhenskii vopros). Despite the Bolsheviks’ efforts, the city police showed up to the meeting to monitor the situation. Shura Aleekseva, a textile worker and one of the speakers at the meeting, spoke about terrible conditions in factories and appealed to the trade unions to protect women workers. Her speech received a positive reaction from the crowd and a negative one from the police, who arrested her later that day. The meeting officially ended when the police interfered after participants
attempted to sing revolutionary songs.23
Preparations for International Women’s Day in 1914 began two months in advance with hopes that the first socialist women’s journal, Rabotnitsa (Woman Worker), would increase the revolutionary consciousness among women workers. The first issue of Rabotnitsa was scheduled to go to press on International Women’s Day in 1914, but at a meeting before the publication of
Rabotnitsa, the editors of the journal–Kudelli, Samoilova, and two others–were arrested on February 18, 1914, along with other members of the holiday commission. One of the editors, Liudmilla Menzhinskaia, evaded the arrest of the police and published 12,000 copies of the
22It is important to note here that the 1913 celebrations in Russia were not held on the internationally recognized
date for International Women’s Day, which would have been February 23 (Gregorian Calendar) in prerevolutionary Russia and March 8 elsewhere; however, the next year, they would be. There is not a clear indication why this change of date took place in 1913.
23Chatterjee, Celebrating Women, 25-27. For a more detailed description of Russia’s International Women’s Day
journal before being detained. Later in 1914, Rabotnitsa would be banned altogether in tsarist Russia. Unlike the moderate nature of the 1913 festivities, the atmosphere in 1914 turned revolutionary over police repression of planned events. Hundreds of working women and men demonstrated in the streets, singing revolutionary songs, and calling for an end to tsarist repression.24
International Women’s Day and the Fall of Tsarist Russia
Although the situation in Russia worsened with the continuation of the war, food shortages, and terrible working conditions in the factories, there were no International Women’s Day celebrations in 1915 and 1916 due to tsarist oppression of Marxist journals and newspapers, the exile of previous organizers, and World War I. By January 1917, women made up 33 percent of Petrograd’s workforce due to millions of men serving in the Russian army. Food riots, which had been worsening from the onset of 1915, were often referred to as bab’i bunty’ (women’s
uprisings) and were thought to be “peculiarly women’s affairs,” headed by the soldatki (soldiers’ wives). Many socialists, including Lenin, condemned these riots as politically backward, arguing that revolutionary energy should focus on a planned, working-class movement against the tsarist autocracy.25
As material conditions in 1917 continued to decline in Russia, women decided to take
matters into their own hands.On February 23, 1917 (March 8), Russian women began the “bread riots” that would eventually topple Tsar Nicholas II’s regime, ending the tsarist autocracy in Russia.26 As women workers, soldatki, and angry housewives took to the streets to protest the
24Chatterjee, Celebrating Women, 29-32. 25Ibid., 43-45.
26For more on the February Revolution, see: E.N. Burdzhalov, Russia’s Second Revolution: The February 1917
war and lack of food, they convinced male workers and then, eventually, the soldiers of the Petrograd garrison to revolt alongside them. Early Bolshevik historiography depicts the February and October Revolutions in gendered terms, attributing certain “feminine” characteristics to the February Revolution that were outside of the “accepted” model of revolution. As a result, the Bolsheviks made a concerted effort to reconcile the events of the February Revolution with a greater revolutionary moment, connecting the October Revolution with the February Revolution. If the Bolsheviks could establish a relationship between the events in February and those in October, their legitimacy as a political movement would be solidified, proving not only that the revolutionary nature of International Women’s Day in 1917 was a result of continued Bolshevik agitation among women, but that February 1917 was an important component of the Communist Party’s revolutionary “myths.” While the February Revolution remained the “women’s”
revolution that toppled the autocracy, it was seen as step toward the mostly male-led socialist revolution that began in October 1917.27
The “Woman Question” and the Zhenotdel
Immediately following the Bolshevik seizure of power in October 1917, Party leaders acknowledged that women needed to be brought into the Bolshevik revolution.28 To do so, the Bolsheviks pursued three main strategies to persuade women workers into their ranks: give women equal rights through legislation; directly appeal to women during the Civil War to bring them into the workforce; and establish a women’s organizations to draw women workers into the Party.29 Beginning with the Constitution of the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic in
27Elizabeth A. Wood, “February 23 and March 8: Two Holidays That Upstaged the February Revolution,” Slavic
Review 76, no. 3 (Autumn 2017): 732-33.
28For an overview of the October Revolution and its aftermath, see Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks Come to
July 1918, women workers received the right to vote.30 The Code on Marriage, the Family, and Guardianship followed in October 1918, attempting to create social equality between women and men.
Despite opposition to a separate women’s organization among some Bolsheviks, the Zhenotdel, established in 1919, advocated for women’s issues throughout the economic hardships women faced under both War Communism, the state’s economic policies practiced during the Civil War, comprising of forced grain requisitioning, economic centralization, and nationalization of industry and land, and the New Economic Policy (NEP), Lenin’s economic plan from 1921 through 1928 that attempted to alleviate the ills caused by the Civil War. The NEP represented a mixture of free-market forces and state control of large industry.31 From its inception, the Zhenotdel had two goals: the political education of women, especially in recruiting them into the Communist Party; and drawing women workers into “socialist construction,” building a socialist society and economy in the Soviet Union.32 However, Zhenotdel leaders in the 1920s, such as Kollontai, Inessa Armand, and Samoilova, grappled with several
contradictions: women’s position in society under Soviet power was not bettering, but
worsening; general propaganda targeting all workers had failed to make women workers more politically motivated; and women workers could not engage in soviets, factory committees, or trade unions like their male counterparts because the burden of women in the household had not been relieved.33
29Wood, The Baba and the Comrade, 46.
30It is important to note that the right to vote in this 1918 Constitution was class-based, meaning that this was not
universal suffrage in the new Bolshevik-led state, but proletarian women did receive the right to vote.
31For an overview of the NEP, see: Russia in the Era of NEP: Explorations in Soviet Society and Culture, ed. S.
Fitzpatrick, A. Rabinowitch, and R. Stites (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991).
The ability to receive well-paid employment compounded women’s circumstances in the 1920s, as access was based on a worker’s relationship with the Communist Party. The Party narrowly defined what it meant to be a “worker”: he was neither female nor a peasant, he was not tied to the land, his parents had been workers before him, he had thrown off the superstition and customs of the “old world,” and he depended solely on wage labor. The rank-and-file worker described above, known as the kadrovyi worker, was an idyllic representation for the Bolsheviks of what the working class should look like. When soldiers returned from Red Army service at the end of the Civil War in 1921, women workers were dismissed from their jobs on a massive scale, as trade unions, managers, and male workers sought to replace the influx of women workers that had accumulated in the work force during the Civil War with kadrovye male workers. Between 1918 and 1928, women’s share of industrial jobs decreased from 45 percent to 28.6 percent, and they also experienced various forms of sex segregation where traditionally “male” industries increasingly laid off women workers in favor of men.34
Because of the inability of the Zhenotdel to enact widespread social change for women and because of the economic turmoil caused by War Communism and then NEP, the Party sidelined women’s issues in the 1920s. As early as 1924, the weaknesses of the Zhenotdel were evident, which included an ever-changing rotation of leadership, a lack of financial and ideological support from top leaders of the Party, and an overall negative view from male workers and peasants, trade unions, factory managers, and even women themselves that resulted in failed attempts to establish various social welfare services, such as laundries, communal kitchens, and nurseries.35 Bolshevik leaders blamed women workers’ low levels of Party membership on their backwardness, low cultural levels, and “enslavement” to the family. Although Zhenotdel leaders
34Wendy Z. Goldman, Women at the Gates: Gender and Industry in Stalin’s Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002), 6-12.
sought to remedy this problem, they also perpetuated these same negative stereotypes of Soviet women by presenting women workers as babas who needed to be saved by the Party for their backward ways, further engendering differences between male and female workers.36
Although the Zhenotdel also remained weak throughout the 1920s at both the central and local levels, its leaders argued in favor of drawing women into the workforce and establishing social services at the state level. Stressing the importance of the creation of communal
organizations, the Zhenotdel leaders also strove to achieve women’s liberation through the establishment of women’s groups and activists (zhenotdelki) that would provide the ground work for socialist construction on a decentralized, local level. However, this idea of localized and decentralized construction of socialism clashed with Party leaders’ ideas that centralized organizations at the state level would achieve communism and women’s equality through
economic structures.37 The economic interests of the Bolshevik leaders effectively overshadowed the Zhenotdel leaders’ dreams of women’s liberation through socialized housework and
childcare and equal relations between men and women. Furthermore, the Zhenotdel found some of its greatest challenges in the hostility of local party committees that refused to give
zhenotdelki financial support, material resources, or personnel to help with the mobilization and education of women workers and peasants.38 As a result, Zhenotdel leaders and activists in the 1920s failed to politically mobilize women into the Party and to bring women out of the dire social and economic circumstances that plagued all levels of Soviet society.
36Wood, The Baba and the Comrade, 198-99.
Soviet Law and Disorder
Women and children most clearly felt both the positive and negative results of the Code on Marriage, the Family, and Guardianship in October 1918, replacing centuries of archaic religious and tsarist laws. The 1918 Code established women’s full equality under the law, giving
legitimacy only to civil marriages, removing centuries of male privilege, extending equal rights to all children, allowing women to own their own property, and simplifying divorce by letting either party file for divorce without fees or consent of the other partner.39 The theoretical justifications behind these radical changes in law lie in Marxist foundations that the family created women’s oppression, and, with the introduction of women’s equality under the law and socialized childrearing, the family would “wither away” to allow women to focus their energy on their work for the state. However, because the new state could ill afford almost any type of social services, women workers bore the brunt of supporting the family both financially and socially. The Code of 1918 facilitated various negative social consequences that most heavily affected women and children, such as homelessness, poverty, and prostitution.
Fueled by an increase in illegal abortion rates following the October Revolution, the Commissariats of Health and Justice (NKZdrav and NKIu) legalized abortion in November 1920, making the Soviet Union the first country in the world to allow the practice. However, even with the legalization of abortion, it was never designated as a woman’s legal right and was referred to as an “evil” practice that must be combatted with legislation to alleviate the issues that were driving working women to abortions in the first place.40 The legalization of abortion gave women safe alternatives to illegal abortion techniques.
39Wendy Z. Goldman, Women, the State, and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917-1936 (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 49-51.
Soviet leaders soon debated the need to reform aspects of the Code of 1918, owing to its unforeseen repercussions on society. By the time the 1926 Code on Marriage, the Family, and Guardianship was ratified, Soviet society and familial relationships had been altered
dramatically. The ease of which a man or woman could obtain divorce meant that divorce rates skyrocketed between 1918 and 1926. Because divorce rates were so high, the courts were overwhelmed by unprocessed cases. The 1926 Code transferred the divorce process from the courts to ZAGS, the civil registration office, and recognized the legal standing of de facto
marriages based on cohabitation.41 However, for many women this decision also complicated the process of suing for alimony, leaving single mothers to fend for their children on their own. The idea surrounding the 1926 Code “was that family, not society, was responsible for the
maintenance and support of its weaker members.”42 In this case, alimony forced men to have culpability in cases of divorce or abandonment, as the state did not have the resources to lessen the hardships of women and children. Although attempting to placate some of the social ills felt strongly by women that emerged after 1918, the 1926 Code not only did not fix these problems but even worsened the situation for single mothers and children.
The Fight over International Women’s Day
Although the new Bolshevik state celebrated International Women’s Day in the chaos of social, economic, and political upheaval caused by revolution, civil war, famine, and overall disruption of everyday life, the development of the holiday experienced a myriad of setbacks. International Women’s Day was considered an official holiday already by 1918, but a variety of factors limited the extravagance of celebrations across the country during the Civil War. Seeing the holiday as a nuisance both politically and economically, some Bolshevik leaders repeatedly,
41Goldman, Women, the State, and Revolution, 248-49.
42Becky Glass and Margaret Stolee, “Family Law in Soviet Russia,”
albeit unsuccessfully, tried to cancel or significantly reduce the budget of International Women’s Day celebrations. With Bolshevik leaders’ ambivalence toward women’s issues and wariness of “feminist deviation” in the Party, the idea that International Women’s Day would serve as a women-only holiday was fervently debated in the early 1920s. For instance, Clara Zetkin, the founder of International Women’s Day in 1910, criticized the Zhenotdel for promoting International Women’s Day as a women’s affair but open to the proletariat as a whole.43 However, Alexandra Kollontai–almost singlehandedly–saved International Women’s Day in 1921 after reversing the Party’s decision to cancel the holiday due to budget issues when she published an article in Kommunistka (Communist Woman) detailing the importance of the holiday as both a “woman’s holiday” and as a celebration of the Party’s goals of women’s equality.44 While International Women’s Day survived cancellation in the 1920s, it was never established as a major Soviet holiday.
Historian Malte Rolfe identifies three “tiers” of Soviet festivals. “First order” ones, the most important, were work-free days that commemorated the greatest events in Soviet history, such as May Day, the October Revolution, and the anniversary of Lenin’s death. The state celebrated second-tier holidays such as International Women’s Day, but they were not work-free days and usually resulted in smaller rallies or get togethers. Third-tier holidays had limited significance and often focused on regional celebrations.45
The Zhenotdel attempted to coordinate International Women’s Day festivities in both the cities and the countryside, but antipathy among the male population and even ignorance about how to celebrate the holiday led to confusion among both men and women participants. In the
43Wood, The Baba and the Comrade, 190. 44Chatterjee, Celebrating Women, 61-62.
45Malte Rolf, Soviet Mass Festivals, 1917-1991, trans. Cynthia Klohr (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press,
countryside, local Zhenotdel activists opened literacy groups in reading huts, sewing circles, and nursing homes. In Moscow and Leningrad, celebrations included party-held congresses at prominent theaters to smaller gatherings at factories. Striving to combat some of the obstacles women faced for trying to attend International Women’s Day celebrations, Zhenotdel leaders often encouraged workers clubs or peasant reading rooms to provide temporary child care and instructed Party organizations to include women in planning events for the holiday.46 Although surrounded by ambivalence in the Party, trade unions, and the general male population,
International Women’s Day gained popularity from the late-1920s onward, replacing prerevolutionary rituals associated with traditional Russian holidays and offering women a chance for self-expression and the opportunity to participate in parties, plays, dances, and family meetings organized by factories, trade unions, and workers’ clubs. Women also dressed in their best clothes and prepared special meals on International Women’s Day.47 On March 8, factories released Soviet women from work early, allowing women to gather together to sing, dance, and celebrate one another.
CHAPTER TWO: INTERNATIONAL WOMEN’S DAY IN THE SOVIET PRESS, 1930 – 1935
Introduction
With the introduction of the First Five-Year Plan in 1929, International Women’s Day celebrations in the Soviet Union reflected the production needs of the state and the role women were to play in collectivization and industrialization, focusing on the holiday as “a strategic form of cultural practice that marked the distinctiveness of Soviet civilization, legitimized the Soviet mission for women, and articulated the Soviet construction of gender.”48
On March 8 from 1930 through 1940, Pravda and Izvestiia dedicated portions of their newspaper space to women’s issues, achievements, and work in the Soviet Union and abroad. The celebration of International Women’s Day in the early Stalinist 1930s highlighted Soviet women’s commitment to socialist construction of everyday life (byt’) and the economy. This chapter focuses on Pravda’s and Izvestiia’s portrayals of women and their work and roles in society between 1930 and 1935, examining the language utilized by journalists, authors of letters to the editor, and in Party mandates. Before doing so, it is essential to establish the context of the early 1930s: Stalin’s First Five-Year Plan and Cultural Revolution, the closing of the Zhenotdel, and the “solving” of the “woman question.”
While it is not a part of this project, the reception of Pravda and Izvestiia is also
important to consider.By the end of the 1930s, the circulation numbers of both newspapers had risen sharply. Izvestiia grew from 427,000 in 1928 to 1,600,000 in 1938, while Pravda’s
numbers increased from 620,000 to 1,914,000.49 The most widely read newspapers already in the 1920s, by 1929, they had become “mass journalism” organs under the coordination of the Party’s Agitpop (Agitation and Propaganda) Department, as a result of which the same information was disseminated not only in Moscow and Leningrad but in provincial towns and cities as well.50 The content of the mass newspapers complemented Party slogans and tasks, limiting what could be printed. Because of the regulated nature of acceptable news material,
Pravda’s and Izvestiia’s coverage of International Women’s Day during the 1930s are similar and even, at times, identical.
The Stalin Revolution
Beginning in the late 1920s and ending in the mid-1930s, the Stalin Revolution sought to transform both the Soviet economy and culture. With the introduction of Stalin’s First Five-Year Plan (FFYP) in late 1928, the Soviet economy decidedly broke from Lenin’s NEP to promote heavy industrialization and forced collectivization. The Cultural Revolution accompanying this overhaul of the economy focused on the modernization of Soviet society by “building socialism” and changing byt’, which included the mass entrance of workers into higher education and the reorganization of the family and gender roles in society. The Stalin Revolution produced massive societal upheaval, reshaping the work force, cities, the countryside, and, in particular, the lives of many women across all social classes. When Party planners approved the First Five-Year Plan, they were unaware–or even ignorant–of the transformation that would take place in the work force, as they believed it would be nearly impossible to eliminate unemployment altogether.51
49Sheila Fitzpatrick and Lynne Viola, eds. A Researcher’s Guide to Sources on Soviet Social History in the 1930s
(Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1990): 176.
50Matthew E. Lenoe, “Agitation, Propaganda, and the ‘Stalinization’ of the Soviet Press, 1922-
1930.” The Carl Beck Papers in Russian & Eastern European Studies (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998): 70-71.
However, it soon became clear that chronic labor shortages across industries would transform the working class and the makeup of the Communist Party itself.
When shortages in both skilled and unskilled labor positions emerged in 1930, labor officials and exchanges actively recruited women into the workforce, such as wives of workers, stay-at-home mothers, and widows. On October 9, 1930, the Commissariat of Labor (NKT) decreed that unemployment had been replaced in the Soviet Union by a labor shortage and that
unemployment benefits would stop immediately. On October 20, the Central Committee
announced unemployment had been entirely eliminated.52 Unemployed women workers showed up in droves at factory gates in an unregulated and sporadic way (samotek), filling unskilled labor positions in most instances, thereby furthering the gendered nature of Soviet industry and changing the face of the workforce.53
Peasant women most clearly felt the effects of forced collectivization, as it irrevocably altered the prevailing economic and social structures of village life.54 In the countryside, almost 90 percent of Soviet women worked in agricultural production and served as caretakers to entire families. Similarly to industrial women workers, peasant women also experienced gender segregation in their work on collective farms, often inhabiting unskilled and manual labor positions, with the exception of a few women who learned to operate heavy machinery.55 However, even with the gendered nature of Soviet agricultural production, Soviet women
52Goldman, Women at the Gates, 126-127.
53Thomas G. Schrand,"The Five-Year Plan for Women's Labour: Constructing Socialism and the 'Double Burden',
1930-1932," Europe-Asia Studies 51, no. 8 (1999): 1456.
54For more on the ways in which peasant women’s lives changed under the Stalin Revolution, see: Wendy Z.
Goldman, Women, the State, and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917-1936 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993); Mary Buckley, Mobilizing Soviet Peasants: Heroines and Heroes of Stalin’s Fields (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc, 2006); and Liubov Denisova, Rural Women in the Soviet Union and Post-Soviet Russia (London: Taylor & Francis Group, 2010).
55Liubov Denisova, Rural Women in the Soviet Union and Post-Soviet Russia, (London: Taylor & Francis Group,
became the face of the state’s collectivization efforts, often featuring women tractor drivers and women like Maria Demchenko, a well-known member of the Stakhanovite movement, as the forebearers of technology and modernization to the countryside.56
Cultural Revolution accompanied the economic upheaval that took place during the First Five-Year Plan. The Party, seeing itself as a political and cultural vanguard, promised a bright future that would be achieved through “building socialism,” which not only included economic transformation through industrialization and modernization, but also a transformation performed in everyday life, such as changing names, speaking a certain way, or learning Soviet “culture.” Alongside the idea of “learning” to be Soviet was the mass entrance of over one hundred
thousand adult workers and Communists (vydvizhentsy) into higher education between 1928 and 1931. These vydvizhentsy were part of a larger campaign by Stalin to build a new Soviet
intelligentsia, a group of educated experts with working-class backgrounds who are loyal to the Party and the state.57 Stalin’s attempt to create a Soviet intelligentsia also signaled a time of upward mobility for many workers with proletariat or peasant backgrounds. The vydvizhentsy
would soon inhabit many high-level positions in government, academia, and the Party following the Great Purge (1937-1938), replacing disgraced, arrested, or deceased Party members.
The Cultural Revolution formulated different values and ideals for Soviet men and women. In regard to the family, there “as an all-out assault on staryi byt’ (former lifestyle)” that included an emphasis on personal hygiene, putting an end to drunkenness and hooliganism, and stopping abuse in the home and at work.58 The New Soviet Man should exemplify discipline and
commitment to the Party and his work, his dedication to raising his cultural level (kul’turnost’)
56 Victoria E. Bonnell, Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1997): 102-103.
through education, and his vigilance against class-enemies in everyday life.59 The values of cultural revolution for Soviet women, however, looked starkly different. The public identity of Soviet women changed drastically from their characterization in the 1920s as a backward section of the work force, threating the revolution itself. Propaganda organs created the New Soviet Woman of the 1930s as a “heroine,” a woman dedicated to her work and who is thankful for the state and the resources it provides. Oftentimes both Pravda and Izvestiia associated Soviet woman with “shock work” and, later, the Stakhanovite movement–both movements emphasizing a commitment to working as hard as possible to exceed work quotas on behalf of the state. The Soviet state, mainly through the press, created what historian Jeffrey Brooks calls “the economy of the gift,” repeatedly showing the ways in which ordinary and extraordinary Soviet people owed gratitude to the state and Stalin for public services, work, or life in general under
socialism.60 Women featured in the Soviet press were youthful and active participants in socialist construction.
The End of the Zhenotdel and the “Woman Question”
With the introduction of the First Five-Year Plan, the official party ideology of the 1930s contended that “equality of the sexes was guaranteed through the economic policies of industrialization and collectivization.”61 The entrance of massive numbers of women into the labor force in 1930 and then again in 1932 exemplified this so-called “equality,” ending theoretical debates over the role of the family, marriage, and sexuality in women’s liberation.62
59Sheila Fitzpatrick, Everyday Stalinism: Ordinary Life in Extraordinary Times: Soviet Russia in the 1930s (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1999): 40-42.
60Jeffrey Brooks, Thank You, Comrade Stalin!: Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2000), 83.
61Buckley, Women and Ideology, 109.
62Wendy Goldman argues that two waves of women’s migration into the workforce occurred in the early 1930s. In
While women’s unemployment decreased, the “double burden” women faced did not. Even as access to social services and child services increased with the First Five-Year Plan, the growth of the labor force outpaced the availability of social services.63 However, that did not stop the Party from liquidating the Zhenotdel in 1929 and subsequently declaring the “woman question” solved in the Soviet Union. The end of the Zhenotdel signaled the conclusion of any central women-specific organization fighting for the liberation of women in the Soviet Union, as well as the liquidation of thousands of local Zhenotdel activists and organizations who coordinated International Women’s Day celebrations and sought to better women’s lives. International Women’s Day and its representations in the press from 1930 onward reflected the centralized control of the Party and the “solving” of the “woman question” in the Soviet Union.
International Women’s Day and Soviet Women’s Identity
On International Women’s Day, the Soviet press celebrated Soviet women and their
accomplishments in work. On average one or two articles related to International Women’s Day would adorn the front page of Pravda and Izvestiia and usually one page, but sometimes two, were dedicated to women and their achievements. Izvestiia–with one or two exceptions that covered major events (i.e. in 1931 the speech of the state prosecutor N. V. Krylenko against the “Menshevik counterrevolution”)–printed four pages every International Women’s Day with the third page solely devoted to women. Pravda often printed six pages total with pages two and three dedicated to International Women’s Day and celebration of Soviet women. Izvestiia and
Pravda regularly printed anywhere between four to six pages daily.
During the First and Second Five-Year Plans (1928–1932; 1933–1937), the publications frequently praised women workers on the physical outcome of their work. Emerging in the
mid-seen as more reliable than peasants, reducing the turnover of labor, increasing productivity, and mitigating the need for extra housing. For more, see chapter 8 of Goldman’s Women at the Gates.
1920s, the trope udarnyi (shock) is used in International Women’s Day articles alongside descriptions of “shock workers” and “shock brigades,” people who produce above the work quotas set for their respective industry. Enthusiastic workers aspiring to reach the status of “shock worker” wanted to reach “maximum productivity.”64 In one section of a 1930 article, “On the Forefront of the Revolutionary Struggle for Socialist Construction,” the author states: “Every day the number of female shock brigades increases, the number of all women workers in the fight against laziness at work increases, the number of staff workers in leadership positions in production, in economic bodies, etc., increases.”65 Another example showing the relationship between shock work and socialist construction is a letter by a worker named Nurina in 1932: “In the ranks of this shock brigade there are millions of persistent women activists, who, together with the entire working class, under the leadership of the Party, masters technology and
completes the construction of the foundation of a socialist economy in the third and decisive year of the [first] five-year period.”66 Shock workers and brigades represent a call to action for
industrial workers and peasants on collective farms by inciting a competition between individuals and brigades.
Out of the thirty-nine pages in Pravda and Izvestiia that mention International Women’s Day or women-related topics from the period 1930 through 1935, over 25 percent of the coverage on women includes descriptions of shock workers or shock brigades. Shock work and, later, the Stakhanovite Movement, exemplify upward mobility for many women workers. As the press praised women workers for their labor efforts on behalf of the state and Party, it was clear that women had become an important part of the labor force. For example, a letter written in 1932
64Mary Buckley, Mobilizing Soviet Peasants: Heroines and Heroes of Stalin’s Fields (Lanham: Rowman &
Littlefield Publishers, Inc, 2006), 39.
from the Kharkov Tractor Collective reads: “2,200 women are now working at our plant, which is 15 percent of all workers. By the end of the final year of the first five-year period, the
proportion of women in the factory will be 22 percent.”67 The author calls her collective the “shock workers of Pravda,” who will work to “complete the six conditions of the leader of our party, Comrade Stalin.”68
The idea of “building socialism” also permeates articles on International Women’s Day. Over half of the thirty-nine pages mention building socialism, and, most of the time, the term is used repetitively throughout the articles. For example, an article in Izvestiia in 1932, “Soviet Women at the Forefront of Socialist Construction,” mentions that “the role of women in socialist construction is increasing from year to year. Female labor occupies an increasing place in all sectors of the economy.”69 Another article in 1930, “On the Forefront of Revolutionary Struggle and Socialist Construction,” writes that “thousands of advanced workers and peasant women are drawn into the cause of socialist construction” and that “millions of workers and peasants of the Soviet Union represent one of the gigantic [labor] reserves of this initiative [the First Five Year Plan] of the working masses. There must be an effort to bring new masses of working women into the cause of socialist construction."70 The articles also regularly associate women’s work with the goals of the Stalin Revolution–rapid industrialization in heavy industry and
collectivization of agriculture to further socialist construction in both the economy and byt’. An article in 1932, “Millions of Women in Socialist Construction,” for instance, states that:
67“At the Forefront of New Technology,” Pravda, March 8, 1933, 3.
68Ibid. Stalin’s famous “Six Conditions” speech in June 1931 established six, new conditions of development for
Soviet industry to succeed in socialist construction. These six conditions include: the mechanization of labor; the organization of wages and improvement of living conditions; personal responsibility in work; a new Soviet intelligentsia; enlistment of the “old school” engineers and technicians; and the reorganization of finances.
69“Soviet Women at the Forefront of Socialist Construction,” Izvestiia, March 8, 1932, 3.
The main tasks of women's work in the USSR are determined by the current situation. Under the leadership of the Leninist party and its leader Comrade Stalin, we laid the foundation of the socialist economy, we set the goals for the final abolition of classes, we are building socialism, and we are increasing the material well-being of the working people by two or three times.71
Every issue of Pravda and Izvestiia on International Women’s Day from 1930 through the end of 1935 mentions fascism, capitalism, and imperialism as constant threats against
socialist construction and the new Soviet way of life, implying that women’s work contributions undermined these “deadly” forces. Writing on behalf of women workers in the Soviet Union and across the world, a worker named Efrimova in 1930 said:
This year on March 8, louder than ever, slogans will be voiced against capitalism and imperialism, against fascism and social fascism, against new imperialist wars and for the defense of the USSR against unemployment and the impoverishment of working people. The proletarians and working women of all countries will speak on behalf of the
proletariat for a seven-hour working day, for equal pay, for equal work, for the strengthening of the communist parties by joining their ranks.72
The papers consistently compare Soviet women’s work, lives, and legal rights to the situation of women workers under capitalism, imperialism, and fascism. When discussing the replacement of working men by women in Germany and England, one 1932 article, “Working Women Abroad,” highlights that “this process of increasing the number of women in production is primarily due to the fact that women are paid less than men. The slogan of equal pay for the same work found its implementation only in the USSR.”73 By paying women less than men, capitalist countries can turn a greater profit in production. The article further mentions the freedom the USSR provides women: “Millions of oppressed proletarians are beginning to understand that, with the establishment of the Soviet system, a woman can be completely freed
71“Millions of Women in Socialist Construction,” Izvestiia, March 8, 1932, 1.
from centuries of prejudice, from double oppression—the capitalist system and the remnants of the past.”74
Moreover, Pravda and Izvestiia often featured letters from international women workers about the working conditions in factories or about the oppression experienced under their regimes. In 1930, for instance, Pravda published letters from foreign workers. One letter, “We are Dying in Textile Factories,” describes the working conditions and pay of a Japanese textile worker. She details that “often, as a punishment, they lowered our salaries or simply beat us, sometimes they transfer us to unskilled jobs, for which they pay only 1 shilling [47 kopeks] per day;” however, women workers must unite against this oppression in the end.75 Another letter, “We Will go Your Way, Workers of the USSR,” from a Berlin textile worker laments the poor pay and working conditions she and other German women workers face in factories. She writes that “we work in two shifts of 6 hours without a break” and that “there is absolutely no money left” for women after necessary expenses caring for children.76 Finally, the worker defiantly states that “the example of the liberation of working women in the USSR should bring our [German] workers out of a passive state and should push them onto the path that the workers of the Soviet Union have taken.”77 Articles on International Women’s Day show that women’s “freedom” in the Soviet Union is inherently tied to her dedication to socialist construction and to the Soviet Union’s survival. If the Soviet Union does not achieve socialist construction, then the Soviet woman’s fate will be that of women under capitalism, imperialism, and fascism.
74“Working Women Abroad,” Izvestiia, March 8, 1932, 2.
75“We are Dying in Textile Factories,” Pravda, March 8, 1930, 3.
Fascism rose to prominence in Europe in the late 1920s and early 1930s. When the National Socialist German Worker’s Party took power in 1933, the Soviet press reflected the state’s fears of fascism and war. In a 1933 article “Councils, Workers, and Collective Farmers are Building Socialism in the Country,” Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaia, vehemently states that “Hitler hates Marxism with all his soul” and “wants to kill all Marxists.” She further writes that “every year on March 8, we celebrate the work done to involve women in the public, in production, and in organizing them” and that true women’s equality “is unthinkable in any capitalist country.”78 At the same time of fascism’s emergence in Europe, the international Communist movement, represented by the Comintern (1919-1943), attempted to determine how to placate the alarming rise of Nazi Germany in 1933 in particular. As a result, in 1935 the Comintern adopted as its policy the Popular Front, a coalition of centrist, liberal, socialist, and communist parties to defeat fascism in Europe.79 A 1935 Resolution by the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), signals the importance of uniting all working-class parties and, especially women, who believe in equality and liberation: “The March 8 campaign should be a demonstration of the advantages of the socialist system over the capitalist system . . . and a rally to unite the working women of the entire world under the banner of the Communist International.”80 What these examples show are the ways in which the Soviet press not only used International Women’s Day as a celebration of women’s equality under socialism and of oppression under capitalism but also as a way to articulate the state’s anxieties over fascism’s rise in Europe.
78“Councils, Workers, and Collective Farmers are Building Socialism in the Country,” Izvestiia, March 8, 1933, 3. 79The emergence of the Popular Front signaled a reversal in Soviet foreign policy. Prior to 1935, the Soviet state and
Comintern rejected a broader, working-class coalition among the leftist groups in Europe, labeling some Social Democratic parties, in fact, as social fascist themselves. As a result, there was little leftist opposition in Germany on the eve of Hitler’s ascension to power. After Hitler’s aggressive nature became clear, the Soviet state established the Comintern’s Popular Front to combat the spread of fascism to the rest of Europe.
Between 1930 and 1935, International Women’s Day articles rarely discuss women as mothers, sisters, and wives. Instead, women are mostly described by their roles as workers or as active members of socialist construction. When women are mentioned on March 8 in their “traditional” roles as mothers or wives during the first half of the 1930s, it is often in relation to the freedom from oppression and equality they received under socialism. For example, one 1933 article, “At the Forefront of the Struggle for Socialism,” mentions that “the task of the
proletariat, who came to power, was to free the woman from the household, from this
unproductive, dulling and debilitating work, and to create all the necessary conditions for her active participation in the industrial life of our country.”81
In sum, press coverage of International Women’s Day from 1930 through 1935
encapsulates Soviet women’s experiences as directly related to their roles mostly as workers and participants in socialist construction. The newspapers contrast their “freedom” as Soviet women with the unequal nature of women workers abroad, especially in fascist, imperialist, and
capitalist countries. Shock workers also appear prominently in International Women’s Day descriptions, underscoring the importance of women’s work in transforming Soviet society and economy. Lastly, the Soviet press on March 8 consistently includes women in the broader struggles against external threats by highlighting their work and dedication to socialist construction.
CHAPTER THREE: THE RISE OF THE SOVIET HEROINE, 1936-1940
Introduction
Between 1936 and 1940, the press’s portrayal on International Women’s Day of women’s issues, achievements, and roles changed significantly. If International Women’s Day had been used as a political tool to unite the Soviet populace against the evils of fascism and imperialism and to tout the superior position of Soviet women workers compared to that of women
elsewhere, starting in 1936, the Soviet state reconfigured the New Soviet Woman as a “heroine” dedicated to her work, the state, and her family. Her gratitude to the both Soviet state and Stalin permeates stories of women’s advancement under the Stalinist Revolution. Furthermore, in International Women’s Day content, Soviet women’s issues continued to be reflected in the state’s anxieties over the threats of fascism, imperialism, and capitalism abroad. Newspapers on International Women’s Day used fascism, especially Hitler’s Germany, as a mechanism for comparing Soviet women’s and mother’s lives to the women and mothers under fascist oppression.
The Restructuring of the Family
In June 1936 the Soviet Central Executive Committee (TsIK) outlawed abortion, signaling a larger campaign to restructure the family, to reduce the societal problems that emerged from the breakdown of the family, and to increase the overall birthrate in the Soviet Union. The 1936 decree on abortion also offered incentives for mothers to have children, allocating stipends to new mothers, bonuses for women with many children, and maternity leave.82 Additionally, the number of social services–maternity clinics, nurseries, and milk kitchens–increased. Lastly, the 1936 decree also sought to make divorce more difficult by increasing the fee for divorce and handing out harsh penalties to men who did not pay alimony or child support. 83
The 1936 decree on abortion was a pronatalist attempt to restructure the traditional family in the Soviet Union. The rise in the rate of legal abortions in some parts of the Soviet Union exceeded the number of births: “in 1926, there were 1.3 abortions for every 1,000 people. In 1935, 13.1, a more than tenfold increase.”84 The Soviet state had a vested interest in growing the overall birth rate among young women, rewarding mothers with multiple children financially and publicly. After 1936, women with seven or more children received 2,000 rubles for five years for every child born after, while mothers with 10 children or more were publicly dubbed “heroine-mothers” and received substantial financial compensation.85 Another social problem the Soviet state had to solve was that of the besprizorniki (homeless children). A legacy of the Great War and Revolution, Besprizornost’ (homelessness among children) shot up significantly during the
82Goldman, Women, the State, and Revolution, 291.
83During the same time as the Soviet Union’s pronatalist push toward raising the birthrate and restructuring the family, Western Europe and America both had similar movements. The casualties of World War One and then the Great Depression in the early 1930s had decreased the birthrate in the West. The Soviet state’s pronatalist measures paralleled those of Western Europe. For more on a comparison between the Western and Soviet pronatalist
movements, see chapter 3 of David Hoffman Stalinist Values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity, 1917-1941 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003).
