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RICHARD STITES (Lima, Ohio, U.S.A.) Zhenotdel: Bolshevism And

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RICHARD STITES (Lima, Ohio, U.S.A.) Zhenotdel: Bolshevism And RICHARD STITES (Lima, Ohio, U.S.A.) Zhenotdel: Bolshevism and Russian Women, 1917-1930 From reading about the early years of Soviet history in the vast majority of textbooks and accounts, the student the ' general might easily carry away impression that nothing of enduring significance went on in Russia between the inauguration of NEP in 1921 and the beginnings of industrialization in 1928 except the struggle for power between Stalin and his enemies. Materials on social innovation, experi- mentation, and popular mobilization are usually relegated to separate chapters subordinate to the "main" story. This is the result partially of our Western pre- occupation with purely political events and personalities; but partially also, it would seem, of a reluctance to grant excessive space to the positive achievements of the Russian Revolution. The campaigns against anti-Semitism and illiteracy, the labor schools and the mass edication drives, and the variety of morally inspired egalitarian and affirmative action movements-in other words, early "communism"-receive short shrift in most Western studies. This is all the more regrettable since much of the educational and liberation work done in these years, though certainly pushed into the background under Stalin, really constitutes the social and psychological foundations of present-day Soviet life. Nowhere is this truer than in the Zhenotdel campaign to emancipate Russian women in the years 1917 to 1930. Zhenotdel, the women's section of the Communist Party, had a pre-history. The first generally known Russian work dealing with the problem of women from a Marxist viewpoint was Krupskaia's pamphlet, The Woman Worker, written in Siberia and published in 1900. No follow-up to it was made, however, until 1906 when Alexandra Kollontai, then a Menshevik Party worker in St. Petersburg, began to organize working women into Social Democratic discussion groups. Her initial impulse, aside from her own Marxist views on the woman question, was the desire to keep working women away from the seductions of the Russian feminist-suffrage groups which had sprung up in 1905 and which would achieve their apogee of self-confidence and organizational power at the feminist Women's Congress of 1908. Playing on themes from Bebel, Krupskaia, and Clara Zetkin, Kollontai ap- peared at feminist meetings for the purpose for harassing and disorganizing the leaders; and she formed her own labor circles where she taught factory women of St. Petersburg that their long-range interests were intimately tied to those of their husbands and brothers of the proletariat and that only socialism could bring genuine liberation. After locking homs with the feminists at the congress in 1908, Kollontai was forced to flee the country in order to evade the police. Even during this first stage of the Marxist women's movement in Russia, certain Social 175 Democrats-men and women-had displayed indifference and hostility to any kind of "proletarian women's movement" within social democracy; after Kollontai's departure from Russia, the embryonic women's organizations fell into disarray. In 1913, the movement received a new spurt of organizational energy when the Bolsheviks, who had long neglected the problem, decided to found a special journal for women workers, Rabotnitsa (The Working Woman), to be edited by Krupskaia, Inessa Armand, Anna Elizarova (Lenin's sister), and a half-dozen others scattered from Paris to St. Petersburg. Since Zetkin, in 1910, had established 8 March as International Women's Day for the socialist movement, the editors decided to synchronize the appearance of the first edition of the journal with the celebration of that holiday in St. Petersburg in 1914. Rabotnitsa came out, but the local editors were all arrested. A few months later Russia's entry into World War I with its attendant repressive measures brought an end to Rabotnitsa and to this second stage of the so-called proletarian women's movement in Russia. There was little activity among organized women in wartime Russia; yet, women workers and soldiers' wives were active in a number of strikes and "food pogroms" which broke out in 1915 and 1916. The famous episode in Petrograd on 8 March (23 February, O.S.) was, among other things, a confluence of two developments: the growing frustrations of urban women with the mismanagement and high prices; and the decision, after a three-year hiatus, to celebrate International Women's Day. Whenever a revolution has been preceded by a long-established underground movement, the structure of that movement-just as much as its leadership and its ideology-superimposes itself on the political life of the new society. This is why Bolshevik Russia became a land of committees, commissions, congresses, and cells. Before 1917, the Bolshevik Party had been a congeries of local committees directed from the center by a small group which communicated with its branches by means of newspapers (for general ideas) and peripatetic agents (for specific instructions); feedback to the center came through correspondence and rare congresses and con- ferences. After 1917, the Bolsheviks used these devices of political organization and communication (now amplified by railroads, telegraphy, and wireless) for social mobilization of the country, in the same way that they had used them to destroy its former regime. The "novel" methods of social communication all had their counterparts in the history of the revolutionary underground. The techniques of Zhenotdel-the post-revolutionary organ responsible for women's liberation in Soviet Russia-were no exception. In 1917, Kollontai (now a Bolshevik), Krupskaia, and Armand returned to Russia and, with the help of other Bolshevik women, set about reconstituting the women's movement, which had dried up during the War. They revivified Rabotnitsa and launched a campaign to organize women workers and soldiers' wives in the capitals and in the great textile towns of central Russia. Kollontai organized a strike of laundresses and a movement of soldiers' wives in Petrograd, both of which included political demands in their list of grievances. On the offensive side, the Bolsheviks delivered verbal assaults upon moderate socialists and the Provisional Government, upon the feminists, and upon the Women's Shock Battalions which .
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