Abstract
One of the most moving testimonies by a Russian revolutionary woman is a set of interviews with Lydia Osipovna Dan, a veteran member of the Menshevik party the history of which has occupied my interest for a long time. Lydia Dan appears in these interviews as a bright and sensitive person as well as a committed and resourceful revolutionary, whose prominence in the party, nevertheless, had more to do with her role as sister, wife, and lover.1 She was the sister of two leading Mensheviks (Iulii Martov, the party’s main theoretician, and Sergei Ezhov), the wife of the party’s main strategist and organizer (Fedor Dan), and the lover, later friend, of Iraklii Tsereteli, the man who led the party through the storms of the 1917 revolution. Her story has much to tell us about women and women’s issues in the Russian revolutionary movement.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
The original interviews with Lydia Dan are on deposit at the Project on Menshevik History, Harriman Institute, Columbia University; an abridged and edited translation is included in L H. Haimson, with Ziva Galili y Garcia and Richard Wortman eds., The Making of Three Russian Revolutionaries: Voices from the Menshevik Past (Cambridge, 1987).
Several works from this growing body of scholarship, all published in the last decade or so, were used in preparing this paper and could be used for further reading. See Richard Stites, The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism 1860–1930 (Princeton, 1978); Gail Warshofsky Lapidus, Women in Soviet Society: Equality, Development, and Social Change (Berkeley, 1978); Barbara Evans Clemens, Bolshevik Feminist: The Life of Aleksandra Kollontai (Bloomington, Indiana, 1979); Linda Edmundson, Feminism in Russia, 1900–1917 (London, 1983); Barbara Alpern Engel, Mothers and Daughters: Women of the Intelligentsia in Nineteenth Century Russia (Cambridge, 1983); Rose L. Glickman, Russian Factory Women: Workplace and Society, 1880–1914 (Berkeley, 1984).
Stites, The Women’s Liberation Movement, offers a most comprehensive and insightful treatment of the “woman question” in the pre-revolutionary decades.
Kollontai first formulated these ideas in her 1908 pamphlet (published in 1909) The Social Bases of the Woman Question, but she returned to them in later years.
Lydia joined Fedor Dan and Iulii Martov in the political exile that most leading Mensheviks accepted after their party was defeated in 1917 and outlawed (1918). For over 40 years, she lived in Germany, France, and the United States.
Glickman, Russian Factory Women, p. 83; Stites, The Women’s Liberation Movement, p. 162.
Stites, The Women’s Liberation Movement, p. 210.
Sotsial’nye osnovy zhenskogo voprosa, St. Petersburg, 1909.
See Glickman, Russian Factory Women, pp. 210–218.
Among the editors of Woman Worker and the organizers of women’s groups were Nadezhda Krupskaia (Lenin’s wife), Anna Elizarova (his Sister), Inessa Armnand (a personal friend of Lenin), and L. Zinovieva (wife of another party leader).
The term is borrowed from Vera S. Dunham, On Stalin’s Times: Middle Class Values in Soviet Fiction (Cambridge, 1976).
L. Trotsky, The Revolution Betrayed (1936), (New York, 1972);
Nicholas S. Timasheff, The Great Retreat: The Growth and Decline of Communism in Russia (New York, 1948); Dunham, On Stalin’s Times.
Lapidus, Women in Soviet Society, table 11, p. 176.
Ibid., table 6, p. 149.
Ibid., table 2, p. 131.
Ibid., p. 102.
Ibid., table 11, p. 166.
Lapidus cites two estimates: one, which places omen’s earnings at 87 percent of men’s, a figure she considers too high; the other, at 67 percent (pp. 193–94).
Wendy Zeva Goldman, “Women, the Family and the New Revolutionary Order in the Soviet Union,” in Sonia Kruks, Rayna Rapp, and Marylin B. Young eds., Promissory Notes: Women in the Transition to Socialism (New York, 1989); “Working-Class Women and the ’Withering Away’ of the Family: Popular Responses to Family Policy,” in Fitzpatrick, A. Rabinowitch, R. Stites eds., Culture and Society, (Bloomington, Indiana, 1990).
The play was written by Anatolii Glegov in 1928 and had its premiere at the Moscow Theater of Revolution in April 1929. The quote is from the English-language translation in E. Lyons ed., Six Soviet Plays (New York, 1934).
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1998 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Galili, Z. (1998). Women and the Russian Revolution. In: Diamond, M.J. (eds) Women and Revolution: Global Expressions. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9072-3_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-9072-3_4
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-90-481-5073-1
Online ISBN: 978-94-015-9072-3
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive