Between Exploitation and Empowerment: Soviet Women Negotiate Stalinism

  • Karen Petrone
Chapter
Part of the Mass Dictatorship in the 20th Century book series (MASSD)

Abstract

The Soviet Union was distinct from other mass dictatorships in the interwar period in that early Soviet family policy was the most liberal the world had ever seen. In the 1920s, the Soviet state squarely attacked patriarchal familial relations and destabilized marriage and the family. Soviet feminist thinkers such as Aleksandra Kollontai argued that ‘the family is ceasing to be necessary either to its members or to the nation as a whole’,1 and the Soviet government enacted progressive legislation that allowed abortion, made divorce easy and broadened the definition of marriage to recognize ‘unregistered’ unions. This remarkably progressive attitude towards women’s equality did not last however. Some scholars trace the Soviet impulse to control sexuality back to the early Soviet period and suggest that the liberatory impact of Soviet policies was always limited by the leadership’s puritanical views of sexuality and their understanding of gender roles as strictly circumscribed by biology.2 Other analysts suggest that the key turning point away from feminism was the 1930 closure of the Zhenotdel or Women’s Department of the Communist Party. Still others posit that women’s liberation was never a part of the Soviet program. Sarah Ashwin argues that ‘the policy of the Bolshevik state was never directed at the liberation of women from men, it was directed at breaking the subordination of women to the patriarchal family in order to “free” both women and men to serve the communist cause.’3

Keywords

Interwar Period Soviet State Russian Woman State Ideology Soviet Policy 
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Notes

  1. 1.
    Aleksandra Kollontai, ‘Communism and the Family’, in Selected Writings of Alexandra Kollontai, translated by Alix Holt (London: Allison and Busby, 1977), p. 253.Google Scholar
  2. 2.
    Frances Lee Bernstein, The Dictatorship of Sex: Lifestyle Advice for the Soviet Masses (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007), p. 50.Google Scholar
  3. 3.
    Sarah Ashwin, ‘Introduction’, in Sarah Ashwin (ed.), Gender, State, and Society in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 5.Google Scholar
  4. See also Elizabeth Wood, The Baba and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997).Google Scholar
  5. 4.
    For a discussion of Soviet family legislation, see Wendy Goldman, Women and the Soviet State: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917–1936 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).Google Scholar
  6. 5.
    The term ‘great retreat’ was coined in 1946 by sociologist Nicholas Timasheff who argued that Stalin’s Soviet Union made a systematic retreat from communist ideology in the 1930s. Nicholas S. Timasheff, The Great Retreat: The Growth and Decline of Communism in Russia (New York: E. P. Dutton and Co., 1946).Google Scholar
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    Melanie Ilič (ed.), Women in the Stalin Era (Houndsmills, Hampshire: Palgrave, 2001), p. 6.Google Scholar
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    Sheila Fitzpatrick and Alf Lüdtke, ‘Energizing the Everyday: On the Breaking and Making of Social Bonds in Nazism and Stalinism’, in Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick (eds), Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 267.Google Scholar
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    Rebecca Balmas Neary, ‘Mothering Socialist Society: The Wife-Activists’ Movement and the Soviet Culture of Daily Life, 1934–41’, Russian Review 58(3) (July 1999), p. 396. See also Mary Buckley, ‘The Untold Story of the Obshchestvennitsa in the 1930s’, in Ilič, Women in the Stalin Era, pp. 151–72.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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    Galina Vladimirovna Shtange, ‘Diary of Galina Vladimirovna Shtange’, in Veronique Garros, Natalia Korenevskaya and Thomas Lahusen (eds), Intimacy and Terror: Soviet Diaries of the 1930s (New York: The New Press, 1995), p. 172.Google Scholar
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    Anne Noggle, A Dance with Death: Soviet Airwomen in World War II (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 1994), pp. 21–2.Google Scholar
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    Cynthia Simmons and Nina Perlina, ‘Introduction’, in Cynthia Simmons and Nina Perlina (eds), Writing the Siege of Leningrad: Women’s Diaries, Memoirs, and Documentary Prose (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002), p. 16.Google Scholar
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    Agrippina Korevanova, ‘My Life’, in Sheila Fitzpatrick and Yuri Slezkine (eds), In the Shadow of Revolution: Life Stories of Russian Women from 1917 to the Second World War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 201.Google Scholar
  27. 34.
    Mary M. Leder, My Life in Stalinist Russia: An American Woman Looks Back (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002), p. 59.Google Scholar
  28. 43.
    See Vera S. Dunham, In Stalin’s Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990).Google Scholar
  29. 45.
    Vera Ivanovna Malakhova, ‘Four Years as a Front-line Physician’, in Barbara Alpern Engel and Anastasia Posadskaya-Vanderbeck (eds), A Revolution of Their Own: Voices of Women in Soviet History (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), p. 215.Google Scholar

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© Karen Petrone 2010

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  • Karen Petrone

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