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
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Notes
Aleksandra Kollontai, ‘Communism and the Family’, in Selected Writings of Alexandra Kollontai, translated by Alix Holt (London: Allison and Busby, 1977), p. 253.
Frances Lee Bernstein, The Dictatorship of Sex: Lifestyle Advice for the Soviet Masses (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2007), p. 50.
Sarah Ashwin, ‘Introduction’, in Sarah Ashwin (ed.), Gender, State, and Society in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 5.
See also Elizabeth Wood, The Baba and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997).
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).
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).
For a critique of the ‘great retreat’ and a reading of Stalinist gender policy as consistent with that of all modernizing states in the interwar period, see David L. Hoffmann, Stalinist Values: The Cultural Norms of Soviet Modernity (1917–1941) (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), especially pp. 88–117.
For a discussion of women’s military roles in Soviet interwar media, see Alison Rowley, ‘Ready for Work and Defense: Visual Propaganda and Soviet Women’s Visual Preparedness in the 1930s’, Minerva: Women and War 18(3–4) (2000), pp. 3–15;
John P. Davis, ‘Soviet Women, Militarization, and Modernity in the 1930s’, MA Thesis, University of Kentucky (2005).
Melanie Ilič (ed.), Women in the Stalin Era (Houndsmills, Hampshire: Palgrave, 2001), p. 6.
See Wendy Goldman, Women at the Gates: Gender and Industry in Stalin’s Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
See Karen Petrone, Life Has Become More Joyous, Comrades: Celebrations in the Time of Stalin (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2000), pp. 59–65.
Barbara Alpern Engel, ‘Women Remember World War II’, in Nurit Schleifman (ed.), Russia at a Crossroads (London: Frank Cass, 1998), p. 129.
Margaret R. Higgonet and Patrice L.-R. Higgonet, ‘The Double Helix’, in Margaret R. Higgonet, Jane Jenson, Sonya Michel and Margaret Collins Weitz (eds), Behind the Lines: Gender and the Two World Wars (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989, reprint edn), pp. 31–50.
Choi Chatterjee, Celebrating Women: Gender, Festival Culture, and Bolshevik Ideology, 1910–1939 (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002), p. 6.
Anna Krylova, ‘Stalinist Identity from the Viewpoint of Gender: Rearing a Generation of Professionally Violent Women-Fighters in 1930s Stalinist Russia’, Gender and History 16(3) (November 2004), pp. 628–9.
Jochen Hellbeck, ‘Working, Struggling, Becoming: Stalin-era Autobiographical Texts’, Russian Review 60(3) (July 2001), p. 340.
See also Anna Krylova, ‘The Tenacious Liberal Subject in Soviet Studies’, Kritika 1(1) (Winter 2000), pp. 119–46.
Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution On My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), p. 12.
For a critique of Hellbeck, see Choi Chatterjee and Karen Petrone, ‘Models of Selfhood and Subjectivity: The Soviet Case in Historical Perspective’, Slavic Review 67(4) (Winter 2008), pp. 977–80.
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.
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.
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.
Anne Noggle, A Dance with Death: Soviet Airwomen in World War II (College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 1994), pp. 21–2.
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.
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.
Mary M. Leder, My Life in Stalinist Russia: An American Woman Looks Back (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2002), p. 59.
See Vera S. Dunham, In Stalin’s Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990).
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.
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© 2010 Karen Petrone
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Petrone, K. (2010). Between Exploitation and Empowerment: Soviet Women Negotiate Stalinism. In: Lim, JH., Petrone, K. (eds) Gender Politics and Mass Dictatorship. Mass Dictatorship in the 20th Century. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230283275_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230283275_7
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