2. The ‘Woman Question’: Early Years in Russia

2.1 Introduction

From 1878, Russian women, invariably from the upper classes, were allowed into higher education where for the first time they came into contact with radical and revolutionary ideas. The result was an influx of young women into study groups that forbade male participation, such as women-only book clubs, as are still common in certain countries. Separatism was adopted to allow the women to overcome their lack of confidence to prepare themselves to act together with men with no sense of subjugation. The first such political groups were formed by the Narodniks who saw the peasantry as the revolutionary class that would carry through the overthrow of the Tsar, with the peasant communes as ‘embryonic socialism’. Politically, the Narodniks were banging their heads against a wall and, sad to say, as one attempt after another to mobilise the peasant revolution failed, a common cause of death amongst these young female idealists was suicide. Fortunately, many came to understand that only the elimination of capitalist exploitation could guarantee the effective emancipation of women.

Rose Glickman’s ground-breaking study depicted the lives of Russian labourers – dehumanising working and living conditions with employers openly contemptuous of both male and female workers.^[1] Women occupied a special and subordinate position in an overpowering patriarchal structure which made women diffident in mixed meetings, unwilling to speak or take responsibilities. All-women meetings were necessary for the development of working women as trade union or party cadres. Glickman finds part of the explanation in the “legacy of … subordination” that peasant women brought with them as they moved from the village to factory. As is common with first generation migrants, severing ties to the patriarchal village and earning an independent wage at the factory served neither to ameliorate women’s subordination nor noticeably improve the quality of their lives.

Marriage rarely removed women from the labour force; rather it added housework after long hours of waged labour. In the absence of paid maternity leave, as late as 1912, three-quarters or more of pregnant women worked right up until the onset of labour and resumed work within days of giving birth. According to one study, as many as two-thirds of the infants of factory workers died in the first year of life.^[2]

2.2 Krupskaya and The Woman Worker

In tsarist Russia, society was permeated with the grossest anti-woman bigotry. According to a report published in 1897, only 13 per cent of Russian women were literate, and these tended to be concentrated in the towns. Peasants barely fifty years out of serfdom comprised over 80 per cent of the population. They lived in a village commune system without even the rudiments of a modern infrastructure. Almost entirely illiterate, they subsisted hand to mouth with their lives dominated by church and landlord; the medieval institution of the household and a rigid patriarchal hierarchy enforced the degradation of women as the property of men, often treated as no more than work horses to pull wooden ploughs whose design was medieval. In such conditions, Lenin declared the participation of women and juveniles in social production was progressive. Even though women workers started working in the factory at an average age of twelve to fourteen years, and for up to eighteen hours a day, these conditions were “incomparably superior” to life under pre-capitalist relations.^[3]

Social Democrats organised women-only study circles. Whilst these were usually directed toward women factory workers, they also reached out to non-factory workers such as domestics. An important activity of these circles was teaching new members to read and write using illegal literature, often copied by hand. The circles were based on the study of politics, but also extended to communal activities such as eating meals together and shared baby-sitting.^[4] A new type of female revolutionary was emerging, women workers who were no longer content to be just passive observers at activities organised and managed by the radical intelligentsia. Women were especially active organising the ‘Sunday Schools’, allowed by the authorities to encourage bible studies. They were used by socialist activists – often women teachers and librarians, to promulgate Marxist ideas. Held in working-class neighbourhoods, they became an important means of spreading socialist propaganda.

In 1895, several social democratic circles merged to form the Union of Struggle for the Emancipation of Labour, the forerunner of the Social Democratic Party. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979) lists twenty-two members of this group, but the only woman named is Nadezhda Krupskaya despite there having been four women among the founding members. We found information on only two; Nadezhda Krupskaya and Apollinaria Iakubova.^[5] These schools were particularly successful amongst women workers in the textile industry.

In 1889, Krupskaya – the technical secretary of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) and its paper, Iskra – was allowed to join Lenin in exile, in the Siberian village of Shushenskoye, provided they married on her arrival. There, Krupskaya wrote the first socialist text on the oppression of Russian women. Entitled Zhenshchina Rabotnitsa (The Woman Worker), the pamphlet described the living conditions of the masses of Russian women and concluded: “a woman has a double interest in the success of the workers’ cause – as a worker and as a woman”.^[6] This was the first time that Russian Social Democracy had been called on to recognise women workers as a group and take note that they had specific demands.

At the time of Krupskaya’s exile, the Russian working class movement was still largely limited to isolated study circles focused on exploring the ideas of Marxism. For example, at the time of their arrest, she and Lenin were leading figures in one such group of about a dozen, which had successfully established links with militants in many of the Petersburg workers’ districts.^[7]

Krupskaya’s pamphlet demanded that comrades “help women workers to organise themselves, to awaken class-consciousness in them, as conscious and organised women would be less receptive to the employer’s demands and would not allow themselves to be twisted around the boss’ little finger”.^[8] Krupskaya then worked with Lenin to have women’s equality included in the 1903 RSDLP programme. She later recounted how for Lenin the RSDLP programme adopted at the First Party Congress (1898) had been inadequate regarding the woman question, and it was necessary to add the “demand for complete equality of rights for men and women”.^[9]

The 1903 Second Congress repeated the call for universal, equal, and direct suffrage for all men and women (of the age of twenty or above), and extended the RSDLP programme specifically for women, calling for a reduction of their financial burden by state provision of food, clothing, and school supplies to needy children up to the age of sixteen, for free compulsory education for both sexes, for female labour to be forbidden in industries injurious to their health, and for female inspectors to be appointed to enforce existing legislative protection. Both Lenin and Krupskaya had demanded equal pay for equal work since at least the publication of The Woman Worker, so it is strange that this demand was missing from the programme. A possible reason is that Lenin did not attend the final meeting to approve the programme.

Social and economic pressures meant women workers, including revolutionaries, often had little choice but to marry by the end of their teens or early twenties, and – generally – a first child arrived soon after. Almost universally, this would be seen as the responsibility of the mother. Bobrovskaya, at one time, a leading Bolshevik, described in her memoirs:

Comrade Stopani’s wife […] A true revolutionary in spirit, she had to take care of four young children, although she yearned for active Party work. […] During the many years of illegal work I often came across women – wives of revolutionaries – who, because of their children, were obliged to play the unenviable role of mother and housewife even though they had all the attributes required to make them real Party workers.^[10]

It is no wonder that before 1917 women who took leading positions in the party, whether Bolshevik or Menshevik, were seldom workers, tending to be professional women such as teachers, students, or librarians (even from the lower ranks of the aristocracy), and that about one fifth of Bolshevik women chose not to have children. Some women within the party raised the question of whether men would automatically change their attitudes to women after the revolution and argued that it was necessary to begin immediately to work towards more equal relationships, a theme that would be taken up later by both Lenin^[11] and Trotsky.^[12] The situation was all the more important because as many as one-third of women Bolsheviks were related to revolutionaries and were introduced to radical ideas by relatives.^[13]

2.3 The 1905 Revolution

By the end of 1904 numerous study circles had sprung up across the Russian Empire, many initiated by women workers who were proactive supporters of socialist ideals. Some of the study circles were along party political lines, but many were run co-operatively by members of different parties. With the 1905 Revolution the picture radically changed. The hugely unpopular 1904-05 war against Japan, the ignominious defeat of the Russian armed forces and the financial burdens imposed had radicalised both workers and peasants. The aim of overthrowing the Tsar and his replacement by a democratic regime, raised the question of women’s right to vote in elections to the Duma.

Events in St Petersburg stirred the provinces into action. On 1 May, workers struck in nearly 200 towns throughout Russia. The major strike, of some 70,000 workers, lasting over two months from 12 May, was in the Bolshevik stronghold of the giant industrial complex at Ivanovo-Voznesensk, a textile town known as the ‘Russian Manchester’. Women participated in many of these economic and political struggles, and some were elected to the Soviets of Workers Deputies in Ivanovo-Voznesensk and St Petersburg.

The first Soviet of the 1905 Revolution was established in Ivanovo-Voznesensk, pre-dating that in the capital, St Petersburg, and was active from 12 May to 27 June. It was set up as the result of the general strike in that city and comprised 151 elected delegates from factory strike committees, at least twenty-five of whom were women. In one of the factories, seven of eight delegates were women.^[14] The relative roles of the Ivanovo-Voznesensk and St Petersburg Soviets were reviewed later by the Commission on the History of the October Revolution of the State Publishing House, which decided that the St Petersburg Soviet under Trotsky’s leadership not only exercised power but posed the question of transferring state power into the hands of the proletariat.^[15] Grigory Zinoviev confirmed this: “The St. Petersburg Soviet became an embryonic government. […] either this Soviet took power in its hands and dissolved the Tsarist government, or the latter would dissolve the Soviet.”^[16]

Skilled men dominated the elections to the Petrograd Soviet and the factory committees that soon followed. This was true even for industries in which women formed a clear majority of the workforce. There were two main reasons for this: women’s continuing household responsibilities, especially with food and other shortages persisting, and a lack of self-confidence on the part of women themselves. Marxist women worked hard, organising public meetings, carrying out consistent propaganda in opposition to the bourgeois feminists. Special emphasis was given to women factory workers, and issues concerning gender oppression. Sexual harassment by foremen or security guards were linked to the political, social, and economic conditions that determined them. The aim was to show that socialism was the answer to their problems. In Kiev, the Bolsheviks issued a leaflet intended for working-class women:

Comrades! Working women! The men comrades toil along with us. Their fate and ours are one. But they have long since found the only road to a better life – the road of organised labour’s struggle with capital, the road of struggle against all oppression, evil, and violence. Women workers, there is no other road for us. The interests of the working men and women are equal, are one. Only in a united struggle together with the men workers, in joint workers’ organisations – in the Social Democratic Party, the trade unions, workers’ clubs, and cooperatives – shall we obtain our rights and win a better life. […]

Comrades! Working women, let’s go to work! Wake all those who are still sound asleep; unite in struggle for the demands of the whole working class.^[17]

During the revolution of 1905, Lenin fought to open the doors of the Party to workers and there was a tremendous response amongst women. However, at that time even in the RSDLP the issue was posed as a democratic and not socialist struggle. The aim was “a freely convened constituent assembly of the whole people” to which “every class of the population would turn”.^[18] Such a perspective was developed in a reformist direction by the Menshevik wing of the RSDLP, giving bourgeois feminist organisations such as the League for Women’s Equality and the Progressive Women’s Party, the opportunity to pose the suffrage question as ‘Votes for Women’, and thus made it more difficult to link the struggles to the general class struggle.^[19] The difficulties were amplified because the very real disparities in civil, political and economic rights of working-class men and women had been ignored for far too long by the traditional working-class movement, and this encouraged women to sympathise with the bourgeois feminist groups who were concentrating on fairness and gender oppression.

This class-less feminism attracted support from significant numbers of women workers and the inaugural meeting of the bourgeois feminist Union for Women’s Equality in 1905 was supported by many women who declared themselves socialist. Kollontai, who was deeply involved in making contact with women workers (particularly textile and domestic workers), soon concluded that for working-class women to eschew bourgeois feminism, Russian Social-Democrats needed their own organisation with meetings, literature, etc.

Between 1906-08, Kollontai was still a member of the Menshevik faction and worked hard to win party members, especially women members, to her perspective. She attended the Fourth Socialist Conference of SPD Women, held in Mannheim in late September 1906, and renewed her links with Zetkin. This was the Conference at which Zetkin floated the idea of an International Conference of Socialist Women with its own secretariat. Kollontai enthusiastically endorsed Zetkin’s idea as making it easier to rally the generally less politically-aware female proletarians around the party. But when she raised this issue in Russia, the local committee-men accused her of placing too much emphasis on matters of concern to women, which they thought was harmful. Krupskaya wrote:

The ‘committeeman’ was usually a rather self-assured person. He saw what a tremendous influence the work of the committee had on the masses, and as a rule he recognised no inner-Party democracy. […] At the same time they did not want innovations. […]

[They] had done a tremendous job during the period of 1904-1905, but many of them found it extremely difficult to adjust themselves to the conditions of increasing legal facilities and methods of open struggle. […]^[20]

Party work and the self-activity of the workers somehow did not seem to converge.

After the 1905 Revolution, women workers in particular were drawn into active politics, and more by other women than by men. During the strike waves of 1905-07, there was a fair amount of participation by women workers who, in their overwhelming majority, accepted Bolshevik demands as their own. This compelled Marxists to turn more seriously to working-class women, and women revolutionaries attempted to integrate themselves more into the wider labour movement by emphasising trade union demands in opposition to the bourgeois feminists.

In the aftermath of the 1905 Revolution, women were taking their own initiatives, working women founded women’s clubs in opposition to the Union for Women’s Equality and were assisted in this by hundreds of female members of the RSDLP, both Bolshevik and Menshevik. Importantly, the authorities allowed these women’s clubs to operate legally with twenty to twenty-five women attending. A room would be booked for a meeting of women textile workers under the guise of a literacy class, talk on hygiene or maternity care. These informative and useful talks would last for about twenty minutes, and were followed by a few minutes making a political point.

The philanthropic Nobel family, possibly the richest in Russia at that time, allowed their mansion to be used for women’s meetings in the spring of 1907. The “large hall was filled to overflowing with women from the textile and needlewomen’s unions”, but the last meeting coincided with a strike at a local factory and the audience left the meeting to demonstrate its support of the strikers. The police, of course, banned any future meetings.^[21]

It is a fact that even a revolution does not eliminate the deep prejudices implanted over generations in the minds of both men and women workers. As Marx said: “Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living”.^[22] However, all organisations are under pressure from the society in which they exist. For example, Kollontai’s attempts at gaining approval for a meeting of party women to discuss the formation of a Woman’s Bureau made slow progress. By the autumn of 1907 she had obtained the approval of the Party’s Petersburg Committee – which, according to Schapiro had a Bolshevik majority – for a meeting to discuss a Woman’s Bureau.^[23] However, approval of such a formation was not forthcoming. Nevertheless, Kollontai succeeded in obtaining approval for a Mutual Aid Society for Women Workers, which achieved a membership of over 300 members.^[24] From these Alexandra Artiukhina and Klavdia Nikolaeva were recruited, both of whom we’ll meet again as they played leading roles as Bolsheviks in the 1917 revolution and the period after.

2.4 The First All-Russian Women’s Congress

In December 1908, liberal feminists called the First All-Russia Women’s Congress and brought together a thousand delegates, the largest section being from the intelligentsia.^[25] Despite those feminists calling the Congress being opposed to the idea of class struggle, many women workers wanted to take part. Initially, the Bolshevik majority on the Petersburg Committee was in favour of a boycott, but it soon became clear that the idea of the Congress was very popular amongst working women. After it gained the backing of textile workers and the support of the Petersburg Central Bureau of Trade Unions, an intervention was agreed. A group of about forty RSDLP women activists organised to be delegated from their trade union and party branches. The intention was for them to intervene from the floor to promote socialist propaganda and attempt to turn the Congress into a political education session that would demonstrate the differences between feminists and socialists.^[26]

The Petersburg Committee passed over Kollontai and appointed Praskoviya Kudelli (an active Bolshevik since 1903), deemed more representative of the majority view, to lead the delegation members who would all wear red carnations pinned to their dresses. The tone was set when the majority of delegates rejected a resolution on the protection of women workers, for one on crèches, maternity leave, etc., as being opposed to the demand for equality. The delegation made clear its opposition to the compromise raised by liberal feminists that ‘Votes for Women’ was not a question of principle but could be based on property qualifications. The intervention of the socialist women at this Congress served to draw a clear line of demarcation between the bourgeois feminists and the socialist revolutionary movement, epitomised by the walk-out of the RSDLP women when their call for immediate universal suffrage was rejected.^[27]

Kollontai had wanted to make a parallel theoretical intervention during the Congress by the publication of her book, The Social Basis of the Woman Question, timed to appear on the first day, but delays in production prevented this. The complete book is unavailable, but we can get a good idea of Kollontai’s intervention from the book’s introduction which can be accessed on the internet.

According to Kollontai, the tsarist state was the defender of all that was reactionary in legal marriage and the Russian family. There could be no women’s liberation within such a state. Women’s liberation, the liberation of half the population could come only when motherhood and the duties of child rearing fell on society collectively, not on individual women. For Kollontai, this meant socialism had to be determined by both sexes equally, and within the party this meant an ideological struggle to redefine women’s position in the class war to be equal to that of men, and under the prevailing circumstances separate preparatory meetings for women were necessary to recruit them to the party. As a well-known revolutionary, Kollontai was forced to flee into exile to evade arrest. She left Russia for Germany where she re-established links with Zetkin, helped with Equality, became a member of the vertrauenspersonen and the International Secretariat, formally joining the Bolsheviks in 1915.

From 1910, with the revival of the labour movement, Russian women began to take an increasing part in economic struggles. When women took a leading role in strike actions, they added their own demands. In 1912-13, in nearly thirty strikes in which women were a significant proportion, or majority, of the strikers, an end to sexual harassment by supervisors under the pretext of searching workers as they left the factory premises was a major demand, with equal pay becoming increasingly popular.^[28]

Zetkin had won over the Second International in 1911 to support an annual day of action, 8 March, International Working Women’s Day, to organise working-class women in a movement distinct from feminist groups. In Russia, in 1913, Koncordia Samoilova, a member of the Bolsheviks since 1903 and secretary to the Pravda editorial board, called on the Petersburg Party Committee to be allowed to organise an illegal meeting to mark IWD. The Committee approved her proposal, but by no means unanimously because of concerns that it could be seen as a feminist event. In the event the meeting was packed out and a great success.

2.5 Pravda, Rabotnitsa and International Women’s Day

By 1913 there was extensive support within the RSDLP for a mass demonstration to be called on IWD, on the understanding that this was an important way to undermine the dominance of the bourgeois feminists. Samoilova had successfully argued for a regular column in the Bolshevik legal daily, Pravda, and in January 1913 Pravda began to feature a woman’s page entitled Work and the Life of Working Women. This dealt with the exploitation of female labour, specific women’s problems, and advertised meetings. Pravda was soon receiving so many letters from women that there were far too many to print. Women who could not write frequently turned up asking to see Samoilova to give her the news from their factory, others queued to ask for advice.^[29]

Samoilova would have been well aware that women were a growing proportion of factory workers; 25 per cent in 1900, and as the use of machinery increased so did the proportion of women; 31 per cent in 1908, and 45 per cent in 1912. In certain industries such as textiles, the proportion reached 52 per cent. Of course, with the outbreak of World War One and the introduction of conscription, the proportion of women increased substantially. Pravda circulated a questionnaire to discover the actual conditions of these women workers. Pravda urged those trade unions with a large proportion of women members to investigate the conditions of women working in their particular industry and submit the data gathered. Samoilova coordinated all this material, and, in addition, to the Working Women column, wrote numerous articles on matters of interest to working women, often gained from her visitors – the results of strikes by women, the struggle against the rise in the cost of living, the government’s intention to introduce a Bill in the Duma providing for women factory inspectors, etc.^[30]

To everyone’s surprise, the authorities gave permission for meetings to celebrate IWD, which were scheduled for Sunday 23 February. The thirteen-day difference between the Julian calendar then in use in Russia, and the Gregorian calendar used elsewhere, meant this was the weekend closest to worldwide celebrations held on the internationally agreed date of 8 March. Parallel to the Women’s Work column, a second column For International Women’s Day appeared in Pravda to rally support for IWD. The paper passionately appealed to women workers to join “the mighty torrent of the international revolutionary workers’ movement” that IWD represented. Pravda carried on systematic agitation in its columns; a series of articles appeared on IWD, and how it should be organised so that Russian women workers could take ownership of it. On the day, a special edition of Pravda was produced and soon sold out. The initiative was a great success with a huge meeting at the Kalashnikov Stock Exchange and numerous other places, designated as ‘scientific matinees’ to avoid police interest. These were well-attended by women workers of all professions, and from all industries there was an army of potential revolutionaries.

However, there still existed a deep suspicion in many quarters within the party about IWD, with many members believing it to be a kind of separatism that might split the working class. Samoilova in her daily activities gave the lie to this charge, strongly rejecting the accusation that observing IWD was a kind of surrender to bourgeois feminism, quoting Kollontai: “Only those who do not understand the radical difference between the movement of socialist women and bourgeois suffragettes can think this way”. She suggested that the insensitivity of male comrades was an important factor explaining why so few Russian women joined the party and mass organisations, arguing that: “the work to attract more working women into the socialist movement lies with … women’s committees, secretariats and bureaux”.^[31]

Following on from the success of the previous year, the Bolshevik Central Committee agreed to celebrate IWD on a wider and more intensive scale in 1914 and set up a special sub-committee to organise meetings in a number of halls in proletarian districts. Samoilova, having assessed the support of a women’s paper, used her position on the Pravda editorial board to suggest the time had come to launch such a paper.^[32]

With Krupskaya, Anna Ulianova-Elizarova (Lenin’s elder sister), and Inessa Armand (Lenin’s very close and dear friend), Samoilova met with Lenin, convinced him of the correctness and timeliness of the proposal, and gained his support for the immediate launch of a Bolshevik paper for women.^[33]

Anna was responsible for selecting the editorial board residing in Russia and Krupskaya for those in exile. The first group included Samoilova and Anna herself. This Russian group was responsible for raising the necessary funds, the production of the journal and its sale at four kopeks a copy (approximately US $1, today). The second, the exiles, included Armand and Krupskaya. We should note that Rabotnitsa was the first official commitment of the party to a long-term effort specifically for women. Lenin, the National Committee and the editorial board of Pravda all approved the Rabotnitsa project, but finances were scarce, and the party could not afford to directly contribute funds to its launch. Some funds came from Armand’s affluent friends, some from the editorial board members in Russia taking on ‘sewing jobs’, but most from donations by working women. Bolshevik policy was that there should be no separate organisation of women within or associated with the party that had the right to decide policy. Such a structure would have meant the women’s organisation was itself an embryo party. Rather, the party favoured separate, autonomous, women’s groups for carrying out party work amongst working women.

In a letter to Anna, Krupskaya suggested an outline of contents, including current politics, reports of general political and economic struggles of the workers’ movement highlighting the participation of women, hygiene information, the struggles of working women abroad, and the family and working women.^[34] The party posed demands of special interest to women – full equality in civil and family life, benefits for pregnancy and maternity, the protection of women in their workplaces, childcare centres to help ameliorate the problems faced by working women with a family. Naturally, these demands were presented as part of the general struggles of the working class as a whole and inseparably linked to the success of socialist revolution. The members of the Russian editorial board held a meeting a few days before the first issue was due. Anna was late and arrived at the meeting to find the other members had been arrested and most of the articles for publication confiscated by the police. Anna, single-handedly, edited the paper, found a printer, and organised the distribution of 12,000 copies on time to meet the deadline: IWD, 23 February.

The intention was for worker representatives to help organise IWD public meetings and join in the work of the Rabotnitsa editorial board. Good progress was made. Official permissions were received for the meetings, premises were booked, speakers chosen from among the factory workers to complement and support the main Bolshevik speakers with real life examples. But so successful was the initiative that it attracted police attention. The organising committee was raided, and all thirty persons present were arrested. Arrests notwithstanding, the public meetings went ahead, were filled to overflowing and Rabotnitsa sold out. Rabotnitsa produced seven issues between 23 February and 26 June 1914, of which three were confiscated by police.^[35]

Krupskaya saw Rabotnitsa as bringing women into the socialist struggle, explaining to the insufficiently conscious working women what their interests were, and the communality of those interests with the interests of the entire working class. Rabotnitsa became an arena in which women activists expressed their frustrations in bold language. The editorial board considered the views of Prokhorova, an active Bolshevik, to have sufficient basis to publish her letter: “Many women comrades say that everything will be done without us. But comrades, whatever is done without us will be dangerous for us”.^[36] This demand for inclusion was being widely expressed, particularly by women active in the trade unions. The trade union journal for the tannery industry opined that if socialism did not take women’s voices into account, it would create a society with negative attitudes towards women. The journal of the textile workers’ union, predominantly women, complained that while male workers could attend meetings women were expected to return home and undertake household drudgery.^[37]

The editors of the paper were no less-committed Bolsheviks than their male counterparts, but the content of Rabotnitsa continually confirmed the dual nature of the oppression of Russian women, including party members. Armand’s articles emphasised that the struggle for socialism could not progress without more encouragement for women’s struggles.^[38] Whilst it was primarily Rabotnitsa that reflected this pressure, Pravda also began to give encouragement, developing solidarity and militancy among women workers. These efforts were cut short by the exigencies of the First World War; the publication of Rabotnitsa ceased due to the impossible circumstances imposed by the outbreak of war.

2.6 Women and the February Revolution

In Russia, there was little to celebrate during the First World War. Defeat followed defeat, casualties rose into the millions, and women became an ever greater presence in the factories, particularly in the giant textile and munitions factories. For many women, the war initially offered the promise of greater personal freedom and paid work, despite women’s pay being as little as a half of the pay of the men working alongside her. But as prices soared and food became scarce, it was working mothers who suffered most. In April 1915, desperate to support themselves and their children, women in Petrograd looted a meat market; soon after, women in Moscow looted bread shops and that summer attacked the large Khitrov food market. In June 1915, women in the giant Ivanovo-Voznesensk complex went on strike demanding to be supplied with flour.^[39]

In the autumn of 1915, Kollontai was invited to deliver a series of lectures in eighty-one cities across America. The tour was a great success and she had not long returned to Norway when she received a second invitation. On this visit she worked with both Nicolai Bukharin and Leon Trotsky producing Novy Mir (New World). Kollontai was in regular communication with Lenin but for factional reasons she dishonestly misrepresented Trotsky as being on the ‘right-wing’.^[40] Lenin had taken this as good coin and, in his replies to Kollontai, was highly critical of Trotsky’s alleged views.^[41] These letters were later used by Zinoviev and Joseph Stalin after Lenin’s death to undermine Trotsky in the internal party debates.

By 1917, over two million Russian soldiers had been killed, wounded, maimed, or captured with little to show other than mounting hunger, growing anger and an increasing number of families mourning lost sons, brothers, and fathers. These were a primary target for the Bolsheviks, especially in those areas of Russia where, by late 1917, two-thirds of the adult population were women.^[42] More and more women were living alone, caring for their children while holding down a job that could last fourteen hours a day, after which they were expected to do the housework and care for the children. With primitive kitchens, inadequate drainage and sanitation, housework was hard labour. Tens of thousands of children wandered the streets waiting for their mothers to return home, left in the care of siblings, or handed over to wretched orphanages. Peasant women were particularly hard-hit as not only were the men conscripted but so too were the horses, meaning that women had to replace the men and also to pull the ploughs.

Early on the morning of 23 February 1917, the 180th Infantry Regiment received a woman delegate from the largely female staff of the nearby Vasilevsky Island Tram Depot. She asked the soldiers whether they would shoot if the women marched in support of International Women’s Day. The answer was: “No”.^[43]

On the eve of Women’s Day, Vasily Kayurov, a ‘committee-man’ representing the Vyborg District Committee addressed a women’s meeting, calling on the women to “refrain from isolated actions and to act exclusively according to the directives of the party committee”. Kayurov later described his reaction on learning that some of the women from the textile factories had gone on strike. The reader is asked to note the tone.

I was extremely indignant about the behaviour of the strikers: firstly because they had blatantly ignored the decision of the district committee of the party, and secondly because I myself had appealed to the women workers that very night for self-control and discipline, and now suddenly they were on strike.^[44]

This was the same Kayurov who would conclude that very evening: “one thing seems evident: the insurrection is dissolving”.^[45] Not a single political party called for strikes on that day. Even the most militant section of the Bolshevik Party (the Vyborg District Committee) was opposed, believing the time was not yet ripe for militant action and that party work should be to prepare for a revolutionary struggle some time in the future. During the morning, despite opposition from Bolsheviks, Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, women textile workers in several factories came out in support of the demand for ‘Bread and Peace’. Large crowds of women began to converge on the centre of Petrograd to celebrate IWD and to demonstrate under the slogans “Bread and Peace”, and “Bread. Our children are starving”. As the women workers marched through the streets, they threw sticks, stones, and snowballs at factory windows, urging their male counterparts to join them. A delegation was sent to the Metalworkers’ Union appealing for support. Workers, with many men now joining, flooded the streets, calling for an end to the war.

The crowd swelled until it was over 75,000 strong. The police were swamped and unable to stop the demonstration proceeding. International Woman’s Day passed peacefully, successfully, with enthusiasm and without victims. The following morning the strikers returned to their factories; instead of going to work they held meetings, and the stoppages spread rapidly until about one-half of the industrial workers of Petrograd were on strike. Processions from the individual factories, workshops and districts coalesced into a mighty demonstration of some 400,000 persons which, while still calling for “Bread and Peace”, called even more loudly: “Down with the Tsar!”

The parallel with the beginnings of the great French Revolution is noteworthy. On the morning of 5 October 1789, the first revolutionary stirrings began in the district of Saint-Eustache where a young girl began:

… beating a drum and declaiming the scarcity of bread drew together a large crowd of women, whose numbers rapidly increased … Arriving at Versailles in the early evening the marchers made straight for the Assembly … with swords and hunting-knives slung from their skirts.^[46]

The women of the Paris Commune of 1871, despite being denied the vote, were the first into battle, the most heroic fighters on the barricades, the last to surrender and the most defiant in defeat. But the Commune demonstrated unequivocally that the liberation of women was not possible without the liberation of the working classes.

A revolution is conducted by contending forces of historic proportions and contains a wide degree of variability and uncertainty. Masses in motion, prepared to face down reaction even at tremendous cost to themselves, are essential for the liquidation of the old order. How far and in what direction the revolutionary movement advances, how well it realises its latent possibilities depends not least on the energy and determination displayed by revolutionaries.

This was not the first time the women of Petrograd had taken spontaneous strike action. Demands for paid maternity leave, time off for feeding infants, and childcare provision at the factories had been demanded in many previous strikes. Women workers were often more militant than the men in the pre-1917 period, but the perennial problem had been their lack of organisation.^[47] However, Trotsky, in his History of the Russian Revolution, was at pains to show that the February 1917 actions of the Petrograd workers, built on the experience of 1905, were deeply politicised, with participants experienced in street fighting. Trotsky described factory committees and meetings and how inventive they were in developing means to neutralise and win over the state forces. The February Revolution was led by “conscious and tempered workers educated for the most part by the party of Lenin”.^[48]

In Russia in 1917, the broad masses progressed from one revolutionary position to the next, each time testing their strength and improving their understanding of the significance of their actions. The more research is done the more we understand, a hundred years later, the importance of Russian women in the process. The Bolshevik leadership saw the need for an initiative aimed at women, and organised by women, to take the Bolshevik message to the mass of female factory workers and mobilise their support. At this stage of the revolution, the challenge to women’s double oppression by capitalist society required specific demands and a degree of organisational autonomy within the party but retained the perspective that there could be no women’s liberation without a socialist revolution, and no socialist revolution without women’s liberation. Of course, today, we could add no socialist revolution without gay liberation, no gay liberation without socialist revolution.

The actions of the Petrograd working class – which began on International Women’s Day, in protest against food shortages, and developed rapidly into a mass movement – ousted the imperial regime in less than a week. The February 1917 Revolution spread outwards across Russia and its empire as a tsunami of soviets.^[49] An immediate result was that the Bolshevik Party, together with all other Russian political parties, was made legal, Pravda immediately resumed publication, and exiles returned home. During this period, Lenin’s strategic objectives for the Russian Revolution underwent a tectonic shift. This is reflected both in an increase in the frequency and number of articles addressed to, and about women. Between 1900-15 he wrote eight such articles, in the six years between 1916-22 he wrote twice as many. But not only did the frequency of the articles change. Their character changed, moving from description to calls to action, which is what would be expected as his perspective for the revolution moved from bourgeois democratic to having one foot in socialism, a task he saw as unachievable without the mass, active support of women.

Endnotes

[1] See R. Glickman, Russian Factory Women: Workplace and Society, 1880-1914.

[2] See ibid.

[3] V. I. Lenin, The Development of Capitalism in Russia, LCW, Vol. 3, p. 546.

[4] See A. Hillyar, Revolutionary Women in Russia 1870-1917.

[5] See R. Henderson, ‘Liberty Hall: Apollinariia Iakubova and the East London Lecturing Society’, Revolutionary Russia, 28(2), 2015, pp. 167-190.

[6] N. Krupskaya, The Woman Worker, Russell Press, 2017, p. 12.

[7] See J. Roberts, Lenin, Trotsky and the Theory of the Permanent Revolution, Wellred Books, 2007, p. 19.

[8] N. Krupskaya, The Woman Worker, p. 19.

[9] V. I. Lenin, ‘A Draft Programme of Our Party’, LCW, Vol. 4, p. 239.

[10] C. Bobrovskaya, Twenty Years in Underground Russia: Memoirs of a Rank-And-File Bolshevik, Proletarian Publishers, 1978, p. 150.

[11] See V. I. Lenin, ‘From a Great Beginning’, June 1919, LCW, Vol. 29.

[12] See L. Trotsky, ‘From the Old Family to the New’, in Problems of Everyday Life.

[13] See B. Evans Clements, Bolshevik Women.

[14] See A. Hillyar, Revolutionary Women in Russia 1870-1917.

[15] See P. Glatter, ‘A Revolution Takes Shape’, Revolutionary History, 2006, 9(1), pp. 11-118.

[16] G. Zinoviev, History of the Bolshevik Party, New Park Publications, 1973, p. 126.

[17] Quoted in A. Woods, Bolshevism: The Road to Revolution, Wellred Books, 2017, pp. 550-1.

[18] V. I. Lenin, ‘Our Tasks in the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies’, LCW, Vol. 10, pp. 26-8.

[19] E. Rossi, ‘The Emancipation of Women in Russia Before and After the Russian Revolution’, March 2004, In Defence of Marxism. Available at: https://www.marxist.com/emancipation-women-russia.htm (accessed 3 November 2022).

[20] N. Krupskaya, Reminiscences of Lenin, Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1959, pp. 124-5.

[21] C. Porter, Women in Revolutionary Russia, Cambridge University Press, 1987, pp. 23-4.

[22] K. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Wellred Books, 2022, p. 2.

[23] See A. Bobroff, ‘The Bolsheviks and Working Women, 1905-20’, Soviet Studies, 26(4), 1974, pp. 540-567.

[24] See R. Stites, The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia, p. 251.

[25] See L. Edmundson, ‘Russian Feminists and the First All-Russia Congress of Women’, Russian History, 3(2), 1976, pp. 123-149.

[26] E. Rossi, ‘The Emancipation of Women in Russia’.

[27] A. McShane, ‘Women and Revolution’, Weekly Worker, Issue 959, 25 April 2013.

[28] See A. Bobroff, ‘The Bolsheviks and Working Women, 1905-20’.

[29] See R. Dale, ‘The Role of the Women of Petrograd in War, Revolution and Counter-revolution, 1914-1921’.

[30] L. Katasheva, ‘Natasha – A Bolshevik Woman Organiser’, January 1926. Available at: https://www.marxist.com/natasha-a-bolshevik-woman-organiser.htm (accessed on 3 November 2011).

[31] A. Kollontai, Alexandra Kollontai: Selected Articles and Speeches, Progress Publishers, 1984. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1913/womens-day.htm (accessed 3 November 2011).

[32] See B. Evans Clements, Bolshevik Women.

[33] See R. Elwood, Inessa Armand: Revolutionary and Feminist.

[34] See R. Dale, The Role of the Women of Petrograd.

[35] A. Bobroff, ‘The Bolsheviks and Working Women, 1905-20’.

[36] Quoted in S. Marik, Revolutionary Democracy, p. 331.

[37] See S. A. Smith, Red Petrograd.

[38] See B. Evans Clements, Bolshevik Women.

[39] See C. Porter, Women in Revolutionary Russia.

[40] See B. Evans Clements, Bolshevik Feminist: The Life of Aleksandra Kollontai.

[41] See V. I. Lenin’s letters to Kollontai on 4 August 1915 and 17 February 1917 in LCW, Vol. 35.

[42] E. Volkova, ‘Women in the Revolutionary Movement of the Late 19th-Early 20th Centuries’, Vestnik Volgogradskogo gosudarstvennogo universiteta, 22(6), 2017, p. 122.

[43] R. Stites, The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia, p. 290.

[44] Quoted in M. Donald, ‘Bolshevik Activity Amongst the Working Women of Petrograd in 1917’, International Review of Social History, 27(2), 1982, p. 133.

[45] Quoted in L. Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, Vol. 1, Wellred Books, 2007, p. 131.

[46] G. Rude, The Crowd in the French Revolution, Clarendon Press, 1959.

[47] See R. Glickman, Russian Factory Women: Workplace and Society, 1880-1914.

[48] L. Trotsky, History of the Russian Revolution, Vol. 1, p. 171.

[49] See N. Sukhanov, The Russian Revolution 1917: A Personal Record.