4. October 1917: A Proletarian, Socialist Revolution
October 1917 - October 1918
4.1 Introduction
On 25 October 1917, Soviet power was established in Petrograd. The armed bodies of men and women that formed the power of the state were the Red Guards, together with those sailors and units within the army supporting the Bolshevik-led Soviets. The few armed Mensheviks or SR units in the city mostly joined the Red Guards and fought alongside them in defence of the Soviet Congress.
On 26 October, the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets opened with 390 Bolshevik delegates, the SR delegation fell from about 190 to 160 and after some thirty right SRs walked out, the total number of Menshevik delegates was seventy-two, and there were a handful of other delegates bringing the total to about 650. The forgiving nature of the Bolshevik Party at this time can be seen by the election of Kamenev as chairperson of the Soviet Central Executive Committee consisting of fourteen Bolsheviks, seven SRs, four Mensheviks and one from the group headed by Maxim Gorky.
In the event, there was no necessity, nor call for, an alliance with any other party to carry through the revolution. The Congress established a new government, the Council of People’s Commissars (though at that moment its writ ran only in the capital) but it quickly, easily and mostly peacefully extended its control, though in Moscow there was a week of bitter fighting, and by mid-December it was clear that it held nearly all key areas with the exception of those under German occupation and the Ukraine.
On 29 October, the Executive Committee of the Union of Railway Workers (Vikzhel) – in its majority Mensheviks – declared its opposition to the revolution. It announced that unless the Bolsheviks stepped down in favour of a coalition government composed of all the socialist parties, but with Lenin and Trotsky excluded, and with the Red Guards disbanded, Vikzhel would call a railway strike throughout the country. The Union of Civil Servants declared its support for Vikzhel’s demands.
Those who had opposed the armed insurrection and the seizure of power were demanding, after the victorious conclusion of the insurrection, that power be handed back to the very parties against which the proletariat had just taken up arms! What was in question here was the liquidation of October - no more, no less. An enlarged session of the Central Committee was hurriedly called for 1 November at which the right wing led by Kamenev gained a majority for continuing the negotiations. Lenin, Trotsky, Sverdlov, and one other argued for “no repudiation of Soviet power” but found themselves in a minority. Later, the CC records for the period 1-7 November, of who voted for what were lost, but it is noteworthy that the leadership of the Petrograd city organisation (where Stalin had been until recently senior organiser) backed the demand for a coalition government, in opposition to Lenin’s proposal.[1]
The following day Lenin launched a determined counter-attack. He did not oppose coalition in principle and welcomed participation by any party or organisation which had a genuine base in the Soviets, but the policy of the government had to follow the decrees issued by the Soviets (peace, land, etc.). On that basis any socialist party was welcome to participate.
On November 6, the Petrograd Conference of Working Women re-convened. Kollontai, Nikolaeva and Samoilova were at the door of Petrograd’s First House of Culture (formerly the Urals cinema), to welcome an expected eighty delegates notionally elected on the basis of one per 500 women. In the event, 500 delegates arrived representing some 85,000 women workers, including delegations from as far away as Moscow.
Samoilova gave the welcoming address. From its very beginning, the conference demonstrated a high level of class consciousness, notes showered on the organising committee asking why Kamenev, Nogin, Rykov and Zinoviev had resigned from the Central Committee. What had the Central Committee done to call them to order? Immediately after Samoilova had spoken, the following resolution was adopted:
This meeting of women workers demands that members (of the CC) submit to Party discipline … Only by pursuing a definite revolutionary class line can the Russian proletariat support the revolutionary movement of the international proletariat for socialism.[2]
A delegation was sent to the Smolny to make the conciliators aware of the fighting sentiments of the women workers who severely condemned their conduct. Trotsky wrote later that at the moment of crisis inside the Central Committee, the Petrograd Conference of Working Women unanimously agreed to: “welcome the policy of the Central Committee of our Party led by Lenin and Trotsky”.[3] Lenin later responded during his interview with Zetkin by saying:
In Petrograd, in Moscow, in cities and industrial centres, and out in the country, proletarian women have stood the test magnificently in the revolution. Without them we should not have won, or just barely won. That is my view. How brave they were, how brave they still are! Just imagine all the sufferings and privations that they bear. And they hold out because they want freedom, communism. Yes, indeed, our proletarian women are magnificent class warriors. They deserve admiration and love …[4]
The Conference returned to its agenda, passing resolutions demanding an eight-hour workday and banning labour for children under the age of sixteen. However, the Conference was not without its own drama. The official resolution reflected the somewhat limited view of the Petrograd leadership: ongoing activities by Rabotnitsa and restrictions on the Initiative Group to solely encourage women to join the party and the relevant trade unions, there were to be no extra-party women’s initiatives.
Kollontai, as a member of the Central Committee was the main speaker and scheduled to speak on the second day. She called on the women present to campaign for the Bolshevik Party – which would support equal pay, paid maternity leave, and other matters relating to women’s needs – in the coming Constituent Assembly elections. Then, on her own initiative, she moved an amendment to the official resolution that embodied her personal perspective. She declared to the Conference that women had the opportunity to gain full equality, but this would be achieved only if they formed their own groups to act in their interests in unions, Soviets, and the party. She called on the Conference to support an expanded Initiative Group with, in effect, Rabotnitsa its own journal, supported by a structure of local committees established by the Bolshevik Party. Kollontai was clearly breaking party discipline; unfortunately, she had the support of the great majority of delegates. There can be little doubt that her actions confirmed the suspicions of many Bolsheviks that Kollontai was, at heart, a ‘feminist’.
Samoilova attempted to withdraw the official resolution, so Kollontai would have no resolution to amend. This was rejected. The Conference finally agreed a compromise resolution containing the original proposals for Rabotnitsa and the Initiative Group, but simultaneously agreed to initiate local ‘commissions’, or zhenotdely, to support women’s activities in and around the party. These would be subject to approval by the local party organisation. Armand and Kollontai immediately began to lay the basis for a network of such commissions to take responsibility for actions such as setting up communal kitchens and establishing orphanages.[5]
On 7 November, in Pravda, Lenin replied to the conciliators: “There must be no other government in Russia but a Soviet Government (and) only a Bolshevik Government can be regarded as the Soviet Government”.[6] The ‘moderate’ socialists walked off, leaving Kamenev, Zinoviev and their fellow thinkers to recant and be readmitted to the party, but with no deeper understanding of the issues at stake and no grasp of the analysis that had led Lenin to his new action programme. Their errors would be repeated with disastrous consequences in Germany in 1923 and China in 1925.
In the given situation, with the revolutionary victory of the proletariat and its allies, the Congress of Soviets was the supreme body and the Constituent Assembly the subordinate. This was an inversion of the relative importance of the Soviets and bourgeois-democratic institutions as perceived by Lenin between 1905 and 1915. In 1905, Lenin had argued that a Social-Democratic majority in the revolutionary government was impossible.[7] In 1917, he argued for a Bolshevik-only government. Only Trotsky had unequivocally foreseen “the participation of the proletariat in a government … as a dominating and leading participation”.[8]
However, the matter was not up for debate. Without waiting for the Constituent Assembly, the Soviets had introduced measures to destroy the old state and take the first steps in the construction of the new. The Council of People’s Commissars, while proclaiming itself a temporary body, had issued decrees of a decisive nature. The most important were the decree on peace and the decree abolishing private ownership of the land, both drafted by Lenin and issued on 26 October. These key measures were rapidly followed by the right of the peoples of Russia to self-determination and secession; banking made a state monopoly; all judges henceforth to be elected; a revolutionary code for courts; marriage and divorce made civil matters; creation of a Red Army; key factories confiscated, etc.
Reactionaries decried the land distribution as giving the peasants very little, on average something like 5,500m2 (1.25 acres), but for most peasants, getting rid of the landlord was more important because that freed them from their mortgages and debts which impoverished them. For many it also ended the feudal obligation to work the landlord’s land without pay for one, two or even three days a week.
These Soviet decisions and decrees determined policy on all the most important issues of the day and were being implemented as the elections to, and convening of, the Constituent Assembly took place. The Assembly met on 5 January 1918, but of the 800 elected representatives, fewer than 500 attended, and with the withdrawal of the 150 Bolsheviks and Left SR delegates, fewer than 40 per cent of the elected delegates remained. The Constituent Assembly did not have the authority to oppose the policies being implemented by the Soviets, but it could become the focus for a campaign against the Soviets and lend legitimacy to anti-Soviet forces. And that is what happened. The Assembly became a rallying point for the so-called democratic forces, all of whom ceded real power to the counter-revolution. Early on 6 January, the Red Guards and sailors present declared the session closed.[9] Their actions were confirmed in a decree of dissolution by the Soviet Central Executive Committee the next day.
The dispersal of the Constituent Assembly was so easy because the land decree pulled the peasants behind the Bolsheviks, and the 100,000 to 200,000 Red Guards that comprised the power of the state, were everywhere loyal to the Bolshevik Soviets.[10] Given the geographic and social distribution of Russian society (workers had to live close to their factories as public transport was a luxury they could not afford) the workers’ militias and Red Guard units were, of necessity, factory-based.[11] In 1917 this, de facto, ensured that the bands of armed men that formed the power of the Soviet state were firmly in Bolshevik hands. The actions of these workers’ militias confirmed Trotsky’s predictions based on his experience of leading the Petersburg Soviet – that if the armed workers held the power outside the factory gate, that authority would naturally spill over into a direct challenge to managers and owners.[12] In 1906 Trotsky had argued that the proletariat, having taken political and state power would immediately approve all revolutionary expropriations carried out by the peasants. Lenin explained how it was done. In the hands of the proletariat:
… [state power] can and must become an instrument for winning to the side of the proletariat the non-proletarian working masses, an instrument for winning those masses from the bourgeoisie and from the petty-bourgeois parties. … the proletariat can, and must, at once, or at all events very quickly, win from the bourgeoisie and from petty-bourgeois democrats ‘their’ masses, i.e., the masses which follow them – win them by satisfying their most urgent economic needs in a revolutionary way by expropriating the landowners and the bourgeoisie.[13]
The Russian peasant was given a vested interest in maintaining the Soviet regime and the Constituent Assembly lost its most important prop.
Numerous Western academics insist on classifying the October revolution as a coup. They close their eyes, and their minds, to the obvious fact that in Russia, in 1917, to realise the democratic aspirations of the overwhelming majority of the population: land to the peasant, an end to Russia’s participation in WWI, etc., it was necessary to carry through the October socialist revolution. Failing to understand the theory of the permanent revolution, they cannot comprehend how the struggle to realise democratic demands can end up as a socialist revolution. They explain it in terms of someone, somehow must have cheated. They conclude that Lenin, or Mao or Castro must have deceived the Russian, Chinese or Cuban people. They fail to grasp that in the era of imperialist decay the demands of a democratic revolution can only be achieved by taking the first step to socialism.
The same people charge Lenin with having deserted his principles by accepting the SR land programme and enacting it as the policy of the Bolsheviks. They fail to see that carrying through the SR land programme was impossible “without overthrowing capitalist rule”; without taking “decisive strides towards socialism”.[14]
To give substance to their claims they propagate the lie that the October Revolution was a coup, carried out by relatively few people without the support and even against the wishes of the masses. Such arguments are nonsense and ignore the blinding reality that the great majority of the population – the peasants – hurried to take the land and share it amongst themselves, and the Bolshevik Party was the only one prior to October 1917 that had these measures as policy.
4.2 Women, Homosexuals and the New Regime
We have seen that organising women working in the city laundries led to a strike for the eight-hour day and a minimum wage, a strike that ended the social peace enjoyed by the Mensheviks and SRs. We have also seen how Bolshevik women were active in the formation of the Union of Soldiers’ Wives and the championing of their demands, and how the soldatki directly challenged the Menshevik and SR-controlled Soviets, demanding they end the war and solve the food crisis, and how the influence of the Bolshevik Party in the armed forces grew significantly as a result.
Rabotnitsa became a centre of agitational and organisational work among women workers, with the dynamic of events bringing new layers of women into action. Kollontai and Armand were determined to develop an autonomous space within the party structure and subject to party policy for women workers, and in this they were supported by Lenin. However, there was a degree of tension with those of a more traditional view, such as Klavdia Nikolaeva, who argued that their role should be limited to bringing more women under party hegemony.[15]
Through the Soviets, the Bolshevik Party mobilised hundreds of thousands of women in support of the socialist revolution. The October Revolution, and the transfer of power into the hands of the working people, gave women in Russia full political and civil equality for the first time. From that moment on, they enjoyed total legal equality in every sphere of work and life. This was a complete break from the highly patriarchal Russian family that was the norm under the Tsar. A cradle of religion, an ideological brake on political consciousness, it played an important role in training the young, particularly girls, to obey authority. The subservience of a wife to her husband was buttressed by the fusion of state power and religious authority, the latter with a medieval attitude towards women.[16]
From its very first days the Soviet state hurried to utilise the abilities of women communists and women workers, giving them important posts and responsibilities in every section of the new state apparatus up to and including the Council of People’s Commissars. Kollontai was appointed People’s Commissar of Social Welfare and was the world’s first female minister, in which position she played a leading part in drafting new laws recognising women as full citizens with rights equal to men.
Badcock makes the telling point that the tone of the letters from soldatki to government officials changed significantly with the October Revolution.[17] Before October, these would tend to be pleas justified by some reference to charity, precedent, or moral principles. With the revolution the soldatki petitions began to refer to their rights, a sure sign that these women saw the new Soviet state as their own.
In December 1917, a series of decrees were issued dealing with vital matters of the state, including marriage and divorce. These provisions transferred marriage and divorce, from the religious to the civil area and ended the authority of the church in these matters, with state regulation reduced to a minimum. Separation of church and education was considered an absolute. The 30,000 church schools attended by over one million pupils were to be state schools as soon as possible, and here the Bolsheviks resisted the pleas of the peasants and elder generations that religion should be a ‘voluntary’ subject, refusing to give an inch in the battle with obscurantism. The absence of property interests meant that the post-revolutionary proletarian family was intended to be based on mutual love and personal preference, marital equality and mutual freedom to divorce. A wife was no longer obliged to adopt her husband’s surname, nor did change of residence on the part of one of the married parties “oblige the other to follow”. Just as marriage was now made by mutual consent of the parties, (minimum age eighteen years for men, sixteen for women) so it could be dissolved whenever the parties, or even just one of them, so wished.
Four days after taking power the Soviet government adopted a decree introducing the eight-hour working day, seen as essential for making working women’s participation in politics possible. The party’s new political programme promised a series of important additional measures:
The task of the Party at the present moment is mainly to carry on ideological and educational work for the purpose of finally stamping out all traces of the former inequality and prejudices, especially among the backward strata of the proletariat and the peasantry. Not satisfied with the formal equality of women, the Party strives to free women from the material burden of obsolete domestic economy, by replacing this with house-communes, public dining-halls, central laundries, crèches, etc.[18]
These welcome ad-hoc measures were systematised a year later by the 1918 Family Code. In January 1918, the Third All-Russian Congress of Soviets adopted the ‘Declaration of the Rights of the Working and Exploited People’, and formally declared the political and social equality of men and women in the new Soviet Regime. The first decree issued by Kollontai as Commissar of the Commissariat of Social Welfare was for the protection of mothers: sixteen weeks paid maternity leave, nursing mothers should work no more than four days a week and should be provided with crèche facilities at their place of work, and time off for breast-feeding. Family allowances were introduced, and long hours and night work were forbidden for pregnant women and nursing mothers. This applied irrespective of whether the mother was married.
The position of woman is the most graphic and telling indicator for evaluating a social regime and state policy. The October Revolution inscribed on its banner the emancipation of womankind and created the most progressive legislation in history on marriage and the family. This does not mean, of course, that a ‘happy life’ was immediately in store for the Soviet woman. Genuine emancipation of women is inconceivable without a general rise of economy and culture, without the destruction of the petty-bourgeois economic family unit, without the introduction of socialised food preparation and education.[19]
In July 1918 the first Soviet Constitution was adopted by the Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets with ‘Article 22’ confirming the equality of all citizens regardless of sex, race and nationality, and ‘Article 62’ declaring the equal right of men and women to vote and to be elected to the Soviets. All children, born in or outside wedlock, were placed on an equal legal footing, with husband and wife having an equal duty to care for and financially support their children. The new divorce laws were, initially at least, especially popular with women not only for the freedoms they gave but for the new responsibilities they introduced. For example, unmarried women could now claim child support from the father until the child reached the age of eighteen. Alimony was introduced because the state at that time could not guarantee jobs for all and, given women’s traditional responsibilities for childcare, they had greater difficulties in finding and retaining paid work.
The October Revolution was a breakthrough in women’s emancipation and demonstrated irrefutably the crucial relationship between women’s liberation and workers’ revolution. It was hoped, and expected, that by liberating women from daily chores and isolation they would increasingly participate actively in the economy and public life. However, to realise its goals, such as implementation of the new maternity laws, housewives would need wide-scale provision of cheap, good quality public dining halls, laundries, crèches and nurseries.
But, as Lenin would repeat many times, laws alone are not enough. Soviet women had full legal rights, but that was just the beginning. Soviet women would remain downtrodden while housework (“the most unproductive, the most barbarous and the most arduous work”) was left to them. They could only be completely emancipated and truly the equal of men if the national economy was socialised and women able to participate in common productive labour. As Lenin said: “the building of socialism will begin only when we have achieved the complete equality of women”.[20]
In 2019, just over a century after the Soviet Union had tackled sexist legislation head-on, the World Bank published a report Women, Business, and the Law. In only six countries, all European but not including the UK, are women deemed to have legal equality with men. How precarious this equality is, has been demonstrated in Hungary, Poland, Portugal, Spain and the USA where conservative governments have attempted to restrict access to abortion. The report was issued the same week that Christine Lagarde, the first female head of the International Monetary Fund and then the European Bank, bemoaned the failure of capitalist enterprises to treat women as equals in industry and commerce. But, as Lenin explained many times, the inequality between the property-owners and the property-less, means inequality is an inherent and necessary part of capitalism, and a direct reflection of this is not just the legal but also the social oppression of women.
Within the Bolshevik Party there was a conservative layer, many of whom were rural cadres, and who were deeply uneasy at moves towards women’s emancipation. The policy adopted was the outcome of a struggle between different viewpoints, and in the period after 1917 reflected the impulse of the revolution. The degree and extent of the differences changed with time; the transition to the New Economic Policy would mean a substantial change in the climate of opinion, as would industrialisation at the end of the 1920s, as we shall see.[21]
For those without money or position there were no abortion rights in Russia before February 1917. In tsarist Russia abortion was considered a serious crime except in cases of medical necessity to save the life of the mother. The punishment was the cancellation of the physician’s medical license, and four to six years hard labour, increased to eight if the woman died. Nevertheless, in both towns and countryside, abortions were common, sought by women to protect themselves from the physical consequences of too frequent births, and to protect their families from the economic consequences of too many children. Since these were usually unhygienic, performed with whatever instruments were at hand, abortion was high-risk with an appallingly large number of women maimed or killed.
The right to a safe abortion was especially important for peasant women, as a major mechanism for their oppression was constant pregnancies. It has been estimated that in 1908 a quarter of peasant women aged forty-five had been pregnant up to ten times; so exhausted were these women that a quarter of pregnancies ended in a miscarriage. Added to this, poor post-natal care and an appalling child mortality rate often resulted in the killing of illegitimate and female children.[22]
The successful transition from repressive tsarism to full and equal rights both in law and in practice, depended ultimately upon having an adequate economic base and “the transformation of private domestic work into a public industry”.[23] In fact, social transformation would be severely restricted due to the lack of adequate resources. This was demonstrated first and foremost by the living conditions and social treatment of the growing numbers of homeless, abandoned, and orphaned children. The new government accepted, unquestioningly, that the state had responsibility for feeding minors and issued decrees, instructing local authorities to arrange to supply free meals in suitable institutions such as schools. In parallel the government set up a network of children’s homes to feed, clothe, accommodate, educate, and train the ‘nation’s offspring’.
These ambitious plans, motivated by the same goals that had inspired the Code, were derailed immediately by the huge influx of orphans and abandoned children generated by the civil war. They were then completely swamped by the tidal wave of children in need as famine hit in 1921-22. Shortages, particularly of food, were greatly exacerbated by the blockade initiated and sustained by the imperialist powers aiding the White Army. Orphanages with meagre resources, built to accommodate 100 were, in September 1921, holding as many as 500, with thousands left out on the streets. Many expired each night, their places taken the next day by individuals selected from the large and unruly crowd of equally hopeless cases wanting admittance.[24]
The ceaseless influx of sick, lousy, excrement-covered, shrivelled children caused the morale of exhausted staff to collapse at being asked to cope with too little food, few medicines, no soap, no blankets or clothing, and insufficient fuel for cooking or heating. This contradiction between the goals of the revolution and the capacity to deliver them, expressed most extremely in the living conditions of these children, would be central to the early development of the Soviet Union. The armies of intervention, the White armies funded by the imperialists, were part of a policy of attempting to bleed Soviet Russia dry, and those who suffered first and most were children.
Equality in law now applied not only to women but also to oppressed groups in general. Under the Tsar, homosexuality had been prohibited, and for those men who did not fit into the traditional norms of gender and sexuality, there was a risk of ending up in a labour camp. In December 1917, the Bolshevik government abolished all Tsarist laws, including all those that forbade or restricted homosexual activity after which the open expression of homosexuality was accepted to a much greater degree than in the most advanced capitalist states. This was another demonstration that revolutionary socialism is the key to destroying capitalism’s reactionary moral laws, and to enforce on behalf of LGBT people the democratic principle that the state should not interfere in private matters.
The rise, initially in the Anglo-American world, of the gay liberation movement, has had the beneficial effect of placing Soviet history under a microscope. The decriminalisation of male homosexuality (sodomy), in early revolutionary Russia was one of the sweeping changes to criminal, family, and property law that marked the start of Bolshevik power as a benchmark of enlightened sexual politics. Honest analysis presents gay activists with the fact that the world’s first socialist state proclaimed a radical sexual liberation.
The Bolsheviks took the lead in extending human rights in ways that would take the advanced industrialised countries more than a generation to catch up. The reaction of anti-communist academics in, particularly, the USA and UK to this advance has been bizarre. Some try to ignore it and jump from tsarist to Stalinist repression, suggesting continuity in policy, claiming that Stalin’s reactionary laws on homosexuality demonstrated that the omission of homosexuality from the draft penal code was not a true reflection of Bolshevik intentions.
Others attempt to lay credit at the feet of anyone but the Bolsheviks, the list includes even the Cadets, despite the Cadet leaders being part of the White counter-revolution. Some go so far as to say that the Bolsheviks revoked the anti-homosexual legislation accidentally – because they repealed the Tsarist Code in its entirety, they unwittingly repealed anti-homosexual legislation. It was an oversight, just as the French revolutionary Code Pénal had ‘forgotten’ to restrict homosexuality.[25]
The problem for these counter-revolutionaries is that the Bolsheviks legalised homosexuality, first in 1918, and again in both the 1922 and 1926 constitutions. The draft penal Code in 1918 had taken much from the 1903 code, but there was a conscious decision to decriminalise consensual same-sex acts between adults, while at the same time retaining the criminalisation of same-sex acts with minors or when violence or coercion were involved. Mieczysław Kozłowski, the Commissar of Justice in 1920 wrote a series of comments on the drafts confirming that Bolshevik policy was to ensure same-sex activity between consenting adults was not against the law. This provided the basis for the Penal Code of 1 June 1922. When, in 1926 the Code was redrafted, homosexuality continued to be legal, which confirms that there was no oversight or forgetfulness involved.
Russia became one of a handful of countries to render homosexuality legal. Bolshevik policy was explained by Doctor Grigorii Batkis, the director of the Moscow Institute of Social Hygiene, in his 1923 pamphlet, The Sexual Revolution in Russia:
Concerning homosexuality, sodomy, and various other forms of sexual gratification, which are set down in European legislation as offences against public morality – Soviet legislation treats these exactly the same as so-called ‘natural’ intercourse. All forms of sexual intercourse are private matters.[26]
Soviet power expanded southward, and eastward, new Soviet republics arose in Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan. Azerbaijan, for example, had a population of less than two million, overwhelmingly peasants tied to the landlords by a feudal system of land tenure, while the city of Baku was the centre of a major oil industry. After the end of WWI and temporary occupation by British forces, which withdrew after the defeat of General Denikin, there was a successful Bolshevik uprising in Baku and an independent Azerbaijani Socialist Soviet Republic was proclaimed at the beginning of May 1920.
Azerbaijan became a part of the Soviet Union. Soviet jurists analysed regional customs in these very different social and cultural contexts and, in 1923, for the first time pederasty, not sodomy, became a criminal offence punishable by up to five years in prison, or up to eight years if it involved force or threats. Whether by design or accident, a number of publications have misrepresented what actually happened. Historians, even those specialising in the history of homosexuality, exist in an academic world that is shaped by anti-socialist pressures, in this case to play down or obfuscate the pro-gay policies of the Bolsheviks. For example, it is claimed that the Azerbaijan SSR while formally legitimising sodomy, was simultaneously persecuting consenting gay adults. The ‘proof’ offered is that charges of pederasty were brought against local Orthodox clergy. Recent revelations of the widespread sexual abuse of children by priests of all faiths have given the lie to this argument. The use of the Code against clergy can no longer be cited, in itself, as proof that it was being used to persecute sodomy. In fact, the Bolsheviks were attempting to stamp out the tradition of employing bachi, boy prostitutes, who danced and dressed in female clothing to service the local clergy. To strengthen their arguments these academics present Stalin’s re-criminalisation of sodomy in 1933-34 not as the degeneration it was, but as the natural outcome of socialism.
4.3 Children in the Early Soviet Regime
Child abandonment was a serious problem for the Bolsheviks post-revolution, but it was not a problem that originated with them. The privations and degradations of Russian women meant that 150 years ago when Russia had a population of less than 35 million, the foundling homes in Moscow were receiving some 17,000 children a year.[27] For the poorest sections of Russian society, giving up children was an accepted way of saving them from starvation.
By the time of the October Revolution there were hundreds of thousands of hungry children blackened by dirt, their only clothing filthy rags, roaming the streets of towns and villages. Their parents often died of cholera or typhus, or the children were separated from their parents in the chaos of millions of refugees flooding eastwards away from the German advance. They lived by begging, stealing, or prostituting themselves. The new regime immediately put in place measures to rescue “the flowers of the future”.[28] The Commissariat of Enlightenment set to work to provide long-term accommodation in the form of children’s homes but, given the lack of resources, these were soon full to bursting and forced to turn away new arrivals.
Many working mothers left their children in children’s homes funded and run by private charities, often known as ‘angel factories’ because so many of the children in their care died. The Nikolaev Institute was one such, and as a practical demonstration that the Bolsheviks took women’s and children’s needs seriously, the Commissariat of Social Welfare determined the new state would use its scant resources to renovate this Institute; clean, re-paint, provide beds and cots, a library with posters on baby care, and a medical centre. The hostility of the White Army to the gains of the revolution was seen in the actions of the countess who had managed the Institute. She denounced the Bolsheviks as heathens, and the nurses as prostitutes, before sending the refurbished building up in flames just hours before it was to be opened.[29]
Kollontai’s Commissariat dealt directly with those in most need, so she was besieged by the old, orphans off the street, soldatki mothers carrying babies, begging for shelter and food, soldiers crippled in the war demanding a pension. She found the perfect place to shelter them, hundreds of beds in private rooms, communal cooking and eating facilities with substantial stocks of food. The only problem was that it was the famous Alexander-Nevsky monastery. Kollontai, ignoring the reality of local support for the monastery, accompanied by a detachment of sailors went to seize the monastery, and was met by a crowd of believers determined to protect their church. Shots were exchanged and a number of people were killed. Lenin was furious that Kollontai had behaved in such an adventurist manner in a matter that was politically very delicate. The Bolsheviks were happy to disestablish the Church, but not yet ready to declare war on it. Lenin’s comments made at the First All-Russian Congress of Working Women, November 1918, initiated by Kollontai while she was Commissar of Social Welfare and where she was a major speaker, can only be taken as a public reprimand of her:
We must be extremely careful in fighting religious prejudices; some people cause a lot of harm in this struggle by offending religious feelings. We must use propaganda and education. By lending too sharp an edge to the struggle we may only arouse popular resentment; such methods of struggle tend to perpetuate the division of the people along religious lines, whereas our strength lies in unity. The deepest source of religious prejudice is poverty and ignorance; and that is the evil we have to combat.[30]
Faced with rapidly deteriorating conditions in Petrograd, Moscow and other large towns, officials began to re-locate the children to areas where the peasants were still producing food, including the Ukraine, the Caucases, and the Crimea.
4.4 Revolution in the Countryside
The initial Workers’ and Peasants’ Government formed after the October Revolution was a Bolshevik-only government. The Bolsheviks invited the Left SRs, who were a breakaway from the SR Party, and claimed to support the October Revolution, to join as junior partners, but the offer was initially refused.[31] The Left SRs did join the government, but not until mid-December, and withdrew only three months later, wishing to continue the war, refusing to agree to the peace conditions accepted by the Bolsheviks. As a result, “the soldiers and sailors who at first had followed the Left SRs now streamed into the Bolshevik fold”.[32] During this three-month period there was a two-class government with little difference in agrarian policy between Bolsheviks and Left SRs. In fact, in many important regions it was Left SRs who administered government policy. Of the agitator-organisers sent into the countryside by the peasant section of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (VTsIK – the highest legislative and administrative body of the USSR) in early 1918 to aid implementation of land reform, 601 were Bolsheviks and 693 were Left SRs.[33]
“Land to the peasant”, the key bourgeois-democratic demand, was approved by a Bolshevik-only government, after the assumption of power by the proletariat, and after the victory of the proletarian, urban socialist revolution. Lenin, in his published works, repeatedly insisted that in semi-feudal Russia the Bolshevik Revolution was a necessary pre-requisite for carrying through the bourgeois-democratic revolution to its end. Lenin’s description of actual events bears an uncanny resemblance to Trotsky’s predictions made in Results and Prospects, “The proletariat in power will stand before the peasants as the class which has emancipated it”.[34]
The war had greatly increased the burdens on peasant women. With their men at the front, the responsibility for farms, family and land fell on their shoulders. By the autumn of 1917, village stability was threatened by economic collapse. The fall off in production and the chaotic distribution system meant few manufactured goods were available, and the price of these rocketed due to the inflation that was simultaneously destroying the value of the peasants’ savings. The peasants, seeing little point in taking their crops to market, were falling back on subsistence farming. Thus, although in some regions the area sown by peasants in 1918 did increase, most if not all of this was given over to subsistence crops; rye and potatoes.
After the Soviets took power, the peasants saw the Bolsheviks as the party that legitimised land seizures and its distribution to peasants by peasants. It is an axiom of Marxist political economy that individual peasant farming will, in time, give way to agricultural collectives. Only when small-scale peasant farms are superseded by collective ownership can the peasant become part of an integrated highly productive socialist economy. But this economic principle must be considered in context: the participation of the peasants in large-scale units or collectives must be voluntary, the way smoothed by the provision of the machines that made large scale production possible and profitable. Ignoring this political principle could severely damage the work of socialist construction.
Engels combined these economic and political principles when he wrote: “… when we are in possession of state power, we shall not even think of forcibly expropriating the small peasants (regardless of whether with or without compensation) …”.[35] In the short period between the end of WWI and the commencement of the civil war, Lenin repeatedly and clearly stated that it was absolutely forbidden to use compulsive measures against the peasants; they had to be convinced by practical example.[36] Trotsky later summarised Marxist principles regarding the peasantry in the The Transitional Programme of the Fourth International:
The program for the nationalisation of the land, the collectivisation of agriculture, should be so drawn that from its very basis it should exclude the possibility of expropriation of small farmers and their compulsory collectivisation. The farmer will remain owner of his plot of land as long as he himself believes it possible or necessary.[37]
The Bolsheviks had no intention of expropriating even the big peasants; their policy was for the peasants themselves to re-divide the land. This was done predominantly between January and March 1918 via peasant soviets created for the purpose.[38] It ensured that the Bolshevik, urban, socialist revolution had the support of the overwhelming mass of the peasantry without which it would have soon collapsed.
Leaving the peasants to sort out land affairs meant the initial redistribution went very smoothly. The peculiarities of the Russian peasant village (mir) were of immense help here. One duty of the mir included periodical redistribution of the arable land among the households to ensure that every household had an acceptable minimal (but not equal) standard-of-living. Redistribution of the land was usually on a ‘mouth-to-feed’ basis, and after October 1917 was formally required to include women and girls, frequently excluded in earlier periods. However, the village assembly (skhod) that made all decisions was composed of the heads of the individual families, i.e., the older men, who generally did not welcome innovation. It was only to be expected that these elders often comprised the majority of delegates elected to the peasant soviets.[39]
The 1918 Marriage Code which was based on free choice was in stark contradiction to the collective nature of life in the village communes. A household was patriarchal, the sons with their wives and children, remaining in the house of their father. A member of the household had only their personal possessions, essentially the clothes they stood up in; all property was held in common; all crops and animals were held in common; food was eaten communally. Membership of the household was primarily by birth, but another man could step in to replace one who had left or become incapacitated. Day labourers were excluded from this arrangement. Common ownership did not include married women who were barred from buying or selling cattle, tools or machinery, and from leasing or renting land. The rights of a widow varied, in some areas she could assume the role of head of household, in others she had no rights at all. Divorce was rare, but in the few cases that occurred the obligation to pay maintenance fell on the mir because the individual peasant formally owned nothing.
The Bolsheviks were committed to the root-and-branch destruction of the patriarchal structure of the peasant family, and private ownership of the land, in short, to the abolition of key elements of the villagers’ traditional way of life. But the early, triumphant mood that accompanied the re-division of the land had given way to a determination to win the civil war. As the death toll mounted and the economy deteriorated, village life became a struggle to survive. Before 1914, widows had no right of inheritance but according to custom, a woman had every entitlement to continue to work the family allotment in her husband’s absence while she was capable. In practice, however, widows who tried to farm alone consistently failed, largely because the men of the village forced them to give up their land. Villagers not only refused to help single women but often contrived ways to make their lives more difficult. One well-known method was moving border fences to progressively reduce the area of a woman’s land. Women were often refused the right to be heard at village meetings and so could not protest these injustices, and if they were allowed to speak, they were often shouted down and subsequently ostracised.[40]
However, mass conscription transformed what had been occasional events into a common phenomenon; there were millions of soldiers’ wives and widows farming their family lands alone. The death toll in the war brought changes, and soldiers’ widows were finally given access to communal land on an equal footing with men.[41] Nonetheless, soldiers returning from the front, the end of the civil war, and the flood of refugees from the starving cities meant that, suddenly, more men than ever before were demanding an allocation of land from village holdings. The demands of male claimants were prioritised at the expense of the most defenceless, and, allegedly, the least productive landholders – single women.
Many gave up their lands in the face of harassment and the difficulties of farming alone and during 1917-21, there was a growing impoverishment of single peasant women.[42] Widows and soldiers’ wives began to attend the commission meetings organised by Bolsheviks to ask for support. Their requests were for the army to return their husbands, for day-care facilities, and support with their farming. Some of these women became Bolshevik supporters, and even stood for election to the local soviet. It took great courage to appear on an election platform, where men ridiculed the women, cursed at them, and threatened violence if they persisted. Despite such attitudes, women delegates were elected to local soviets.
After the revolution, the stratum of relatively wealthy peasants survived remarkably well. Wealthy peasants often adopted a radical face, speaking out loudly for the seizure of aristocrats’ and landlords’ lands and, with their experience of public speaking, frequently became the village spokespersons. With their ability to read and write they often became the office personnel (e.g., scribe and ‘land measurer’) in the bodies created to carry out the land reforms and were able to find ways to preserve much of their families’ former possessions.
Bolshevik land policy was hugely popular with the vast mass of peasants. The first stage of land distribution was officially described as ‘provisional’, suggesting that any wrongs could be righted in a later redistribution. Subsequent distributions did take place but were largely limited to those fleeing the cities and returnees from the civil war. In the case of disputes, peasants could turn to conflict commissions established by the new regime for help in resolving perceived wrongs. The conflict resolution teams were composed largely of Left SRs, Bolsheviks, and returning Red Army soldiers. These brought with them the news that women had been granted full equality; newspapers and pamphlets announced the party’s commitment to, and plans for, female emancipation. However, no-fault divorce, alimony, legal and civil equality of women (which meant they could own land in their own right), and equal rights for children born in and out of wedlock, were serious threats to the traditional patriarchal rule and invariably opposed by the skhod.
Contradictorily, the October Revolution greatly strengthened the petty-bourgeois nature of agriculture in Russia. The ABC of Communism describes how, throughout Russia, virtually all the large estates passed into the hands of those who had previously worked them and were then farmed as small-holdings. In fact, both the number and proportion of poor peasants and agricultural labourers, on which state power notionally rested, fell substantially.
The Bolsheviks, however, were on the horns of a dilemma, they were committed to the destruction of the patriarchal structure of the peasant family, to Orthodox Christianity, and to primitive, subsistence farming. But they had no material means, ample or otherwise, to show the small peasant the advantages of social progress, and simultaneously were committed to not using compulsive measures. They could use only propaganda and persuasion. Since only about one in ten peasant women were literate, printed propaganda was quite inadequate. Agit-trains, Agit-boats and Agit-tents as mobile action centres were used to enable female activists to get out amongst the peasantry. A major literacy campaign was launched, with libraries established that contained ‘Lenin corners’, also known as ‘red corners’ exclusively for women. But even here there was opposition; literate women and children were seen as a threat to the authority of the head of the family.[43]
Zhenotdely meetings, held mostly in larger villages, were a way of bringing peasant women together to discuss their grievances and illustrate how joint activities could benefit them: collective childcare, literacy classes, mushroom picking and firewood collection, and trips to the local town to sell their produce or buy seed. These actions were an introduction to the new and shocking idea that women could have a voice and vote in political matters. However, the biggest demand on the Zhenotdely was to represent peasant women in obtaining their new legal rights, a demand that far outstripped their capacity. As one critic commented: “It wouldn’t have been so bad if only the young girls listened … but the married women listened too.” Within just four years, especially among the younger generation, a ‘baba’ leaving her husband ceased to astonish her neighbours though rural divorce rates never approached those of the towns.[44]
On the first anniversary of the October Revolution, Lenin made the point that the Bolsheviks deliberately confined their rural activities to bourgeois-democratic tasks as a stratagem to protect the socialist urban revolution while laying the ground for the later expansion of a socialist rural revolution.[45] By adopting a radical, revolutionary, but still bourgeois-democratic programme for the vast majority of the population, the Bolsheviks ensured they would hold onto governmental power. Nevertheless, we must remember that at this time the extension of the revolution into Europe was in the forefront of Lenin’s mind as the means by which the contradictions within Russia between the proletarian regime and petty-bourgeois peasantry would be resolved.
The great majority of the Russian population continued to engage in small-scale private production until collectivisation more than a decade later. How then could the revolution be called socialist? In the periods between revolutions, when progress is more gradual and linear, it is quite correct to say that state power cannot have a different class character from its economic base. In the last analysis the economic base and political superstructure must correspond, but in the highly turbulent and non-linear situations that constitute a revolution, it is perfectly possible, for a short period in historical terms (months, years, or even a decade), for the class that has seized power and destroyed the old state machine, to hold state power while re-ordering the economic base to its own requirements.
Lenin was well aware that the material conditions for socialism did not exist in Russia, but they did exist on a world scale and the revolution in Russia was part of the world socialist revolution. This was why Lenin placed such strong emphasis on the perspective of an international revolution, and why he devoted so much time and energy to the building of the Communist International. The Russian Revolution gave a massive impulse to, for example, the German Revolution. It was only the treachery of Social-Democracy that saved European capitalism and, incidentally, left Russia to face a dreadful famine alone.
4.5 Peace At Any Price
The army which the Bolsheviks inherited from tsarism had completely disintegrated: discipline had broken down; units were demobilising themselves; tens of thousands of officers had gone over to the reaction and would soon be fighting on the side of the counter-revolution. The Bolsheviks had won the support of the great mass of soldiers away from the SRs and Left SRs because they advanced a slogan of immediate peace. If they continued the war or attempted to engage in a revolutionary war against the imperialist powers, the soldier masses would have recoiled from them.
Initially, the Bolsheviks attempted to prolong the peace negotiations, in the hope that a revolutionary movement in the West would come to their assistance. Trotsky turned the negotiations into a platform for expounding the ideas of the revolution to the war-weary workers of Europe. Lenin weighed up the situation - the delay of the revolution in the West, the military weakness of the Russian Revolution, the likelihood of a new German offensive and, on 21 January 1918, proposed an immediate peace even on the disastrous terms offered by the Germans. The capital was transferred from Petrograd to Moscow in expectation of an attack by the German army.
German troops began to advance, Lenin called for the immediate signing of a peace deal and, with Trotsky’s support, gained a majority on the Central Committee. Only two Soviets, Petrograd and Sevastopol, supported Lenin’s peace plan, all others voted to break off the negotiations. On 21 February, new and harsher terms were announced by the German High Command, with the clear intention of making the signing of a peace impossible. The condition imposed by the peace treaty threatened a serious split within the party leadership, but peace was signed on 3 March. A group of nine on the CC, led by Bukharin and including Kollontai, adopted an ultra-left stance and came out in open opposition, going so far as to launch their own paper, The Communist. Lenin took the dispute to the party to resolve the matter, and the Seventh Party Congress on 6-8 March 1918, endorsed Lenin’s position. He was supported by a massive 453 votes to 36 in the Bolshevik delegation to the Fourth Extraordinary Congress of Soviets, which ratified the treaty on 15 March.[46]
Kollontai resigned from the CC and her Commissariat in protest. From that point forward she was on a downward path politically; her adventure at the Alexander-Nevsky monastery, and her resignation combined to reduce her status within the party to the point where she was removed from every public post.[47]
The peace deal represented a body blow to the new Soviet state. Russia’s population and farming land were reduced by a third. The Ukraine was surrendered, Russia’s grain basket, almost all her coalfields and over half her industrial centres were lost. To Turkey, the Bolsheviks ceded Butum, the main port of Georgia, and Kars and Ardahan in the Caucases.
The continuing allegiance of the masses to the new regime resulted from the overthrow of tsarist oppression, the division of the land, an end to participation in WWI, and an overwhelming belief that the new social system offered justice. Overlaying these factors was the huge support inherent in the mass participation in the October Revolution. The great majority of workers were convinced that the new regime would, in time, provide a better life for them and their children. Every one of these factors was especially felt by women.
4.6 First Code on Marriage and the Family
The Bolsheviks understood that legislation alone could never liberate women, but as a symbolic first step, The Code on Marriage, the Family, and Guardianship, ratified by the VTsIK in October 1918, swept away centuries of ecclesiastical and patriarchal power. It abolished the inferior legal status of women and established equality under the law. It gave civil marriage legal status and removed it from religious marriage. In the introduction the tasks of The Code were divided into three:
… first, those aggressively revolutionary provisions aimed at the destruction of the old order; secondly, there are the temporary expedients which, while recognising the stubborn survival of old conditions within the new order, operate to accelerate their disappearance; and, finally, there are here also truly socialistic forms, the constructive foundations of the new organisation.[48]
The Code was Marxist in its vision of freedom, independence, and equality of both spouses and the belief of its authors that it was seen as an important first step toward the eventual withering away of the family.
Modern feminists argue for the fairer division of housework within the family, and who can disagree with that, but those constructing the Marriage Code had a very different goal, the elimination of household chores, not to transfer a share of the woman’s burden to the man, but to transfer housework to the public domain; to totally reorganise the family (the relations of production and reproduction) as the only way to really eliminate gender conflict within the home. Under socialism, relations between partners would be based solely on genuine affection and mutual respect.
Washing must be done by a public laundry, catering by a public restaurant, sewing by a public workshop. … Then the bond between husband and wife would be freed from everything external and accidental, and … genuine equality would at last be established. The bond will depend on mutual attachment. And on that account, it will acquire inner stability, not the same, of course, for everyone, but compulsory for no one.[49]
The Code swept away centuries of property law and male privilege by abolishing illegitimacy and entitling all children, whether they were born within or outside a registered marriage, to equal rights and equal parental support. This was something of which Lenin was very proud. The Code attempted to detach the concept of marriage from that of family by making family obligations independent of the marriage contract. Looking to the future, the Code forbade adoption in the belief that the state would be a better guardian for an orphan than an individual family. Abolition of adoption was seen as the first step in transferring childcare from family to state, anticipating a time when all children would enjoy the benefits of a collective upbringing. Such a ban simultaneously attempted to deal with the immediate fear, based on extensive experience, that in a primarily agrarian society, adoption by well-to-do peasants meant exploitation of the child as unpaid labour, with some adoptees being returned to the orphanage at the end of harvesting.
The Code launched a new doctrine based on individual rights and gender equality that made it the most progressive family legislation the world had ever seen. Similar legislation concerning gender equality, divorce, legitimacy, and property has yet to be enacted across America or Europe. In accordance with the idea of marriage as a union between equals, the Code sharply restricted the duties and obligations of the marital bond. A woman retained full control of her earnings after marriage and neither spouse had any claim on the property of the other. Although the Code provided an unlimited term of maintenance for either gender, support was limited to those ‘unable to work’. The Code presupposed that the economic and social structure of the new state would be such that both parties, married or divorced, if healthy, would be able to support themselves.
Despite its radical innovations, the Code itself made clear that it was legislation “destined to vanish with the more perfect establishment of the socialist order”. The purpose of the Code was not to strengthen the family or the state, but it did propose the family as a temporary prop for those unable to work for as long as the state could not support them. Child maintenance, for example, was justified as necessary only by the present inability to organise a comprehensive programme of social welfare.[50]
While it preserved the family as the primary unit for bringing up children, the Code made important changes to the relationship between parents and children by replacing the authority of the father by parental rights which were to be “exercised exclusively for the benefit of the children”. The Code considered it went as far as it could, “taking into account the practical necessities of the immediate circumstances”. Not that the Code was without its critics. Rumours circulated in the countryside that the Bolsheviks wanted to take children away from their parents. Critics on the left challenged the Code with its formal registration of marriage and its maintenance payments as a bourgeois survival,[51] and argued that the entry of female wage labour into industry over the previous two decades had created the material preconditions necessary for women’s independence, for the rethinking of gender roles, and for a new conception of the family. The majority, however, responded that the socialisation of housework depended ultimately upon an adequate economic base and “the transformation of private domestic work into a public industry”,[52] and in the aftermath of the war that was not yet feasible. In October 1918, VTsIK voted the new Code into law.
During this initial period there was an intense debate between those who argued for free union as the way forward, and those who argued that free union meant lack of legal protection and exacerbated the vulnerability of women and children. The same arguments offered by Bebel and Engels on the need to socialise domestic labour would be repeated by Kollontai and Lenin. The issues of free sexuality and women’s vulnerability were to become crucial determinants in the direction of Soviet family policy. The most public test of the Code was the ratio of purely civil marriages to those with some religious content. The difficulties imposed by the civil war meant statistics were hard to come by, but by about 1925 civil-only ceremonies accounted for about half of the marriages that took place in the larger towns while nationwide the majority of all marriages were still either religious only, or civil plus religious.
In the cities and industrial areas this law on complete freedom of marriage is doing all right, but in the countryside it all too frequently remains a dead letter. There the religious marriage still predominates. … The status of women up to now has been compared to that of a slave; women have been tied to the home, and only socialism can save them from this. They will only be completely emancipated when we change from small-scale individual farming to collective farming and collective working of the land.[53]
Divorce was quite another matter. There was a huge backlog of those who, under tsarism, had been locked in miserable marriages and unable to divorce, marriages entered into in haste during the civil war, peasants who had journeyed to the cities and were discarding their family ties, and young people who saw marriage as a transitory process; a process of profound social change was taking place. Soon Russia had the world’s highest divorce rate and it showed no sign of levelling-off. Moscow had the highest divorce rate, 6.1 per 1,000 people, the figure for the peasant heartland, Black Earth region, was 1.1.[54] At that time, the only country with a comparable divorce rate was the USA with 1.5 divorces per 1,000 people.
During 1918 economic conditions steadily worsened. After four years of war, the country entered a devastating civil war which would last another three years. Women in towns and cities who had previously taken part in Soviet initiatives were now fully occupied with the search for food and greeted known Bolsheviks with demands that they produce the promised better life.[55] The leading women Bolsheviks, Armand, Kollontai, Krupskaya, Nikolaeva and Samoilova, obtained Lenin’s support and then CC endorsement for an All-Russia Congress of Women Workers, though Zinoviev and especially Rykov, voiced disapproval. It was agreed to reflect the unity of workers and peasants by adding “and peasants” to the title and inviting peasant women to attend. Yakov Sverdlov, Secretary to the CC, sat on the organising committee where he was of tremendous help, calling on party committees in the localities to publicise the Congress and elect delegates.[56]
The Congress was a hugely optimistic gesture in a country which was fighting for its very existence against imperialist aggression. The members of the organising group, mostly the Rabotnitsa editorial team, promoted the Congress, arranged the election of delegates and organised food and accommodation. There was a strong response from women in the countryside, the factories, and the Bolshevik Party. In the history of the struggle for Soviet power this Congress occupies a prominent place and was an enormous propaganda victory. It became the basis for an all-Russia apparatus within the Communist Party for conducting work amongst women.
Only 300 delegates were expected, but when the Congress opened there were over 1,000 women in their seats, many wearing army greatcoats with bullet holes, but all with a highly symbolic red neckerchief. The enthusiasm, optimism and commitment of these women can be judged by the tremendous personal effort required to travel hundreds, even thousands of kilometres across a war-torn country in turmoil, to reach Moscow. With over 800 unexpected delegates there was a crisis of accommodation. This was resolved in a direct manner. Kollontai gained permission to use the Hall of Soviets by threatening that the delegates would occupy it.[57]
Nikolaeva took the chair and Sverdlov gave the welcoming address, followed by Armand and Kollontai who both attacked domestic drudgery along much the same lines as Lenin:
Notwithstanding all the laws emancipating woman, she continues to be a domestic slave, because petty housework crushes, strangles, stultifies and degrades her, chains her to the kitchen and the nursery, and she wastes her labour on barbarously unproductive, petty, nerve-racking, stultifying and crushing drudgery. The real emancipation of women, real communism, will begin only where and when an all-out struggle begins (led by the proletariat wielding state power) against this petty housekeeping, or rather when its wholesale transformation into a large-scale socialist economy begins.[58]
Kollontai published the main points of her speech in a pamphlet ‘Communism and the Family’ which concluded:
The workers’ state needs new relations between the sexes, … the indissoluble marriage based on the servitude of women is replaced by a free union of two equals … united by love and mutual respect. … These new relations will ensure for humanity all the joys of a love unknown in commercial society, a love that is free and based on the true social equality of the partners.[59]
A generation earlier, Engels had pointed out in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State that ‘household bondage’ would end only when the individual family ceased to be the economic unit of society. But this would require an efficient large-scale industry with the means of production being common property. It had been assumed that under socialism there would be so-called ‘collective housework’ as proposed by Kollontai;[60] public dining rooms would largely eliminate the time spent buying food and cooking, communal living including crèche and kindergarten facilities would free women from “irritating and tiring domestic chores” and give parents flexibility in their daily lives. Free provision of birth control and corresponding education regarding abortion would give women control over their own bodies. However, the Soviet Union was not socialism; it was a transitional regime between a backward largely peasant economy and socialism, struggling for its very existence. In a society desperately short of all resources, Kollontai’s demands were ultra-left because they were unachievable.
Housework was, according to Armand, an “unbearable double exploitation”; Strumilin described it as “barbaric”; Bukharin and Preobrazhenskii called it “slavery”. While Lenin was alive it was frequently stated that women must be freed from housework.[61] It was only natural for Armand to take these ideas and integrate them into the programme produced by the ‘All-Russia Congress’, with the goal of drawing previously isolated housewives into clubs where they could be taught to read and write, given technical skills that could enable them to become economically independent, and to actively engage in communal activities.
The aim of the Congress was, of course, to win the support of working women for the Soviet regime. This would be achieved through the extension and/or defence of the rights of working women and mothers, and the establishment of collective living accommodation to minimise household drudgery. Kollontai’s message, however, had a sting in the tail for the more conservative elements within the party. Women themselves were to pro-actively demand the necessary resources to free women from housework and provide adequate childcare; women themselves had to take the initiative and push the government to prioritise these issues. In this Kollontai was echoing Lenin who had said: “the emancipation of the workers must be effected by the workers themselves, and in exactly the same way the emancipation of working women is a matter for the working women themselves”,[62] but she won few friends among the committee men.
The Russian Revolution had been sparked by women workers inspired by International Woman’s Day. At that time, in all major countries, women not only lacked the vote but were enmeshed in a thick web of discriminatory laws and sexist oppression. The Soviet government of October 1917 took swift action to end women’s oppression: women in Soviet Russia achieved full legal and political rights. Soviet law specified that women receive equal pay for equal work, whilst also providing on-the-job protection for them. Other laws protected and assisted mothers and assured full rights for children born outside marriage. It would take only a short time before abortion became legal and free. Women’s freedom of choice was also strengthened by the Soviet law, adopted in 1922, legalising relations among all consenting adults. Europe’s most backward country achieved more in five years than most advanced capitalist countries would accomplish by the new millennium.[63]
The Russian Revolution confirmed once and for all, the vital inter-relation between the emancipation of women and workers’ revolution. Soviet legislation at that time granted women in Russia a level of equality and freedom that has yet to be attained by most economically advanced ‘democratic’ capitalist countries. The fundamental question – reform or revolution – is as decisive for the liberation of women as it is for all the exploited and oppressed in class society. However, as Lenin would explain on numerous occasions, despite the new laws emancipating woman, she would continue to be a domestic slave, degraded by a crushing drudgery, chained to the kitchen until the proletarian state began an all-out struggle to abolish her inequality in both home and work, private and public life, through provision of public facilities such as catering, and nurseries.[64]
Bolshevik policy during and after the October Revolution not only wholeheartedly endorsed the emancipation of women, but put a special emphasis on bringing women, as women, into the work of the revolution. This was reflected not only in law-making but also practically through attempts to address women’s rights, the question of substantive equality, the issue of marginal sexualities and so on. However, at no stage was this an unchallenged process. There was a conservative current within Bolshevism on the ‘Woman Question’, which reflected the growing weight of the bureaucracy and was founded in the economic backwardness of Russia and the isolation of the revolution.[65] It would increasingly incorporate pre-revolutionary traditions into its practices which would lead to sharp conflicts in the party.
Endnotes
[1] See R. Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution.
[2] Quoted in L. Katasheva, ‘Natasha – A Bolshevik Woman Organiser’, In Defence of Marxism, 2017. Available at: https://www.marxist.com/natasha-a-bolshevik-woman-organiser.htm (accessed 4 January 2023).
[3] L. Trotsky, Stalin, Wellred Books, 2016, p. 306.
[4] C. Zetkin, ‘Lenin on the Woman Question’, Marxists Internet Archive. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/zetkin/1920/lenin/zetkin1.htm (accessed 4 January 2023).
[5] See R. Ellwood, Inessa Armand.
[6] V. I. Lenin, ‘To all Party Members and to All the Working Classes of Russia’, November 1917, LCW, Vol. 26, p. 303.
[7] See V. I. Lenin, ‘The Revolutionary Democratic Dictatorship of the Proletariat and Peasantry’, March 1905, LCW, Vol. 8.
[8] L. Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects, Wellred Books, 2020, p. 216.
[9] See O. H. Radkey, The Sickle Under the Hammer.
[10] See R. Wade, Red Guards and Workers’ Militias in the Russian Revolution.
[11] See E. Dune, Notes of a Red Guard.
[12] See R. Wade, Red Guards and Workers’ Militias in the Russian Revolution.
[13] V. I. Lenin, ‘The Constituent Assembly Elections and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat’, December 1919, LCW, Vol. 30, p. 264.
[14] V. I. Lenin, From a Publicists Diary, August 1917, LCW, Vol. 25, pp. 280-2.
[15] See S. Marik, Revolutionary Democracy.
[16] See A. Erh-Soon Tay, ‘The Status of Women in the Soviet Union’.
[17] S. Badcock, ‘Women, Protest and Revolution: Soldiers’ Wives in Russia During 1917’.
[18] ‘Political Program of the CPSU’, Marxists Internet Archive, 1919. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/history/ussr/government/1919/03/22.htm (accessed 4 January 2023).
[19] L. Trotsky, Writings of Leon Trotsky 1937-38, Pathfinder Press, 1976, p. 129.
[20] V. I. Lenin, ‘The Tasks of the Working Women’s Movement in the Soviet Republic’, September 1919, LCW, Vol. 30, pp. 40-6.
[21] See E. Waters, ‘The Bolsheviks and the Family’, Contemporary European History, 4(3), 1995, pp. 275-91.
[22] See M. Savage, ‘The Law on Abortion in the USSR’.
[23] F. Engels, Anti-Düring, Wellred Books, 2017, p. 377.
[24] See A. Ball, Abandoned Children in Soviet Russia 1918-1930.
[25] See J. Riordan, Women in Russia and the Ukraine.
[26] G. Batkis, ‘The Sexual Revolution in Russia’, In Defence of Marxism, 2018. Available at: https://www.marxist.com/the-sexual-revolution-in-russia.htm (accessed 4 January 2023).
[27] See D. Ransel, ‘Mothers of Misery; Child Abandonment in Russia’.
[28] A. Ball, Abandoned Children in Soviet Russia 1918-1930, University of California Press, 1996, p. pxiii.
[29] See C. Porter, Alexandra Kollontai: A Biography.
[30] V. I. Lenin, ‘Speech at the First All-Russian Congress of Working Women’, November 1918, LCW, Vol. 28, pp. 180-2.
[31] See R. Daniels, Red October.
[32] O. H. Radkey, Sickle Under the Hammer, Columbia University Press, 1963, p. 137.
[33] See J. Channon, ‘The Bolsheviks and the Peasantry’.
[34] L. Trotsky, The Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects, Wellred Books, 2020, p. 217.
[35] F. Engels, ‘The Peasant Question in France and Germany’, Die Neue Zeit, 1894. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894/peasant-question/ (accessed 4 January 2023).
[36] See V. I. Lenin, ‘Report on Work in the Countryside’, March 1919, LCW, Vol. 29.
[37] L. Trotsky, The Transitional Programme, The Classics of Marxism, Vol. 1, Wellred Books, 2013, pp. 199-200.
[38] See V. I. Lenin, ‘Preliminary Draft Thesis on the Agrarian Question’, 1920, LCW , Vol. 31.
[39] See C. Porter, Alexandra Kollontai: A Biography.
[40] See B. Evans Clements, ‘Working-Class and Peasant Women in the Russian Revolution: 1917-1923’.
[41] See B. Engel, ‘Women in Russia and the Soviet Union’.
[42] See ibid.
[43] See ibid.
[44] B. Farnsworth, ‘Village Women Experience the Revolution’, 1981, p. 5. Available at: https://www.wilsoncenter.org/publication/village-women-experience-the-revolution-1981 (accessed 4 January 2023).
[45] See V. I. Lenin, ‘Extraordinary Sixth All Russia Congress of Soviets of Workers’, Peasants’, Cossacks’, and Red Army Deputies’, November 1918, LCW, Vol. 28.
[46] See R. Daniels, Red October.
[47] See C. Porter, Alexandra Kollontai: A Biography.
[48] ‘The Marriage Laws of Soviet Russia’, 1921. Available at https://www.revolutionarydemocracy.org/archive/marriagelaws.pdf (accessed 4 January 2023).
[49] L. Trotsky, ‘From the Old Family to the New’, Pravda, 13 July 1923. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/women/life/23_07_13.htm (accessed 4 January 2023).
[50] ‘The Marriage Laws of Soviet Russia’, 1921. Available at: https://bannedthought.net/USSR/GeneralInfo-SocialistEra/TheMarriageLawsOfSovietRussia-1921-OCR.pdf (accessed 4 January 2023).
[51] See W. Goldman, Women, the State and Revolution.
[52] F. Engels, Anti-Düring, Wellred Books, 2017, p. 377.
[53] V. I. Lenin, ‘Speech at the First All-Russian Congress of Working Women’, November 1918, LCW, Vol. 28, pp. 180-1.
[54] See W. Goldman, Women, the State and Revolution.
[55] See B. Evans Clements, ‘Working-Class and Peasant Women in the Russian Revolution’.
[56] See A. Kollontai, ‘V. I. Lenin and the First Congress of Women Workers’.
[57] See W. Goldman, ‘Industrial Politics, Peasant Rebellion and the Death of the Proletarian Women’s Movement in the USSR’, Slavic Review, 55(1), 1996, pp. 46-77.
[58] V. I. Lenin, ‘From a Great Beginning’, June 1919, LCW, Vol. 29, p. 429.
[59] A. Kollontai, ‘Communism and the Family’, The Worker, 1920. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1920/communism-family.htm (accessed 4 January 2023).
[60] See A. Kollontai, Love of Worker Bees.
[61] See E. Waters, The Bolsheviks and the Family.
[62] V. I. Lenin, ‘The Tasks of The Working Women’s Movement in the Soviet Republic’, LCW, Vol. 30, p. 44.
[63] See J. Riddell, ‘Revolutionary Internationalism in Lenin’s Time’.
[64] See V. I. Lenin, ‘From a Great Beginning’.
[65] See F. Weston, ‘Stalinist Persecution of Homosexuals’.