5. War Communism, the Founding of Zhenotdel
October 1918 - August 1920
5.1 Introduction
No sooner had the revolution been successful that White generals, sponsored by one or other of the Allied powers, rallied tsarist officers and other dissidents to overthrow the Soviets. From May 1918, through 1920-21 a total of some twenty-one armies of intervention fought on Russian soil in support of the White counter-revolution. This included 13,000 American, 40,000 British, 4,000 Canadian, 12,000 French, 24,000 Greek, 70,000 Japanese, 12,000 Polish as well as Italian, Rumanian and Serb troops.[1] These imperialist interventions transformed a popular revolution into a bitter, destructive civil war and would result in the deaths of countless Russians; most of them women and children.
Under Trotsky’s overall leadership the Red Army was created and, one by one, defeated the three major White forces: Kolchak advancing from Siberia towards Moscow (July 1919), Yudenich advancing from Estonia on Petrograd (October 1919), and Denikin advancing from the Don region towards Moscow (March 1920). It was during this period that an opposition led by the conciliator Zinoviev, and the future leader of the bureaucracy, Stalin, coalesced, determined to undermine the prestige and authority of the newcomer and ‘former Menshevik’, Trotsky, the better to achieve their personal ambitions.
The progress of the civil war dominated all aspects of life in the party, so it was natural for Stalin’s faction to begin to take shape in the Red Army. Men were conscripted, women were not, but as many as 70,000 women volunteered, reflecting the massive support Bolshevik policies had amongst women.[2]
Stalin congregated around himself prominent party cadres such as Sergei Kirov, Vyacheslav Molotov, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, and Kliment Voroshilov, and opposed Trotsky in any dispute that arose, often inventing issues as when supporters of his group on the Pravda editorial board had the paper publish defamatory and totally untrue articles about how tsarist officers appointed by Trotsky were having the “best comrades … shot without trial”. These were complete lies, as was proved by a subsequent CC investigation which reprimanded both the author and the Pravda editorial board.[3] But mud sticks.
Towards the end of 1917 food was scarce, and by the start of 1918 there were severe food shortages in the larger towns. The peace deal had given Germany control of the Ukraine, cutting Soviet Russia off from a major source of grain and, to make matters worse, the White armies had their bases predominantly among rich peasants in the vast granaries of eastern Russia and amongst the Cossacks of the Don basin in southern Russia. Soviet Russia was also subject to an efficient and effective blockade, primarily by the British Royal Navy. The direct intervention of imperialist armies in support of the White counter-revolution, and the destruction they wrought, meant the Bolsheviks were forced to take draconian measures against the richer peasants to obtain the grain necessary to feed the towns and the Red Army. At a meeting in January 1918 of those responsible for feeding the Petrograd Soviet, Lenin introduced the idea of armed bands of soldiers and workers being despatched from the towns to seize the grain stocks he was convinced the rich peasants (kulaks) and their supporters were concealing in an attempt to overthrow Soviet power “as the result of famine”.[4]
Facing hostile forces in every direction, the Bolshevik regime, out of necessity, adopted a policy of intense centralisation and party control of virtually every aspect of society, nationalisation of industries necessary to maintain supplies to the armies, and the removal of decision-making authority from non-party organisations. The core of this policy, known as ‘War Communism’, was a system of forced requisitioning of grain from the kulaks accompanied by an extremely detailed and complex distribution of goods. When the Council of People’s Commissars issued the decree of 28 June 1918, nationalising all large-scale industry Soviet Russia entered the transitional phase between capitalism and socialism. The government had come to power by a socialist revolution, the forces of the bourgeois state (the army, police, etc.) had been replaced with the Red Army and a new police force recruited largely from the ranks of revolutionary fighters, both determined to defend the gains of the revolution; there was state monopoly of foreign trade (including currency); every important sector of the economy had been nationalised and was subject to a national plan based on social need not private profit.
To gain support for its policy of grain requisition, the VTsIK launched Committees of Poor Peasants (kombedy) who would be rewarded with half the value of the grain taken when they identified kulak grain stores. But many, if not the majority, of poor peasants had become middle peasants through land re-distribution, and the remaining poor peasants were no longer sufficiently numerous to be effective. The kombedy, failing to provide the grain expected, soon extended their activities beyond the kulaks, and increasingly came into conflict with middle peasants. The numerous and violent clashes this generated risked alienating the bulk of the Red Army, and on 2 December 1918, VTsIK issued a decree dispersing the kombedy and amalgamating them into the existing Peasant Soviets controlled by the middle peasants.[5]
The peasants (in their vast majority) rallied to the Red Army to protect their newly-acquired land, without which there would have been no Bolshevik victory. After the spring of 1918, and certainly for the duration of the civil war, the general attitude of the peasant masses to the Soviet regime was support for the Bolsheviks who ‘gave’ them the land, opposition to the communists who requisitioned their grain, but an overwhelming and deep hatred of the Whites because their victory would have meant the return of the landlords.
A major propaganda effort was launched, with responsibility given to leading women party members to rally support against the counter-revolution and raise morale. Kollontai was assigned to the textile factories in Kineshma on the Volga River. The women workers there impressed on her the sexual, social, and domestic oppression they were continuing to experience, and made it clear that they were expecting a great deal from the new regime. They also impressed her with the successes of their collective activities such as children’s canteens which Lenin praised as “everyday activities that could really emancipate women, really lessen their inequality with men as regards their role in social production and public life”.[6] With the memory of the 1917 Petrograd Women’s Conference still fresh in their minds, the lead group of Bolshevik women proposed a non-party All-Russia Congress of Women Workers to be held in Moscow in mid-November 1918 to round off their campaign.
5.2 The Red Army
In July 1918, Trotsky outlined his plans for a Red Army to the Fifth Congress of Soviets, including his decision to enrol former tsarist officers (30,000 in the final count) which generated a quite natural hostility among the Bolshevik rank and file.[7] Given the urgency of the matter, Trotsky did not mince his words, pouring scorn on those who opposed this initiative, ruffling more than a few feathers in the process. The opposition of many Old Bolsheviks to Trotsky’s proposals was overcome only by Lenin’s direct and forceful intervention.[8]
Despite his poor performance in 1917, Stalin was emerging as a central figure within the party. With Sverdlov’s death from influenza, Stalin was rapidly promoted to become the key organisational figure. The Eighth Party Congress agreed to Zinoviev’s proposal (made on Lenin’s behalf) that the CC should establish two notionally subsidiary bodies: a Politburo that would, in fact, soon come to decide all policies that mattered, and an Orgburo which was responsible for allocating resources to enact Politburo decisions. The Congress, with Lenin’s strong support, also confirmed Stalin’s appointment as Commissar of the newly-created Rabkrin, a body tasked with eliminating bureaucracy in the new state.
In his new posts, Stalin participated in the making of policy decisions, was responsible for allocating party resources to implement them, and in charge of the Commissariat which assessed how well he had done! Lenin’s advancement of Stalin to such a decisive position may have been the advancement of an efficient functionary but it showed a serious misestimation of the man. In June 1918, Stalin was sent to Tsaritsyn (later Stalingrad) to ensure food supplies to Moscow. Stalin had undoubted genius as an organiser and he energetically went to work to sort out the chaos he found. Tsaritsyn was a hot-bed of opposition to Trotsky’s policy of employment of former tsarist officers. The opposition was led by two of Stalin’s old friends and colleagues from his trade union activities ten years earlier in Baku: Voroshilov, commander, and Ordjonikidze political commissar of the Tenth Army. Stalin immediately gave them his support.[9]
In June 1919, Stalin rallied opposition to Trotsky on the CC to vote down Trotsky’s strategy of concentrating the Red Army’s forces against Denikin in the south. Then, at the CC meeting of 3-4 July, on Stalin’s suggestion, the Central Committee removed the Commander-in-Chief (CiC), Vatsetis, appointed by Trotsky. Furious, Trotsky offered his resignation. This was rejected by the Politburo but trumpeted by those such as Voroshilov and Ordjonikidze as an example of Trotsky’s personal vanity and capriciousness. The third part of Stalin’s manoeuvre to undermine Trotsky was the appointment of a new CiC at the 11 July CC meeting. Sergey Sergeyevich Kamenev, a known opponent of Trotsky’s war strategy and Stalin’s protégé, was appointed by forty-two votes to two. The new CiC now proposed to the CC his own strategy for the Southern Front against that of Trotsky. Having just appointed him the CC was obliged to back his plan. The Red Army fought bravely for six weeks but was overwhelmed by the combined forces of the Cossacks and White Army, which rapidly captured a large amount of territory; on 20 September Kursk was occupied, on 30 September the large and strategically important city of Voronezh was occupied, and on 14 October the Whites occupied Orel, only 250 miles from Moscow.[10]
Kamenev’s plan had obviously failed disastrously. The two CC meetings of 21 and 26 September accepted a return to Trotsky’s original strategy for the Southern front, though Sergey Sergeyevich Kamenev remained CiC.[11] Within a month the tide had turned, and by 1920, the Whites had been driven all the way back to the Crimea. With Denikin’s defeat, the Ukraine returned to Soviet control. However, the message assiduously spread within the party by Stalin’s clique was that Lenin, supported by Stalin, had stepped in to correct Trotsky’s reliance on tsarist officers and Sergey Sergeyevich Kamenev had led the army to victory.
In October 1919, General Yudenich, supported by the British, advanced rapidly from Estonia towards Petrograd. On 15 October at a meeting of the politburo Lenin, Stalin and Zinoviev proposed abandoning Petrograd and concentrating their forces around Moscow. Trotsky opposed this defeatism and the following day rushed to Petrograd to take personal control of a successful defence.[12] Britain and the other imperialist invaders re-assessed the situation and all, apart from the Japanese, had withdrawn their ground forces by the end of 1920.
For his inspired defence of Petrograd, the Politburo agreed to award Trotsky the Order of the Red Flag. Kamenev formally proposed that Stalin be given the same honour. Mikhail Kalinin asked: “For what? … why it should be awarded to Stalin.” Bukharin’s reply was instructive. “Stalin can’t live unless he has what someone else has”.[13]
There were many tens of thousands of first-class proletarians participating in the leading Soviet organs, but there were also numerous representatives of the intelligentsia and semi-intelligentsia. These had sincerely rallied to the revolution but retained many of the qualities and ways of thought characteristic of the petty-bourgeois: “a real historical ballast – already conservative, sluggish, complacent, unwilling to learn and even expressing enmity to anybody who reminds him of the need to learn”.[14] These, as Lenin agreed, because of their superior education were becoming an important factor in the new Soviet administration and a conservative influence within it.
5.3 First Congress of the Communist International
The Russian Revolution gave a mighty impulse to a revolutionary wave across Europe; workers and returning soldiers overthrew the Kaiser, broke-up the Austro-Hungarian empire, established workers’ councils in Germany, in Bavaria, Hungary and Italy and on Red Clydeside in Scotland. However, the Social Democratic, traditional, leaders of the European workers preferred class compromise to socialist revolution. Their actions led to a series of defeats that isolated the Soviet Union and threw it back on meagre resources to face economic, social, organisational, and cultural challenges of a magnitude never before confronted by any country.
The Soviet regime might have defeated the Whites, but the Bolshevik leaders understood that in the long term a Russian workers’ state could not survive on its own. Russia could begin an international socialist revolution but it would be completed by the European and American proletariat.[15] Before Stalin took power, it was the declared position of the Bolshevik Party, stated by Lenin again and again, that without a workers’ revolution in (particularly) Germany, the Russian Revolution was “doomed”.[16] Lenin wrote in a private letter to Trotsky and Sverdlov in late 1918, when the German Revolution was about to begin, saying: “Even if we all die, we must help the German workers bring about their own revolution”.[17]
The Russian Communist Party (RCP) appealed to communists of all countries to defend the Soviet regime by rallying to the revolutionary Third Communist International. The Communist International (CI – First Congress 2-6 March 1919), was launched to unite all genuinely revolutionary opponents of capitalism, and was an absolute necessity due to the disgraceful collapse into social-chauvinism of Social Democracy at the outbreak of World War One.[18] So tight was the imperialist blockade that only nine delegates from abroad, travelling the most circuitous routes made it to Moscow.
Before the newly-formed German Communist Party (KPD(S)), the most important of the European Communist parties, could meet to select delegates, the German government led by the Social Democrats (SPD) staged a provocation against the Berlin workers’ Revolutionary Committees. The response of the KPD(S), against the advice of Rosa Luxemburg, was to attempt an uprising. The result of this ultra-left adventure was a catastrophe. On 10 January 1919, the Freikorps (forerunner of the Nazi SA), and regular troops backed by heavy artillery moved into Berlin and decapitated the revolution. By 15 January, Liebknecht and Luxemburg were dead. Hundreds, even thousands, of workers were killed or wounded by shells and bullets.
Despite this important setback, the period before and after the First Congress was hugely optimistic. A wave of mass strikes and street fighting swept across Europe, and the expectation that the formation of a new International would accelerate the formation of mass national Communist Parties proved correct. Many of the newly-formed sections of the CI rapidly transformed themselves into mass organisations – the German VKPD claimed a membership of over 400,000 (December 1920), the Czech CP over 200,000 (December 1920), the French Socialist Party 140,000 (December 1920), the Italian Communist Party 60,000 (January 1921), the Bulgarian section over 21,000 (June 1919), and the Swedish section 17,000 (summer 1919).[19]
Of the fifty-one delegates to the founding Congress, three were women. The Congress affirmed the necessity for work among women in a brief statement: ‘Resolution on the Need to Draw Women Workers into the Struggle for Socialism’, moved by Kollontai and which can be summarised by its final words: “The dictatorship of the proletariat can be won and maintained only with the energetic and active participation of working-class women”.[20] The Bolshevik Revolution was presented as the beacon of hope to the world’s oppressed, not least to those “slaves of slaves”, the oppressed women workers and peasants, who were at last to take their place in history through the transformation of class society into a new, socialist world. Kollontai, in her assessment of the Congress, in a Pravda article on 7 March, argued that the abstract character of the statement should be given form by campaigning for International Working Women’s Day on concrete demands for the social and economic emancipation of women.[21]
Zetkin had remained in Berlin to attend the party conference (2-6 March 1919) of the USPD, a centrist break-away from the SPD, which had several hundred thousand members of whom Zetkin was one. Zetkin, the main speaker for the left wing of the party, launched a blistering attack on those USPD leaders who had supported the SPD government’s actions in killing Spartacists.
However, ultra-leftism was undermining revolutionary opportunities. Prior to the First Congress of the CI it was clear that in Hungary, workers and returning soldiers were moving towards the seizure of power, and soon after the Congress, on 21 March 1919, the Hungarian Soviet republic was declared. This lasted only until 1 August 1919 when it collapsed due to a combination of opportunism and ultra-leftism. To head off the revolution, the ‘wily old foxes’ of the Social-Democrats offered the recently-formed Communist Party unification. The inexperienced Communist leaders thought they saw the opportunity to take undisputed leadership of the entire working class, but instead they drowned the revolutionaries in the swamp of Social Democracy. Lenin by telephone and telegram pressed for a Congress of Soviets and challenged Béla Kun:
I regard this unification as dangerous. It would have been better to form a bloc of both parties in which both parties would preserve their independence. In this way the Communists would appear before the masses as an independent party. … and in the case of necessity, if the Social Democrats did not fulfil their revolutionary duties matters could be taken to the point of a split.[22]
The stance of the Hungarian Communists towards the peasantry was equally ill-judged – an ultra-left refusal to allow the seizure and distribution of the landlords’ estates amongst the peasants by the peasants – and was assessed by Lenin, thus:
… The establishment of the proletarian dictatorship hardly changed anything in the Hungarian countryside, the day-labourers saw no changes, and the small peasants got nothing. There are large latifundia in Hungary … part of which can be turned over to the small peasants … so that even the smallest peasant may get some part of the confiscated estates. Otherwise, the small peasant will see no difference between the old order and the dictatorship of the Soviets. If the proletarian state authority does not act in this way, it will be unable to retain power.[23]
The outcome of these opportunistic and ultra-left policies was the defeat of the Hungarian revolution and the slaughter of tens of thousands of workers. The fight against ultra-leftism would be a major theme at both the Second and Third Congresses of the CI.
5.4 The Founding of Zhenotdel
Despite Lenin’s and Kollontai’s efforts, many if not most Bolsheviks (men and women) still tended to see the ‘Woman Question’ as a diversion from the enormous tasks confronting them. Lenin took to task those party activists who paid lip service to the emancipation of women yet refused their own wives the opportunity to participate in party activities. A campaign was needed within the party itself to change attitudes to women. Lenin, addressing the All-Russia Congress of Working Women, again emphasised the need for women to participate in the revolution for it to be successful:
Comrades, … the Soviet government is doing everything in its power to enable women to carry on independent proletarian socialist work … because one of the hardest things in every country has been to stir the women into action. There can be no socialist revolution unless very many working women take a big part in it. … One of the primary tasks of the Soviet Republic is to abolish all restrictions on women’s rights. … Nowhere else in the world have equality and freedom for working women been so fully established … the experience of all liberation movements has shown that the success of a revolution depends on how much women take part in it.[24]
Note 71 in Volume 28 of Lenin’s Collected Works reports that the Congress adopted decisions on easing women’s conditions by developing social services, protection of child labour, to continue establishing commissions for work among women, etc. The commissions began immediately to establish crèches and public canteens, to agitate for maternity and other rights, to campaign for women to have access to higher education and to be recruited into higher grade jobs. An important slogan of the commissions was: “propaganda in deeds as well as words”. The commissions were, de facto, a special apparatus linking the party with the broad mass of backward working women. Their goal was to enlighten women politically and draw them into social activity. In practice, while the decision to set up the commissions was endorsed by the CC and a number of local party branches enthusiastically launched commissions to represent the interests of working-class and peasant women, it often took time to overcome the resistance of the many party organisations that were not sympathetic to the idea.[25]
Both Armand and Kollontai had left their own marriages to dedicate themselves to revolutionary activities, and their views on women’s sexual autonomy both expressed an understandable impatience that, unfortunately, was not supported by the resources available. Armand, in her speech to the 1918 Party Congress proposed that “the time had come to replace the household economy, and free women as housewives so that they could participate in Party, Soviet and other communal activity”.[26] True, but bled dry by World War One and faced with a civil war the Soviet Union had no resources available to carry through such a programme. Armand wrote in 1920 that until the old institution of the family was abolished it would be “impossible to obliterate exploitation and enslavement … impossible to create the new person; impossible to build socialism”.[27] Again, quite true but unrealisable in the prevailing situation. Both Armand and Kollontai correctly described the ultimate goals but failed to propose any path on how to achieve them.
By the end of 1918 the food situation was desperate; so grave that the majority of the urban population returned to their families in the villages. In October 1917, there had been some 400,000 industrial workers in Petrograd; by 1920 fewer than 75,000 remained. The population of Petrograd dropped from nearly two and a half million to just over a million. The situation was dire at every level in every major city and the same exodus was seen throughout Soviet territory.[28] Under the general oversight of Anna Ulianova-Elizarova, Armand, Krupskaya, Kollontai and Varvara Moirova (the daughter of an Odessa laundress), the commissions in Petrograd, Moscow and other cities began to organise and rationalise communal facilities to enhance the involvement of women in social, economic and political life. Feeding the population was a major part of their activities, and the commissions (later amalgamated into Zhenotdel) played a major role in feeding those remaining in the cities through the provision of free school meals, milk for children, communal kitchens and canteens, pregnancy consultation and maternity centres, and other services.
… In Petrograd during 1919-20 almost 90 per cent of the entire population was fed communally. In Moscow more than 60 per cent of the population are registered with the feeding-halls. In 1920 twelve million town-dwellers were served in one way or another by communal feeding centres.[29]
Kollontai’s figures might have been optimistic, but they were in the right ballpark, and these communal efforts were praised by Lenin as shoots of communism that had sprung into existence. He pointed to the organising talent to be found amongst working and peasant women, how they were capable of organised, practical work much better than “big-headed ‘intellectuals” or half-baked “Communists”.[30]
The commissions were a huge success in the cities and towns of European Russia, well-attended, with issues such as abortion and venereal disease openly discussed. As the work done by the commissions increased it became necessary to regulate this and make the work more efficient and thorough-going. A formal proposal was made to the CC to create a women’s department (Zhenotdel – Women’s Department of the Central Committee of the Russian Communist Party) to champion the cause of women. In September 1919, the CC of the party passed a resolution entitled: ‘On Work among Women Workers’ which made it binding on all party organisations from the CC down, to establish departments exclusively for work amongst women. This decision to launch Zhenotdel was taken when the Bolshevik government was most threatened during the civil war, with the Whites under General Denikin advancing on Moscow, and it confirms the importance with which it was viewed at the very top of the Bolshevik Party. In line with the CC resolution and in recognition of the importance of the work of the commissions, the Ninth Congress (April 1920) urged the strengthening of party work amongst urban and rural women and called on those party organisations that had not yet organised local Zhenotdel branches to do so.
The structure and funding of Zhenotdel were determined by the CC, but the decisions were made at a time when the regime was facing a crisis of such magnitude that the arrangements for Zhenotdel must have seemed relatively unimportant. Zhenotdel was to be funded indirectly, either through the party’s Department for Agitation and Propaganda (‘Agitprop’) or through local party committees. However, this decision meant Zhenotdel would always be a subsidiary organisation, with its cadres having their responsibilities and loyalties split two or even three ways if the party, Agitprop or Zhenotdel allocated different priorities.[31]
Armand and Kollontai, echoing Zetkin, argued that to mobilise working women in support of the Soviet regime, especially in a civil war, required involving them in decision-making, giving them a vision of the new society they were fighting for. They argued forcefully that culture did not mechanically follow economic progress, that the formation of a new class ideology does not wait for complete socio-economic collapse of the old regime but is worked out in the process of the struggle.[32]
During the civil war, under the leadership of Armand, Zhenotdel’s primary function was to mobilise women in support of the war effort and the Red Army. Many women had been accepted as members of the Red Guards, and this laid the foundation for a significant number of women to join the Red Army. These women soldiers fought on every front with every weapon and gained a particularly fearsome reputation as machine gunners. Vera Slutskaia, a former medical student, was active in founding and staffing an effective Red Army medical corps, the Red Sisters, consisting of more than 6,000 Bolshevik women, many of whom were medical students from Moscow. Their training contained important additions, politics and sanitation. For the first time a Russian army contained trained technicians to provide potable water and prevent such diseases as dysentery and cholera. The practical effects were significant, but the psychological effects were enormous.[33] To be a Red Sister near the front line was a brave act because the Whites’ treatment of captured nurses was especially barbaric and savage, including the ritualised mutilation of female bodies.
But Zhenotdel also had responsibility for tasks that would later become its major areas of work, such as food distribution and care of orphans. As previously mentioned, Russian society was reeling from the effects of the Great War, and by the end of the civil war it would have over a million homeless, abandoned, and neglected children to care for.
On the second anniversary of the Russian Revolution, it could genuinely be claimed: “more has been done to emancipate women, to make them the equal of the ‘strong’ sex, than has been done during the past 130 years by all the advanced, enlightened, ‘democratic’ republics of the world taken together”.[34] But while the Bolsheviks could be proud of achieving legal freedom and equality, ending the degradation of women could come only with the building of the new socialist society which was just beginning. Lenin repeatedly made the point that, in the Soviet Union, the real emancipation of women would not be accomplished by changes in the law but by the socialist transformation of production.[35]
Zhenotdel faced the formidable task of making women aware of their new rights in a society that was largely resistant to such ideas. For example, in January 1920, the Petrograd Provincial Zhenotdel investigated whether Bolshevik women spoke at meetings. They found fewer than one in ten did, demonstrating a widespread lack of self-confidence, and taken by Zhenotdel to confirm the need for ‘appropriate bodies’ for the political education of women, even within the party itself.[36] Clara Zetkin quotes Lenin as agreeing to the formation of Zhenotdel while simultaneously warning against any separate organisation for women:
Our ideological conceptions give rise to principles of organisation. No special organisations for women. A woman communist is a member of the Party just as a man communist, with equal rights and duties. Nevertheless, we must not close our eyes to the fact that the Party must have bodies, working groups, commissions, committees, bureaus or whatever you like, whose particular duty it is to arouse the masses of women … I am thinking not only of proletarian women, whether they work in the factory or at home. The poor peasant women, the petty-bourgeois – they, too, are the prey of capitalism … It would be absurd to overlook them, absolutely absurd. We need appropriate bodies to carry on work amongst them, special methods of agitation and forms of organisation. That is not (bourgeois) feminism, that is practical, revolutionary expediency.[37]
The party recognised two leading principles when establishing Zhenotdel. The double burden of working women and, for the remainder, social isolation in the home, meant special work among women was necessary to rally them behind the Communist banner. Secondly, this work must take place under the leadership of the party as the work of the whole party. Thus, Zhenotdel was intended to be a mobilising agent in support of party policies and, simultaneously, a lobbyist and organiser for women’s specific interests within the party. As bureaucracy grew within the party these two tasks came into increasing conflict and Zhenotdel came under considerable pressure to curtail the latter activities.[38] Thus, as she campaigned for the implementation of equal pay for equal work, Armand sought to assure the trade union leaders and certain party tops: “Women workers do not have specific female tasks, [they] do not have special interests which differ from the interests of the entire proletariat”.[39]
As with Rabotnitsa, Zhenotdel had a centralised hierarchy of full-timers. Initially, there were twenty-two paid staff (Director, Deputy Director, assistants, and secretaries), the Director was automatically advisor on matters relating to women’s health and welfare to the Ministry of Health and numerous other bodies including the trade unions. Zhenotdel was an integral part of the party, thus at national level the Director would report to the Orgburo, and so on down the hierarchical chain at every level in all the districts of Soviet Russia.
Armand created a flexible and democratic form of organisation for the Zhenotdel modelled on the Soviets. In the localities, at the base, there were Zhenotdel branches, consisting mainly of elected delegates, reporting to the local party organisation and, officially, under its discipline. Delegates were elected, usually at an enterprise or factory meeting with one woman delegate for every twenty-five to fifty women workers, depending on the enterprise. The elections themselves were intended to be the culmination of a campaign on some local issue of interest. In a situation where the women concerned had little or no experience of election procedures, for an initial period the elections were often ‘guided’ by Zhenotdel activists who would post lists of those deemed suitable for election. In urban areas selection meetings tended to be women only but in rural areas, possibly to give the process a degree of ‘respectability’, men were invited.[40]
The delegates were elected for three to six months; they attended weekly delegate meetings which received reports on the most important recent events and, in particular, party activities directly assisting the emancipation of women. Delegate meetings functioned as representative bodies, discussion forums and training centres, with the goal of mobilising support for current party and state campaigns. Activities also included, for example, building support for the party by organising literacy campaigns for women, hearing complaints from women and helping resolve conflicts, organising sales of Zhenotdel publications, and holding public meetings on relevant issues. The relative emphasis of the activities would depend on the specific conditions in the locality. Delegates would also sit on labour protection committees in order to improve working conditions in their own enterprises, or visit state institutions in order to become familiar with the methods and systems used in the state apparatus.[41]
Armand died of cholera on 24 September 1920, caught while in the Caucases recovering from exhaustion. One in eight women Bolsheviks were killed in action or died of disease between the October Revolution and the end of the Civil War.[42] In November 1920, Kollontai was appointed Director of Zhenotdel and in this capacity addressed the Eighth Congress of Soviets held the following month. It was at this Congress that she formally joined the Workers’ Opposition, an ultra-left tendency within the Party.
With the end of the civil war Kollontai faced the difficult problem of finding a new identity for Zhenotdel. With enormous energy and enthusiasm, she changed Zhenotdel’s direction to meet the new needs of the day, turning it from war work to social involvement: looking after orphans, feeding the population, and housing the community. But she also maintained a dimension that many conservative elements within the party found disturbing. She wrote that Zhenotdel had to: “put before the Party and promote in the sphere of Soviet construction those issues which arise … from the peculiarities of the female sex”.[43]
Its commitment to socialised childcare, gave Zhenotdel important responsibilities, for example, educating the masses of peasants in the care of babies, explaining that sunshine and fresh air were good for children, cleanliness was a child’s best friend, that using swaddling to restrict a child’s movements did not prevent the child being bandy, etc. Informative posters were placed in the new baby care clinics covering all aspects of mothering; designed to be striking, comprehensible and persuasive. The messages were delivered in ways that were in keeping with the times and today would seem heavy-handed: “Breast feeding of the baby by the biological mother is one of the iron laws of nature which cannot be broken without serious consequences” was accompanied by a poster featuring a bottle-feeding mother with a cemetery inset, and a breast-feeding mother beneath a scene of healthy little children playing games.[44] Zhenotdel had its own publishing house, but the written word could not be relied on to reach peasant women in areas such as Soviet Central Asia, where literacy rates amongst women were as low as 2 per cent, so books and magazines were complemented by slide shows, public talks and exhibitions in women’s clubs, the women’s corners Zhenotdel had created in the libraries and, of course, radio programmes.
Given that Zhenotdel was launched after the revolution, its tasks were significantly different from those of the SPD woman’s department or the original Rabotnitsa. Its over-riding responsibility was to mobilise masses of working women into active support of the new regime, women who the Soviets and party could not otherwise have reached. Thus, for example, when it became clear that the low level of literacy, particularly amongst peasant women, was a major obstacle to getting the party’s message across, Zhenotdel spent considerable efforts organising reading classes as part of its Down with Illiteracy! campaign, and so killed two birds with one stone.[45]
The work of the local Zhenotdel branches varied greatly with location. Generally, they were most active in the textile industries north and northeast of Moscow, but southwest of Moscow in the Bryansk locomotive plant, ninety-nine women delegates held regular weekly meetings to discuss and decide who would: submit material to the Bryansk Worker newspaper, wash local children in a bathhouse, and staff the ‘liquidation of illiteracy’ campaign. The Bryansk Zhenotdel’s annual report stated it had: “opened three illiteracy liquidation centres in the city and five in the countryside, held fifteen public lectures, staged eleven rallies, and convened five conferences with the total number of 7,100 women participants”.
Delegate assemblies provided the opportunity for women to voice their views. Most party speakers emphasised the legal gains made and the promise of future equality, but certain criticisms were repeated: why were women’s jobs the lowest-paid? Why were there so few childcare facilities attached to workplaces? But the power of the local Zhenotdel was limited, with no authority to intervene.[46] Their initiatives opposed by the trade union bureaucracy led by Tomsky, meant that on numerous occasions, women workers initiated protests and strikes, and took actions that even led to fist fights, a serious concern for the union bureaucrats because, on occasion, they were on the receiving end.
That Zhenotdel as a department of the Central Committee was meant to demonstrate its importance to the party as a whole, though many of Zhenotdel’s younger activists voiced their concern that assigning them the task of their own emancipation was in itself a sexual division of labour within the RCP.[47] Their criticism was that while Lenin advocated the promotion of women into full and equal partnership in society as a central task of the party, his efforts were to a significant degree undermined by the relative backwardness of Bolshevik Party members on this question. It is true that before 1917, neither Lenin nor any of the long-term leaders of the Bolshevik Party had written anything substantial on the ‘Woman Question’. Lenin’s support, for example, of a woman’s right to abortion and to initiate divorce proceedings were public displays of his appreciation of the double burden faced by women implicit in his call:
If women are not drawn into public service, into the militia, into political life, if women are not torn out of their stupefying house and kitchen environment, it will be impossible to guarantee real freedom, it will be impossible to build even democracy let alone socialism.[48]
After 1917, Lenin openly and severely criticised the chauvinism and philistinism of his own comrades, and these included those who had been his closest confidantes for nearly two decades. His illness and death meant it would be left to Trotsky to develop a rounded understanding of the role of the Soviet family. Trotsky represented the traditions and methods of Bolshevism so it was no surprise that in an increasingly conservative and bureaucratic party machine, he was the leader who developed the ideas of Bebel and Engels and applied them to a poverty-stricken Soviet state.
Trotsky had accurately analysed the class relations that would lead to a predominantly peasant country being the first to carry out a socialist revolution, but all things are dialectical and carry within them the seeds of their contradiction. The proletariat and, more so, the peasant masses, had only recently emerged from centuries of slavery and bore all the consequences of oppression, ignorance, and darkness. Thus, the low cultural and industrial level of the country after the revolution, greatly exacerbated by the civil war, had serious consequences for the position of women in society. The conquest of power does not, by itself, transform the working class; it is only when the working class has won power that the conditions are created for the transformation of life. But all real processes take time, and the lower the initial cultural level the longer such transformation of custom and habit takes.[49]
In June 1920 Zhenotdel launched its own journal Kommunistka, edited by Krupskaya and intended primarily for activists. Kommunistka was published monthly or bi-monthly with each issue containing between fifty to ninety pages of theoretical articles, news, reviews, reports, and calls to action. Its print run over the next decade would reflect the declining influence of Zhenotdel as the more conservative elements took control at the top of the party – from 30,000 on its launch to 11,000 at its demise. Zhenotdel also published its own local papers such as Rabotnitsa in Petrograd, Delegatka in Moscow, specialist papers such as Rabotnitsa i Krest’ianka (Woman Worker and Peasant >Woman) and, later, journals such as the Uzbek language journal YangiYo’l (New Life).[50] Working-class women were encouraged to become correspondents by submitting reports and letters. Using methods that had previously proved successful, these were used as material to teach women to read and write and equip them to take up positions as delegates to the local Soviets. This was, again, a two-way street as the women brought into public life were expected to promote awareness of specific demands relevant to women.[51]
To reach out more widely to women, Zhenotdel used stranichki, special pages devoted to women’s issues appearing in newspapers. Initially these were limited to national newspapers but had extended to some eighty local newspapers by 1921. The total claimed circulation of these would be just under 400,000. Typical stranichki appeared monthly and were produced with the aid of local Zhenotdel activists. They continued well after the closure of Zhenotdel in 1930 but with a more limited focus; practical household advice, fashion, and recipes with party propaganda only occasionally included.[52]
By 1921 there were, at any one time, tens of thousands of Zhenotdel delegates, primarily workers from factories and transportation. According to Krupskaya, some 2,000,000 Soviet women passed through delegate meetings in the decade before Zhenotdel was abolished.[53] Zhenotdel was a training ground in leadership skills, and many delegates displayed qualities that did not appeal to the ever more powerful party secretaries, increasingly appointees of the Orgburo, who were looking for unquestioning obedience not independent thinkers.
Zhenotdel delegates were not engaged in abstract debates, they were attempting to resolve immediate problems with no previous examples to follow. The writings of Bebel and Engels did provide a general framework to link the struggle for personal emancipation from the restraints of family and convention with the fight for socialist change. Advocates of women’s rights could point to Bebel’s critique of the bourgeois family as “a place of darkness and superstition”, and on sexual morality they could refer to his claim that “the sexual impulse is neither moral nor immoral; it is merely natural like hunger and thirst”. When they demanded economic and sexual independence, they could refer to Engels’ view that not only was women’s entry into productive labour essential but that involvement in “social production would transform sexuality” and quote Engels to the effect that women’s independent economic activity required an end to the bourgeois family.
But there was an insurmountable barrier to implementation. Bebel and Engels both predicated women’s transition to full equality on the transformation of the economic base to one in which the great majority of women could be gainfully employed. In the early 1920s, Soviet Russia was at the opposite end of the spectrum, fighting to avoid starvation and to keep even basic industries functioning.
The main theorists of the idea that the socialist revolution could not be completed without a radical transformation of daily life were Inessa Armand, Alexandra Kollontai, and Leon Trotsky. All three related social order to the gender question. In a series of articles published in Pravda in 1923 on ‘Problems of Life’, Trotsky pointed to the conservatism that characterised the so-called private sphere, the family and social relations between the sexes, arguing for the need for a radical overhaul. According to him, for that to occur, not only did husbands need a new awareness, but public authorities needed to take over housework and child-rearing:
… The emancipation of woman from household slavery, the social education of children, the emancipation of marriage from all economic compulsion, etc. – will only be able to follow on a long period of development and will come about in proportion to the extent to which the economic forces of socialism win the upper hand over the forces of capitalism.[54]
All three criticised male privilege and the gendered division of labour in the private sphere, with Kollontai’s critique extending to the emotional norms within the couple. She targeted the inequality inherent in the then dominant conception of love, which she saw as demanding women gave up a part of themselves, losing their individuality. Above all, she challenged the taboos surrounding women’s sexual freedom. For Kollontai, the ‘new woman’ (married or not) would make no secret of her natural physical drives. The rebellion of women against a one-sided sexual morality would be one of the most sharply delineating traits of the new heroine.[55] As Engels had noticed some forty years previously: “It is a curious fact that with every great revolutionary movement the question of ‘free love’ comes into the foreground”.[56] However, while Kollontai’s innovations are generally recognised as important, they had severe limitations. Unlike Trotsky who understood the limitations imposed by the dire lack of resources, Kollontai’s proposals were often unachievable which meant they led to disillusion in those who accepted them as good coin.
5.5 Second Congress of the Communist International, and First Conference of Communist Women
At the Second Congress of the CI (19 July-7 Aug 1920) the average age of the 218 delegates (of whom nineteen were women) was young, at about thirty-seven, with Lenin, fifty that year, being amongst the oldest. It was also hugely optimistic. The triumphs of the Red Army meant Soviet victory in the civil war was assured.
The important German Communist Party (KPD(S)), led by Paul Levi, was successfully moving towards becoming a mass party, getting rid of the worst of the ultra-lefts and working towards a merger with the left wing of the Social-Democratic Party. Levi had assimilated the lessons of the Kapp Putsch when, on the morning of 13 March 1920, 12,000 troops of the Ehrhardt Brigade, one of the most feared of the Freikorps units, marched into Berlin and declared the German Social-Democratic government overthrown. Without a shot being fired the government fled like rats leaving a sinking ship. Luxemburg’s analysis was confirmed, with only a parliamentary perspective the SPD leaders were paralysed when the counter-revolution took extra-parliamentary action.[57]
In Venezuela, it was the spontaneous uprising of the plebian masses of the barrios that defeated the coup, with at least sixty laying down their lives to defeat the reaction.[58] In 1920, the Kapp Putsch was defeated by a mass mobilisation of workers. Karl Legien, a right-wing leader of the main trade union federation, reluctantly called for a general strike. In an ultra-left reaction, the KPD(S) at first refused to support the strike but the great mass of workers threw themselves unhesitatingly into the struggle. On 15 March, the KPD(S) reversed its position and united action by trade unionists, social democrats and communists defeated the attempted coup in a matter of days.[59] This, and the events in Hungary, were worrying signs that the new, impatient, and inexperienced communists, believing in the imminence of a socialist revolution, considered that the defence of bourgeois democratic rights actually hindered the revolution. This ultra-left and erroneous theory of the offensive was promoted by Zinoviev and Bukharin, who held that the capitalist regimes of Western Europe were in such a state of decay they would collapse if only the national CPs pushed hard enough. Lenin responded by writing “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder, and having it circulated to every Congress delegate.
On 21 May 1920, a joint plenum of the Zhenotdel and the Orgburo was held to prepare for the first International Conference of Communist Women. The plenum appointed an editorial commission, consisting of members of the central Zhenotdel and editorial board of Kommunistka to conduct a preliminary review and suggest amendments to the Theses for the Communist Women’s Movement, drafted by Zetkin. The Russians expanded Zetkin’s draft by adding a lengthy criticism of the work amongst women carried out by the Second International. The Executive Committee of the CI (ECCI) met on 6 July and proposed Clara Zetkin as Head of the International Women’s Secretariat (IWS) and leader of the Communist Women’s Movement (CWM). It also fixed the forthcoming first International Conference for a weekend during the Second CI Congress, from 18.00 on Friday 30 July until Monday 2 August.
Three months prior to the Second Congress, on 25 April 1920, Poland invaded the Ukraine. On 26 May the Red Army began its counter offensive and soon reached the Polish border. On 17 July, Lenin pushed the Politburo (with only Trotsky voting against) to approve the Red Army march on Warsaw in the mistaken belief that the advance of the Red Army into Poland would inspire the Polish workers’ revolution. As the Second Congress opened the Red Army was advancing on Warsaw adding to the excitement of the occasion.
It was clear that the CI was facing two major tasks simultaneously. On the one hand, the CI had to drive away those Social Democratic leaders, such as the right-wing leaders of the Italian Socialist Party, who to retain their reformist hold on the workers’ organisations, were prepared to join in the near universal enthusiasm among working people for the Russian Revolution. The CI proposed the famous twenty-one conditions, requiring evidence of commitment in deeds as well as words. Lenin drove away those false ‘friends’ without whose treacherous instability the Soviet Union was better off. The twenty-one conditions gave the International a centralised structure, binding its member parties to enact the agreed strategy, but with the national sections free to determine tactical and day-to-day activities. Lenin may have seen the Russian Revolution as a model for future revolutions, but he stressed that concrete events in each specific country had primacy in day-to-day struggles.[60]
Simultaneously, the International had to train and educate the young leaderships of the emerging mass CPs to avoid ultra-left attitudes towards the SD Parties, existing trade unions, parliamentary elections, and bourgeois democratic rights. The fightback against ultra-leftism and for united front policies took place in three main areas: parliamentarism, trade unions and workers’ councils, and the agrarian question.[61] Despite parliament being an instrument of the bourgeois state, communists were required to participate in the parliamentary, electoral struggle in a way that helped the masses understand the need to break up the state machine, including parliament itself. It was also necessary to work within the reformist trade unions and not to attempt to split them unless it was “in the concrete, immediate interest of advancing the working classes’ economic struggle”.[62] Communists were to support shop stewards and other factory committees but were not to attempt to establish revolutionary workers’ councils (Soviets) unless specified political preconditions existed. An example of this discussion was the decision to work with and within the British Labour Party. The other important area of fightback against ultra-leftism was the attitude to adopt to the peasantry. The failure of the Hungarian Revolution to distribute land to the peasants had been a major factor in its defeat. A similar attitude had contributed to setbacks in Finland, Latvia, and Lithuania. As the Congress was ending Lenin was sending telegrams to the CC of the Polish Communist Party pleading for it to allocate the great estates to the land-hungry, poor peasants.[63] The failure to comply was a significant factor in the victory of reaction in Poland.
Twenty-one women representing nineteen countries attended the First Conference of Communist Women to discuss ‘women’s issues’ within the framework of the policies determined by the Second Congress of the CI. The Conference was organised and chaired by Inessa Armand and was a significant factor in the undermining of her health that led to her death on September 24. To work alongside Zetkin, the Conference elected an IWS composed of six Russians; Kollontai, Krupskaya, Samoilova, Stal’, Zlata Lilina, and a woman known only as Similova (possibly a pseudonym), with Henriëtte Roland-Holst from Holland and Rosa Bloch from Switzerland. The IWS had its headquarters in Berlin. Zetkin had remained in Germany and helped lead a successful campaign that won the majority of USPD members to the Communist Party. She was tasked, with the help of Kollontai and Sofia Smidovich, with re-structuring the Theses for the Communist Women’s Movement and to present them to the ECCI on which she sat as a member. The document was published in the CI theoretical journal, Communist International in December 1920. The Theses highlighted that for:
… full social equality with men in reality (and) to win the possibility of unrestricted development of women’s full human personality … private property must be uprooted and replaced by social property … the activity of women must be integrated into the social production of a new order free of exploitation and subjugation.[64]
The IWS was tasked with assisting in the formation of national women’s commissions, which would encourage work directed at women, down to a branch level, and to call periodic coordinating conferences of communist women. The commissions were open to all party members, and while men were invited to attend, they usually stayed away. Structures for work among women were established in the early 1920s in almost all European Parties where communists could work legally. Large numbers of women were recruited, more than 100,000 joined the Communist International. The proportion of women among party members ranged from a high of 20 per cent in Czechoslovakia and Norway down to about 2 per cent in France and Italy. In Germany and Russia, it rose gradually through the 1920s to 17 and 14 per cent, respectively.
From the start the IWS emphasised its international character through two main campaigns: building International Women’s Day and support for International Workers’ Aid for Soviet Russia, emphasising aid to Soviet women. The exchange of experience and information among different countries was an important aspect of its work and this was achieved via a bi-monthly international magazine, Communist Women’s International edited by Zetkin. The magazine was complemented by national and even local communist women’s publications and became a formidable educational tool, consistently and vociferously advocating a united front policy. In the five years of its existence, from 1921 to 1925, the magazine published twenty-five issues, containing reports of the women’s movement in different parts of the world, with extensive coverage of what was happening in Soviet Russia, but chief on its agenda was the ongoing promotion of International Women’s Day as a global revolutionary event. Other issues on which there were regular articles included agitation against fascism.
The Theses laid out tasks for the CWM, but these depended on where the work was to be undertaken, pre-capitalist, capitalist, or socialist countries. A unifying theme was the need to transform housekeeping – backward, deforming, and stultifying – into a social activity. For the first time the issue of housekeeping and the domestic division of labour appeared as part of a socialist programme for women’s emancipation. Much was made of the recognition by Lenin and Kollontai of housework as a major cause of women’s subordination, and that in Soviet Russia women’s commissions were providing public amenities, child day-care, public kitchens and canteens, communal laundries, etc., to free women from domestic labour. The Theses put the ‘Woman Question’ at the centre of the socialist project, underlining that women’s emancipation was not only a consequence but a goal of socialist transformation. The perspective of freeing women (and men) from housework, offered a quite different perspective to the ‘Wages for Housework’ campaign that became popular in the 1970s and has re-appeared recently.[65]
The published Conference summary emphasised that all communist parties should immediately begin to engage in the broadest, most intensive work among the masses of proletarian women who remained outside the orbit of the party. It was agreed that, in suitably adapted forms the two highly effective methods of work among women introduced by Armand; delegate assemblies and non-party women’s conferences, be introduced in all countries.[66]
The Theses were unambiguous: “the demands of the bourgeois women’s movement have proved incapable of securing full rights and humanity for the whole of womankind as these aimed merely at reforming the capitalist order for the benefit of wives and daughters of the possessing classes”.[67] That did not mean that communist women were against all co-operation with bourgeois feminists. Where feminists demanded the right to vote without property qualifications they were to be supported, though, as Kollontai had pointed out, “for the feminists the achievement of equal rights with men within the framework of the contemporary capitalist world [was] a concrete ‘end in itself’; for proletarian women equal rights [was] a means to be used in the continuing struggle against the economic enslavement of the working class”.[68] However, Zetkin’s opposition meant the Theses did not address the issues of reproductive rights and abortion.
Communist women were not sectarian, they were ready to co-operate with bourgeois feminists on specific issues to the benefit of working women. Communist women were active in the campaign against anti-abortion laws, particularly in France and Italy, making great play of the fact that the Soviet government had decriminalised abortion and made the procedure freely available. In Denmark they established the Working Women’s Information Bureau, which made information on birth control available to women. In Canada, communists joined with non-communist women to demand the de-criminalisation of fertility control and establishment of ‘Mothers Clinics’, to provide information on contraception and free contraceptives. These initiatives often had a spontaneous grassroots character, with the IWS encouraging communist women’s sections outside Russia to participate and circulate Soviet literature on abortion provision.[69]
Within a week of the Second Congress the Red Army beat a hurried retreat from Poland having suffered an ignominious defeat. Lenin himself later admitted privately to Zetkin that Trotsky’s arguments had been correct. In the wider party, Stalin’s coterie spread the story that Trotsky’s criticism was another example of his egotism and ongoing opposition to Lenin. The methods of the group around Stalin: lies, slander and innuendo were signs of what was to come. In her published report of the interview, Zetkin had Lenin ascribe the views expressed by Trotsky to Radek.[70] In 1924, to say that Trotsky had been right on any issue would have led to conflict with Stalin and Zinoviev, and that would have endangered her position on the IWS and CWM.
In Germany, meanwhile, the centrist USPD had grown rapidly, its membership reaching over three-quarters of a million by the summer of 1920, with a growing body of members who wanted the USPD to adopt a revolutionary perspective and adhere to the Third International. Between 12 and 17 October 1920, 392 USPD delegates gathered at Halle to hear Zinoviev speak and decide whether the USPD should affiliate to the Third International and, if so, whether it should fuse with the KPD(S). Zetkin’s twenty minute intervention has been described as decisive.[71] A total of 234 delegates voted for affiliation to the Comintern and fusion with the KPD(S), 158 voted against and walked out to re-join the SPD. By the end of the year over 300,000 USPD members had joined the KPD(S) to form the United Communist Party of Germany (VKPD) which, soon after the Third CI Congress in 1921, simplified its name to Communist Party of Germany (KPD).
Endnotes
[1] See T. Grant, Russia: From Revolution to Counter-Revolution.
[2] See L. Stoff, They fought for the Motherland: Russia’s Women Soldiers in World War I and the Revolution.
[3] R. Segal, The Tragedy of Leon Trotsky, Peregrine Books, 1983, p. 232.
[4] V. I. Lenin, ‘Report on Combating the Famine’, June 1918, LCW, Vol. 27, p. 428.
[5] See E. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution.
[6] V. I. Lenin, ‘A Great Beginning’, July 1919, LCW, Vol. 29, p. 430.
[7] See L. Trotsky, My Life.
[8] See T. Cliff, Trotsky.
[9] See A. Barmine, One Who Survived.
[10] See P. Kenez, Civil War in South Russia 1919-1920.
[11] See T. Cliff, Trotsky.
[12] See R. Segal, The Tragedy of Leon Trotsky.
[13] B. Souvarine, Stalin: A Critical Survey of Bolshevism, Alliance Book Corporation, 1939, p. 244.
[14] L. Trotsky, ‘Scientifically or Somehow: A Letter to a Friend’, The Military Writings of Leon Trotsky, 1918. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1918/military/ch26.htm (accessed 4 January 2023).
[15] See V. I. Lenin, ‘Farewell Letter to the Swiss Workers’.
[16] V. I. Lenin, ‘Report of the Central Committee’, March 1919, LCW, Vol. 27, p. 98.
[17] World Revolution and Early Soviet Society, [YouTube] Birkbeck University of London, UK: Social Histories of Revolution, 2017.
[18] See V. I. Lenin, ‘The Third International and its Place in History’.
[19] See R. Sewell, Germany 1918-1933: Socialism or Barbarism.
[20] A. Kollontai, ‘Resolution on the Role of Working Women’, March 1919. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/1st-congress/women.htm (accessed 4 January 2023).
[21] See J. Riddell, Founding the Communist International.
[22] Quoted in A. Woods, ‘The Hungarian Soviet Republic of 1919: The Forgotten Revolution’, In Defence of Marxism, Issue 25, 2019, p. 19.
[23] V. I. Lenin, ‘Terms of Admission to the CI’, July 1920, LCW, Vol. 31, pp. 249-250.
[24] V. I. Lenin, ‘Speech at the First All-Russian Congress of Working Women’, November 1918, LCW, Vol. 28, pp. 180-182.
[25] See W. Goldman, ‘Industrial Politics, Peasant Rebellion and the Death of the Proletarian Women’s Movement in the USSR’.
[26] Quoted in R. Ellwood, Inessa Armand, Cambridge University Press, 1992, p. 238.
[27] Quoted ibid, p. 249.
[28] See V. Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary.
[29] Quoted in R. Schlesinger, Changing Attitudes in Soviet Russia, Routledge, 1949, pp. 48-53.
[30] V. I. Lenin, ‘A Great Beginning’, July 1919, LCW, Vol. 29, p. 430.
[31] See M. Patterson, ‘Red Teaspoons of Charity: Zhenotdel, Russian Women and the Communist Party, 1919-1930’.
[32] See A. Kollontai, Sexual Relations and the Class Struggle.
[33] See A. Hillyar, Revolutionary Women in Russia 1870-1917.
[34] V. I. Lenin, ‘Soviet Power and the Status of Women’, November 1919, LCW, Vol. 30. p. 122.
[35] See V. I. Lenin, ‘From a Great Beginning’.
[36] See M. Patterson, ‘Red Teaspoons of Charity: Zhenotdel, Russian Women and the Communist Party, 1919-1930’.
[37] Quoted in C. Zetkin, ‘Lenin on the Women’s Question’, Marxists Internet Archive, 1925. Available at: https://www.marxist.com/lenin-on-womens-question.htm (accessed 4 January 2023).
[38] See D. Atkinson, Women in Russia.
[39] Ibid, p. 39.
[40] See M. Buckley, Women and Ideology in the Soviet Union.
[41] See A. Kollontai, ‘The Woman Worker and Peasants in Russia’.
[42] See B. Evans-Clements, Bolshevik Women.
[43] M. Patterson, ‘Red Teaspoons of Charity: Zhenotdel, Russian Women and the Communist Party, 1919-1930’, University of Toronto, 2011, p. 9.
[44] E. Waters, ‘The Modernisation of Russian Motherhood: 1917-1937’, Soviet Studies, 44(1), 1992, pp. 123-135.
[45] See B. Clements, ‘The Utopianism of Zhenotdel’.
[46] R. Stites, The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia.
[47] See C. Porter, Alexandra Kollontai: A Biography.
[48] V. I. Lenin, ‘Third Letter from Afar’, March 1917, LCW, Vol. 23, p. 320.
[49] See L. Trotsky, ‘Scientifically or Somehow: A Letter to a Friend’.
[50] See A. McShane, ‘Bringing the Revolution to the Women of the East’.
[51] See M. Buckley, Women and Ideology in the Soviet Union.
[52] See A. Rowley, ‘Spreading the Bolshevik Message? Soviet Regional Periodicals for Women, 1917-1941’.
[53] See M. Patterson, ‘Red Teaspoons of Charity: Zhenotdel, Russian Women and the Communist Party, 1919-1930’.
[54] L. Trotsky, ‘Habit and Custom’, Pravda, July 1923. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/women/life/23_07_11.htm (accessed 4 January 2023).
[55] See A. Kollontai, ‘New Woman’.
[56] F. Engels, ‘The Book of Revelation’, Marxists Internet Archive, 1883. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/subject/religion/book-revelations.htm (accessed 4 January 2023).
[57] It was ever thus. We are lucky to have a first-hand record of such an event made by an Irish camera crew of the behaviour of a reformist government during an attempted coup in Venezuela in April 2002. The documentary can be seen on YouTube under the title Hugo Chávez – The Revolution will not be Televised. As Chávez and his cabinet were meeting the military delivered an ultimatum, “surrender or we bomb the palace”. Chávez was ‘arrested’ and led away. The cabinet was paralysed. They made no attempt to rally support or to organise against the coup. Instead, they said things like “The game is up”, “They were too strong for us”. The best that was recorded was: “The people are with the president, they’ll defend him – you’ll see”. There was no concept that they, themselves, should lead a fightback against the coup – the words ‘headless’ and ‘chicken’ spring to mind. But the lack of leadership in 1920 and again in 2002 were no accidents; reformist ministers govern under the illusion that they control the state, when the facade collapses, they collapse with it.
[58] See A. Bellow, ‘Chavez Rises from a very Peculiar Coup’.
[59] See R. Sewell, Germany 1918-1933: Socialism or Barbarism.
[60] See V. I. Lenin, “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder.
[61] See J. Riddell, Second Congress of the Communist International.
[62] ‘Theses on the Trade Union Movement, Factory Committees and the Third International’, Minutes of the Second Congress of the Communist International. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/history/international/comintern/2nd-congress/doc04.htm (accessed 4 February 2023).
[63] See V. I. Lenin, ‘Telegram to the Polish CC’.
[64] J. Riddell, Workers of the World and Oppressed Peoples, Unite! Proceedings and Docsuments of the Second Congress: 1920, Pathfinder Press, 1991, pp. 1233-1258.
[65] See D. Rey, ‘Is Housework an “Unpaid” Job?’, In Defence of Marxism, 2021.
[66] See C. Zetkin, ‘Report on Communist Women’s Movement’.
[67] J. Riddell, Proceedings and Documents of the Second Congress, p. 1235.
[68] A. Kollontai, ‘The Social Basis of the Women’s Question’, Marxists Internet Archive, 1909. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/kollonta/1908/social-basis.htm (accessed 4 January 2023).
[69] See E. Waters, ‘The Communist Women’s Movement 1920-1943’.
[70] See C. Zetkin, Reminiscences of Lenin.
[71] See M. Boxer and J. Partington, ‘Clara Zetkin: National and International Contexts’.