7. Objective Circumstances Limit Bolshevik Aspirations
1921-23
7.1 Introduction
The years 1914-23 were one demographic catastrophe after another for Russia and the Soviet Union. In round numbers, two and a half million were lost in the World War, another million died in the Civil War, and one and a half million were lost to typhus, influenza and cholera. Then in 1921-22 came the disastrous famine in the Volga region. The American Relief Administration, the only officially sponsored external organisation, estimated about two million died of hunger and associated diseases, a figure lower than some Soviet agencies. The famine threw into the sharpest relief the contradiction between the aspirations of the Communists and the enormous difficulties of trying to achieve them in a backward country left isolated after the revolutions in Germany and other countries had been defeated.
The Soviets had won the Civil War, but the country was in ruins – the severity of which cannot be over-emphasised – because this was at the root of the bureaucratic degeneration that led, eventually, to the horrors of Stalinism. In an isolated revolution in an economically and socially devastated country, was it a utopian dream to successfully achieve the emancipation of women? Faced with a series of economic crises, each of catastrophic proportions, the revolution had no material means of establishing socialised alternatives to domestic work and childcare. Was the best that could be achieved a constitution that gave women full legal equality? No! For women especially, the October Revolution was a moment in history:
… when everything seems possible, when it seems possible to re-think how we structure the world, the distribution of wealth and resources, patterns of exploitation and injustice, and even the most basic human relationships. These moments do not come often, but when they come, they bring a heady sense of promise and possibility for change. The Russian Revolution in 1917, was one of the greatest of these moments …[1]
The Revolution and the Civil War galvanised the masses, especially women. The result was a rapid and radical shift in women’s (especially urban women’s) sense of identity. This would eventually reach out into the country, but more slowly. Women were realising big changes in their lifestyles, not least of which was legal equality with men, and all the rights this gave them. It has been said that many women saw the greatest gains from the revolution in their personal lives, freedom to divorce and the protection given to women from wife-beating.[2] The Bolsheviks had a long history of defending working women from abuse, and after the revolution when Zhenotdel had gained a real authority, this became an important area of work, not least because many women joined Zhenotdel against the wishes of their partners. As the lyrics of a popular song of the time said: “Now we have Soviet power / My husband I don’t fear”. Recruitment figures show Zhenotdel was taking the party into the mass of working women, but the hostile reaction of the more conservative party tops that represented the rising bureaucracy showed it was not so successful at taking women’s concerns into the party.
From being almost invisible, women became an important focus of attention and, thanks to Zhenotdel’s Down with Illiteracy campaign, millions of worker and peasant women became regular readers – helped by the nationalisation and promotion of libraries, as well as the introduction of new mobile library services, all of which received Bolshevik publications free of charge. As a result of the literacy campaign some 40 per cent of urban working women spent over ten hours per month on reading newspapers, journals and magazines, with younger readers enthusiastically supporting the “heroine social activist”.[3] No longer did the heroine yearn for her lover and swoon in his presence; now determined women took action to resolve the problems of life.
7.2 The New Economic Policy and Urban Women
The NEP was a necessary retreat to protect the Soviet Union, and in such situations, it is inevitable that some retreat more than others. The introduction of the NEP did adversely affect the economic position of urban women, but within a general setting of massive social gains. For women life was being turned upside down – equality in marriage, no longer a chattel of her husband, freedom to initiate a divorce and, by no means least, control over her own body. Women elected women to responsible posts within their local Soviet, read how women were being appointed to senior government positions, saw women stepping into the social limelight in their own right, as judges, academics, authors and designers. Literary works by women became widely available. Nowhere else in the world were there so many educational and training opportunities offered, nor so many women active in the public domain.[4]
In his articles and speeches at this time, Trotsky explained many times that socialisation of housework through the provision of public laundries, public restaurants, and public care of children, were impossible without a substantial improvement in the economy. He pointed out that compared to 1913 “when Russia was considerably richer than we are now”, infant mortality in the Moscow region had been halved.[5] The reason was the new social structure and new attitudes, described by Ivan Stepanov, Head of the State Publishing House, and a former elementary school teacher, writing in 1924:
During the years of War Communism we managed to feed the children collectively. All we adults were insanely and dreadfully hungry, but we could justly say to the whole world: the children are privileged citizens of our republic. We could say that we were moving towards the realisation of freeing love from those crippling and killing elements, freeing love from economics and women from household slavery.[6]
The millions of women who benefited from these changes were a solid base of support for the new regime.
The necessity for female labour during WWI and the civil war meant the number of women employed as industrial workers had increased steadily until, by 1921, they were 46 per cent of the total workforce. This had strengthened women’s bargaining power and given muscle to Zhenotdel’s demands. However, the workers, who in their hundreds of thousands had flooded into the Red Army and Bolshevik Party to defend the Revolution, demanded their old jobs back when they returned home. Many of these men, including party members and trade union leaders, had retained prejudices from tsarist times regarding women and the family and wanted to return to a more traditional life, with women back in the home.
Zhenotdel would fight case after case for equal pay, for access to more skilled jobs, for women having access to training programmes, against women being the first to be laid off in cut-backs, and against the sexual harassment of women. The argument that due to the war many women had become their family’s sole breadwinner won few friends among trade union leaders and factory managers. All too often the trade union leaders argued that to bring up women’s equality at a time of such chaos was irresponsible; a luxury that could not be afforded.
The introduction of the NEP benefited the petty-bourgeois kulaks and NEPmen (capitalist speculators hostile to socialism), who grew wealthy. The impact of the NEP was immediate. Victor Serge in his Memoirs of a Revolutionary recalled how, in Moscow, from one week to the next, the famine and the speculation diminished perceptibly with restaurants re-opening and “pastries which were actually edible were on sale”.[7] With the end of requisitioning, the 1922 harvest was a good one and although food was by no means plentiful the famine of 1921 was well and truly over.
Of course, workers and their families longed for an end to hunger, disease and deprivation, and the economic revival under the NEP made this possible. In 1920 real wages were about one-fifth of what they had been prior to the war, by the spring of 1922 they were about half, and by 1925 they were back to 1913 levels. Food consumption showed a similar pattern with agricultural production also reaching pre-war levels in 1925. However, the delay in achieving the living standards that existed pre-1914, after all their ordeals and heroic efforts, greatly increased the cautious, sceptical, and conservative tendencies amongst the workers.[8]
Light industry which directly supplied the peasants with consumer goods was largely in private hands and underwent an initial boom. For industry to expand, more workers had to be employed and fed. Grain supplies to the towns had to be increased, and this increase came overwhelmingly from kulak farms. The more industry expanded, the greater was the pressure for the kulaks to acquire more land and hire more labour. The NEP, with its reliance on market forces, increased the domination of the kulaks whose resurgence was greatly strengthened because they had the largest and most fertile farms and the capital necessary for equipment, horses, and fertiliser. Under the NEP they made huge profits, and the difference between the rich and poor in the villages began to grow at an alarming rate, with the associated danger of increasing political opposition to the workers’ state.[9] The process of equalisation of holdings and resources that had taken place after October and intensified during War Communism was suddenly reversed. According to Carr:
In the first place, NEP had brought into the open the mass of private traders who had eked out an illegal existence in the penumbra of war communism, and encouraged the appearance of many more, so that the great bulk of retail trade was now conducted by private traders … Figures compiled in early 1924 showed that 83.4 per cent of retail trade was in private hands, leaving 10 per cent to the cooperatives and only 6.6 per cent to the state organs and institutions.[10]
The commanding heights of the economy remained in the hands of the state, but the NEP increased the political and economic strength of the kulaks and NEPmen to the detriment of the poor peasants and the proletariat. The rapid enrichment extended beyond the kulaks, shopkeepers, and traders to a significant number of party and state officials. In 1920, the government ruled that the highest-paid managers should earn no more than four times the minimum wage. With the advent of NEP that ratio was increased to eight times. Many of these people were Communist Party members and were expected to donate earnings above that of a skilled worker to party funds. But a survey carried out in 1924 showed that more than 80,000 state officials admitted to earning more than the upper limit, 15,000 were on more than 15 times, and 1,500 on 30 times the minimum – to say nothing of undisclosed, corrupt and illegal earnings, which everyone believed were widespread.[11]
The NEP inherited, and in its initial phase, introduced a mass of progressive labour legislation. Women thus faced great contradictions, the steps towards equality via the enhancement of their legal and social position were largely offset by the impoverished state of the country which imposed severe limits on what could be put into practice.
The net effect was that Zhenotdel was successfully recruiting women to the Communist Party. These women were predominantly workers, so that the proportion of female members who were working class increased from about a third at the time of the revolution to a majority.[12]
Male membership had also increased, with some fluctuations due to purges of drunkards, etc., but women’s membership had increased at a much faster rate. Patterson shows that in 1922 the proportion of female members within the party was 8 per cent and by 1927 had increased to 12 per cent. These women were inspired by the hope and expectations created by the October Revolution, by the party’s implementation of new laws giving equality to women, and the new and extraordinary social mobility open to them.
With NEP-driven cuts, government support for workers’ canteens was reduced which resulted in a lower quality of meals being served, workers returning home to eat, and sometimes in canteen closures. Many of Zhenotdel’s communal canteens, that had been so popular (and necessary) in the civil war period, were closed in a move greeted with dismay by many Communist Party members. This was trebly hard for urban women, who now had to shop daily as there were no fridges and few preservatives, and to cook for their families in addition to all the other domestic chores for which women were responsible.
7.3 The NEP and its Contradictions
The Bolshevik Party correctly saw the alliance between the working class and the peasantry (smychka), as an absolute requirement without which the workers’ state would be placed in grave danger. The NEP had been introduced as a means of increasing grain production, but with Lenin incapacitated during most of 1922 (see Section 8.2), the Politburo majority enforced a policy that allowed the kulaks to hold the new workers’ state to ransom. While the 1922 harvest had been a relatively good one, problems were developing in the economy as a whole and during 1923 it became increasingly obvious that the relative growths of agriculture and industry under the NEP were seriously unbalanced. The most obvious symptom was a growing gap between decreasing grain prices and increasing prices for industrial goods; a situation which could only encourage kulaks to hoard grain to push up its price.
It soon became apparent to the more far-sighted party members that the taxes on the peasants were far below what was required to rebuild heavy industry and transport. The NEP was failing to revitalise heavy industry, the essential base for any attempt at a transition to socialism. Production languished at only about 10 per cent of what it had been in 1912. It was necessary to place the state sector (predominantly heavy industry) within a national economic plan that ensured its growth. The NEP had stimulated light industry directly relevant to agriculture, but agricultural output could not maintain its rate of increase without new agricultural equipment, and that needed new machine tools which required investment in heavy industry. But the money for this would have to come from the kulaks through taxation in one form or another. Those who proposed this course were ridiculed as hare-brained ‘super-industrialisers’, whose proposals risked the smychka and threatened the existence of the Soviet Union. Bukharin called for a snail’s pace in the development of industry to give the kulak a painless transition to socialism.
Such a perspective had much in common with the policies of the Right SRs and Liberals, who now flocked into the state and party machines, singing praises to practical common sense. They allied with the careerists and opportunists, who had hurried to join the Bolsheviks and the state machine once victory was assured. Rather rapidly a stratum formed that had never subscribed to a socialist revolution, they were more likely to be infected with Russian chauvinism. Left isolated, Russia’s cultural and economic backwardness provided the conditions for the growth of alien class forces and the bureaucratic degeneration of the Bolshevik Party. Stalin gave form to this backwardness, proposing policies promising the careerists that their privileged position in society would be protected. The budding bureaucracies of the state, industry and party began to coalesce and flex their muscles.
Trotsky proposed to the Central Committee on 7 August 1921, that because the NEP greatly strengthened capitalist tendencies in the economy, state-directed planning was even more important. As a result, the Soviet of Peoples’ Commissars established ‘Gosplan’, for general economic planning, although Lenin supported the alternative of improving the efficiency of existing state institutions through ‘Rabkrin’ (Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate) led by Stalin. Rabkrin had the express purpose of eliminating inefficiency and corruption at every level and in every branch of government. Instead, the exact opposite took place; Stalin used Rabkrin to extend bureaucratic control, to widen his power base, to give him access into, and authority over, other Commissariats.[13]
After a ten-month absence due to illness, Lenin returned to active political life in late 1922. The situation that confronted him caused him to reappraise his attitude to the NEP, and he proposed publication of Trotsky’s pamphlet on the NEP as a means of explaining party policy to the foreign public. On 27 December 1922, Lenin further endorsed Trotsky’s position when he wrote to the Politburo saying that on the question of a State Planning Commission “we can and must accede to the wishes of comrade Trotsky” i.e., that the state should pay more attention to heavy industry and transport as part of a planned economy.[14]
By the summer of 1923 it had become obvious that the heavy machinery inherited from pre-war days needed replacing, that the agricultural machinery and tools produced by industry were too expensive for the peasants to buy and were being stockpiled in warehouses. In the meantime, the kulaks threatened to hold onto their grain in the hope of an increase in agricultural prices. Continuing their policy of maintaining the smychka at the expense of workers, the party tops agreed industrial prices must be cut. The smychka was becoming a yoke around the neck of the proletariat forcing it to bear the costs of producing cheaper goods for the kulaks.
Some factories were closed as unprofitable, others amalgamated, concentrating industry into a smaller number of larger, more efficient units. Many enterprises responded by cutting the numbers employed. Often the first step was for managers to sack older women workers.[15]
Women in industry were hit by a two-fold blow, returning soldiers and the NEP. It has been estimated that in the traditional male industries, such as metal working, more than 250,000 women, about a third of the total, were replaced by returning soldiers. Additionally, the introduction of the NEP meant a further pressure on managers to reduce their costs, quickly and dramatically. Cutting staff numbers was a common strategy and women were often the first to go. Managers also cut the facilities needed by women, particularly childcare.[16] Between January 1922 and January 1923, the number of factory-run crèches dropped substantially. This placed an extra burden on women workers, but despite these cut-backs the level of childcare provision was still thirty times as great as in 1917.
We should note, however, that despite the higher levels of female unemployment under the NEP there were millions of women in paid employment benefiting from the revolutionary gains made: provision of crèches, paid maternity leave, nursing breaks, and rest facilities. This social progress would continue to be a feature of Soviet society. In fact, the proportion of women employed in factories after 1923 remained constant at just under 30 per cent, so the total number of employed women increased as industry picked up.
Between the autumn of 1922 and summer of 1923, the total number of unemployed industrial workers rose from about 500,000 to 1,250,000.[17] A wave of strikes and disturbances swept the country led not only by opposition elements but also by loyal party members who, as active trade unionists, felt a large degree of responsibility to their workmates.[18] The first response of the Secretariat was to place restrictions on party democracy to restrain the dissent. When the ‘hierarchy of party secretaries’ proved inadequate, the party machine resorted to police methods. The secret police (GPU) stepped in and arrested party members leading opposition to the cuts; these were then summarily expelled. Felix Dzerzhinsky, head of the GPU and a founding member of the Stalin faction, demanded members of the CC inform the GPU of any known opposition activity.
Trotsky was spurred into writing formally to the CC. In a letter of 8 October 1923, he argued that Dzerzhinsky’s demand revealed an extraordinary deterioration of the situation within the party. He gave the immediate causes of the crisis as the party becoming cut off from the lives of workers and peasants due to its degree of bureaucratisation, and the dissatisfaction of workers and peasants with the disastrous economic situation brought about by an incorrect policy.[19] The immediate response of Zinoviev and Stalin was to accuse Trotsky of factionalism, to affirm peasant needs would continue to determine economic policy, to declare that the events of the summer in no way called into question party policy, but rather confirmed the failure of state industry to lower its prices sufficiently.[20] Official policy was temporarily saved by a bumper harvest which increased grain exports and the further postponement of investment in domestic industry.[21]
The NEP had forced the workers into a substantial retreat, but unemployment and cuts in pay and working conditions had failed to revive heavy industry. Rather, so-called red managers who were alienated from the workers were joining the party in thousands, becoming integrated into its hierarchy and coalescing into a stratum that would become the rulers of the Soviet Union.[22] Equally, party members responsible for economic decisions were becoming infected by the petty-bourgeois ideas inherent in the NEP and were beginning to move the economy in a restorationist direction. Vladimir Milyutin (a strong supporter of a coalition government in 1917) now head of the Soviet trade delegation took the NEP to its logical conclusion when he unilaterally promised to end the state monopoly of foreign trade. On the Politburo he was supported by Bukharin who wanted the monopoly abolished and by Stalin, Kamenev and Zinoviev who wanted the monopoly relaxed.
Lenin immediately called for an official ban on all activities that could lead to a weakening of the foreign monopoly of trade.[23] Lenin’s reasons were very simple, without such a monopoly there would be no Soviet economic sovereignty and no possibility of planning the economy, a flood of cheap, high-quality goods would fatally undermine the loyalty of the peasants to the revolution and open the door to the wholesale bribery and corruption of “the vast army of officials” inherited from the tsar. On 22 May the Politburo formally endorsed Lenin’s demand for ‘no relaxation’, but the CC meeting of October 6 – which Lenin missed due to illness – ratified new initiatives that had, at their heart, a considerable reduction in the state trade monopoly.
Lenin approached the only full member of the Politburo who appeared to agree with him and suggested that together they oppose any further vacillation on this question. Lenin’s letter of 15 December to the CC proposed Trotsky as his spokesperson.[24] Faced with Lenin supported by Trotsky, the CC reversed its decision. Lenin’s letter must have caused considerable consternation amongst Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Stalin. In this short letter of only one paragraph, he makes two statements – that he had made appropriate arrangements to retire, and that Trotsky would be speaking for him on the foreign trade monopoly. This could only be taken as promotion of Trotsky (who, we should recall, had just submitted two letters to the Politburo attacking not only the party structure but the direction of the core economic policy), and equally doubtlessly fanned the flames of personal jealousy and animosity that Zinoviev and Stalin felt towards him.[25] The discussion on the monopoly of foreign trade was important because it demonstrated the intellectual and theoretical weaknesses of those who would later form the ruling Troika.
In fact, the proposals advocated by Trotsky, if accepted, would have not only lessened considerably the adverse impact of the NEP on women but opened the road to an improvement in their situation even with the existing material conditions. Implementing planned industrialisation would have undercut the bourgeois tendencies fuelled by the NEP, increased the employment of women in industry and undercut the forces fuelling discrimination against women workers in wages and employment.
7.4 The Woman Question and Zhenotdel
Under the NEP, Zhenotdel activists faced not only rising and disproportionate female unemployment in heavy industry, but also cutbacks in state funding for childcare and communal kitchens, the very things that they believed to be key for emancipating women from domestic drudgery. Zhenotdel responded by demanding the strengthening of the women’s sections and for Zhenotdel to have more representation on factory committees, Labour Exchanges (which found jobs for unemployed workers), and on trade union committees. Under the NEP, membership of trade unions was voluntary and individual. This meant an exodus of 3.5 million workers between 1921 and 1922, leaving only 5 million. Understandably, the minds of the trade union leaders were concentrated on membership, but there is nothing to indicate that they attempted to make good the shortfall by encouraging the recruitment of women.
Prior to the October Revolution, there had been little done within the Bolshevik Party to develop the ideas of Bebel and Engels that the monogamous bourgeois family was little more than a sophisticated means of ensuring the rights of inheritance and regulating property transfer, requiring the enslaving of women within the chains of domestic labour. Only under a workers’ state with their full integration into social production could women, freed from domestic drudgery attain full economic, social, and sexual equality with men. These were the ideas that Zhenotdel advanced, with, it should be said, Lenin’s and Trotsky’s full support, especially regarding housework. As Lenin said: “You all know that even when women have full rights, they still remain factually downtrodden because all housework is left to them”.[26]
The truth was that there was, within the party, a conservative current that interpreted party policy of not supporting a separate women’s organisation, as opposition to any party organisation directed specifically at women. Within the party tops this view was voiced by Rykov, Mikhail Tomsky (responsible for leading trade union work), and Zinoviev. During the Tenth Party Congress, this had resulted in Agitprop (the party organisation responsible for agitation and propaganda) being given oversight of Zhenotdel. This gave many local party organisations, which saw the work of Zhenotdel as secondary, the opportunity to reduce or even remove funding. Zinoviev’s ‘own’ city of Petrograd took this as an opportunity to push local Zhenotdel branches into accepting assimilation into Agitprop. Subsequent reports from the central Zhenotdel detailed Agitprop’s re-allocation of Zhenotdel workers to other assignments. This downgrading of the work of Zhenotdel was invariably accepted by the provincial Zhenotdel because, as disciplined party members, they were obliged to follow the policies dictated by the local party bosses. By 1923 the Petrograd Provincial Party Committee ceased receiving reports on work by Zhenotdel.[27] Samoilova protested that many male comrades saw the project as “beneath their dignity” and “exhibited a lot of prejudice towards the Zhenotdel”.[28] Lenin, confirmed this in his 1920 interview with Zetkin:
Agitation and propaganda work among women … is regarded as an incidental matter … What is at the basis of this incorrect attitude? … Unfortunately, it is still true to say of many of our comrades, ‘scratch a Communist and find a Philistine’. Of course, you must scratch the sensitive spot, their mentality as regards woman. … We must root out the old slave-owner’s point of view, both in the Party and among the masses.[29]
Lenin despaired of the slave-owner mentality regarding wives that continued to exist in layers of the Bolshevik Party. Too many Bolsheviks saw the Woman Question as divisive, failing to understand that the tasks they faced would be overcome much more easily by including women as equal partners at all levels of the struggle. That was why the period of the civil war was Zhenotdel’s high point; it was a time when women’s efforts were most closely integrated into the party’s activities. Zhenotdel had engaged in a thousand-and-one actions in support of the war effort, not least of which were provision of childcare and canteen facilities.
It was implicit in the 1918 Code that both parties to a marriage or divorce would be able to make their decisions free of economic necessity. Reality was moving in the opposite direction, instead of being able to add hundreds of thousands of care workers to its budget, sharp cutbacks in government spending demanded by the NEP meant tens of thousands of teachers, care-workers, medical staff and other government employees, lost their jobs. Additionally, there were mass lay-offs of women workers as heavy industry contracted. By 1922 nearly two-thirds of the registered unemployed were women.[30] The pages of Kommunistka now contained numerous articles complaining at the re-emergence of reactionary attitudes toward women.[31]
Kollontai’s replacement as Director of Zhenotdel was sufficiently important to require a meeting of the Politburo. In January 1922, on Stalin’s recommendation the post was given to one of his most ardent supporters, Sofia Smidovich. Smidovich was much more respectful of the party leadership, and far more conservative in her views on marriage and sexuality, and had referred to the behaviour of members of Komsomol as “suitable for a Hottentot” showing “African passions”.[32] Kollontai had dared to argue that for the new Communist woman, separation of sex and procreation was a necessary pre-requisite for sexual liberation. Smidovich, on the other hand, had repeatedly scolded young women for casual liaisons and insisted on the inseparability of femininity and motherhood. Distancing herself from her predecessor, Smidovich made clear that calls for radical changes to the family were firmly in the past. When she emphasised the necessity of stable marriage for an orderly society she was voicing the concerns of the backward elements in Soviet society, in particularly the peasantry. The official line of Zhenotdel that the individual family had to be superseded in order to bring women into society as equals may have remained, but now it was an empty slogan. Smidovich concentrated on day-to-day tasks, particularly the provision of orphan care.[33]
But even Smidovich, soon after her appointment, was forced to challenge the party’s indifference to work among women, complaining that it would be better to “liquidate” the local Zhenotdels “than drag out (their) miserable existences” they were leading in the majority of provinces. She also faced personal discrimination, as a woman, at the highest level within the party. In the run-up to the Eleventh Party Congress (1922) the Orgburo reviewed the work of the various Party Commissions. Unlike the heads of other Commissions, the Zhenotdel Director “was told to wait in the hall” and “allowed into the meeting only when a point arose concerning women, and then she was sent outside to wait again”.[34] That the Orgburo had such little respect for the Director of Zhenotdel spoke volumes about Stalin’s attitude to the Woman Question. With the clampdown on inner party democracy there was a shift toward greater centralism within the party which, for Zhenotdel, resulted in a cut in the funds it received, the loss of nineteen of its forty-two full-time staff and many of its regional organisers. Smidovich resigned as Director in 1924, when she was replaced by Nikolaeva.
7.5 Living Conditions of Party Members and Ban on Other Parties
Prior to October 1917, no leader within the Bolsheviks had ever suggested that after the revolution there would be a one-party political system, and in the period immediately after the insurrection even the bourgeois Cadet party remained legal. The only political party which was suppressed was the Black Hundreds, an anti-Jewish, fascist type organisation, infamous for inciting pogroms. This was to be expected since the Bolsheviks had, until 1917, the governmental goal of “a freely convened constituent assembly of the whole people” to which “every class of the population” would turn.[35] In such a schema only die-hard tsarists and landed aristocrats would seriously oppose the revolution, so the notion of banning political parties had never arisen.
But the October Revolution had been socialist, which meant that the urban middle classes, expected by Lenin in 1905 to be an ally, opposed the Bolshevik-led revolution. The initial response, on 9 November 1917, was a decree banning hostile newspapers, but the decree specifically stated that the ban was temporary and would be repealed as soon as normal conditions were re-established.[36] However, under the protection of the armies of intervention the Right SRs with support from the Cadets proclaimed their own government in places such as Archangel, Omsk, Samara and Ufa, claiming to speak in the name of the Constituent Assembly while actually ceding real power to the counter-revolution. This made it impossible for these parties to have freedom of propaganda and agitation within Soviet-controlled areas. The civil war gave the Bolsheviks no choice but to exclude from the Soviets the SRs, Mensheviks and others who had taken up arms against the revolution.
By November 1918, of the 950 delegates at the Sixth All-Russian Congress of Soviets, 933 were Communists. Generally, by 1921 at local level the party branch secretary had replaced the chairman of the Soviet as the leading local official.[37] But with party monopoly of power, the separation of party and state became unrealisable; whatever was determined in a party caucus was binding on all party members attending the Soviets. In 1921 in the local Soviets, at the lowest level in the administration, party members comprised less than half the delegates, but by the time one reached the Executive Committees of the large urban Soviets over 90 per cent were party members.
By early 1922, Lenin had realised that the flood of recruits into the Bolsheviks meant “the bulk of the present membership” was “not proletarian enough” but the thin layer comprising the “Old Guard of the Party”, which determined party policy, while under severe pressure, was coping.[38] Nevertheless, he understood that “Communists who acquitted themselves magnificently during the revolution had been given commercial and industrial responsibilities about which they know nothing”, and because of their forced reliance on former tsarist officials, they were being dominated by these bureaucrats whose most powerful weapon was their detailed knowledge and higher cultural level.[39] As a step towards correcting this imbalance in early 1922 he agreed to, perhaps suggested, Stalin for the new post of General Secretary. This was a period when Lenin was seriously ill and isolated from party affairs, it was not until the very end of his life did Lenin grasp the extent of the contribution to the bureaucratic nature of the Soviet state made by a section of the Bolshevik Party led by Stalin.[40]
The Twelfth Party Conference (4-7 August 1922, which Lenin had been too ill to attend) had passed the resolution: ‘The Improvement of the Living Conditions of the Active Functionaries of the Party’. This had formalised a range of perks and privileges for party functionaries. Prior to the Twelfth Conference there was a strong material disincentive preventing factory managers and technical intelligentsia inherited from the tsarist regime from joining the Communist Party; afterwards membership of the Communist Party provided substantial additional benefits. Managers now saw joining the Communist Party as a means of protecting their material interests. Carr looked at the data for industrial managers who gave their background as non-worker. He found two trends: first, the number of such managers appeared to almost double between 1922 and 1923, and that the proportion of these managers who joined the Communist Party increased seven-fold.[41] By the end of 1923, this new social layer was progressing rapidly; previously this layer had accumulated material benefits surreptitiously, but now their actions were legitimised by the party.
On 3 August the Conference passed the resolution, ‘The Registration of Associations and Unions’ which meant, in reality, the prohibition of all parties but the Bolsheviks.[42]
7.6 Fourth Congress of the Communist International
In December 1921, the ECCI published ‘Theses on the Workers’ United Front’ to clarify the strategic measures to be taken by national Communist Parties. It demanded support for the tactic of the workers’ united front with CPs taking the initiative and specified the particular tasks of each of the major Comintern sections.
In Italy, for example, the Communist Party was urged to carry out a “tireless campaign for the united front of the workers against the bourgeoisie, which should expand continually and involve larger and larger sections of the masses”.[43] Such a perspective was imperative faced with the successes of the Italian fascists. But the sterile ultra-leftism of Amadeo Bordiga and his group, who led the Italian CP, did not differentiate between fascism and bourgeois democracy which meant that the party failed to enact the united front policy, and this was an important element in weakening the Italian labour movement, leaving it divided in the face of advancing fascism. Criminally, the Italian CP also refused to support the People’s Commandos (Arditi del Populo) a spontaneous self-defence force of ex-soldiers and workers that was being built, and which on several occasions had dealt important blows against the fascists. Initially, many rank and file members, and even leading figures, of the party adhered to the Arditi del Popolo, but were then ordered by the party executive to pull out, which led to further isolation of the Communist Party from the rest of the organised working class. By the time the Fourth Congress convened on 7 November 1922, fascist militia had violently and decisively defeated the workers in battles across Italy. Mussolini had led the second, successful, march on Rome only three weeks previously and was in the final stages of forming a government.
However, in Germany the KPD had responded well to the decision of the Third World Congress to implement a united front policy. The united front tactic was consistently winning support amongst women, youth, trade unions, and the factory committees. Membership was rising rapidly, including many who had quit after the March Action. The high point for the KPD was a joint action with the SPD and trade unions in protest at the murder of Walther Rathenau, the Foreign Minister, and a Jew, on 24 June 1922, by extreme Freikorps elements. The KPD played an important role in organising a million strong march, followed by a twelve hour long general strike throughout Germany.
The Fourth Comintern Congress, (7 November-3 December 1922), was opened by Zetkin and began with an Executive Committee report that specifically approved the policy of the united front tactic introduced at the Third Congress and tackled head-on the important differences and divergent interpretations that persisted on this issue. But an omission was preparatory documentation for the Fourth Congress analysing the importance of the rise of fascism, possibly because it was such a new phenomenon.
The KPD instructed its delegates to push the Congress to call for united front actions and proletarian self-defence against fascist mobilisations in the three days devoted to ‘The Capitalist Offensive’. This included a discussion on fascism, but what was noticeable by its absence, was any coherent strategy for countering fascist attacks. The resolution on the situation in Italy, where the fascists were in the process of forming a government, concentrated on a fusion with the centrist majority of the Socialist Party after the right wing had split away. Indeed, most of the rank and file of the SP were looking to the Comintern for a political lead. Reunification of the left of the SP with the CP would have given the working class a powerful, united party. Bordiga, however, rejected the united front tactic and was against any compromise with the socialists. It was Antonio Gramsci who guided the merger of the Serrati faction of the SP and PCI in 1923, after Bordiga was imprisoned, arrested by the fascists. However, by this time Serrati was no longer leader of the centrist PSI with 80,000 members and brought with him only 2,000 PSI members.
An important factor was that the ECCI discussions were dominated by Zinoviev, who still classified Social Democracy as the worst enemy and this was a likely reason why the ECCI guidelines on united front tactics contained no description of those used by the Bolsheviks to achieve political hegemony during 1917.[44] Missing was any mention of the demands made on the Menshevik and SR-led Soviets to take governmental power; or the defence of Alexander Kerensky’s pro-capitalist government against the attempted right-wing coup of General Kornilov; or of the launch of the revolution itself under the slogan of defending the Soviets; or the adoption – in its entirety – of the Left SR’s agrarian programme.
Zetkin who was given the responsibility of preparing the report on fascism to be presented to the June 1923 ECCI was also the main reporter on the IWS, in which she included comments on the struggle by women against fascism. The Congress provided a day to hear four reports by Zetkin and Hertha Sturm of the KPD, and Smidovich and Varsenika Kasparova of the RCP. These reports contained serious criticisms of foot dragging on the forming of special structures for women by a number of Communist Parties, such as in Poland, France and Britain. In other parties (Italy and the Netherlands), women were only just being integrated into the party ranks. Zetkin was keen to establish the status of the women’s committees, or whatever name they went by:
One thing has been clearly established. However much Communist work among women must be firmly linked ideologically and organically to the life of each party, we nonetheless need special bodies to carry out this work. Of course, Communist work among women must be not women’s business, but the business of the totality, of the Communist party of each country, of the Communist International. …
In this process, it has emerged as a requirement for expediency and for a practical division of labour inside the party that women should be called on first and most often for activity in the special committees for Communist work among women. … What nature has bequeathed as sex merges with what history has created in terms of social institutions and conditions. Just as we must reckon with the specific psychology of the masses of poor peasants, based on their specific living conditions, so we must also reckon with the special psychology of the broad masses of women. … women themselves are the quickest, most astute, and most effective in recognising the key issues in the life of working women, … In addition, women are also generally better at discovering the most promising methods and forms of Communist activity among the layers of women that are deeply oppressed and are striving upwards. …
As Communists, we consider it our duty and our right to take part in every party activity, (and) in the same way, every man is welcome to take part in the special Communist work carried out among women. That applies to our committees as well as to our entire activity in its various expressions and arenas.[45]
The final resolution, drafted by Zetkin, and adopted unanimously, called on the national sections to collaborate with the IWS in setting up “special structures” to draw the broadest masses of women into struggle to defend working and living conditions. Those national sections which had “unfortunately” been negligent in this respect were “instructed” to make up this omission “as rapidly as possible”. Zetkin identified International Women’s Day (March 8) as a major activity, characterising it as “a party campaign, a declaration of war by communism against capitalism, a beginning of the struggle for which an army of millions of exploited and oppressed must be gathered, armed, and made ready”.[46]
The Fourth Congress was Lenin’s last. During his final speech on 13 November, he savagely attacked the mentality according to which the Russian experience could be applied mechanically in different circumstances in other countries. He appealed to the delegates to “study … in order that they may really understand the organisation, structure, method and content of revolutionary work”.[47] Lenin saw that, just as he had to rethink the basic strategy of the Russian Revolution in order to seize the opportunity offered in 1917, so now, new thinking was required in the face of new problems.
At the Fourth World Congress, the machinery of the centre was considerably strengthened with an enlarged ECCI scheduled to meet once every four months, with a Praesidium on the pattern of the Russian Politburo. The decisive role would be played by Zinoviev and Bukharin, and with Lenin increasingly incapacitated, he was no longer able to intervene to decide questions of real substance.[48] Without Lenin, political weakness at the centre coupled with an increasingly dictatorial attitude, would prove fatal for communist uprisings in Bulgaria, Germany, and Estonia.
There were numerous obvious reasons why the Russians on the ECCI (effectively the Politburo of the RCP) dominated the national parties: the prestige of the October Revolution, their much greater knowledge of Marxist theory, and their experience of creating and organising a disciplined Marxist party. With time, other factors became significant; the money distributed by the ECCI, and the presence of ECCI emissaries who would organise the removal of individual leaders not toeing the ECCI line.
Great play has been made in this book of the discussions and decisions of the first four congresses of the CI, in which Lenin personally participated eagerly and enthusiastically. These were consigned to the dustbin of history by the Stalinist communist parties. At first sight it might appear that communist parties had a lot to gain by collecting the documents of the first four congresses and publishing them with commentaries as a means of educating their membership. But there were five reasons why this was impossible.
First, the absence of Stalin from the proceedings. In Jane Degras’ meticulous work Stalin’s name appears only twice before 1922, once in the appendix as a member of the large executive committee elected at the Second Congress, and once in a note by the editor that although the future dictator was supposedly a delegate at the First Congress “there is no evidence, either in the records of the congress or in the accounts written by participants and observers, that he took any part in its meetings”.[49] Quite contrary to later myths, Stalin was neither a decisive factor nor Lenin’s right-hand in the major decisions made by the world Communist movement in the period immediately following the October Revolution.
Second, leading participants, such as Bukharin, Radek, Trotsky and Zinoviev were later murdered by Stalin’s secret police as ‘fascist mad dogs’. In the Moscow frame up trials, it was claimed that the wrecking activities of these people extended back to the first days of the Soviet Union. How then could their real activities be brought before the rank and file of the national CPs?
Third, the policies followed by the Stalin regime were in open and absolute contradiction to those developed and adopted at the first four congresses. In China in 1925-27, opportunistically dissolving the Chinese Communist Party into the nationalist Kuomintang, in Germany following an ultra-left policy of refusing a united front with the Socialist Party that assured Hitler’s victory. The membership of the CPs could hardly be encouraged to study the very texts on which the Trotskyists were basing their criticisms.
Fourth, a study of the first four congresses reveals a picture of collective leadership, a team of such contrasting types as Bukharin, Lenin, Radek, Trotsky and Zinoviev were able to combine their knowledge, experience, and various skills, and not even the greatest completely dominated. The Stalinist image of a genius laying down the correct political line after which the rank and file immediately and unquestioningly plunged into action was completely at odds with Lenin’s actual practice. Horror of horrors, the top leaders of the CI could find themselves in a minority, and a majority vote did not always coincide with a correct estimate of events.
Fifth, no major political differences can be discerned between Lenin and Trotsky over Comintern policy.
In contrast to the early period when the Communist International held a Congress every four years, during the twenty years existence of the CI under Stalin’s leadership there were only three Congresses: one in 1924 to denounce Trotsky, one in 1928 at which Bukharin’s influence was eliminated, and the third in 1935 to adopt the Popular Front policy. The reality was that the Politburo of the Russian Communist Party determined the strategy and tactics of the CI and, ever the practical man, Stalin saw no reason to waste time (and risk opposition) with Congresses. The centre of gravity for the CI rapidly shifted from international congresses to the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCI) and all significant decisions of this body were determined by the Russian delegation. Later, matters would be decided by Stalin personally and those affected called in to hear their fate.
7.7 The 1922 Land Code
On 1 December 1922, the Soviet Land Code was enacted. This attempted to reconcile and combine peasant custom and practice with a revolutionary assertion of gender equality. Private ownership of land, water, and other natural resources had been abolished and ownership had passed into the hands of the state. However, the Land Code was coincident with the NEP and conciliatory towards the peasantry, thus it attempted to avoid confrontation while making social progress. For example, the Code preserved the authority of the mir, and of the head of the family, but now that women had a clear and undisputed right to own land, they could hold that post. All adults over the age of eighteen, not just the men, were members of the mir by right, and important decisions required a two-thirds majority – an attempt to ensure women who had entered the mir cast their votes.
The most intense contradictions between the goals of the Revolution for the liberation of women and the actual conditions of Russian society occurred in the countryside. The Family Code by introducing divorce, alimony, the rights of children born out of wedlock and emphasising the rights of the individual against the mir, was a real threat to traditional village life. However, the Land Code allowed family property to continue to be held in common, which meant that individual peasants continued to have no personal income and hence no means of paying alimony. There was conflict here between the Family and Land Codes, how could an individual attain the right to their ‘own’ property when the basis of the mir was common ownership? According to custom a woman sacrificed her right to family land when she left the paternal home and went to live with her husband’s family. She never gained a right to a share of the land of her husband’s family and, if she left the family home her only entitlement was the return of her dowry (or equivalent value). She could hope for – but was not entitled to – a share in the material gains the family had obtained as a result of her efforts. So long as the family remained the basic unit of production, so long as the patriarchal family determined the institutions of village life, neither peasant women nor men could realise the individual freedom promised by Soviet civil law. The situation was exacerbated by the extreme poverty of most peasants.
The Commissariat of Justice repeatedly refused peasant demands to abolish divorce and alimony, and in so doing supported the rights of peasant women. Initially, these measures were enacted in a situation where, due to the civil war, grain seizures, and famine, many peasants were genuinely impoverished and did not have sufficient disposable income to pay alimony. In 1926, the situation changed. In an important ruling, recognising the material gains made by peasants under the NEP, the Soviet Supreme Court declared that the mir as a whole had responsibility for the alimony and child support of its members. This ruling more than any other enhanced the position of peasant women and improved their standing and treatment in the mir. However, men who incurred alimony payments could find themselves ejected from the mir or would voluntarily join the many peasants looking for paid work in the towns and cities, taking with them much of the cultural baggage of the village. Such actions meant that about one-third of women never received the alimony they had been awarded, even though payment in kind was deemed acceptable.
Court decisions to allocate land to divorced women were often circumvented in practice. The mir would allocate the divorcee the poorest land. Unable to physically cope with pulling a plough on her own, she would often rent out the land with herself as a day-labourer. The efforts of those women were often sabotaged by other villagers encroaching on their land and/or stealing their tools, or the mir simply taking their land and allocating it to a returned soldier.
But such actions, in the long run, undermined the mir. Women driven to desperation, for food for themselves and their children, for a roof over their heads, increasingly turned to Zhenotdel and the courts, and village life began to change under the impact of the new legislation. The patriarchal family was incrementally weakened by peasant women taking advantage of their new rights, deciding for themselves who they should marry and whether to divorce, and by demands from young families for their share of mir land, and from young workers for wages.
A small number of peasant women influenced by the activities of Zhenotdel did rally to the Bolsheviks, attempted to attend meetings, stood for election, and organised women’s self-support groups. This was a slow process; after six years of propaganda, the proportion of peasant women elected to the Soviets in Russia was 10 per cent in the 1926 elections, and 27 per cent in 1934, though by this time elections could no longer be taken as a true expression of the will of either workers or peasants.[50] One important subjective factor Zhenotdel had to confront, when seeking peasant women prepared to serve on the local Soviet Committees, was their reticence; it was considered unseemly for a woman to sit at a table with a man who was not a family member.
Zhenotdel was particularly active regarding motherhood. In 1918, immediately after the Revolution, child mortality in the countryside was a serious cause for concern for Zhenotdel and health officials. Pregnant women were not exempted from work in the fields and were expected to return to work immediately after giving birth. There was no maternity leave of any kind. Mothers gave birth on the way to work or while working in the fields. During the day, most infants remained home alone while their mothers worked long hours. The lucky few were cared for by a grandparent too old or weak to work, or an older sibling not yet old enough to work. Given such circumstances plus the lack of even basic hygiene, as many as 80 per cent of babies born during the harvest died within their first year of life.[51] Zhenotdel brought with it two important items of news, disbelieved at first but then welcomed: that women had the right, under Soviet law to paid maternity leave and to control their own bodies.
To uproot the feudal relations on the land inherited from the past would require a huge investment of resources, not only to mechanise agriculture, but to put in place an adequate transport system, hospitals and schools. The Bolsheviks looked to a socialist revolution in the advanced European countries to provide the means to demonstrate the benefits of collectivised agriculture to the peasant masses. In the event this never happened.
7.8 The German October
The failure of the German October strengthened all that was conservative in the Russian Party and was a significant factor in determining the outcome of the factional struggle between the Troika and Trotsky.[52]
Internationalism was a beacon for all levels of the Bolshevik Party, activists, militants, and leaders before, during, and after October 1917. However, the great majority of new party members were young, and while they were prepared to dedicate their lives to the Revolution, they had seen one international setback after another, including Hungary and Poland. This process would culminate in the fiasco that was the German October, when an opportunity, without precedent, of a revolution in an advanced country was simply thrown away. As a result, many lost heart in internationalism and became more passive and conservative.
In Soviet Russia, a huge propaganda campaign prepared the general population for a victorious German revolution, promising the end of isolation and major social and technological advances. Newspapers carried articles explaining that a workers’ victory in Germany meant Russian factories would have the latest machine tools to supply Russian peasants with more and better agricultural equipment. The younger generation responded with revolutionary enthusiasm, but the shock of the defeat of the German revolution without a struggle, and the disillusion it provoked, reverberated through the discussions in the Russian Party. The disillusion was all the deeper because some of the Russian leaders, especially Zinoviev, had presented the victory as assured and near at hand. Details of how the failure of the German revolution impacted on Russia are given in Pierre Broué’s excellent book Revolution in Germany (1917-1923).
The KPD was headed by Ernst Meyer and Heinrich Brandler. During 1923 there was the total collapse of the Deutschmark, the working class was pauperised, and the petty-bourgeoisie ruined, while the export industries made fabulous profits. The trade union apparatus collapsed, belief in the parliamentary system evaporated, mass strikes led by factory committees erupted throughout the country. Having adopted the united front strategy, the KPD grew at an enormous rate, registering not only electoral gains but acquired a majority in the factory committees; Germany was moving inexorably towards a revolution.[53]
The June meeting of the ECCI discussed Zetkin’s report, ‘The Struggle Against Fascism’, adopted the ‘Resolution on Fascism’, and agreed that to combat the rising tide of Nazism and unify the workers’ movement, the KPD should call mass anti-fascist demonstrations on Sunday 29 July. On 23 July, the Prussian government banned the demonstrations, and local authorities across Germany followed suit. Brandler, in an ominous sign of weakness and lack of self-confidence, contacted the ECCI for instructions on whether to bow to the prohibition.[54] Only Radek was available, and after getting what advice he could, he telegraphed Brandler advising abandonment.
In early August in protest at the hyper-inflation, the Berlin factory councils called for an immediate general strike with the political aim of bringing down the right-wing, nationalist Cuno government. The strike paralysed Berlin, and the government collapsed on 12 August. Against Brandler’s doubts, the ECCI concluded that Germany was rapidly approaching revolution and technical preparations for the insurrection should be undertaken.[55] With Zinoviev’s approval, a complex and convoluted plan was put in place. KPD representatives were to enter the left-leaning Social Democratic governments of ‘Red’ Saxony and Thuringia as junior partners but on a platform which was supposed to include arming the workers, disarming the fascists and emergency measures to feed the population. Any central government move against the governments of Saxony and/or Thuringia would be the excuse to launch a revolutionary defence jointly with the Social Democrats. There would be a simultaneous national general strike which would be the basis for an insurrection. The plan had the same fatal flaw that had sunk the Hungarian Revolution, it relied upon a reformist party to actively support a socialist revolution.
The rank and file of the KPD, in their tens of thousands moved to a war footing. In many factories and urban areas, the KPD military organisation, the ‘M-Apparat’, was openly active in organising armed defence squads known as the ‘Proletarian Hundreds’. Brandler entered the government in Saxony, and three days later, KPD representatives entered the government of Thuringia. The central government issued a direct order banning the Proletarian Hundreds in Saxony, giving them three days in which to surrender their arms. The ultimatum was ignored. On 21 October government troops entered Saxony.
As everything came to a head the KPD plans for insurrection fell apart. In Saxony, the left Social Democrats capitulated, abandoned office, and refused to back a national general strike. The arsenals of weapons which were to be put at the disposal of the workers were found not to exist. A trade union conference in the great workers’ city of Chemnitz in Saxony was hastily chosen to launch the call for the national general strike. On the platform was Social Democratic Minister of Labour, Georg Graupe. Brandler made the case for a general strike. Graupe declared the proposals unconstitutional, and if the resolution calling for a general strike was put to the meeting, then the Social Democrats would walk out. Brandler simply abandoned the entire plan! Within days the government troops were able to remove the head of the Saxony government, Zeigner, without any resistance. A partially-supported general strike simply petered out, the German October ended not with a bang but a hiccup.
Initially Zinoviev and the ECCI glossed over the defeat and even justified the retreat, but by early December, to protect himself from criticism, Zinoviev accused Brandler of excessive optimism beforehand, and cowardice at the crucial moment, and had him removed from his leading position within the KPD. This enormously strengthened the feeling amongst the national leaderships that leading members of the ECCI would get off scot-free whatever their errors while the local party would carry the can.
The Russians were now the undisputed leaders of the CI. Despite protestations to the contrary the authority of Moscow was deliberately bolstered by technical, administrative, and financial measures.[56] Moscow was the centre of the International, and the core leading staff responsible for the day-to-day running of the CI between Congresses were Zinoviev as President and a small number of full-timers led by Radek and Bukharin and including Béla Kun. In parallel with the moral and political authority of the Bolsheviks, the ECCI now allocated substantial funds to the national sections. In 1923, the German CP received sufficient funds to publish twenty-seven daily papers and support nearly 200 full-time officials. Without these funds it would have been able to support a mere dozen full-time officials and possibly four papers.[57] In 1925 the CPGB received sixteen times as much money from the CI as it did from its own members.[58] National leaders relied on the CI rather than their own members for funding full-time posts. Such a scenario might have been acceptable in the short term when a revolution in Western Europe was believed imminent and Lenin and Trotsky were at the helm, but as a long-term strategy it was to prove disastrous.
Endnotes
[1] ‘Free Love, the Family, and the Russian Revolution’ (2017), [You Tube], Social Histories of Revolution, Birkbeck: University of London.
[2] See R. Stites, The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia.
[3] E. Dobrenko and A. Reitblat, ‘The Readers’ Milieu: 1917-1920s’, Reading Russia, Vol. 3, 2020, p. 34.
[4] See K. Fairfax, Comrades in Arms: Women in the Russian Revolution.
[5] L. Trotsky, Women and the Family, Pathfinder Press, 1873, p. 32.
[6] W. Goldman, Women, the State and Revolution, Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 129.
[7] V. Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, Oxford University Press, 1963, pp. 147-98.
[8] See L.Trotsky, ‘Theses on Revolution and Counter-Revolution’.
[9] See A. Woods, ‘Lenin’s Last Struggle’.
[10] E. H. Carr, The History of Soviet Russia, Vol. 4, 1969, Penguin, pp. 11-4.
[11] See R. Medvedev, On Socialist Democracy.
[12] M. Patterson, ‘Red Teaspoons of Charity: Zhenotdel, Russian Women and the Communist Party, 1919-1930’.
[13] See I. Deutscher, Stalin.
[14] V. I. Lenin, ‘Granting Legislative Functions’, December 1922, LCW, Vol. 36, pp. 598-9.
[15] D. Koenker, ‘Men Against Women on the Shop Floor in Early Soviet Russia: Gender and Class in the Socialist Workplace’.
[16] See K. Murphy, Class Struggle in a Moscow Metal Factory.
[17] See P. Broué, History of the Bolshevik Party (CP) of the USSR.
[18] See K. Murphy, Class Struggle in a Moscow Metal Factory.
[19] See N. Allen, The Challenge of the Left Opposition (1923-25).
[20] See P. Broué, History of the Bolshevik Party (CP) of the USSR.
[21] E. H. Carr, The History of Soviet Russia.
[22] See ibid.
[23] See V. I. Lenin, ‘Letter to J. V. Stalin’.
[24] See V. I. Lenin, ‘Letter to J. V. Stalin for Members of the CC’.
[25] See ibid.
[26] V. I. Lenin, ‘The Tasks of Working Women’, September 1919, LCW, Vol. 30, p. 43.
[27] See M. Patterson, ‘Red Teaspoons of Charity: Zhenotdel, Russian Women and the Communist Party, 1919-1930’.
[28] C. Eubanks-Hayden, ‘The Zhenotdel and the Bolshevik Party’, Russian History, 3(2), 1976, p. 161.
[29] C. Zetkin, ‘Reminiscences of Lenin’, Marxists Internet Archive, 1924. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/zetkin/1924/reminiscences-of-lenin.htm (accessed 1 February 2023).
[30] See W. Goldman, ‘The “Withering Away” and the Resurrection of the Soviet Family: 1917-1936’.
[31] See A. McShane, ‘Bringing the Revolution to the Women of the East’.
[32] R. Stites, The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia, Princeton University Publishing, 1990, pp. 359-383.
[33] See M. Patterson, ‘Red Teaspoons of Charity: Zhenotdel, Russian Women and the Communist Party, 1919-1930’.
[34] Ibid, pp. 32-3.
[35] V. I. Lenin, ‘Our Tasks and the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies’, November 1905, LCW, Vol. 10, pp. 26-8.
[36] See J. Bunyan, and H. Fisher, The Bolshevik Revolution 1917-1918: Documents and Materials.
[37] See L. Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
[38] V. I. Lenin, ‘Letter to Molotov’, March 1922, LCW, Vol. 33, p. 257.
[39] V. I. Lenin, ‘Eleventh Congress of the R.C.P(B), March 1922, LCW, Vol. 33, p. 304.
[40] R. Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution.
[41] E. H. Carr, The History of Soviet Russia.
[42] A. Podsheldolkin, ‘The Origins of the Stalinist Bureaucracy – Some New Historical Facts’.
[43] J. Riddell, Towards the United Front: Proceedings of the Fourth Congress of the Communist International, Haymarket, 2012, pp. 1168-9.
[44] See ibid.
[45] Ibid, pp. 838-9.
[46] C. Zetkin, ‘Report on Communist Work Among Women’, Fourth Congress of the Communist International, 1922. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/zetkin/1922/zetkin03.htm (accessed 4 February 2023).
[47] V. I. Lenin, ‘Five Years Of The Russian Revolution And The Prospects Of The World Revolution’, Fourth Congress of the Communist International, 1922. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/nov/04b.htm (accessed 4 February 2023).
[48] See L. Trotsky, The Challenge of the Left Opposition (1928-29).
[49] J. Degras, The Communist International 1919-1943, Vo1. 1, Routledge, 1973, p. 6.
[50] See M. Buckley, Women and Ideology in the Soviet Union.
[51] See A. Linhardt, ‘The Image of Motherhood in Rabotnitsa i Krest’ianka’.
[52] See P. Broué, Revolution in Germany (1917-1923).
[53] R. Sewell, Germany 1918-1933: Socialism or Barbarism.
[54] See P. Broué, Revolution in Germany (1917-1923).
[55] See L. Trotsky, ‘Is It Possible to Fix a Definite Schedule for a Counter-Revolution or a Revolution?’.
[56] J. Degras, The Communist International 1919-1943.
[57] See I. Deutscher, ‘Correspondence Between Brandler and Deutscher: 1952-9’.
[58] L. Macfarlane, ‘The British Communist Party’.