9. The First Five-Year Plan, Women in the Workforce
1927-32
9.1 Introduction
This chapter resumes the description of the bureaucracy’s rise to power, and its effect on the women of the Soviet Union. For convenience we continue to discuss individual topics separately, but one process can, and did, reinforce and complement others. The violence used against the peasants, the show trials, the ‘cultural revolution’, the new brutal way of conducting politics, all went hand in hand, one could not have existed without the others.
The party bureaucracy silenced discussion on the ‘Woman Question’ by declaring equality of the sexes had been achieved and the question had been ‘solved’. The lively debates of the early 1920s were replaced by a new party line that a liberated woman was one who overfilled her work quota, or roused her husband to exceed his, while carrying out her domestic duties of cooking, cleaning and caring. Calls for women’s liberation through the socialisation of domestic labour, were replaced by calls for women to liberate themselves by increasing factory output. Critical thought about the meaning of the Revolution for women’s double burden, and the role of the family would soon be a thing of the past, symbolised by the closure of Zhenotdel.
The First Five-Year Plan (FYP) would begin a radical transformation of the Soviet Union, with the burgeoning bureaucracy giving the planned economy a highly centralised, hierarchical and undemocratic form. Such a system best co-exists with an authoritarian and repressive political regime, and very rapidly the egalitarian goals of October were replaced in the state-controlled, popular culture with acceptance of a multi-tiered social structure, justified as necessary for the economic growth required to achieve socialism.
At the outset of the First FYP, the economy was relatively primitive, industrial output had only just attained the level of 1913. The plan generated an exceptionally dynamic but highly turbulent system and, for a time, the emphasis on growth at all costs hid many of its dysfunctional elements. Initially, managers of enterprises were allowed to innovate to meet targets, and as long as they were successful would get away with it. However, within five years breaking the rules under any circumstances was asking for trouble, any resulting shortfall could mean being shot as a ‘saboteur’.
9.2 Final Defeat of the United Opposition
In late 1926 and early 1927, party leaders and the Soviet press promoted the fear that a concerted military attack by Western capitalist powers was imminent. In January 1927, Bukharin, Rykov, and Voroshilov warned of a war possibly within weeks. There was little evidence to support these claims, and it is now generally accepted that they were fabricated to enable the hounding of the UO as disloyally undermining party unity at a time of national danger. Such claims were also used to rally party members and the working class behind the First FYP, the forced collectivisation of agriculture and to justify the hardships imposed on the peasants.[1]
Events in China were a real and major test outside Russia of the two perspectives for world revolution being discussed within the AUCP(B). Trotsky, constrained by party discipline, did not present a permanent-ist analysis of the situation in China. He limited himself to calling for the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to maintain its class independence and warning of the dangers of ‘national democratic degeneration’. Trotsky’s presentations emphasised that in the East, women would play a greater role than in Europe or Russia. He argued that economic relations forced on China by imperialism would tear the Eastern woman out of the old family relations with even greater force and abruptness than men; the Chinese woman, “the slave of a slave”, would have a thirst for new ideas, a new consciousness, “There will be no better communist in the East, no better fighter for the ideas of the revolution and for the ideas of communism than the awakened woman worker”.[2]
The Soviet Union hosted several thousand Chinese students at Sun Yat-Sen University, mostly young CCP members. In February 1927, Krupskaya was invited to speak on ‘Communist Education’. The officers of the student branch had codified in a document, ‘A Concrete Guide to the Work of Training’, the growing attitude amongst the hierarchy of secretaries that party members had no right to individual free will. From what she said, it appears that Krupskaya went to the meeting determined to attack this aspect of the ‘Guide’, and to oppose its tyrannical attitude towards women students, its heavy criticism of female party members if they became pregnant, and its demand that communist women must not bear children.
Krupskaya conceded that having a child made party work more difficult, but forced abortions were not the solution. The thrust of her talk was that while there must be discipline in communist organisations, it should be the self-discipline generated through carrying out mutually agreed tasks for a common goal. It was quite incorrect to see free will as a manifestation of lack of discipline. Party unity could not be achieved by the terroristic imposition of ideas on party members. Genuine party unity could be achieved only by the conscious agreement of party members on the issues involved. Party unity, she said, should be based on trust and understanding. Creating an atmosphere in the party whereby members were suspicious of each other and frightened of authority would seriously damage the party in the long term. Her arguments were as open a criticism of the party regime as was possible at that time and helped many Chinese students make up their minds to join the opposition.[3]
Events in China were moving rapidly, but to avoid a provocation Trotsky delayed until summer 1927 before he clearly and openly promoted Lenin’s formulation, “the dictatorship of the proletariat supported by the inexhaustible masses of urban and rural poor”.[4] This was in sharp contrast to Stalin and Bukharin, who argued that because China was oppressed as a colonial nation, the unity of interests between the national bourgeoisie, petty-bourgeoisie, workers and peasants against the common enemy, imperialism, was greater than the class divisions between them; only a ‘united front of four classes’ would be strong enough to carry through the national bourgeois revolution and throw out the imperialists.
Based on this analysis, Stalin concluded that the presence of the National Revolutionary Army (NRA), led by General Chiang Kai-Shek, negated the need to set up Soviets.[5] Massive military aid was given to the NRA and its initial successes inspired the workers in Shanghai to rise in revolt and throw out the local warlord (19 February 1927). On 5 April 1927, Stalin made a speech to 3,000 party members in Moscow in which he said: “Chiang Kai-Shek cannot do otherwise than lead the army against the imperialists”.[6] Chiang and his army entered Shanghai to a hero’s welcome, but only a week after Stalin’s speech, on 12 April, Chiang launched his army, not against the imperialists, but the Communists, massacring tens of thousands of workers and peasants.
The response of the Bukharin-Stalin faction was not to open a discussion in the party to seek the best way forward, it was precisely the opposite. As their policies led to disastrous defeats, the more the truth of what was happening was kept secret. This was achieved by cynical misreporting, torrents of abuse heaped on the UO, refusing to publish its articles on China and bully-boy tactics in party meetings.[7]
On 11 November 1927, a purge of oppositionists began, and hundreds of rank-and-file oppositionists were arrested and held incommunicado. The Fifteenth Party Congress (2-19 December 1927) opened with not one of the 1,600 delegates from the UO, and it unanimously declared the programme of the UO was incompatible with party membership. Stalin demanded: “The Opposition must surrender unconditionally and totally, on both the political and organisational level … They must renounce their anti-Bolshevik views, openly and before the whole world”.[8] At the Thirteenth Congress a similar call by Zinoviev had been rejected. The degree of degeneration of the party in the short period between the two Congresses was seen when the Fifteenth Congress cheered Stalin’s demand and agreed the expulsion of all members of the UO. Zinoviev and Kamenev capitulated immediately, denounced themselves and recanted. On the penultimate day of the Congress, seventy-five oppositionists who refused to bow to Stalin’s diktat were expelled. Trotsky was deported to Alma Ata on 17 January 1928.
Behind the scenes, Stalin stage-managed a suicidal uprising in Canton to take place while the Congress was in session. The uprising had no basis in the class struggle in China and was a total disaster, but was cynically touted as ‘proof’ that the ECCI’s political line for China had enabled the CCP to launch a revolutionary bid for power. Stalin, centre stage, received the plaudits for this ‘success’, while thousands of Chinese Communists paid in blood for their supporting roles.
The leadership of the International shamelessly proclaimed that such defeats were leading the CCP to victory and a Soviet revolution. The Communist of March 1928, following the official ECCI line, described a situation in China in which the tide of workers’ and peasants’ revolutionary movement was growing, the Canton ‘commune’ had generated an immense wave of insurrections, soviets were appearing across a vast territory.[9] Pure fiction replaced factual reporting of the near destruction of the CCP. It was more important to the bureaucracy to protect itself, than for the party to adopt a correct policy towards the Chinese revolution.
9.3 The Right Opposition
Social differentiation was growing rapidly in the countryside; between 1924-6 the kulaks had doubled the area of land they farmed. Increasingly, poor peasants were hiring themselves out as day-labourers and the number of kulak farms employing more than ten wage labourers was growing rapidly. By the spring of 1926, 6 per cent of the peasants had control of 60 per cent of the grain for sale in the markets.[10]
The right wing, led by Bukharin, wanted a considerable extension in freedom of trade and ever more concessions to the kulaks, but it was becoming increasingly clear that such a path risked capitalist restoration. By the Fifteenth Party Congress there were clear signs that a change in policy towards the kulaks was coming. At the Congress, Molotov correctly described the process of collectivisation as extending over many years and being limited until the state had the capacity to supply farms with the necessary machinery. The discussion on agriculture proposed only moderate changes with 15 per cent as the upper limit of food and grain coming from collective farms. Taxes imposed on the wealthiest peasants would fund a very modest expansion of industry, averaging about 7 per cent per annum. With new industries supplying agriculture with the machines needed to increase production, there would be an end to food shortages for good, a noticeable increase in real wages and lower food prices. The proposals were so mild that the implementation of the plan was not predicted to decrease unemployment, and certainly not amongst women.
However, within weeks of the Fifteenth Party Congress, a crisis in the food supply erupted and the warnings of the UO concerning the emphasis on placating the kulaks, were proved entirely correct. The grain harvests of 1925 and 1926 had been amongst Russia’s best ever, but it soon became clear that the grain harvested in 1927 had fallen short of target by more than a quarter. The rural petty-bourgeoisie, the vanguard of the forces supporting capitalist restoration, were flexing their muscles demanding, for example, that the rights accorded to women in the Family Code (such as land ownership) be restricted, that the rights of ‘legitimate’ children over ‘illegitimate’ be recognised, but above all it wanted higher prices for its grain.
It could not be admitted that the agrarian and economic policies followed by the party since 1924 were at fault, so scapegoats were found. Contrary to all they had said previously, the Stalin group on the CC now argued that the kulaks were the root of the grain problem; they were concealing from the government thousands of tons of grain and to cover their activities had infiltrated the party, taken posts as local party secretaries, and denied admission to poor peasants and proletarian day labourers! By November 1928, it was clear Stalin realised that further concessions to the kulaks were an existential threat to the Soviet bureaucracy.[11]
The lifeblood of the bureaucracy was the nationalised industry and land; control of these were the source of its dominance and privileges. Stalin simplistically reasoned that if the kulaks threatened this arrangement, then the solution was to immediately replace individual peasant farms with collective farms, and “liquidate the kulaks as a class”.[12] In an about-face, Stalin now argued that heavy industry must be the basis for industrial development and should have absolute priority over light industry which served peasant and consumer needs.
Using organisational methods tried and tested against previous oppositions, Stalin moved against the Right Opposition. Quickly and quietly, Bukharin was removed as editor of Pravda. Then the party faction at the All-Russian Congress of Trade Unions (end of December 1928) presented a motion calling for accelerated industrialisation and rejecting a “purely working-class” conception of trade unions (i.e., defence of wages and conditions).[13] Henceforth the tasks of the unions were “to mobilise the masses” and to “overcome the difficulties of the reconstruction period”. The Russian working class as a collective force was to be broken down and atomised, leaving each worker to fend for him or herself.
The Sixteenth Party Conference (23-29 April 1929) took place against a background of a 20 per cent shortfall in grain procurement. Bukharin and the right wing were denounced, they abjectly accepted their views were erroneous and pledged themselves to be obedient servants of the party. Stalin’s ascendancy was complete. Bukharin would be denounced as an agent of the counter-revolution subjected to a show trial, found guilty, and shot on 15 March 1938. An insight into Stalin’s vindictiveness is shown by his making of Lenin’s sister, Maria Ilyinichna Ulyanova, a Right Oppositionist and personal friend of Bukharin, sit on the commission to decide his fate. Krupskaya, who had the temerity to approach Stalin personally to ask for clemency for Bukharin, was also placed on the commission. The death penalty was the only possible outcome, and all those on the commission had to agree to it for fear for their own lives.[14]
Rationing was introduced in the course of 1928, and in February 1929, the state reintroduced bread rationing which was gradually extended to include meat, sugar, and butter. In 1929, rationing was the provision of food to ensure people could eat, not a restriction on what could be purchased, the opposite of rationing to limit panic buying, as occurred during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. Workers’ rations were higher than their dependants which put pressure on women to take jobs to upgrade their ration status. The 1929 grain procurement was lower than in 1928, and food prices rose quite sharply. To avoid widespread hunger in the cities, exportation of grain had to be restricted, reducing the resources available for industrialisation.
9.4 The Third Period
At the Fifteenth Party Congress, Stalin had startled everyone by announcing the stabilisation of capitalism was ended: that ‘peaceful co-existence’ between the Soviet Union and the capitalist states was over. The Third Period was proclaimed; the First period had been the revolutionary upsurge that lasted from 1918-1922, the Second was the period of the united front and the relative stabilisation of capitalism, that lasted from 1923-1928, now the Third Period had arrived; world capitalism would soon face revolutionary convulsions.
As was usual with Stalin there was no attempt to explain how such a dramatic change in his views had occurred in such a short time. A likely explanation is that he adapted the warnings of the UO that European and American capital could soon face severe economic, even revolutionary, convulsions, and used them for his own purposes, to justify the attacks on the Right Opposition and kulaks. The Third Period was launched while the war scare was front page news. Stalin exploited the sense of alarm within the party to obtain unconditional support for his regime.[15]
The realisation of the kulak danger also meant the sudden and panicked acceleration of the First FYP. A dramatic and unplanned turn towards extreme industrialisation called for investment in heavy industry, almost five times that of the original plan and greatly exceeded the growth rate of 18-20 per cent proposed by those previously ridiculed as ‘super industrialisers’. To demonstrate how necessary the new industrial targets were, Stalin removed statutory holidays from the calendar, leaving only 1 January, 8 March, and 7 November.
There was a similar leftward lurch in the policies of the CI, which accepted that capitalism was entering its death agony and this meant its sections had to make ready for immediate socialist revolution. United fronts with Social Democrats may have been appropriate during a period of social and economic stability but now those same Social Democrats had to be treated as enemies. The CPs adopted a strategy of confrontation, with their major target not fascism but Social Democracy. The United Front policy had called for all German workers to make common cause, but now the KPD went so far as to have its members join Nazi stormtroopers in joint actions against the SPD.[16]
The CI formally accepted both the Third Period orientation and the TSOC at its Sixth Congress (17 July-1 September 1928). From now on every political nuance in the Soviet Union would be automatically imposed on the CI. Stalin’s lurch to the left in Russia placed the power and authority of the only ‘socialist’ state behind the ultra-left currents and leaders in the CI. All sense of democracy within the CI disappeared, major decisions even those affecting specific national parties would be decided by Stalin meeting in camera with Molotov and transmitted to the section, often without the ECCI delegate being informed.
However, following the 1929 Wall Street Crash which plunged millions of workers into unemployment and starvation, the ultra-left rhetoric of the Third Period resonated with a section of militant workers. Thus, while in some countries Communist Parties actually grew, the effect of the policy on the working class as a whole fatally undermined any partial progress that may have resulted from the growth of individual Communist Parties.
In Germany election results even as late as July 1932, showed the combined strength of the Communist and Social Democratic forces was more than sufficient to defeat the Nazis, had they been united around a serious programme of struggle. But the suicidal policy of the KPD divided the working class in the face of reaction. In January 1933 Hitler was handed governmental power in a country with the most highly organised working class, and with the strongest Communist Party outside of Russia. For the first time in history, reaction was permitted to conquer power without any resistance on the part of the working class. The workers’ organisations were destroyed. Communists and SDs alike ended up in Hitler’s concentration camps. The balance sheet of Third Period ultra-leftism was the USSR placed in mortal danger.
9.5 The First Five-Year-Plan
Industrialisation was a major volte-face for the Stalin faction. Stalin’s lack of foresight was demonstrated when he personally intervened at the April 1927 Central Committee to sink the massive Dnieper hydro-electric project (proposed by Trotsky), arguing the dam “would be for the Soviet authorities to act like a foolish peasant who bought a gramophone instead of a cow”.[17]
By 1928 the state had succeeded in rebuilding the industries devastated by the civil war, but given this level from which to start, the Stalin-Bukharin bloc’s original projection of a 7 per cent annual increase in industrial activity was miserable. In December 1929, the annual growth rate was upped to 30-35 per cent.
The launch of the First FYP and the end of the NEP was seen by many rank-and-file members of the party as an end to compromise with capitalism and great hope for the future. Industrialisation was greeted enthusiastically, particularly by many oppositionists who saw the new direction as an implicit acceptance of their criticisms, and partial adoption of their policies. Their support was an important factor in ensuring its successes. Amongst the young, and in the official literature, the language of liberation was widely used, but there was a significant gap between the propaganda and reality. Nothing in Stalin’s perspective addressed the root of women’s double oppression, their role within the family. Industrialisation did mean new and exciting roles for many women, but at the cost, for most, of an intensification of society’s demands. In this there was no continuity with the ideas of Engels, Bebel and Lenin.
The state’s new commitment to accelerate industrialisation appeared to merge well with its formal ideological commitment to socialising life. Rapid industrialisation appeared to reinforce earlier visions of women’s liberation because public dining halls (and laundries and bath houses) were essential if millions of new workers were to be housed and fed on giant construction sites without individual cooking facilities.[18] Zhenotdel delegates, NARPIT (the Union of Public Dining and Dormitory Workers), women party members, and local activists joined with young and idealist architects, city planners and others to draw up highly ambitious plans for the transformation of urban areas into communities with socialised housing.
As hundreds of new industrial projects opened, the unemployment of the NEP came to an end. For women this was a period of great optimism despite their day-to-day hardships. Most welcomed the opportunity of gainful employment as bringing them the financial independence they longed for, transforming women’s lives by freeing them from domestic bondage. They expected the labour they traditionally performed in the home – cooking, cleaning, washing, caring for children, the sick, and the elderly – to be transferred to the public sphere, where it would be undertaken by waged workers. Women, relieved of household chores, would be free to enter the waged labour force and public life.
The CC called for a transition from individual family cooking and food preparation to socialised dining by the end of the First FYP. Half the urban population would be fed in communal dining halls. Plans for workers were even more ambitious, 90 per cent of industrial workers and over half of their families would eat breakfast, mid-day meal and evening meal in a dining hall. Every child, urban and rural, was to receive a hot breakfast at school. There would be daycare centres (for both very young and very old) and laundries for 70 per cent of the urban population. The Commissariat of Enlightenment was to provide pre-school places for all workers’ children.
Zhenotdel activists were optimistic, they saw the possibility of overcoming the material barriers to realising women’s liberation, recalling their expectations that women could lead lives without endless toil. Artyukhina publicly challenged producing labour-saving devices for individual homes. Instead of imitating the bourgeoisie who used such devices to keep women chained to the pots and pans of private kitchens, the Soviet Union was believed to be producing machines to support communal living.
To provide the human base for industrialisation, the Sixteenth Congress (June-July 1930) approved universal primary education, raised the school leaving age to 17, increased the total student population, including apprentices, to over 20 million. The Soviet Union was leading the world in the provision of universal education. The building of the great Dnieper dam, the largest in the world, was already under way, with Stalin taking the credit despite having previously condemned the whole project.
The enthusiasm for the FYP was an international phenomenon and many workers outside the Soviet Union wanted to join the drive for socialism. The Sixteenth Party Congress formally welcomed the experience, knowledge and skills of these foreign workers, and by the mid-30s there were over 40,000, mostly men and mostly skilled, working in the Soviet Union. In Magnitogorsk, there were, at times, as many as a thousand foreign workers amongst the 33,000 waged workers building a giant steel producing plant, and the city to house its workers. They entered a world in which they worked side-by-side with illiterate peasants newly arrived from the countryside, with little idea about labour discipline and no knowledge of machinery. They added an enthusiasm that inspired everyone and, apart from introducing technical know-how, taught that it was necessary to turn up on time and work throughout the day at a steady rate as part of a production process. A 1931 Gosplan document, reported that without these workers and specialists many of the new giant enterprises “could not have been built and put in operation”.[19]
Thousands of factories, usually enlarged copies of the most modern American, from the Gary steel works to Ford auto plants, were built under licence with American supervision and paid for in gold. These new technologies and new methods of production were to be the basis of the Second FYP.[20] The diaries of foreign workers pay tribute to the enthusiasm, hope, and sense of purpose they experienced on all their work sites. However, they were not afraid to speak out against bureaucratic inefficiencies. They railed against the army of petty bureaucrats, their excessive number, so many that they got in each other’s way and served to confuse rather than direct the work.
However, an annual growth rate of 30-35 per cent was grossly over-ambitious, and efforts by relatively inexperienced administrators, and managers to meet this target resulted in an unnecessary mad scramble. It was unavoidable that there would be imbalances, bottlenecks, and shortcomings but the Plan contained no effective mechanisms for correcting such faults. The fantastic growth rate was supposed to be paid for by the increased efficiency and productive capacity of Soviet industry but the contradictions in the plan meant it was actually paid for by lowering real wages and safety standards, lengthening working hours, and worsening the living conditions of Soviet workers.
Right from its inception there were fundamental flaws inherent in the First FYP. Reflecting the nature of the bureaucracy, the Plan adopted an excessively rigid form of the so-called priority method of allocating resources, giving primacy to heavy industry. Whenever there was a shortage, and the scale and speed of the industrialisation meant almost everything was in short supply all the time, the loss was made good at the expense of production of consumer goods and provision of social services. This was the main reason the Plan turned out to be so wildly over-optimistic in terms of improvement of living conditions. Instead, it led to a serious disregard for the welfare of the Soviet people. Maximising industrial investment meant the deliberate curtailment of investment in social support services, low priority given to the retail trade, and minimal production of labour-saving devices. One example of freeing resources for heavy industry was the reduction of the production of clothing and other textiles available to the general population which was both drastically cut and lowered in quality. Even friendly observers reported that many Russians wore rags because nothing else was available. Nor was money spent on providing facilities such as running water to dwellings. Women on sites such as Magnitogorsk washed their families’ clothing in local streams often polluted by cesspits, substantially increasing their double burden and undermining their health.
The FYP was top-down, excluding participation by lower-ranking party and trade union officials, let alone shop floor workers. The Plan lacked the democratic element without which such a complex undertaking was bound to have serious problems. “One-man-management” was introduced in late 1929 and was meant to increase efficiency, which initially it appeared to do because it enabled managers to get away with gross exaggerations, claiming that targets had been met when they hadn’t, and subverting state directives on the hiring and training of, for example, women. The bureaucracy, by its very presence, distorted the system and downgraded efficiency. However, at this early stage of development, planning and popular enthusiasm were so powerful that they swept all before them.
The accelerated pace of the First FYP was due to the shortfall in the harvest, so food shortages were an important obstacle to be overcome. But supplies were administered bureaucratically with bottlenecks, delays, shortages of everything, not only of food, but plates, chairs on which to sit and tables on which to eat. Canteens equipped to serve hundreds had to serve thousands, so that workers had to queue for hours. Drawing on the previous experience of Zhenotdel and supported by the enthusiasm of the masses, NARPIT fed the workers, despite complaints that ‘every meal seemed to consist of cabbage soup’.
NARPIT was responsible for feeding tens of thousands of workers on gigantic construction sites such as the Stalin Magnitogorsk Metallurgical Complex which was, and remains, one of the largest steel plants in the world and was the jewel in the crown of the First FYP. Initially, conditions were primitive, workers lived in mud huts built over holes in the ground, in tents, with the lucky few in flimsy, jerry-built, single-storey, barracks; without running water or street lighting. All were served by outdoor toilets feeding into open cesspits. Hot food on a cold winter day was essential, even if served in vermin ridden canteens where cleanliness and hygiene were novel concepts, and gastroenteritis periodically swept through the workforce. But the spirit of the revolution inspired the working masses. Workers at Magnitogorsk witnessed death, brutality, and hunger but acquiesced believing they were building socialism.[21]
By the completion of the First FYP, over 360,000 dining halls were serving more than twenty-five million people, three million children were served a hot breakfast in school every morning. They were staffed by women whose dedication to revolutionary goals was an essential contribution to the successes of the FYPs.[22] Between 1928 and 1931, the number of childcare places per 1,000 working women more than tripled.[23] The acceleration in economic development had been sudden and abrupt, without proper preparation so, all too often, the on-site childcare facilities provided were both insufficient to meet demand and suffered from a number of defects that were never fully remedied: low status, little or no training given to staff, high staff turnover and absenteeism, and very variable levels of facilities.[24]
The First FYP turned much of the country into a gigantic building site. The industrialisation of Europe had taken generations to complete. Russian industrialisation was to take a decade. Virtually anyone who turned up at the factory gate would be employed in some capacity, but labour turnover was so high that employment and attendance records were, at best, scrappy and inadequate. In such a situation, local managers and officials rarely replied truthfully, or at all, to Ministry questionnaires, and ignored every central directive they could. The Soviet Union was formally committed to gender equality and had enacted legal protection of women workers as mothers regarding, for example, childcare and paid holidays before and after birth, so recording a worker as a ‘woman’ was seen by many managers as asking to incur additional costs. They simply recorded many women as ‘men’.
9.6 Scapegoats and Saboteurs
Right from the start it was obvious that many of the industrial accidents and disasters that occurred were due to the scramble to meet unrealistic targets, and the regime rapidly adopted a strategy of blaming scapegoats to protect itself. In early 1928, on Stalin’s initiative, the secret police arrested a group of engineers in the town of Shakhty, accusing them of conspiring with the former owners of the local coal mines to sabotage the Soviet economy. The trial marked the beginning of ‘wrecking’ as an explanation for under-achievement.[25]
On 10 March 1928, Pravda announced that the bourgeoisie were using sabotage as a method of class struggle and soon thousands of engineers had been arrested in a clear statement by the regime that individuals would be blamed for the systemic failures of the FYP. However, in the real world of industrial plants such as in Magnitogorsk, it remained impossible to meet Moscow’s overambitious targets. As each set of administrators reported failure, they were labelled ‘saboteurs’ or ‘right opportunist’ and replaced by a new set. These had to familiarise themselves with the project, which took time and introduced further delays. Reports to Moscow were filled with lies, tasks were invented so they could be reported as completed, supervisory staff exaggerated the work done, a popular occurrence because under piecework the workers received extra pay. On the other hand, it was decided that every aspect of the project required its own bookkeepers, but the low level of literacy and numeracy meant, in the words of John Scott, “putting ten semi-literate ‘office rats’” to do the work of one accountant, and in some departments there were as many bookkeepers as workers.[26] Worst of all, the lies contaminated everything and undermined the workers’ confidence in the Soviet system.
For the FYPs to have a chance of success, the Soviet Union would require a great number of new technical personnel and skilled workers whose loyalty could be relied upon. The regime was desperate for a huge increase in skilled personnel to form a reliable and loyal stratum of technicians and managers to enable the planned industrial expansion. This necessitated a massive recruitment of workers into higher education. In September 1929, Stalin appointed his close ally Andrei Bubnov, a member of the CC and Orgburo, as Commissar for Education who pushed through a policy of affirmative action which actively encouraged workers to leave their benches and train as technicians and managers. An important part of this initiative were quotas for women on training courses. This was widely seen at the time as a cultural revolution, and those who benefited provided much of the social base for the Stalinist bureaucracy.[27] The state set up short training courses in every workplace, urging workers to acquire additional expertise and increase their wages. Young people flocked to join institutes and universities, from which they graduated to jobs in growing industries in dire need of their skills. Illiterate peasants became the proud parents of sons and daughters who were skilled workers and managers.[28]
This ‘cultural revolution’ was an important stage in the solidification of the bureaucracy. Its beneficiaries were handed extraordinarily rapid promotion and because their promotions came when they were young, they constituted a remarkably long-lasting political and managerial elite, whose hold on power would continue for almost half a century.
9.7 Women Workers and Industrialisation
To meet the targets set out in the FYP, millions of women needed to join the workforce. This required the state to provide a range of facilities, including childcare, communal dining and laundries, and a vast expansion of training and education. The Departments of Health and Education, for example, campaigned to recruit women who were not working outside the home, to volunteer to staff the daycare facilities which were to be provided sixteen hours a day in the giant estates of tower blocks being built to house workers. As these facilities were put in place there was strong, widespread support amongst urban women for the party’s new direction.
Huge advances were made, advances which could only have been achieved in a society which had eliminated private ownership of the means of production and instituted a planned economy. A second ‘Down with Illiteracy’ campaign was launched in 1928, with the target of raising women’s literacy rates to be at least equal to those of men. In the major urban centres this was largely achieved, but in the Central Asian republics traditional attitudes to women’s education hindered progress.
The CC published a decree on ‘Work Among Women Workers and Peasants’ (15 July 1929), instructing Zhenotdel, trade unions and factory personnel departments to recruit women and organise training for them. The Ministry of Labour, on 9 October, ended unemployment pay, replacing the designation ‘unemployed’ with ‘refused employment’. From now on workers could be assigned “to where they were most needed”.
By the end of 1930, the Soviet working class had expanded by 2.3 million. Sovnarkom announced the elimination of unemployment and the party launched a campaign to recruit 1 million women into the labour force during 1931.[29] This huge influx of women workers was to remedy the severe labour shortages that existed everywhere, with many of the largest and most important construction sites functioning with fewer than half the designated workforce. The demand for labour was such that anyone – skilled or unskilled – would be hired if they turned up for work. By the summer, all hiring was done at the gate. Labour exchanges and unions were brushed aside as town dwellers and dispossessed peasants massed at construction site gates seeking work. Women, especially peasant women, fleeing forced collectivisation entered the workforce in record numbers. The main duties of Zhenotdel activists now became reducing absenteeism amongst women, increasing their productivity and reporting local managers for failing to provide facilities for women workers.
The Ministry of Labour on 28 March 1931, circulated all its offices instructing them to set about recruiting the wives of workers to work in the same plants as their husbands. This, it was hoped, would reduce labour turnover, stabilise the workforce, and raise family living standards. Plant managers organised in-house recruitment campaigns on the lines of, there’s a job waiting for your wife, daughter, or mother-in-law. Millions of women entered the workforce in all branches of industry and services. By the end of 1931, just over a half of all women between the ages of sixteen and thirty-four were working outside the home.[30] They were employed not only in the traditional ‘women’s industries’, such as textiles and social care; but also in construction, metalworking, machine building and mining where the percentages of women employed rose from less than 10 per cent to over 20 per cent.[31] Women doubled their representation in a much-enlarged workforce.
A flood of peasants almost doubled the population of Soviet cities, overwhelming the available accommodation. The construction sites were supposed to provide temporary housing, but the cost of the accommodation had to be met from managers’ budgets, and money spent on housing meant fewer machines and lower output, so workers’ accommodation was as cheap as possible, or even non-existent.
The descriptions of living conditions given in the Soviet press of the time, could have been taken from Engels’ description of the condition of the working class in Manchester’s worst slums in the early days of capitalism. Only rarely did a family have a single room of its own to live and sleep in, usually several families had to share bedroom and kitchen, with no laundry facilities and the privy in a disgusting condition.[32] Thievery, drunkenness, and hooliganism flourished. The high turnover in the workforce was directly linked to poor living conditions, with workers moving between factories in search of better housing. In the worst factories labour turnover was more than 100 per cent. Industry cannot withstand such disorder; it aggravates labour shortages, lowers productivity, disorganises production, reduces the quality of the goods produced, and is a major cause of failure to meet targets.
The lack of building materials seriously constrained every project, and the lowest priority was given to social provision, including childcare. Nevertheless, the number of children enrolled in childcare centres rose from about 100,000 in 1927, to 700,000 in 1932. In the countryside, where work and care provision were not so clearly separated, the corresponding numbers were from about 11,000 to 350,000.[33] The provision fell far short of the numbers required, and its allocation tended to favour those in the more ‘responsible’ jobs, not those most in need.
While the NEP had benefited the kulaks, the FYP would directly benefit neither the peasantry nor the working class. Instead of the hoped-for reduction in woman’s double burden there was a precipitous decline in living standards. Only the privatisation of Soviet industry in the early 1990s saw a more catastrophic collapse. To the outside world it was claimed that there was a doubling in wages over the period of the First FYP; not mentioned, however, was the fact that inflation increased four-fold, so real wages almost halved.
Between 1929 and 1932, factory leaders succeeded in dramatically lowering workers’ wages to pay for industrial expansion … compelled employees to work longer … regime loyalists (were forced) to adopt more coercive measures … brow-beating, imposing fines, even arrests and control of food supplies.[34]
The decline in real wages made it impossible for many lower paid urban workers to support a family, forcing women to join the workforce in large numbers. By 1932 this had helped facilitate a major expansion of the labour force at relatively low cost.
Cleverly using the party’s campaign to recruit one million women workers, the KUTB[35] organised brigades to tour and inspect the largest factories to determine how best women could be employed. The KUTB was a government body that had amongst its staff a high percentage of Zhenotdel delegates, who were keen to progress the cause of women’s employment and challenge the inaction and misreporting of managers. The brigades contained resolute and fearless women who remained undaunted by the hostility of managers, factory committees and many male workers. Goldman reports that the results of these on-site surveys presented the first data on what was really happening in the factories and construction sites, and showed that the replies to the questionnaires relied on by government departments for decision-making and resource allocation, were often fairy tales.[36]
By mid-November, having pushed aside managers who argued that ‘one-man-management’ meant their decisions were unchallengeable, and called meetings of workers against the wishes of the local trade union bureaucrats, the brigades presented their report. One thing was clear; most of the restrictions on jobs for women were based on prejudice, not evidence. Again and again, the report showed how in the more traditional industries (such as mining and steelmaking) women would be barred from certain jobs by designating them as too unhealthy for a woman, while in the newer industries (such as electrical machinery production) women were doing much the same job and doing it well. An extreme example was on the railways where it was common for a man who arrived too drunk to operate the points to be replaced by a woman, but women were refused permanent employment in that very job. The second finding was that mechanisation of production opened many semi-skilled jobs to women.
The KUTB met with the VSNKh on 14 November to discuss how to increase employment opportunities for women. The central planners, desperate to recruit as many women as possible into the labour force, but with the least headache for themselves, suggested that specific jobs should be designated as ‘female’. The KUTB agreed despite its obvious adverse effects on women. Accompanied by warm statements welcoming women’s higher sense of social responsibility, honesty and sobriety, the Council of People’s Commissars published a decree on 8 December listing certain jobs as primarily for women. A second list of jobs exclusively for women, such as caring and cleaning, was published soon after. In only a short time, ‘primarily’ and ‘exclusively’ became synonymous. The lists were, and remain, a determining influence on gender divisions within Soviet and post-Soviet society.
As the First FYP progressed, it was clear that the need for skilled and semi-skilled workers was increasing dramatically and the Ministry of Labour pressured colleges to set recruitment targets for women. The Ministry also called for enforcement of equal pay on the grounds that it made women less likely to change jobs. Local managers in traditional, male-dominated industries and the newer more innovative industries faced different day-to-day pressures. In the former, high labour mobility meant there was little systematic hiring, training or promotion, and such circumstances meant women tended to be assigned to low-skill, low-pay jobs. The latter relied much more on technical innovation and required workers with new skills. The Ministry decided that training women for these posts would avoid challenging male prerogatives.[37] Largely as a result, today in Russia, women make up 36 per cent of its practising engineers whereas in both the UK and the USA about 12 per cent of professionally qualified engineers are women.[38]
The speed at which a modern industrial state was constructed showed the incredible strength of a planned economy,[39] but the form it took, the chaos due to the lack of democracy and the arbitrariness of bureaucratic decision-making, meant massive additional and unnecessary costs were incurred, particularly lives lost in industrial accidents due to the appalling working conditions, detracting from the economic gains made.
Before the end of the First FYP voices were being raised, arguing that the under-development of public services could be compensated for by the adoption of policies that strengthened the family as a reproductive and socialising unit, helping lay the basis for later legislation that strengthened the petty-bourgeois family in the USSR, as Trotsky explained. But the provision of domestic labour-saving appliances for individual homes had zero priority, so the burdens resulting from such a policy would fall disproportionately on women. For example, even in large towns some two-thirds of families obtained their water from a communal tap or pump. The only hot water was what you heated yourself and washing of clothes was done by hand. It is estimated that after returning home from the factory, wives would face an additional two or more hours per day of housework.[40]
9.8 Zhenotdel: The Final Days
In May 1924, the Thirteenth Party Congress had criticised Zhenotdel for focusing too much on agitation and propaganda, rather than working directly on issues affecting women’s daily lives. Aleksandra Artyukhina, the newly-appointed Director attempted to justify her appointment by calling on the women’s section to demonstrate it had no tasks separate from the tasks of the party, and to toe the party line closely. Armand was dead, Kollontai was no longer of any real political consequence and Zetkin was physically infirm and withdrew from day-to-day activities. With successive so-called ‘Bolshevisations’ of the International by Zinoviev, Bukharin, and Stalin, women leaders who thought for themselves were replaced by those who accepted every change in line from Moscow. When Zetkin stood down as editor, The Communist Women’s International was closed down.
Zhenotdel had led campaigns against illiteracy, domestic abuse, prostitution, and even vermin! Targeted campaigns had urged women to participate in subbotniki (‘volunteer’ workdays) and to raise funds for orphans and famine victims. Within five years of the revolution, largely due to the ‘Down with Illiteracy!’ campaign, the literacy rate amongst women had risen from single figures to a claimed 43 per cent. In parallel to this, Zhenotdel campaigned for recognition of the academic abilities of girls, and largely through these efforts, by 1927, some 40 per cent of pupils entering the specialist science schools were female. After the First FYP was launched, Zhenotdel called on its 800,000 delegates to campaign in support of industrialisation, for increased productivity, improved labour discipline, against waste, against truancy, and for collectivisation.[41]
There can be no question that Stalin’s ascension to power meant the end of Zhenotdel: if it was outspoken, it was accused of feminist deviation, if it was not sufficiently visible in its support for the party line, it was accused of passivity. The Thirteenth Congress had demanded it pay attention to helping women in their daily lives; then it was criticised for devoting too much attention to helping women in their daily lives. The decision of the Fifteenth Party Congress (2-19 December 1927) to establish a committee to eliminate ‘parallelism’ between Zhenotdel and Agitprop went almost unnoticed in the fury of the attacks on the UO, but it marked the final days for Zhenotdel.
Prejudging the findings of the committee, the CC meeting of 5 January 1930 effectively shut down Zhenotdel. Lazar Kaganovich declared that Zhenotdel was being liquidated as part of a general reorganisation of the party, that its task had been ‘completed’ and so a women’s section was no longer necessary. The historic ‘Woman Question’ had been solved, work among the female masses continued to have ‘the highest possible significance’, and would now be undertaken by all sections of the party rather than by a special women’s section. This speech mirrored one by Yaroslavsky made some fourteen months earlier, when he pledged the support of the Central leadership for a purge of all party members who refused to treat women as equals. Reports in 1929 showed Yaroslavsky’s commitment was worthless.
Zhenotdel was placed under the control of Agitprop. In one region after another, beginning with Leningrad and Moscow, Zhenotdel was either reorganised within Agitmas – a sub-section of Agitprop – or abolished. The party now saw equality of the sexes as a by-product of the FYP, and this did not require an autonomous strategy, or particular policies, or specific analysis; all that was required was to redefine women’s liberation as participation in the labour force.[42]
The party tops arranged for letters and articles to appear in Pravda and elsewhere from groups of women workers expressing dissatisfaction with Zhenotdel, criticising it for failing to solve the problems of unequal pay, of women being denied training, of women being denied promotion. The arguments mirrored those of the CC, that it was necessary to make these issues central to all party work and therefore there was no longer any need for Zhenotdel. Other letters called for the liquidation of Zhenotdel because it had been so successful in achieving the active participation of women in state and party affairs that it was no longer needed. Official publications of the early 1930s boasted that in the USSR women had passed beyond equal legal rights and were enjoying equal rights in practice.[43]
The reasons given for the closure of Zhenotdel were, of course, nonsense. So why was Zhenotdel dissolved? The answer lies in the bureaucratic nature of the regime. Stalin could not allow any organisational structure within the party that could become, in any way, a focus for dissent, and the stated policy of Zhenotdel on, for example, the family, was in direct opposition to the direction the party was going. Industrialisation was reducing working conditions to rock bottom, and while the trade union leaders would acquiesce, opposition from Zhenotdel could have been a significant problem. Zhenotdel was unacceptable because it could act as a transmission belt carrying women’s concerns into the party, at a time when the party was embarking on accelerated industrialisation and forced collectivisation, significantly increasing women’s double burden. The party ultimately eliminated Zhenotdel because the voice of rank and file women could not be incorporated into Stalin’s revisionist definition of the socialist revolution. A survey of party resolutions and decrees shows that during the eleven years of Zhenotdel’s existence, there were 301 addressing issues specifically relating to women, but in the thirty years after its demise a total of just three.[44]
When assessing the policies of the Stalin regime towards women, it is necessary to recognise that it was beset with contradictions. On the one hand, to defend itself, the bureaucracy wanted to promote social conservatism, a process that would include strengthening the family and making homosexuality and abortion illegal. But on the other hand, it was necessary to industrialise the Soviet Union so it could defend itself against likely aggressors, and this meant employing women on a mass scale in technologically advanced and socially responsible positions. In addition, of course, the Stalinist regime had inherited a number of advances in women’s rights from Bolshevism, including equal pay for equal work, equal educational and promotional opportunities, recognition of women as leading writers, artists, engineers, educationalists, scientists, etc., and it continued to pay lip service to these aspirations.
However, the double oppression of women was one topic carefully avoided, or implicitly denied. Kaganovich, speaking on behalf of the Central Committee, boldly stated women should be considered “not as women but as workers – equal, adult and developed”.[45] The new message was that the reorganisation of family life would have to wait on the party’s drive for industrialisation and collectivisation, since only then would the material resources be available. The problem for women was that this meant their condition would get appreciably worse before it got better.
By 1930, conservative attitudes were becoming more open and, as invariably happens, are most obvious with respect to a woman’s right to control her own body. Increasingly, under pressure from above, doctors argued that a woman would risk injury to her health and that she would commit a ‘social crime’ if she did not give birth. Sometimes a doctor would request that the woman first watch the doctor perform an abortion to be sure that she wanted one herself.[46] Since women underwent the curettage procedure without anaesthetic, the doctor invariably intended to frighten the women and, apparently, doctors succeeded in dissuading about half of the women attending the Women’s Consultation Centres from having an abortion. If a woman persisted, she was referred to a state hospital which, typically, dissuaded 25 to 50 per cent of referrals. The remainder still had to petition to a special commission.
In May 1930, the Central Committee accused the leaders of the campaigns for communal housing, dining, etc., of being premature, calling on them to cease such activities and concentrate their efforts on rapid industrialisation and single-family dwellings. At about the same time, it confirmed that Agitmas would be responsible for mobilising women with a more limited goal, “to ensure the successful implementation of the Five-Year-Plan for the socialist construction of industry … [and] to build upon the successful achievements of collectivisation”.[47] Zhenotdel’s delegate meetings, it was alleged, had been over-concerned with women’s issues; Zhenotdel activists were criticised because of their efforts to get a fair deal for women workers, and had “interfered with their correct involvement in, for example, production meetings”.[48]
Under Tomsky, the lack of action by lower-level trade union officials regarding the recruitment and promotion of women had, to a certain extent, been compensated for by Zhenotdel activists. The decision to dissolve Zhenotdel was taken as a signal by the unions to liquidate work amongst women. The Eighth Trade Union Congress (December 1928, still led by Tomsky), voted to redefine the duties of all posts with specific responsibilities for women workers, as having general responsibility for all workers. This was usually interpreted as eliminating all special care for women workers, a heavy blow against the advancement and promotion of equality. Trud, the trade union journal, declared on the front page of its 3 February 1931 issue; “When the baba falls out of the carriage, the horse is better off”.[49]
From the VTsSPS down to shop-floor level, union organisations offered only weak support for the party’s attempts to employ more women. For example, VTsSPS called for an All-Union Trade Union Conference on Work among Women to be held on 5 December 1930. The lack of support from local union branches caused the conference to be postponed three times.[50] Increasingly, women complained that the unions did absolutely nothing to organise the hundreds of thousands of newly-arrived women factory workers.
Women were encouraged to join collective farms and achieve ‘actual liberation’ through meeting output quotas, thus, for example, the slogan for the 1930 International Women’s Day was ‘100 per cent collectivisation’. To avoid any challenges to party officials, Agitmas declared it was not seeking to increase the miniscule number of women in leadership positions on collective farms. Its reticence did not save it since in 1934, Agitmas was abolished on the grounds, “the majority of women had been drawn into social production and their social backwardness had been overcome”.[51]
The regime had eliminated Zhenotdel as an effective organisation to remove a possible focus of dissent. It did the same with other organisations. The Jewish Section of the Communist Party (Yevsektsiya) had formed in 1918 with Lenin’s approval, and had the express purpose of winning Jewish workers to support the revolution. It was liquidated in early 1930. At about the same time, a similar fate befell other associations which were deemed too independent to be sufficiently susceptible to organisational and ideological control from above.[52]
9.9 Women and the Communist International
When the Bukharin-Stalin alliance fell apart, the Bukharinists were cleared out of the CI in a new wave of ‘Bolshevisation’. As conservative attitudes revived in the Soviet Union, there was a parallel shift in the activities of Communist women worldwide. After the Sixth Congress of the CI, there was a weakening of the Communist Women’s Movement with the International Women’s Secretariat of the CI downgraded from an autonomous body to department of the ECCI.
This increased centralisation reflected Stalin’s concern to maintain a tight grip on the CI. It had begun with the expulsion of those who supported the Trotskyist Opposition, and then extended to Zinovievists and Bukharinists, and soon any joint activity with a group outside direct party control was actively discouraged. Demands for contraception and abortion rights were increasingly frowned on as potentially feminist. At the same time criticism of the family as a bourgeois institution largely disappeared and activities were concentrated into areas that fitted events in the Soviet Union. Those who opposed this were condemned as right or left deviationists and expelled. A study of leaders of the international communist women’s movement concluded that almost half of them joined one of the opposition movements, in particular the Trotskyists.[53]
Symbolically, while each of the Third and Fourth Congresses of the CI had an entire session devoted to the ‘Woman Question’, the Fifth (summer 1924) had only a brief resolution, and while the Sixth (summer 1928) did include in its resolution comments drawn from previous congresses, it had no separate resolution on the ‘Woman Question’, rather it demoted the IWS to a department of the ECCI.
A final Conference of Heads of Communist Party Women’s Sections was held in Moscow in August 1930. Otto Kuusinen, a member of the ECCI Presidium, in accord with the ultra-left rhetoric and policies of the Third Period, denounced the Women’s Section as having proven itself incapable of recruiting and training female strike leaders and activists, or developing women for physical resistance to police violence or strike-breakers, and therefore had be dissolved immediately without further discussion.[54]
Endnotes
[1] See H. Hudson, ‘The 1927 Soviet War Scare’.
[2] L. Trotsky, ‘Prospects and Tasks in the East’, April 1924. Available at: https://marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1924/04/perspectives.htm (accessed 2 February 2023).
[3] See Y. Sheng, ‘Sun-Yat Sen University in Moscow and the Chinese Revolution’.
[4] L. Trotsky, Leon Trotsky on China, Pathfinder, 1976, p. 266.
[5] See J. Stalin, ‘Prospect of the Revolution in China’.
[6] H. Isaacs, The Tragedy of the Chinese Revolution, 1938. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/isaacs/1938/tcr/ (accessed 2 February 2023).
[7] A. Pantsov, The Bolsheviks and the Chinese Revolution 1919-1927, Routledge, 2000, p. 145.
[8] R. Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution, Harvard University Press, 1965, pp. 315-9.
[9] See R. Fox, ‘The Commune of Canton’. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/archive/fox/1928/03/canton.htm (accessed 2 February 2023).
[10] See T. Grant, Russia: From Revolution to Counter-Revolution.
[11] See J. Stalin, ‘The Right Danger in the CPSU(B)’.
[12] R. Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution, Harvard University Press, 1965, pp. 328-331.
[13] P. Broué, The History of the Bolshevik Party (CP) of the U.S.S.R. Available at: https://www.marxists.org/history/etol/writers/broue/works/1971/ussr/ch07.htm (accessed 6 February 2023).
[14] See K. Turton, ‘Forgotten lives: the role of Anna, Ol’ga and Mariia Ul’ianova in the Russian revolution 1864-1937’.
[15] See L. Trotsky, The Third International after Lenin.
[16] See J. Valtin, Out of the Night.
[17] A. Woods and T. Grant, Lenin and Trotsky: What They Really Stood For, Wellred Books, 2000, p. 131.
[18] See G. Lapidus, Women in Soviet Society.
[19] A. Graziosi, ‘Foreign Workers in Soviet Russia: 1920-40’, International Labor and Working-Class History, 33, 1988, pp. 38-59.
[20] See for example, J. Scott, Beyond the Urals.
[21] See K. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain.
[22] See W. Goldman, Women at the Gates.
[23] See T. Schrand, ‘The Five-Year Plan for Women’s Labour’.
[24] See G. Lapidus, Women in Soviet Society.
[25] See K. Murphy, Class Struggle in a Moscow Metal Factory.
[26] J. Scott, Beyond the Urals, Indiana University Press, 1942, p. 75.
[27] See S. Fitzpatrick, ‘Education and Social Mobility in the Soviet Union’.
[28] See W. Goldman, Inventing the Enemy.
[29] See T. Schrand, ‘The Five-Year Plan for Women’s Labour’.
[30] See W. Goldman, ‘The “Withering Away” and the Resurrection of the Soviet Family’.
[31] See T. Schrand, ‘The Five-Year Plan for Women’s Labour’.
[32] See J. Wright, ‘The Crisis in the Soviet Union’.
[33] See G. Lapidus, Women in Soviet Society.
[34] K. Murphy, Class Struggle in a Moscow Metal Factory, Berghan Books, 2005, pp. 186-217.
[35] Committee to Improve the Labour and Life of Women, a branch of the Supreme Council of the National Economy (VSNKh).
[36] See K. Murphy, Class Struggle in a Moscow Metal Factory.
[37] See A. Nove, An Economic History of the USSR.
[38] See ‘Women in the Workforce’, Wikipedia, 2017.
[39] See A. Rassweiler, The Generation of Power, the History of Dnieprostroy.
[40] See G. Lapidus, Women in Soviet Society.
[41] See M. Patterson, ‘Red Teaspoons of Charity: Zhenotdel, Russian Women and the Communist Party, 1919-1930’.
[42] See W Goldman, ‘Industrial Politics, Peasant Rebellion and the Death of the Proletarian Women’s Movement in the USSR’, Slavic Review, 55(1), 1996, pp. 46-77.
[43] Quoted in M. Buckley, ‘The “Woman Question” in the Contemporary Soviet Union’.
[44] See G. Lapidus, Women in Soviet Society.
[45] W. Goldman, Women at the Gates, Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 55.
[46] See A. Field, Protection of Women and Children in Soviet Russia.
[47] M. Buckley, Women and Ideology in the Soviet Union, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989, p. 124.
[48] W. Goldman, Women at the Gates, Cambridge University Press, 2002, p. 58.
[49] Ibid, p. 62.
[50] See T. Schrand, ‘The Five Year Plan for Women’s Labour’.
[51] M. Buckley, Women and Ideology in the Soviet Union, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989, p. 124.
[52] See G. Massell, The Surrogate Proletariat.
[53] See B. Bayerlein, ‘International Bibliography of Communist Studies’.
[54] See J-J. Marie, ‘The Women’s Section of the Comintern, from Lenin to Stalin’.