Women, Resistance and Revolution (24 page)

Within the Communist Party conflict emerged about the means by which the new culture should be created. Kollontai describes this in her novel,
Free Love
, sometimes better translated as
Red Love.
The heroine Vasilissa, an ex-trade union organizer, tells a rather bureaucratic party member about the house-commune she has lived in.
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There had been great difficulties because the people living in it retained the old ideas of competition and selfishness. She says house-communes must be transformed from short-term solutions to the housing shortage into ‘schools, and foster the Communist spirit’. This was in line with educational ideas at the time which saw education as completely integrated into social life and the specific educational institutions withering away. However, the other party member was completely bewildered; for him education was something that happened at school or in the university and had nothing to do with housing methods. People reverted to the old forms because it was the only thing they knew.

It was the same with the family. Externally everything had changed. Internally people’s attitudes remained the same. The women clung on to their individual pots and pans – communal substitutes were viewed dubiously. A communard complained in the day-book, ‘I have brought my electric kettle with me to the commune but they use it carelessly. Why did I bring it?’
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Sexual matters were less discussed but it was apparent that women still fell into the old relationship of submission. Yaroslavsky, a party official, commented, ‘It is one thing to write good laws, and another to create the actual conditions to bring the laws into life.’
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Lack of any theory which could explain the personal and sexual aspects of life combined with persistent economic difficulties and the heritage of social and cultural backwardness. In the case of women these problems were magnified. For example, women did not become involved in industry in the way it had been imagined that they would. After the period known as War Communism, when ration cards were issued on the basis of employment, the drift of women into social production was slow. During the N.E.P. (New Economic Policy) period there were often simply no jobs. Nor was most women’s work much of an alternative to household drudgery. It takes time to train skilled workers, and most of the women were unskilled. New factories were built but the old continued, and with them the same bad old conditions. Although the law said equal pay for equal work, women were doing the same work as men in the 1920s for less pay because it was graded differently. In some cases the men workers ignored the official trade union directives and refused point blank to work with women at the same rates. Although officially again the women were meant to have the same say in trade unions as the men, in practice this was often not the case. Kollontai in
Red Love
describes how the women workers couldn’t express themselves, and how their needs were always dismissed by the men as trivial. Vera Alexeyeva told Jessica Smith of the problems of relating the Genotdel to the trade unions:

Originally all work among women in the factories rested on the shoulders of a woman organizer responsible to the Genotdel. At a result it often happened that the Factory Committee failed to take any initiative in work among women, and refused to put subjects of special interest to women on their programs. When the women did come to meetings they were met with, ‘Well, let’s hear what the babas have to sayl’, and were afraid to express themselves, which made it necessary to organize special women’s meetings. While that had some good effects in stimulating women’s interest, it also led to a ‘we’ and ‘they’ attitude, so we decided to change our method. The last Trade Union Congress voted to place the responsibility for the work among women on the factory committee as a whole and instructed the unions to include questions of special interest to women on their general program. That has had a very healthy effect, and the unions have since been much more active in drawing women into their work. There are still Genotdel organizers in every factory, but they concentrate on the delegates’ meetings and party work, while the union takes care of all general and cultural work. It’s the Genotdel, however, which prepares the ground for the union work.
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But if it was difficult to overcome economic problems, female passivity, and male contempt at work, it was even worse in the home, where traditions had a firmer hold, and public facilities were often quite inadequate. During the early period, War Communism, the communal houses were often grim and depressing, the shared kitchens chaotic, the crèches makeshift. In the N.E.P. years, when the need to produce efficiently was given priority, directors and managers were frequently very unwilling to spend money on crèches and allow the women time off with their children. It was a question of attitudes too. Trotsky describes how house communes collapsed:

Many homes which had been allotted to families living in communes got into filthy conditions and became uninhabitable. People living in them did not consider communistic housing as a beginning of new conditions. They looked upon their dwellings as upon a barracks provided by the state.
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In the villages the contrast between the old ways and the new ideas was even more extreme. Jessica Smith explains how peasant women responded to the idea of a day nursery in the late 1920s. Almost all the older women were against it. Children had never been brought up in nurseries before – why start now? They had heard they bathed the children every day and believed this would mean they wouldn’t grow up strong. The young women on the other hand, especially one girl whose child had been killed, were in support of the idea. They arranged for a house to be turned into a nursery and painted it white, hanging bright posters round the walls. The other women were shocked. ‘Surely they’re not going to let children into
a clean place like that.’
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Gradually they changed and accepted a nursery as a matter of course.

It was not only the women who resisted changes in the home. Even men who would accept reforms like equal pay were opposed to the emergence of women from the inner life of the family. In some cases their opposition was outright. Men were known to throw the papers of the Women’s Department on to the fire because they resented the time their wives spent on political activity rather than on housework. More serious was the resistance in the eastern parts of Russia.

‘In 1928, a twenty-year-old girl, Zarial Haliliva, escaped from her parental home and began to call meetings for the sexual emancipation of women; she went unveiled to the theater and wore a bathing costume on the beach. Her father and brothers sat in judgement over her, condemned her to death and cut her up alive.’
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Nor was this an isolated case. In Uzbekistan, for instance, in 1928 there were 203 cases of anti-feminist murder. Girls were also beaten and punished severely simply for attending the meetings of the women’s clubs.

There were many men in the party who were shocked at this kind of open persecution, but who were responsible in more subtle ways for keeping their wives in their old oppression. Lenin deplored how few men, even among the proletariat, would realize how much effort they could save their wives if they helped in the home. Some years later Lunacharsky wrote that he would shake the hands of a comrade, ‘an honest Leninist’, who would rock the cradle so that his wife could go out to a meeting or study.
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More common than these honest Leninist cradle-rockers were the party militants who would make a great show of their revolutionary commitment to the liberation of women but wanted their own wives to stay under their thumbs. One woman described how her husband had put an end to her work and political activity:

And in those very meetings which he forbids me to attend because he is afraid I will become a real person – what he needs is a cook and mistress wife – in those very meetings where I have to slip in secretly, he makes thunderous speeches about the role of women in the revolution, calls women to a more active role.
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All these difficulties provoked intense discussion and argument. There has probably never been a time when great masses of people
discussed openly questions which affected women so much. Naturally, in these public debates on alimony, or the divorce laws, women themselves played an important part Sometimes they criticized very freely. ‘If Comrade Ryazanov intends to abolish
de facto
marriages, why has he not in the sixty years of his life arranged matters in such a fashion that we begat children only after registration.’
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It was apparent that certain questions evaded the party’s decrees and were beyond the competence of the most zealous of moral organizers – Comrade Ryazanov not excepted.

But equally by the mid 1920s it was clear that an approach which regarded relationships of men and women as a personal affair and which just secured equal rights by legislation could only provide an external guarantee for the free development of an internal process of liberation. The real contradictions existed in the contrast between the aspirations for the emancipation of women and the real situation of the women before freedom. The women in the harems of Turkestan who burned their veils and lost their homes and children as a result, or the peasant women suddenly deserted by their husbands, were in an impossible situation. It was clear that liberal freedoms were quite inadequate here. In a debate on the Family Code in 1925 one woman, Comrade Shuropuva, spoke about this:

What is the position of a peasant woman? She looks after the house, she sews, she washes and she helps her husband take in the harvest, while he – forgive me, comrades, for saying so – he will not go to bed alone and she has to obey his pleasure. And if she does not, he kicks her out. [Laughter.] We should think about these problems. The comrade just said: ‘Who forces him to take two wives?’ I can prove it to you. He took two wives, each gave him a baby so he must pay for them both. It is nobody else’s fault. If you like tobogganing you must like pulling your sledge uphill. But comrades here are saying that some women have three or four [men]. Maybe, but we peasant women have no time for that.
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Marxist ideas about the family assumed a completely different historical tradition from the cultural realities of Russia after 1917. In an underdeveloped country, traditionalism, superstition and the old authorities had a real hold. In a situation of economic crisis, post-war chaos, and revolutionary upheaval it would have been extraordinary not to find considerable psychological tension and familial insecurity. Experience kaleidoscoped, people moved away from one another. It
was very difficult to hold fast to the original motive of complete liberation on the woman question while preventing the innumerable distortions which appeared within the existing situation. The struggle was herculean and tragic. Suddenly there were so many orphans. So many children’s homes were needed. Dandies were reported to be sponging off the well-paid working girls. The women from the old upper classes reappeared, were mysteriously well dressed, became secretaries to the ‘specialists’ in industry, and cared nothing for emancipation. It is in this context that the struggle against prostitution, the practical attempt to liberate women in the household, communal kitchens, house communes, cooperative playgroups, the improvements in women’s working conditions and the legislation protecting them appeared. The problem was of course to meet the immediate extraordinary situation of scarcity in a way that could ensure the growth and creation of a new liberation in women’s position and consciousness in the future. The very new is extremely frightening. People watched with apprehension.

In 1924 Trotsky commented on what seemed to be the move ‘from the old family to the new’:

Some viewed it with great misgivings, others with reserve, and others still seemed perplexed. It was, anyhow, clear to all, that some big process was going on, very chaotic, assuming alternatively morbid or revolting, ridiculous or tragic forms and which had not yet had time to disclose its hidden possibilities of inaugurating a new and higher order of family life.
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It was difficult for people to keep their nerve throughout this process of sexual-cultural revolution. The original guide-lines seemed inadequate. The belief that the creation of new economic forms would allow men and women to make their own communist culture, and that personal relations could not be subjected to the same kind of organization as the external affairs of life, gave way under pressure. Possessiveness, jealousy and domination did not disappear with public ownership of the means of production, or even with communes and crèches. There was no alternative theory. Party officials religiously lectured on Engels as though circumstances had not changed. Or like Yaroslavsky they declared, ‘We don’t want to be forever looking under the bedsheets,’
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There was an awkwardness and embarrassment about sexual questions, a feeling that they were
somehow irrelevant to the serious work of the revolution. The liberation of female sexuality is such an important part of the politics of women’s liberation that this neglect of the mechanisms of sexual and personal transformation had serious consequences in allowing a great narrowing in the definition of what constitutes liberation. But the gap was obvious more generally to practical party workers.

The functionary Koltsov complains, ‘These questions are never discussed; it was as if for some reason they were being avoided. I myself have never given them serious thought. They are new to me. They are extremely important and should be discussed.’
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