Women, Resistance and Revolution (25 page)

Similarly a comrade called Tseitlin said:

In the literature, the problems of marriage and the family, of the relations between man and woman, are not discussed at all. Nevertheless these are exactly the questions which interest workers, male and female alike. When are such questions going to be the topic of our meetings? The masses feel that we hush up these problems, and in fact we do hush them up.
³³

In the first half of the twenties there was an implicit assumption that guilt and repression belonged to the old order, but sexuality was still euphemistically called ‘the family’. It was often treated in a ‘scientific’ no-nonsense manner like a cold bath, rather than in terms of how men and women experienced each other and how this affected their whole consciousness. There was little attempt to understand the conditions necessary for women to make love in active enjoyment The material circumstances of female orgasm received as little real attention as they did in the west.

Though the revolution rather avoided discussion about making love, there was a great deal of debate about ‘love’. Some communists dismissed love as bourgeois mystification. A Komsomol organization circular announced it was a ‘physiological phenomenon of nature’.
³⁴
Human experience was thus reduced to physical sensation. There was a spurious radicalism about such an attitude, which went sometimes with opposition to attractive clothing and formal politeness like hand-shaking. It was popular with the younger communists. Their casual attitude to sex – described in one novel as similar to going to the cinema – shocked the older generation, who had come to their ideas of ‘free unions’ painfully and earnestly in desperate and stark situations while they had been opposing the old regime. They
recoiled from what seemed like the brashness of the young, the nonchalant way in which they trod over feeling.

Lenin spoke for the older generation of party members in his conversation with Clara Zetkin. He condemned the hypocrisy of the old bourgeois morality with its double standards, and he recognized the significance of the changes which the revolution had brought in personal relations. He stressed that ‘Communism should not bring asceticism.’ He told her, ‘New boundaries are being drawn.’ He did not elaborate on who was to have the power nor on how boundaries were to be drawn. He identified the young communists’ rejection of tenderness and feeling as simply a reversal of the old hypocritical romantic attitudes. He understood how they could impose their own kind of tyranny. He attempted to distinguish between what he called the ‘glass of water’ theory which conceived ‘free’ love as being simply the satisfaction of desire, and the ‘free’ communist unions which implied deep feeling and comradeship. Not surprisingly he reacted impatiently to the accusation of young communists that his ideas on the sex question were ‘survivals of a Social-Democratic attitude and old fashioned philistinism’. He snorted indignantly against ‘yellow-beaked fledgelings newly hatched from their bourgeois tainted eggs’.
³⁵

His statements, though obviously not carefully thought out, expressed an important contradiction. Theoretically the revolution was committed to release, to the development of free, unrepressed human beings, but practically the immediate task of creating a communist society from the chaos of the Soviet Union in the twenties required a great effort of self-discipline – in fact the good old virtues of the bourgeoisie in early capitalism: hard work, abstinence and repression. To ignore this was to take cover in fantasy. Communism perhaps should not bring asceticism, but communists certainly needed a strong dose themselves if it was ever to be brought into being at all. The chaos of an unruly love life seemed to be completely unproductive for socialist reconstruction, so the shutters started to come down.

Alexandra Kollontai became notorious as one of the defenders of sexual freedom. In fact her ideas were quite different from the ‘glass of water’ theories described in novels like
Without a Bird-Cherry Tree
by P. Romanov, and
The Dog’s Lane
by Lev Gumilevsky. Instead she followed the tradition of the young Marx and Engels
in
The Origin of the Family
in imagining that love would develop rather than disappear under communism:

In the achieved communist society, love, ‘the winged Eros’, will appear in a different, transformed, and completely unrecognizable form. By that time the ‘sympathetic bonds’ between all members of the new society will have grown and strengthened, the ‘love potential’ will have been raised, and solidarity-love will have become the same kind of moving force as competition and self-love are in the bourgeois order.
³⁶

Rather later she said in a letter to a young comrade that she hoped in the future proletarian morals would be based on:

1. Equality; disappearance of the overpowering masculine self-sufficiency and the servile submission of women.

2. Mutual and reciprocal recognition of rights, and disappearance of all feelings of property.

3. Fraternal sensibility, together with an art that will allow the assimilation and comprehension of the psychic developments taking place in the soul of the beloved. [In bourgeois ideology, the woman alone was expected to possess this sensibility.]
³⁷

What is really important about Kollontai’s approach is the attempt to relate changes in sexual relationships to the total social emergence of women. In the preface to
Free Love
she wrote:

This novel is neither a study in morals nor a picture of the standard of life in Soviet Russia. It is a purely psychological study of sex relations in the post-war period. Many of the problems presented are not however exclusively Soviet Russian; they are world-wide facts which can be noted in all countries. These silent psychological dramas, born of the change in the sexual relations, this evolution, especially, in the feelings of women, are well known to the younger generation.
³⁸

It is this ‘purely psychological study of sex relations’, this interest in the ‘silent psychological dramas’, this connection to an international sexual revolution, and the examination of the ‘evolution, especially, in the feelings of women’ – young women, too – which made Kollontai unusual and necessarily suspect Left communists who wrote about the withering away of the family in a far distant society upset no one. Communist feminists who concerned themselves with what particular women were experiencing at that moment upset many.

The plot of
Fret Love
is simple. Vasillissa, a knitter, forms a free union with Volodia, an ex-anarchist, who becomes a member of the party and takes on a job as director of a large industrial concern. He has an affair with Nina, a non-political ex-bourgeois woman who is very beautiful. Eventually Vasillissa leaves him. However, the real interest of the book is in the four conflicting themes which run through it, and the tensions behind them. At one level there is a political clash. The first signs of a break betwen the two appear in their very different ideas about politics, not in their original argument about centralism which was only superficial, but a much deeper difference about the extent to which commitment to the revolution penetrates the way you live. Vasillissa was distressed by her husband’s liking for a grand style of living, which involved dubious deals during the N.E.P. period with non-party bourgeois. This explodes with particular intensity when some of the workers under her husband complain about working conditions. They come to the great house of the director and start talking to Vassillissa. She forgets her role as his ‘wife’, becomes her old Bolshevik trade union bargaining self again, and begins excitedly to plan ways for them to fight back. He returns, sees this, and furiously drags her inside. At another level, as they move away from one another the relationship becomes increasingly dishonest When she finds he has secretly slept with Nina she feels he has done wrong, not in going to another woman but in deceiving her about it. At the same time she is jealous of Nina, who possesses the traditional attributes of women – beauty and elegance. She begins to feel that her union with Volodia is a charade:

There was no longer comradeship, no longer affection, between them.… She was wife in the house merely to serve as hostess, to act as a cover. I live, she said, in wedlock with a Communist, but another woman is the wife for delectation, for love in a secret little house.

At the same time Kollontai explores the way in which it is impossible for Vassillissa to retain her old independence. She has only a borrowed existence as his wife, she no longer has her work, especally her political work in the factory and the party. When she tries to leave him she says, ‘I have panted enough in this cage, I have played the Directress enough.… Take for a wife one of those who value such a life.’
³⁹
When she finally goes she throws off ‘a skin which did not fit me’.
⁴⁰

But in fact the skin held her to him for a long time. Kollontai brings out the clash between the struggle for identity and the ties which had developed over the years when they were together, as well as the very real sexual passion. At first her sexuality was in harmony with the other ways she communicated with him. But ultimately there is opposition between the desire he can still arouse in her and their obvious incompatibility. It is as if her sexuality might swamp her separate identity. The political, emotional, intellectual and sexual factors combine. The only solution is to leave him. But Vasillissa’s choice simply ignores the basic causes of tension. She goes away, and is able to rid herself of her jealousy of Nina the traditional feminine, in an understanding mixed with compassion. She has a child and plans to rear it ‘in the communist way’, cooperatively. She finds her identity thus only by denying the existence of the man and her own sexuality. The only solution possible is no real solution.

But this was precisely what Kollontai meant in
Free Love.
She wanted to:

… teach women not to put all their hearts and souls into the love for a man, but into the essential thing, creative work. When I look through my works I can see that it was this aim that inspired most of my writing on the sexual question. Love must not crush the women’s individuality, not bind her wings. If love begins to enslave her, she must make herself free, she must step over all love tragedies, and go her own way.
⁴¹

It was a negative freedom: a freedom of non-attachment which tended to appear in feminist thought in the period. There was a sense in which very strong personal emotion almost inevitably appeared in opposition to the liberation of the women because traditionally such emotion bound women. But this tended to force women to accept that emancipation meant denying part of themselves. When Kollontai was writing it seemed as if this was the only way out. Unfortunately the tendency could result in a dismissal of the personal and sexual dimensions in relationships. There is a trace of the stiff upper lip. Just as Kollontai could share the easy optimism characteristic of communists in the period – that ‘intelligent educators’ would somehow escape the taint of the past and teach the values of solidarity and comradeship in their revolutionary purity – she shows a hint of that self-denying strain which simply cut itself off from awkward emotion very common in the revolutionary movement. The
rejection of the cellular individualism and the passionate egotistic possessiveness of the bourgeois family came to imply the necessary superiority of external social activity to the inner personal life. Such a rejection, which arose naturally from the need for intense political commitment in the revolutionary period, was elevated into an impossible and restricting moral principle.’
⁴²

It was not that Vassillissa should have continued a relationship which became only formality, but that the points of tension, the struggle of the woman for independent identity in relation to the man and the apparent contradictions between her intellectuality and her sexuality, are too facilely resolved. Such questions were and are still crucial.

In
Love of Three Generations
, the young communist Zhenia tries to solve the problem by divorcing strong emotion from her sexuality. She slept with two men, and was in love with neither. The situation was complicated by the fact that one of them was her stepfather. She told her mother, ‘But I liked them and I felt they liked me.… It’s all so simple. And then it does not tie you down to anything.’ She argued with her mother, who was shocked, that there could be nothing wrong in this as ‘I did it voluntarily and willingly. As long as we like each other we remain together; afterwards we part. No one is the loser.’ She points out that her mother would not be so critical if Zhenia were a boy.

In fact Zhenia’s case is ostensibly eminently reasonable. But on the question of her relationship with her stepfather her justification becomes immediately glib and insensitive. Her mother asks if she has considered
her
feelings. Zhenia claims the sexual act is only an extension of her friendship for her stepfather: it takes nothing away from her mother:

As to our kissing.… Well, you have no time for kissing anyway. And then, mother, you can’t want to tie Andrey exclusively to yourself and not let him have any pleasure apart. That would be a nasty proprietary attitude. It’s this grandmother’s bourgeois upbringing coming up.
⁴³

Zhenia is described honestly. She undoubtedly expressed feelings which were shared by many young communists. She was to be denounced as the symbol of depravity by innumerable party moralists. But it is important to keep her situation in perspective: Zhenia
presents the statement of the dilemma and attempts a particular way out.