Family Networks and the Russian Revolutionary Movement, 1870–1940

Katy Turton

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780230393073
• eBook ISBN: 9780230393080
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia dell'Europa orientale

This book explores the role played by families in the Russian revolutionary movement and the first decades of the Soviet regime. While revolutionaries were expected to sever all family ties or at the very least put political concerns before personal ones, in practice this was rarely achieved. In the underground, revolutionaries of all stripes, from populists to social-democrats, relied on siblings, spouses, children and parents to help them conduct party tasks, with the appearance of domesticity regularly thwarting police interference. Family networks were also vital when the worst happened and revolutionaries were imprisoned or exiled. After the revolution, these family networks continued to function in the building of the new Soviet regime and amongst the socialist opponents who tried to resist the Bolsheviks. As the Party persecuted its socialist enemies and eventually turned on threats perceived within its ranks, it deliberately included the spouses and relatives of its opponents in an attempt to destroy family networks for good.

Conclusion

When writing about her experiences as a condemned wife, Anna Larina’s thoughts turned to the Decembrist wives:

Consider the ‘Russian women’ […] abandoning their lives of luxury in Petersburg and riding post chaise to join their Decembrist husbands in Siberia. There’s no denying it; that was a heroic deed! A subject fit for a poet! But how did they travel? Behind a team of six horses, wrapped in furs, enclosed in a marvelously furnished carriage. […] Also, they were riding to their husbands! Our women […] were transported in cattle cars or in prison ‘Stolypin cars’, and on arrival we had to line up and walk from the station to the camp, drained of strength, barely able to haul our miserable belongings in suitcases or bundles, guarded by police dogs, and terrorized by the shouts of the convoy […] And we were not going to our husbands, though some dreamers among us naively hoped that in that camp over in the other world they would be united with their men—men who had been sentenced to ten years without any mail or, in other words, men who had been shot. ¹

Comparing her own experiences as the wife of a political enemy to those of the Decembrists’ wives, Larina understandably found little in common with them. Yet the fact they came to mind highlights that those who had begun the tradition of familial involvement in and support of revolutionary activity were firmly rooted in the imagination of the Bolsheviks. Larina pointed to the value of family ties in surviving oppression when she concluded: ‘Ah, how different that road would have been to me, if I could have believed that it led to Nikolai Ivanovich! But I was unable to hope.’ ² Indeed, it was for that very reason, the hope which family support provided, that the humanity with which the wives of the Decembrist exiles had been treated was deliberately omitted by the Soviet regime in its own policies regarding the family members of oppositionists.

By the mid-1930s, the institutions in place to incarcerate political enemies were extensive and fine-tuned to ensure the maximum disruption to, if not the destruction of, family networks. The main targets of the Terror were shot as soon as they were convicted, thus preventing final meetings between the condemned and their loved ones as the Tsarist regime had allowed, and their wives and other relatives were sent into exile and later into special camps. ³ Children up to the age of four were housed in nurseries ‘near the places where their mothers were interned’, but young children were placed in orphanages if there were no relatives, friends or former servants to care for them, while older ones were sent into exile or to the camps. ⁴ Brothers and sisters were separated. ⁵ To make even the finding of imprisoned kin and children in orphanages more difficult, the NKVD rarely passed on information about where individuals were being held to relatives. ⁶

Gulag prisons and camps were designed to isolate individuals from their families. The most ‘dangerous’ inmates were kept in solitary confinement in strictly run isolation prisons, often without correspondence rights. ⁷ The rest were confined in the labour camps where correspondence rights were ‘extremely limited’ and all correspondence was censored. ⁸ Some were allowed only to write ‘a single, solitary letter to ask for warm things’ and to ‘receive packages of food once a month’. ⁹ Mothers were usually allowed to correspond with their children. ¹⁰ Others had to live without food parcels, books, clothes and linens. ¹¹ Rather than a right, visits from relatives were a privilege to be won through good behaviour and could be removed as a punishment. ¹²

Nonetheless, even the Soviet regime’s draconian policies could not entirely destroy the link between the family and opposition. When the Decembrist wives chose to follow their husbands into exile, they signalled clearly that personal love and loyalty could be used to serve a political cause, that familial ties could be an asset to revolutionary campaigning and that family members could be counted on to make the same kinds of sacrifices as professional revolutionaries.

This book has traced the ways in which relatives of all types—parents, siblings, spouses and children—could and did support the political activities of the revolutionary movement. They joined as equal comrades and pursued careers side by side. Those who did not become official party members themselves provided emotional and financial support, as well as invaluable help in hiding and smuggling literature, money and weapons for the cause. They helped party agents conduct correspondence and disrupted police interference. When loved ones were imprisoned or exiled, they offered support and care, helped prisoners maintain links with the revolutionary movement, and aided and abetted escapes.

The underground was also a site of experimentation and negotiation of the roles women and men were expected to play, both in the home and in politics. The blurring of the boundaries between the two spheres which resulted from the contingencies of the underground movement enabled women and men to cooperate daily as comrades in arms. Some men found themselves torn between the traditional role of breadwinner and family protector and that of lone-wolf revolutionary serving only the cause, yet most found a way to reconcile the two. For women, having to take responsibility for housework and childcare hindered their involvement in the movement at times, but these roles also took on political meanings. The former task helped to keep revolutionaries healthy and able to participate in the movement, while the latter raised new recruits who from birth could help revolutionaries thwart the authorities. Within the movement, auxiliary roles were assigned to women as a matter of course, yet without correspondence, smuggling, fake papers and safe houses the movement would have ceased to function.

Similarly, the Tsarist authorities had to reconcile their traditional view of family life as an essentially stabilizing force promoting loyalty to the regime and their knowledge that there was deep familial involvement in the revolutionary movement. While prisoners were exiled to family estates to be supervised by parents, the same regime instituted surveillance of the relatives of revolutionaries and enacted laws for the prosecution of aiders and abettors. Yet in the prisons and exile communities of the Tsarist regime concessions to family members were made almost as a matter of course and these proved to be the key to enabling relatives to sustain revolutionaries personally and as political agents.

Having seized power in October 1917, the Bolsheviks drew great strength from the family networks which had served them so well in the unde...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• Joining the Movement
• The Underground
• Prison
• Exile
• Consequences: The Bolsheviks After 1917
• Consequences: Families in Opposition After 1917
• Backmatter