The Women's Revolution

Russia 1905–1917

Judy Cox

• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781608467860
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The dominant view of the Russian Revolution of 1917 is of a movement led by prominent men like Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky. Despite the demonstrations of female workers for 'bread and herrings', which sparked the February Revolution, in most historical accounts of this momentous period, women are too often relegated to the footnotes. Judy Cox argues that women were essential to the success of the revolution and to the development of the Bolshevik Party. With biographical sketches of famous female revolutionaries like Alexandra Kollontai and less well-known figures like Elena Stasova and Larissa Reisner, The Women's Revolution tells the inspiring story of how Russian women threw off centuries of oppression to strike, organize, liberate themselves and ultimately try to build a new world based on equality and freedom for all.

Section One
Revolutionary Times

1. Where are the women?

Women have been written out of all aspects of the Russian Revolution by historians of left and right, of East and of West. The dominant narrative of the revolution in the West portrays the Bolshevik Party as an organisation of iron-willed male fanatics who seized power behind the backs of the working class. Women had no role to play in this macho coup. In Stalinist histories, there was only room for the two great men who created the Soviet Union: Lenin and Stalin. Women were airbrushed out of leading roles, just as was Leon Trotsky.

Historians more sympathetic to the Bolsheviks have been little better. Elena Stasova was a Bolshevik leader willing and able to take orders, energetic, fearless and devoted to revolutionary politics. She was a staunch ally of Lenin and his wife Krupskaya in the underground movement, and she later served on key party committees. She served as the secretary to the Bolshevik Party Central Committee throughout 1917. Stasova was such a powerful figure that she was nicknamed ‘Absolute’, yet in Alexander Rabinowitch’s well-regarded 400-page book, The Bolsheviks Come to Power,¹ she is literally reduced to a footnote.

Historians taking a more social approach have tended to relegate women to the unskilled and less organised sections of the workforce, and leave them there. These women workers may have set the revolution in motion with their riots for ‘bread and herrings’, but they quickly retreated back into the shadows to let the men take over the serious business of taking power. Richard Stites argues in The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia that women do not appear in histories of 1917 because they did not walk the corridors of power or make the important decisions. Therefore, he continues, ‘there is no sense in trying to magnify the role played by the female half of the population during 1917’.²

Recent contributions on the Russian Revolution have been less dismissive of women’s role. Women from a range of oppositional political organisations feature in China Miéville’s 2017 October: The Story of the Russian Revolution.³ Tariq Ali’s 2017 The Dilemmas of Lenin⁴ devotes a chapter to women, in which he discusses the theoretical roots of Marxists’ analysis of women’s oppression and debates around the family and sexuality. Curiously, however, the role played by women during the events of 1917 is not developed in his narrative.

The handful of female Bolsheviks who are remembered today derive their status exclusively from their relationships to important men. They are almost invariably described in a series of stereotypes. The women are tragic, neglected wives, glamorous and sexy beauties or shrewish spinsters. A biography of Nadezhda Krupskaya was titled Bride of the Revolution,⁵ as if only her marriage to Lenin could excite readers’ interest. Inessa Armand is remembered as Lenin’s glamorous friend and possible lover.

The language used to describe socialist women is frequently steeped in sexist assumptions. Women revolutionaries are judged by how sexually attractive they were. Ugly old maids and irritating mothers-in-law are dismissed while the physical attributes of beautiful women are lingeringly dwelt on. This is Robert Service’s description of Armand from his book Lenin: A Biography: ‘She had high, well-defined cheekbones. Her nose was slightly curved and her nostrils were wonderfully flared; her upper lip was slightly protrusive. Her teeth were white and even. She had lustrous, dark eyebrows. And she had kept her figure after having her children’.⁶ Maybe it was the years in exile, or coping with five children while working in the underground revolutionary movement, that kept her so trim.

One of the few women deemed interesting in her own right is Alexandra Kollontai. Conventional histories of the Bolshevik Party tend to focus on her flamboyant beauty and glamour, her powers of oratory and her interest in sexual freedom. Feminist histories describe her as a lone voice, battling single-handedly to force the recalcitrant Bolsheviks to take women workers seriously. It took a female socialist historian, Cathy Porter, to write a biography that situated Kollontai at the heart of the Russian Revolution.⁷

For a hundred years, historians have ignored the role that women played in the revolution, not as wives and lovers, but as militant activists and as political leaders. Yet female workers were at the forefront of campaigns against the First World War, against punitive price rises and appalling working conditions. Their struggles shaped the Bolshevik Party as female socialists broke the mould of revolutionary organisation to reach out to and organise women. The female Bolsheviks deserve to take their place alongside their male comrades. They helped to construct the revolutionary organisations of Russia. They helped to sustain those organisations through years of repression. They helped to convince working men and women of the need to oppose imperialist war and to take power into their own hands. Focusing on the women who left their homes and families and endured hardship, prison and exile can add something both to our understanding of how the Bolsheviks won power and return the oppressed to their rightful place at the centre of revolutionary politics.

2. Russians in Paris: ‘To the barricades!’

The great revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg observed that before a revolution happens, it is perceived as impossible, but that after it happens it is seen as having been inevitable. Female workers and socialists helped to make the impossible become possible. Russians did not have an indigenous revolutionary tradition to draw on. They had to look to the writings of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels and to the great European revolutions for inspiration. The greatest uprising of the late nineteenth century was the Paris Commune. The Communards’ heroism revealed new realities about how the ruling classes maintained their power and how women, as well as men, could be mobilised to oppose it. Through a network of activists which included women, the Commune was to have a deep effect on socialist politics in Russia where it awakened a generation of revolutionaries.

On 18 March 1871, a group of Parisian women stood between a regiment of soldiers and their cannons. The women were determined to keep hold of the cannons so they could defend their city from Prussian soldiers. The French government had surrendered to the Prussians after months of fighting and a catastrophic siege of Paris. The Parisians, however, were determined to fight on. In the early hours of the morning, milkmaids delivering milk from house to house spread the news that the soldiers were taking the cannons. When the women of Paris confronted General Lecomte, he ordered his soldiers to fire on them. The women appealed to them shouting, ‘Will you fire on us?’ They would not. Instead they fraternised with them and the General was executed. By noon most of the cannons were in the hands of the Parisians.

This incident sparked the Paris Commune. The Communards rose up to take control of their city, one of the greatest cities in the world, and held it for two months. In the process, they challenged the existing social order and drew inspiration from ideas which included socialism and women’s rights. ‘Across the city, insurgent women enacted, inspired, theorized and led the revolution’.⁸ These insurgent women smashed existing preconceptions of the role of women and asserted their right to participate in the creation of a new society. Very importantly, Russian women not only played a key role in the Commune, they also took their experiences back to the revolutionary movement in Russia.

In Russia in the 1860s, a ‘great wind of revolution was blowing over the young generation of the intelligentsia’.⁹ This was reflected in the literature of the time, such as Nicolas Chernyshevsky’s 1863 novel What is to be done?, which was hugely influential. Russian women from the educated middle classes were beginning to strain against their repressive, patriarchal society and seek an education denied to them by the Tsarist authorities. Sophie Krukovsky wrote, ‘A sort of epidemic spread among children, and especially among girls; the desire to flee from the paternal house’.¹⁰ Sophie escaped from her wealthy military family to Switzerland where she became a distinguished mathematician. Her sister Anna travelled with her to Geneva where she met and married a revolutionary, Victor Jaclard, and made friends with another Russian radical, Elisabeth Dmitrieff. Then Anna Jaclard headed for Paris where she worked as a book binder and became active in the First International: ‘she simultaneously discovered the necessity for work and the workers’ revolution’.¹¹

During the Commune, Anna Jaclard helped to establish the Montmartre Vigilance Committee, which organised workshops and ambulances, campaigned for women’s rights and sent women to speak at the influential political clubs. Hostile contemporaries described how screeching women with crying babies and red sashes dominated some of these clubs. When the Commune issued an appeal for aid, Anne Jaclard’s Committee proclaimed, ‘The women of Montmartre, inspired by the revolutionary spirit, wish to attest by their actions to their devotion to the Revolution’.¹² Jaclard also founded and wrote for a socialist newspaper and corresponded with Karl Marx.

Another influential Communard organisation was the Union of Women, established by Anna’s Russian friend, Elisabeth Dmitrieff. Dmitrieff was the daughter of unmarried parents, a rich Russian Hussar officer and a young nurse. She came of age in radical circles in the 1860s and she too headed for Switzerland where she met Russian revolutionaries who sent her to London to meet Karl Marx. She spent three months in London, talking with Karl Marx and his daughters Laura, Jenny and Eleanor, and meeting other socialists. A brief reference to Elisabeth in a letter written by Marx’s daughter Jenny to her future husband suggests what a dedicated revolutionary Elisabeth was and hints at how women often had to choose between political activism and sexual relationships. Elisabeth did not want her friend to turn away from her political commitments and opt for a conventional marriage instead. Jenny described about how Elisabeth would respond if she read Jenny’s love letters. ‘How disgusted, how disappointed she would be! She who had set her heart upon making of me a heroine, a second Madame Roland… do not forget that it is you who have deprived the world of a heroine’.¹³

Marx appointed Dmitrieff as his envoy to Paris in 1871. She was just 20 years old, but she proved to be a charismatic and effective revolutionary leader. She established the Union of Women in April 1871 to build support for the Commune among working women. The Union organised women from many different occupations, including hatters, seamstresses, book binders, cardboard makers and gold polishers. The Union was at the heart of the Commune’s attempts to reform both working conditions and the nature of work itself through a new system of workshops. Dmitrieff reported, ‘In taking work away from the bondage of capitalistic exploitation, the formation of these organisations would eventually allow the workers to run their own businesses’.¹⁴ Dmitrieff and Jaclard both fought for unity between male and female workers, opposing calls from men to exclude women from paid jobs so that they could not be used to undercut the higher wage rates paid to men.

When the French government launched its murderous assault on the Commune, Dmitrieff and many other women stayed on the barricades for days on end. Many thousands of Communards were shot dead, more were executed or transported. Anna Jaclard and her husband were captured. He was sentenced to death and she to hard labour for life. Fortunately, they managed to escape to London where they stayed with Karl Marx. On returning to Russia, Anna made contact with revolutionary groups around the People’s Will, an organisation which advocated revolutionary violence to spur a peasants’ revolt against the Tsar. Elisabeth Dmitrieff also escaped the repression and made her way back to Russia.

The experiences of the Paris Commune shaped the socialist tradition in Europe through the First International in particular, and both Jaclard and Dmitrieff were active in the Russian section. After the Commune, many socialists realised that working women could and should be won to the socialist cause. The experience of the Commune was the basis of a key section of Lenin’s State and Revolution¹⁵ and it laid the foundation of the Bolsheviks’ understanding of the state. It stood as a terrible warning to those who thought they could rise up against their rulers without confronting the state and, as such, it was one of the many tributaries which flowed into the Russian Revolution.

3. The first revolutionaries: ‘To the people!’

At the beginning of the twentieth century, the Russian Empire covered one sixth of the surface of the earth. It ruled over 150 million people made up of 170 different nationalities. Some twenty million peasants had only been freed from serfdom – personal bondage – in 1861. The Romanov dynasty had ruled Russia for 300 years and remained absolutist at heart. The extremely repressive nature of nineteenth-century Russian society bred extreme responses. In the years following the Paris Commune, a generation of young people agonised about how to address Russia’s desperate inequalities. The ‘To the People Movement’ and ‘Land and Liberty’ sought to rouse the peasants to rebellion by educating them. However, women were themselves excluded from higher education in Russia. The first generation of Russian female revolutionaries sought to educate themselves, often at universities outside Russia, and in order to be able to educate the peasants. Some dressed as men as they tramped around villages with revolutionary pamphlets while others established egalitarian communes. When the peasantry failed to respond, a new organisation, ‘People’s Will’ emerged. Its activists tried to precipitate a revolution by acts of violence and terrorism. Women were at the forefront of all these developments.

There was a sense among the young people that history was moving too slowly and that progress needed to be speeded up by gestures of self-sacrifice and martyrdom. The Tsarist regime was rotting from within and its barbarity was revealed in its response to this opposition. It launched a wave of repression against the student revolutionaries which culminated in October 1877, when thousands of young Russians were rounded up and arrested. The subsequent ‘Trial of the 193’ became the focal point of a multitude of grievances and served to fuel the movement. Among the few acquitted at this early trial was Sophia Perovskaya. Sophia had left her aristocratic family to become a terrorist revolutionary. She took part in four further attempts to assassinate Tsar Alexander II, finally succeeding on 1 March 1881. Aged only 27, she became the first woman to be executed for terrorism in Russia. Her courage and principled stand against tyranny made her a heroine to many women, including a young Alexandra Kollontai.¹⁶

Vera Figner was one of the few active revolutionaries to escape the crackdown in 1877. Like Sophia, she was born into a noble family, which she left to study medicine in Bern. She abandoned her studies to return home in order to revive the revolutionary cause. She became a leading member of the People’s Will organisation, the same group with which Anna Jaclard had been associated. Like Sophia Perovskaya, Figner took part in the assassination of Alexander II and was arrested. She spent twenty months in solitary confinement and was then sentenced to death. Unlike Sophia Perovskaya, Figner’s sentence was commuted ...