Women, Resistance and Revolution (22 page)

To all citizens of the village of Verteyevka of the male sex who are married, from all citizens of the village of Verteyevka of the female sex who are married. Ultimatum.

Whereas all we married women, citizens of the village of Verteyevka, live under difficult conditions, our husbands beat us, we hear no decent words from them, they treat us like cattle, we therefore have no more patience to endure such insults, and we hereby write the present ultimatum. We agree to work at home and be our husbands’ helpers, but demand in return that we shall not be given over completely to our husbands’ wills, that they shall not be so free with their hands, and call us such names as ‘old hag’, ‘bitch’, ‘slut’, and other unmentionable ones. And this too we add – we shall not disperse, and not return to our husbands until they have all signed their names to this paper.

Reported by Aksinya Karaseva in the village of Verteyevka, Briansk Gubernia, mid 1920s

On all sides the men are being blamed. But it is often the women’s fault when the family breaks up.… Some young fellow comes along with his songs and his accordion.… They are always running to the Genotdel, and slandering their husbands. There a whole women’s commission gets together, the husband knows nothing of it – and he is disgraced.

Tovarish Motish, from Siberia. Congress, 1925

You are surprised that I live with men, not wanting to fall in love with them?… I have read many novels, and know how much time and strength it takes to be in love.… But when, these past years, has there been leisure for us?… If you are attracted to someone he is called to the front, or to another city, or you are so busy yourself that you forget – what harm to cherish the few minutes that may mean a little happiness to you both?

Genia, in Love of Three Generations, by Alexandra Kollontai

Love should make you build bridges and bear children.… Only textbooks on horticulture have anything about roses, and daydreams are dealt with only in medical works.

Vladimir Mayakovsky, The Bedbug

We do not like romance

In our present time – to us

It reeks of flowered screens

Over garbage cans, of pretty words

Bringing hollowness, not flesh,

To every skeleton …

But you are a girl

Your problem cannot be denied.

In the Russia of the past

Women once pinned flowers

To their shoulders, chained to lovers,

Flogged by snarling guards

In the exile of Siberia.

And in the Russia of today

Men and women, proud of working-hours,

Sturdy, far from blood-steeped tinsel,

Take their summer vacations

On the steppes, in cleaner games,

In flowers, pledges, loyalties,

Clear-growing, inevitable,

Deepening in their youth.

Steal, for an hour now and then,

To your time of violets, the hope

Of less impeded tenderness

In a freedom yet to come,

Then fold it in your heart for unapparent,

Secretly unyielding strength

On every picket-line throughout the world,

Revolutionary girl.

‘To a Revolutionary Girl’, Maxwell Bodenheim, in New Masses, U.S.A., 1934

Ukraine girls really knock me out

They leave the west behind

Moscow girls make me sing and shout

And Georgia’s always on my mind.

Beatles, ‘Back in the U.S.S.R.’

The images of women which have come through to us from the Russian Revolution are arbitrary and distorted. Quite often they are descriptions of the women’s role which are completely constructed in manipulative terms. Men have given us their version of what
women should be. There are pictures of those round, rosy Soviet Stalinist heroines of motherhood, all sunset and tractors and socialist realism. There are memories of an old Trotskyist lecturing on the ‘women’s role’, and telling how the women fraternized with the troops. There are the women the right has created in the west, like the sinister butch Cheka women who inhabit spy novels – gnarled, stiff and unhandled in the night, sitting behind desks in uniforms and judging men mercilessly, their breasts hollowed with hatred. There are the beautiful women rescued from the grim stern discipline of the party or the horrors of revolution – Garbo in
Ninotchka
is delicately seduced and falls gracefully in elegant inelegance, or you see Julie Christie and the daffodils of
Dr Zhivago.

Love and daffodils are always on the other side. The things a woman ‘really’ wants come from the ‘free’ west. Women are completely external to the revolution. Here the images of left and right merge. Women are regarded as too fragile or too backward, they lack the discipline necessary for serious politics. The revolution happened despite them.

It is true that the telephone girls John Reed describes in
Ten Days That Shook the World
recoiled from the workers; true too that Louise Bryant met girls who fought for the whites. But other women came out in the spring of 1917, pushed not only by working conditions but by high prices. They wanted bread and peace, demands for the here and now. We know that much, but where they came from and who they were and how they felt and what became of them has vanished now. We inherit a kind of silence. All the stills have been faded out, some are substitutes. It’s hard to piece our own picture together because we have to see through layers of subsequent political interpretation, and because the story of what women did has been shuffled into the background. Many other questions have appeared to interpreters of the Russian Revolution as more important. Yet the effect of the revolution on women has implications wider than those of specific interest to women’s liberation. The world the revolution opened for women is inseparable from that which it opened for men. Because the Russian Revolution is described through the men’s eyes this has been forgotten:

It is quite true that there are no limits to masculine egotism in ordinary life. In order to change the conditions of life we must learn to see them through the eyes of women.
¹

Those women who came out on Women’s Day were not just crucial in terms of the political events which followed; their action has tremendous significance as a symbolic break from their own oppression. If we knew more about the history of the women workers’ movement we would be able to piece together the slow growth in consciousness and organization which enabled them to send for delegates and initiate the strike themselves. But it
is
possible now to understand the kind of stake poor women had in 1917, to grasp the odds against them and realize that we take for granted so much of what they were fighting for that we’ve forgotten the enormity of what they almost won.

Passivity and fatalism were particularly close to Russian women; their subordination was so absolute and bound up with the backwardness of the country, and their poverty was so extreme. They rose from such a long and deep sense of being nothing, of knowing no hope in change. It is not really surprising that in a society where serfdom had only ended comparatively recently, women should be regarded still, quite openly, as property. Nor that the physical contempt for all human life general in that society should be acted out almost ceremoniously on the bodies of the women. Russian proverbs read like hymns of social and sexual flagellation. Public oppression and indignity reproduced itself in the private part of living. The family was a little sanctuary of authoritarianism and suffering:

A chicken is not a bird – and a baba [peasant woman] is not a human being.

Beat your wife for breakfast and for dinner too.

I will love you like my safe and beat you like my fur coat.

A wife isn’t a jug – she won’t crack if you hit her a few times.

She had her own kind of vengeance:

It is easier to manage a sackful of fleas than one woman.

The realities behind such ironies were grim. In peasant families it was customary for the bride’s father to give the groom a new whip so he could exercise his authority if he wished. It hung over the marriage bed and was eloquent of the way in which the young girl passed from the control of her father to the control of her husband. Tsarist family law declared the wife’s duty was ‘to obey her husband as the head of the family, to be loving and respectful, to be submissive in every respect and show him every compliance and affection’. In
practice this meant the wife had to follow her husband wherever he went. She could not get a passport or take a job without his permission. Resistance was almost impossible. The husband took over any property which she inherited. Divorce was very difficult because it was decided by the church and only on very limited grounds. It was moreover extremely expensive and quite beyond the means of the poor. In the eastern provinces women were still veiled and polygamy continued. But even in the rest of Russia peasant women were often sold to the highest bidder. They had little choice as to whom they married. To their husbands they were working hands, part of the livestock, as much as sexual partners. The young girls were soon worn down with work and childbearing. They cooked, carried water, washed clothes in the river, made fires, milked the cows, toiled in the fields, and did the spinning and weaving. In the winter the
moujiks
were often at home with nothing to do but drink vodka and have sex with their wives. There were no contraceptives. Secretly the women went to the local wise woman who operated with nails or buttonhooks or carrots. Childbirth was a kind of nightmare. Infant mortality was high, there were only a few midwives. ‘The mother lay among the cockroaches and pumpkins on the stove, and gnarled and dirty hands delivered her baby.’
²

In the city women worked long hours for less pay than their men, concealing their pregnancies until the last moment. Years later an old worker remembering these conditions told how as soon as anyone was pregnant they were sacked on the spot:

The women workers used to hide it until their mouths foamed and the child was born at the bench. And after the confinement – back to the bench. What could be more terrible than for a mother not to be glad to have her child? And there used to be many women workers who cursed their children.
³

There was no legislation to protect women in industry, until a very limited social insurance scheme was introduced in 1912. Casual prostitution was part of the life of working women; the brothels were blessed by the priests – to protect the rest. Infanticide was common. On the other hand the world of middle- and upper-class women was very protected. But although they lived in comfort they were just as powerless as the others. Young women were meant to be accomplished, not educated. Higher education was regarded as almost
synonymous with indecency. Secretly they pursued their affairs – discovery meant disgrace. When they were married any property they owned was managed by their husbands. Although a few women in the intelligentsia had broken away and joined the revolutionary movement, to the rest they were outcasts.

First the war and then the revolution shattered all this. Families were broken up. The women took over men’s work, they learned new skills. Some women from rich homes became nurses. But instead of this being simply reversed when the men came home, the revolution carried it farther. In April 1918 the Petrograd Council of Trade Unions issued an extremely significant declaration:

The question of how to combat unemployment has come sharply before the unions. In many factories and shops the question is being solved very simply … fire the women and put men in their place.
⁴

The Petrograd Council maintained that such a solution was incompatible with the new manner in which the working class was going to organize the economy. They held that the only way to end unemployment ultimately was by increasing productivity on a socialist basis. In the meantime dismissals which were necessary because of the economic crisis should be related to each individual’s degree of need – regardless of sex. ‘Only such an attitude will make it possible for us to retain women in our organizations and prevent a split in the army of workers.’
⁵