Women, Resistance and Revolution (26 page)

Kollontai makes her own position clear: ‘Many of the opponents of my writings tried to impose on me an absolutely false postulate that I was preaching “free love”. I would put it the other way. I was always preaching to the women, Make yourself free from the enslavement of love of a man.’ Alexandra Kollontai never solved the dilemma in her own life. She said she ‘tried to combine romance and work. But it was and still is difficult for a woman to combine a profession and married life.’ After an early unsuccessful first marriage she entered a civil marriage with a man much younger than her, Dubenko, because he put pressure on her by saying she felt too superior to marry him. This also collapsed. A friend, Zoja, who shared her ideas, called her ‘la dernière grande amoureuse’. But Alexandra Kollontai said her ‘love affairs always ended in the breaking down of romance. The hour of separation was inevitable.’ She concluded that friendship was a more sociable emotion than sexual love.
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She wrote, in
The New Morality and the Working Class
:

The longer the sexual crisis lasts, the more difficult it becomes, With every attempt at a solution things become more and more difficult.… The frightened people fall from one extreme into the other, and the sexual problem remains unsolved. It would be a tremendous error to assume that only members of the economically secure classes are caught in its toils. The sexual crisis creates dramas among the working people which are no less violent or tragic than the psychological conflicts of the refined bourgeoisie.
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Instead of presenting people with a new formula, she thought always in terms of growth. She saw the new morality being created, not imposed, in the process of development towards a communist society. Communism was about the releasing of the potential for responsibility; it implied widening the scope for the practical self-activity of masses of people. The new morality could not be mugged up from ethical manuals of do’s and don’ts. It had to come from people experiencing each other in totally new surroundings.

By the end of the twenties a strong counter-tendency had emerged which questioned this way of defining the areas which had to be left to individual responsibility. Instead of emphasizing human liberation, social usefulness became the moral criterion. Zalkind produced
a way of apparently solving the contradiction which Lenin had hinted at in his conversation with Zetkin. He was concerned to prevent the diversion of energy for social reconstruction into sexuality. He borrowed selectively from Freud to produce a theory which justified the redirection of sexuality into social reconstruction. The embarrassing passages about individual sex love in Engels were hustled out of history. There was no place any more for clouds in trousers – or skirts for that matter. Now ‘every joy must have a productive purpose’.
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As the practical difficulties multiplied ideas like this became more popular – not because they were profound but because they were made to measure. The opposition was always on the defensive. It became easier to dismiss the demand for individual freedom as petty-bourgeois. There were powerful practical short-term factors which came from the old authoritarian regime which gave their arguments an added force. The understanding of the connection between the authoritarian state and the patriarchal family, strengthened by religious and legislative sanctions, tended to be implicit in revolutionary thinking. But at the point of affirming positively a cultural revolution in sexual relationships the revolutionaries’ theory broke down. There was a drawing back, a concern. Significantly, in a discussion of doctors in 1927 about the effects of the law of 1920 which had legalized abortion, the case for legal abortion was nearly always made in terms of social poverty. Only one doctor, Selinsky, accused them of failing to distinguish ‘the real socio-economic and mass-psychological conditions under which abortion has become epidemic’. He stated:

No one of us men would accept a decision by some commissioners as to the social interest in his being married or not. Do not prevent women from deciding for themselves a fundamental issue of their lives. Woman has a right to a sexual life as freely realized as is that of a man. We need no mass-produced class of spinsters which would be merely harmful to the community.
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In 1929 the Genotdel was abolished. The official explanation was that an independent women’s movement was no longer necessary. In reality, quite the reverse was the case. Gradually new moral authorities were imposed, In the 1930s official policy rehabilitated the family. Concern to stabilize Soviet society, the threat of war,
operated as further incentives. Nobody talked any more about the family withering. Instead the official attitude was that it should be as secure as possible. Legal abortions were abolished in 1936 rather than merely discouraged. Referring to the new law a
Pravda
article stressed the responsibility of parents for their own children:

The State in no wise relieves the mother or the father as the social educator … parents’ responsibility for the education of their child will be increased and a blow will be dealt at the lighthearted negligent attitude towards marriage.
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The whole series of legislation which constituted ‘the new family policy’ was a complete reversal of the laws passed in the 1920s which had concentrated on women’s emancipation rather than strengthening the ‘socialist family’. The right of an unwed mother to appeal to court for the child’s support from the child’s father, without being legally married, was stopped. Divorce was made more difficult and more costly. It was not a coincidence that homosexuality was made a criminal offence in 1934. Non-reproductive sexuality came to be seen as a deviation from socialist reconstruction. Individual pleasure had to be subordinated to the needs of the state. Trotsky in
The Revolution Betrayed
noted:

The triumphal rehabilitation of the family taking place simultaneously – what a providential coincidence! – with the rehabilitation of the rouble, is caused by the material and cultural bankruptcy of the state. Instead of openly saying, ‘We have proven still too poor and ignorant for the creation of socialist relations among men, our children and grandchildren will realize this aim’, the leaders are forcing people to glue together again the shell of the broken family, and not only that but to consider it, under threat of extreme penalties, the sacred nucleus of triumphant socialism. It is hard to measure with the eye the scope of this retreat.
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The new family policy was justified not on the grounds of necessity, but elevated into a communist morality. This was a very serious distortion of the original commitment to try to seek a means of liberating women despite the economic obstacles. Wedding rings and marriage ceremonies reappeared in the mid 1930s, articles appeared in the papers praising marriage, elevating the family and encouraging fertility. Inevitably these affected the position of women.

Under Stalin it was as if a new place was being given to women.
Just as the Victorians combined the spiritual elevation of ‘womanhood’ with an institutional framework which made her powerless, in the Soviet Union under Stalin the elevation of Soviet motherhood, the praise of the wives of the engineers in heavy industry, who set about organizing canteens and child care centres in the mid-thirties not for their own efforts but for their possible influence on their husbands’ productivity, provided a new form of paternalist containment. As one Moscow woman commented, ‘He wanted us to work hard and fulfil the Plans. But he kept us in our places, never appointed women to high political office.’ While
Pravda
denounced ‘free love’ along with all ‘disorderly sex life’ as ‘bourgeois’, and claimed that the enemies of the people had introduced ‘the foul and poisonous idea’ of liquidating the family and disrupting marriage’, Stalin visited his old mother in Tiflis, and the Soviet papers carried articles on his children’s reaction to the jam their grandmother made.
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The result was considerable ambiguity. The mere statement of equality and its legislative existence meant a fundamental transformation for millions of women. The unquestioned patriarchal right could exist no more:

Bit by bit Father stopped beating Mother, but sometimes he threatened her that he would be put in prison for it. He would shout: ‘If they put me in prison I will not rest there from you.’ But even at such shouting she would say ‘We are equal.’
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Young women were brought up with strange aspirations. ‘At meetings, at lectures they constantly told us that women must be fully equal with men, that women can be flyers and naval engineers and anything that men can be.’
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Many women had been educated, had become skilled workers. Village women had got a nursery – they didn’t take the children into the fields. There were improved facilities for pregnant women. Some women too were undoubtedly pleased with their wedding rings – they were glad to have a marriage ritual again. But all this was very far from the hopes of the early years of the revolution when so many women had started suddenly to be able to imagine a completely different way of being women.

The Second World War forced an elite of women out into public life but it completed the reversal of women’s position in the family. Large families were encouraged because there was anxiety about the birth rate. A change in the inheritance laws in 1945 gave greater
influence to the father as the head of the family. Women lost their rights in the family: no longer could they choose to limit the number of children they could give birth to. Women who were not legally married enjoyed none of the rights which had been won with the revolution. They no longer had their own organizations through which they could put their case and press for change. The new consciousness which had been developing, of real equality between human beings and the possibility for women of not knowing themselves subordinate and dependent in relation to men, was eroded and almost extinguished. The only kind of emancipation was one which served the interests of the state, and those interests were unquestionably defined by the men in power.

In 1932 an incident occurred which symbolized most precisely the nature of female containment. Stalin’s wife, Nadia Alliluyeva, the daughter of the workman Alliluyev:

hitherto blindly devoted to her much older husband, began to doubt the wisdom and Tightness of his policy. One evening, in November 1932, Stalin and his wife were on a visit at Voroshilov’s home. Other members of the Politbureau were there too, discussing matters of policy. Nadia Alliluyeva spoke her mind about the famine and discontent in the country, and about the moral ravages which the Terror had wrought on the party. Stalin’s nerves were already strained to the utmost. In the presence of his friends he burst out against his wife in a flood of vulgar abuse. Nadia Alliluyeva left Voroshilov’s house. The same evening she committed suicide.
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Indeed, the fate of ideas about the liberation of women and the slow retreat is a sensitive barometer of the revolution itself. How could you demand equality when ‘equality mongering’ had been declared ‘leftist’ by the party and denounced, and when differences in income and power were approved? How could you demand the right to control the circumstances of your own reproduction when coercion at work was open and accepted? How could you demand the liberation of women when the possibility of human liberation had been indefinitely postponed? Why should the revolution extend to women when it had failed to become international? The space within which people could define themselves slowly decreased. Authority and repression closed in. The public world of the state penetrated the private world of the human spirit with armed force, torture and death. Why should women expect equality or love?

Russia was groaning under epidemics, famine, forced collectivization, political terror, the trials, the loss of twenty million men in the Second World War. The effects of such devastation inevitably possessed the lives of women. Meanwhile people were given new shrines to worship at, baubles, badges, medallions to value themselves by. The mummified body of Lenin became an object of cult veneration, socialist realist workers dwarfed and humbled actual men and women. People wanted a place to hide. The family became somewhere to go to escape from the horror of the world outside. The dummy ‘happy Soviet family’ rang like a slogan, reconstructed from the shell of frightened childhood. The liberation of women was submerged, the notion of female activity pressed down. ‘Woman’ was resurrected instead – as the heroine of motherhood, under the benign whiskers of Uncle Joe.

Later, when people were trying to eradicate Stalin and the cult of his personality, they superimposed a new myth – that of suffering Soviet womanhood, the earth-mother rocking the cradle threatened by the man of steel:

Everybody weakened. Women didn’t –

Through hunger and sickness, war and drought

Silently they rocked the cradles,

Saving our sons.
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Where had all those honest Leninists gone?

Out of this slowly came modern Russia. Women’s conditions are not those envisaged by the revolutionaries in the twenties, nor are they those which developed under Stalin. In 1955 abortion became legal again – a tacit recognition that its legal prohibition did not affect the birth rate and an attempt to prevent back-street abortions. In 1964 divorce was made rather easier and some of the disability of illegitimacy removed. Similarly birth-control advice is freely available now – though not the pill. As it became easier to criticize the ways in which Stalin’s laws did not relate to the needs of daily life, some of the submerged issues surfaced. One aspect of family policy which has often been attacked, along with the difficulty of getting a divorce, is the provision in the 1944 law which made unmarried women completely responsible for bringing up children. The right of men not to be accused wrongfully of being fathers had been protected by this law but it meant that the label ‘unmarried mother’
carried all its old stigma along with some of the old economic and social disability.