Mothering socialist society: The wife-activists' movement and the Soviet culture of daily life, 1934-41

Russian Review

Volumn 58, Issue 3, 1999, Pages 396-412

  Neary, Rebecca Balmas ^a  

^a Columbia University ^*

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; CAREGIVER; CHILD; CHILD WELFARE; CULTURAL FACTOR; DAILY LIFE ACTIVITY; ECONOMICS; EDUCATION; ETHNOLOGY; FAMILY; FEMALE; HISTORY; HOSPITAL SERVICE; HUMAN; LEGAL ASPECT; MOTHER; POLITICS; PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECT; SOCIAL CHANGE; SOCIAL STATUS; USSR; WOMEN'S RIGHTS;

ACTIVITIES OF DAILY LIVING; CAREGIVERS; CHILD; CHILD WELFARE; CULTURAL CHARACTERISTICS; FAMILY; HISTORY, 20TH CENTURY; HOUSEKEEPING; HUMANS; MOTHERS; POLITICS; SOCIAL CHANGE; SOCIAL CONDITIONS; USSR; WOMEN; WOMEN'S RIGHTS;

EID: 0347857797     PISSN: 00360341     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/0036-0341.00081     Document Type: Article

References (113)

1. See, for example, Svetlana Boym, Common Places: Mythologies of Everyday Life in Russia (Cambridge, MA, 1994);
2. Elizabeth Wood, The Baba and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia (Bloomington, 1997);
3. Eric Naiman, Sex in Public: The Incarnation of Early Soviet Ideology (Princeton, 1997);
4. and Victoria Bonnell, Iconography of Power: Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin (Berkeley, 1997).
5. The term can be translated as "civic-minded woman. " One significant exception is Sheila Fitzpatrick's brief but insightful analysis of the movement in "Becoming Cultured: Socialist Realism and the Representation of Privilege and Taste," in The Cultural Front (Ithaca, 1992), 216-37.
6. See also Mary Buckley, "The Untold Story of Obshchestvennitsa in the 1930s," Europe-Asia Studies 48:4 (1996): 569-86;
7. Thomas Schrand, "Industrialization and the Stalinist Gender System: Women Workers and the Soviet Economy, 1928-1941" (Ph. D. diss. , University of Michigan, 1994), 231-67;
8. I. V. Kashkina, "Dvizhenie zhen-obshchvennits, 1934-41" (Candidate diss. , Moscow State University, 1988);
9. and Rudolf Schlesinger, The Family in the USSR: Documents and Readings (London, 1949), 235-50.
10. Lewis Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in the USSR, 1935-1941 (New York, 1988), 241;
11. Robert Thurston, "The Soviet Family during the Great Terror, 1935-1941," Soviet Studies 43:3 (1991): 557-58.
12. Timasheff himself does not refer to the obshchestvennitsa movement. On the obshchestvennitsa movement as symptomatic of the "Great Retreat" see Fitzpatrick, Cultural Front, 233;
13. Schrand, "Industrialization and the Stalinist Gender System," 231-32;
14. and Susan Reid, "All Stalin's Women: Gender and Power in Soviet Art of the 1930s," Slavic Review 57 (Spring 1998): 158.
15. I use the terms "domestic life" and "domestic sphere" to refer to home life and family life. Historians studying gender issues often employ the term "private sphere," as does Habermas in his seminal The Structural Transformation of the Private Sphere (Cambridge, MA, 1993).
16. This formulation is problematic in the Soviet context, where the term "private life" was often used with regard to individual consciousness. For an exploration of public and private consciousness in this period see Jochen Hellbeck, "Fashioning the Stalinist Soul: The Diary of Stepan Podliubnyi," Jahrbucher fur Geschichte Osteuropas 44:3 (1996): 344-73.
17. Due to the semiofficial character of the obshchestvennitsa movement, it is difficult to obtain an accurate total number of women involved. Kashkina concluded that approximately eleven thousand women were involved in the movement prior to the May 1936 All-Union Conference of Wives of Managerial and Engineering-Technical Workers in Heavy Industry; the movement expanded significantly after that time ("Dvizhenie," 243). Official materials usually referred to "many thousands" or "tens of thousands" of activists. It is also difficult to assess the degree of genuine voluntarism in the movement. Wife-activists' work was voluntary in the sense that it was not overtly coerced (although there was doubtless social pressure to participate) and was unpaid.
18. Kul'turnost' can be translated as "culturedness," or "cultured behavior" (Boym, Common Places, 34).
19. Vera Dunham, the first scholar to explore its significance for Soviet culture, describes kul'turnost' as a "program for proper conduct in public . . . a fetish notion of how to be individually civilized. " See In Stalin's Time: Middleclass Values in Soviet Fiction (Durham, 1990), 22.
20. Obshchestvennitsa, 1938, no. 2:12-15, 1939, no. 2:12-13, and 1941, no. 2:8-9.
21. Za industrializatsiiu, 24 March 1935;
22. E. E. Vesnik, Nash opyt (Moscow, 1936).
23. Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv ekonomiki (RGAE), Moscow, f. 7297, op. 1, d. 155, 1. 149;
24. Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF), Moscow, f. 5548, op. 16, d. 66, 1. 81.
25. Vsesoiuznoe soveshchanie zhen khoziaistvennikov i inzhenerno- tekhnicheskikh rabotnikov tiazheloi promyshlennosti: Stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow, 1936).
26. GARF, f. 5548, op. 16, d. 3, 11. 12-13.
27. The wives' council (Sovet zhen) was the movement's main organizational unit, the nucleus of a larger aktiv at the factory-wide level (Obshchestvennitsa, 1939, no. 11:26, 1940, no. 3:27, and 1941, no. 4:9-10).
28. Donald Filtzer, Soviet Workers and Stalinist Industrialization: The Formation of Modern Soviet Production Relations, 1928-1941 (London, 1986), 51-59, 135-144;
29. Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley, 1995), 94-105.
30. See, for example, GARF, f. 5548, op. 13, dd. 1 and 2, and f. 5457, op. 22, dd. 72, 74, 81, and 82, passim.
31. "Nepartiinye bol'shevichki," Uchastnitsy velikogo sozidaniia (Moscow, 1962), 215. Although it would have been impossible for Vesnik to repudiate the movement's work and official motivations, this source was published during Khrushchev's "thaw," and might therefore be considered relatively candid. Furthermore, the words chosen to evoke the era's mood are more expressive than a rote formulation of loyalty.
32. A seminal study of modern (British) motherhood is Anna Davin, "Imperialism and Motherhood," History Workshop 5 (Spring 1978): 6-66.
33. See also Ellen Ross, Love and Toil: Motherhood in Outcast London, 1870-1918 (New York, 1993). The evolving Soviet conception of motherhood has not yet received similarly detailed scholarly exploration.
34. Aleksandra Kollontai cited in David Hoffmann, "Mothers in the Motherland: Stalinist Pronatalism in its Pan-European Context" (Paper presented at the annual AAASS Conference, 21 November 1997), 1;
35. "Communism and the Family," in Aleksandra Kollontai: Selected Writings, ed. Alix Holt (New York, 1977), 257-58.
36. Wood, Baba and Comrade, 66.
37. On European maternalism see Seth Koven and Sonya Michel, eds. , Mothers of a New World: Maternalist Politics and the Origins of Welfare States (New York, 1993);
38. and Gisela Bock and Pat Thane, eds. , Maternity and Gender Policies: Women and the Rise of European Welfare States, 1880s-1950s (London, 1991).
39. My definition of maternalism is adapted from Mothers of a New World, 4.
40. Mothers of a New World, 2.
41. Wife-activists played no discernible role in policy formulation, although they had an influence at the level of implementation and, in some instances, attained a public role and celebrity identity through participation in the movement. For a comparison of interwar Soviet and European maternalism see Hoffmann, "Mothers in the Motherland. " On celebrity identity see Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin's Peasants (Oxford, 1994).
42. Susan Pedersen, Family Dependence and the Origins of the Welfare State, Britain and France, 1914-1945 (New York, 1993);
43. and Jane Lewis, "Models of Equality for Women: The Case of State Support for Children in Twentieth-Century Britain," and Karen Offen, "Body Politics: Women, Work and the Politics of Motherhood in France, 1900-1950,"
44. both in Maternity and Gender Policies, 73-92 and 138-59, respectively.
45. See Claudia Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland: Women in Nazi Germany (New York, 1987);
46. Victoria De Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women: Italy, 1922-1945 (Berkeley, 1992);
47. Chiara Saraceno, "Redefining Maternity and Paternity: Gender, Pronatalism and Social Policies in Fascist Italy," in Maternity and Gender Policies, 196-212.
48. Mothers of a New World, 10.
49. There were other important disparities. The wife-activists' movement was more loosely organized than either the Frauenwerk or the Italian ONMI, which were institutionalized entities more closely tied to the party and the state (Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland, xxiii;
50. De Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women, 59, 65;
51. Saraceno, "Redefining Maternity," 205-6). Also, German and Italian women's organizations were subject to the eugenic and racist agendas of Nazism and 1930s Italian fascism, which the Soviet Union, however destructive its own hunt for "class enemies," eschewed.
52. Barbara Engel, Mothers and Daughters: Women of the Intelligentsia in Nineteenth-century Russia (New York, 1983), 53-54;
53. Women were eventually mobilized for employment in Western Europe with the entry of European countries into World War II - a process complicated by the very efficacy of earlier policies and ideologies which had urged women to remain at home.
54. Norton Dodge, Women in the Soviet Economy (Baltimore, 1966);
55. Gail Lapidus, Women in Soviet Society (Berkeley, 1978), 115, 119.
56. Appellations given the movement and its participants support this assertion. Originally referred to as dvizhenie zhen ITR (movement of wives of engineering-technical workers), over the course of 1936 the more inclusive terms dvizhenie zhen-aktivistok (movement of wife-activists), dvizhenie obshchestvennits (obshchestvennitsa movement) or, occasionally, dvizhenie zhen-obshchestvennits (movement of wife-obshchestvennitsy) became the standard (Kashkina, "Dvizhenie," 71).
57. On purge-era anti-elitism see Obshchestvennitsa, 1937, no. 6:2-3, 1938, no. 3:26, 1938, no. 5:6-9, and 1939, no. 1:27.
58. Vadim Volkov, "The Concept of Kul'turnost': Notes on the Stalinist Civilizing Process," in Everyday Subjects: Formations of Identity in Early Soviet Culture, ed. C. Kaier and E. Naiman (forthcoming).
59. See also Dunham, In Stalin's Time, 41-58.
60. In reality, some obshchestvennitsy were widowed, divorced, or had never been married (GARF, f. 5452, op. 31, d. 67, 11. 7-15).
61. Pravda, 10 May 1936;
62. Vsesoiuznoe soveshchanie zhen komandnogo i nachal'stvuiushego sostava RKKA. Stenograficheskii otchet (Moscow, 1937), 80;
63. V. Shveitser and B. F. Mal'kin, eds. , Zheny inzhenerov - Obshchestvennitsy tiazheloi promyshlennosti (Moscow, 1937).
64. Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi voennyi arkhiv (RGVA), Moscow, f. 9, op. 36, d. 1820, 1. 130.
65. Obshchestvennitsa, 1936, no. 1:3.
66. GARF, f. 5451, op. 20, d. 79, 1. 9.
67. Zhenshchina strany sovetov ravnopravnyi grazhdanin (Moscow, 1938), 86-90.
68. See also Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain, 218-21;
69. and Pomoshchnitsy politotdela (Moscow, 1934).
70. This tutelary role dates back to prerevolutionary days (Engel, Mothers and Daughters, 80-85;
71. It is also possible that otherwise "cultured" army officers' wives required (Bolshevik) re-education, given tendency in the 1920s for army officers to marry women of "bourgeois" background. See Mark Von Hagen, Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship (Ithaca, 1990), 192-95.
72. Statistics gathered for the 1936 all-Union wives' conferences in industry and the military show that, on average, officers' wives were less well-educated than their civilian counterparts (RGVA f. 9, op. 36, d. 1811, 1. 78;
73. Vsesoiuznoe soveshchanie zhen komandnogo, 178;
74. Vsesoiuznoe soveshchanie zhen khoziaistvennikov, 205).
75. Boevye podrugi: Kniga o zhenakh komandirov RKKA (Moscow, 1936), 30.
76. RGVA, f. 9, op. 36, d. 3392, 1. 263.
77. See also ibid. , 1. 122, and d. 1828, 1. 15;
78. and GARF f. 5451, op. 20, d. 79, 1. 75.
79. Obshchestvennitsa, 1937, no. 2:17.
80. This term is used by Victoria De Grazia in the context of Italian fascism, but it is also applicable to the 1930s Soviet Union (How Fascism Ruled Women, 82).
81. Naiman, Sex in Public, 5-12;
82. Von Hagen, Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship, 166-68;
83. Von Hagen, Soldiers in the Proletarian Dictatorship, 191-95;
84. Kenneth Pinnow, "Making Suicide Soviet: Medicine, Moral Statistics, and the Politics of Social Science in Bolshevik Russia, 1920-1930" (Ph. D. diss. , Columbia University, 1998), chap. 4.
85. Obshchestvennitsa, 1937, no. 6:2-3.
86. For one prominent example see E. Ia. Vesnik's account of his mother's arrest, imprisonment, release, and rehabilitation in Dariu, chto pomniu: Memuary narodnogo artista (Moscow, 1993), 19, 22-25.
87. Obshchestvennitsa, 1939, no. 1:25.
88. GARF, f. 5548, op. 16, d. 66, 1. 193 ob.
89. In this regard see Wendy Goldman, Women, the State and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917-1936 (Cambridge, England, 1993);
90. Mary Buckley, Women and Ideology in the Soviet Union (New York, 1987);
91. and Richard Stites, The Women's Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, Bolshevism (Princeton, 1990).
92. On "Bolshevik feminism" see Barbara Evans Clements, Bolshevik Women (New York, 1997).
93. On Soviet formulations of gender differences see Frances Bernstein, "What Everyone Should Know about Sex: Gender, Sexual Enlightenemnt, and the Politics of Health in Revolutionary Russia" (Ph. D. diss. , Columbia University, 1998). On instrumentalist views of the woman question see Engel, Mothers and Daughters; and Wood, Baba and Comrade.
94. Vsesoiuznoe soveshchanie zhen khoziaistvennikov, 9-10.
95. Reid, "All Stalin's Women," 158.
96. Evgeniia Vesnik, Klavdiia Surovtseva, Valentina Khetagurova, and others were celebrated for their work as obshchestvennitsy. All three described the gratification and fulfillment provided by participation, as did wives' testimonials at conferences and in the press. While these sources cannot be approached uncritically, it is fully conceivable that women gained satisfaction from the fame or material rewards the movement afforded, or out of genuine commitment to the construction of socialism. In this regard see Igal Halfin and Jochen Hellbeck, "Rethinking the Stalinist Subject: Stephen Kotkin's Magnetic Mountain and the State of Soviet Historical Studies," Jahrbucher fur Geschichte Osteuropas 44:3 (1996): 456-63.
97. Victoria Bonnell, Iconography of Power: Soviet Political Posters under Lenin and Stalin (Berkeley, 1997), 105.
98. See also Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Chicago, 1985);
99. Jeffrey Brooks, "Socialist Realism in Pravda: Read All About It!" Slavic Review 53 (Winter 1994): 973-91;
100. and Fitzpatrick, Cultural Front.
101. Bonnell, Iconography of Power, 115-99;
102. Roberta Manning, "Women in the Soviet Countryside on the Eve of World War II, 1935-1940," in Russian Peasant Women, ed. Beatrice Farnsworth and Lynne Viola (New York, 1992);
103. Matt Oja, "From Krest'ianka to Udarnitsa: Rural Women and the Vydvizhenie Campaign, 1933-1941," Carl Beck Papers, no. 1203.
104. Krest'ianka, 1936, no. 1:16, and 1935, no. 4:22-23.
105. On Krupskaia see Robert McNeal, Bride of the Revolution (Ann Arbor, 1972). On Samoilova see Clements, Bolshevik Women.
106. Bonnell notes that portrayals of peasant women were also softer and more rounded in this period (Iconography of Power, 116).
107. Even khetagurovki - unmarried young women who followed komsomol'ka Valentina Khetagurova to the Soviet Far East to build socialism - fit this characterization. Their energy and enthusiasm were emphasized in official propaganda, but so was their "womanly" talent for making even the untamed Far East cozy and home-like. See N. I. Dubinina, Ty pozovi, Dal'nii Vostok! (Khabarovsk, 1987);
108. and my "Devushki s kharakterom: The Khetagurovki and Women's Migration to the Soviet Far East, 1937-1940" (Paper prepared for presentation at the annual convention of the AAASS, 1998).
109. Obshchestvennitsa, 1939, no. 6:46, and no. 9:25-26. It is possible that the letter and responses were fictitious, in which case the absence of a clear "party line" only underscores the complexity of the issue.
110. Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv literatury i iskusstva, Moscow, f. 1337, op. 5, dd. 43-51.
111. Excerpts translated and published in Veronique Garros, Natalia Korenevskaya, and Thomas Lahusen, eds. , Intimacy and Terror: Soviet Diaries of the 1930s (New York, 1995), 167-218.
112. Intimacy and Terror, 170, 172-73, 189. I am grateful to Jochen Hellbeck for his suggestion in this regard.
113. On this aspect of Shtange's diary see ibid. , p. 166.