Top Quotes: “Red Valkyries: The Revolutionary Women of Eastern Europe” — Kristen Ghodsee
Introduction
“1 use the terms “state socialism” and “state socialist” to refer to the governments of the Soviet Union and Bulgaria during the twentieth century. Although ruled by “communist” parties, both nations considered themselves to be in the socialist stage of the Marxist developmental framework, in which “communism” was the ideal society toward which they were striving. They referred to themselves as “socialist” states, or societies living under what they called “really-existing socialism,” to distinguish their still imperfect systems from the communist ideal. This is why the USSR stands for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.”
“Lyudmila Pavlichenko: the world’s most successful woman sniper with 309 confirmed kills in World War II. Alexandra Kollontai: the first Soviet Commissar of Social Welfare and a champion of sex positivity before we even had a phrase for it. Nadezhda Krupskaya: realizing the revolution through a radical expansion of education, literacy, and librarianship. Inessa Armand: the head of what was essentially the first ministry of women’s affairs in the Soviet Union. And, finally, Elena Lagadinova: the youngest female partisan fighting against her Axis-allied government in World War II and the president of the Committee of the Bulgarian Women’s Movement for twenty-two years.”
“From the earliest days of the development of what we call feminism, there existed an entirely different group of women who, while agreeing that women have the same innate capacity for reason as men and are therefore deserving of political rights, fought side by side with their male counterparts to create a more equitable world for all through collective action. Women in Russia, for example, achieved the franchise in 1917 before most women in the West, and full coeducational access to all universities in Eastern Europe predated that in the United States by decades. Furthermore, women joined the labor force and entered traditionally male professions beginning in the 1920s, and by the 1930 and 1940s, Soviet women were earning doctoral degrees in physics and other natural sciences. A 1957 report of the American Manpower Planning Council noted, with some dismay, that “there are annually some 13,000 women graduating as engineers in the Soviet Union, compared to well under 100 in the United States.” Although they did not have what we in the West would think of as a feminist movement, socialist women enjoyed rapid gains in societies where states made explicit commitments to promoting women’s economic independence through the radical expansion of social safety nets and special programs to support working mothers.
Despite these achievements, most Western historians and gender scholars have ignored or downplayed the profound importance of socialists in shaping twentieth-century women’s movements. Even the most prominent of these Alexandra Kollontai, a theorist, teacher, speaker, politician, and diplomat who served as one of the first female ambassadors in the world and was twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize barely gets mentioned in Western textbooks. Her work is completely absent from the 2005 Feminist Theory: A Philosophical Anthology, the 2016 edition of the Oxford Handbook of Feminist Theory, and the 2016 (fourth) and 2021 (fifth) editions of the Routledge Feminist Theory Reader. Kollontai’s unrelenting antagonism to capitalism apparently undermines her credentials as a “feminist theorist” in liberal circles, even though her ideas and her power to implement them as a politician in the early years of the Soviet Union arguably did more to realize women’s full emancipation than the works or deeds of any other woman in the twentieth century (including Emmeline Pankhurst!).”
“Although they often agreed with the initial aims of the liberal feminists, they felt these goals did not go far enough to help the majority of women in their societies. In nineteenth-century Britain, for instance, the right to vote was based on ownership of a certain amount of property and excluded all women. While suffragists focused on removing the sex exclusion, a different group of women agitated for the removal of the property qualifications, arguing that voting access for only propertied women was a purely middle-class demand.”
“When the American civil rights activist Angela Davis visited Elena Lagadinova in Bulgaria in 1972, for instance, Davis’ goal was to highlight the incompatibility of American claims to upholding democratic freedoms with their poor record on civil rights. Persistent accusations from the Eastern Bloc about U.S. domestic racism played an important role in forcing political progress in the United States. Rather than being intersectional, women like Angela Davis or Elena Lagadinova were confluential in their politics. Instead of focusing on the fixed points where different social identities or movements meet (that is their intersections), socialist women often viewed categories like race, class, and gender as distinct rivers flowing into each other from different tributaries, rivers which can mix and grow larger and more powerful.”
“Both the Western press and her own Bolshevik colleagues once referred to Alexandra Kollontai as a “Valkyrie” after the legendary female warriors of Norse mythology. I have adopted this word for my title because each of the women profiled in these pages, in their own way, fought like superhuman warriors to support causes that defined the twentieth century. Their personal stories reveal certain similar characteristics that they shared, characteristics that made them successful in their quests to create, further, and defend social change. To face the many challenges of the twenty-first century, we need a broader vision of emancipation that targets the forces that produce and exacerbate inequality at all levels of society.
The Red Valkyries can help show us the way.”
Lyudmila Pavlichenko (1916–1974)
“In 1942, union members at the Colt Firearms Manufacturing Company in Hartford, Connecticut, gifted a young Soviet soldier a new automatic pistol and a bullet marked with the number 310. The famous Hollywood director Charlie Chaplin knelt before this same soldier and kissed each of the fingers of her right and left hands.
The folk singer Woody Guthrie wrote a ballad in her honor, and a widowed millionaire proposed marriage. Lyudmila Pavlichenko was the first Soviet woman to be a guest at the White House; she became chums with Eleanor Roosevelt and stunned American audiences in forty-three states with her rousing speeches to whip up public support for the opening of a second front against the Axis in continental Europe. “Every German who remains alive will kill women, children, and old folks,” she told a crowd of incredulous American journalists. “Dead Germans are harmless. Therefore, if I kill a German, I am saving lives.””
“When the Soviet military honored her for her 257th confirmed kill, Pavlichenko told her superiors, “I’ll get more.” And she kept her promise. Between the age of twenty-four and twenty-six, Pavlichenko officially racked up 309 confirmed kills, the highest tally of any woman sniper in history.”
“Lyudmila Pavlichenko numbered among the ranks of about 800,000 women who served in the Soviet armed forces during World War lI, or about a million women if you include those who risked their lives as guerilla fighters with the partisans. Although the numbers are fuzzy, historians suggest that women made up about 3 percent of the Soviet military. Eighty of them would go on to become Heroes of the Soviet Union, the highest honor the state could bestow upon one of its citizens.
Perhaps the best-known Soviet front-line women combatants were the Nachthexen (Night Witches), the 588th Night Bomber Regiment, which later changed its name to the 46th Taman Guards Night Bomber Aviation Regiment. An aviator named Marina Raskova, known as the Soviet Amelia Earhart, used her personal connection with Stalin to convince him to approve the formation of three all-female aviation regiments to make use of the Soviet girls and women who had trained as pilots in the 1930s. A twenty-eight-year-old pilot named Yevdokiya Bershan-skaya was chosen to lead the 588th. The regiment consisted of women between the ages of eighteen and twenty-six who flew outdated Polikarpov Po-2 biplanes made of plywood and canvas, which their fellow pilots called “sewing machines.” These old crop dusters could only carry a few bombs for each run, so their pilots conducted as many as eighteen sorties in a night. Their flimsy construction meant that enemy fire easily damaged the biplanes, and since they flew at such low altitudes, their pilots and navigators lacked parachutes until 1944. Stealth provided their only advantage.
The biplane pilots flew in low, cut their engines, and glided over German targets to drop their bombs. Nazi soldiers on the ground only heard a soft whooshing sound before the devastating explosions, and they likened the swoosh of the biplanes to the sound of a witch’s broom, hence the name Nachthexen. These bombing raids proved so successful at terrorizing the Germans that the Nazis apparently awarded an Iron Cross to any soldier who shot down a Polikarpov Po-2 biplane. Between 1941 and 1945, the Night Witches collectively flew over 23,000 sorties and dropped more than 3,000 tons of bombs on German targets. From the 588th/46th regiment alone, twenty-three female pilots earned the title “Hero of the Soviet Union.”
The Soviets also formed the 1077th Anti-Aircraft Regiment, which participated in the defense of Stalingrad in 1942. This regiment consisted entirely of ill-trained, ill-equipped teenage girls, many of whom lost their lives using their anti-aircraft guns against German Panzer tanks. The 1st Separate Volunteer Women’s Rifle Brigade also mobilized Soviet women trained in marksmanship. Other famous Soviet female snipers include Roza Shanina, who kept a detailed war diary before her death in 1945, and the grandmother sniper, Nina Petrova, who volunteered to fight even though she was too old to be drafted. This middle-aged woman had a confirmed tally of 122 kills and trained an additional 512 snipers before her own death in the last year of the War. All together, the Soviet Union’s female snipers sent over 11,000 Axis troops to their graves.”
“In addition to the threat of rape, torture, and death at the hands of the Germans, Soviet women in the military also faced pervasive sexism and harassment perpetrated by men on their own side. In one case, a brigade of sniper women in the 715th regiment returned from the front lines to find an order that they mop the floors of the headquarters. “No Way! was their unequivocal response: that was work for soldiers on fatigue duties. What did this commandant take them for?” For their disobedience, the brigade spent the night in the guardhouse as punishment, but the women from the field kitchens apparently rewarded them with better meals, in solidarity. In another case, a group of snipers came back to their dugout after forty-eight hours of intense fighting without sleep. A courier appeared and told the deputy platoon commander to send two women to wash the floors of the officer’s quarters. Even though these snipers had fought on the front lines side by side with their male comrades, the officers still considered cleaning to be women’s work. This deputy platoon commander also refused the order. For her disobedience, she was sentenced to five days in the guardhouse until a more senior officer reversed her sentence and sent her back to the dugout to get some sleep.
Sexual harassment and the fear of assault also haunted the Soviet women soldiers. “Amorous” Soviet men sometimes attacked their female comrades.”
“A female journalist felt compelled to ask her whether girls fighting in Russia were allowed to wear makeup at the front. Pavlichenko simply replied, “There is no rule against it, but who has time to think of her shiny nose when a battle is going on?””
“Pavlichenko felt that socialism in the Soviet Union allowed citizens to be first and foremost “individual personalities” before they were men or women, and therefore nothing about their sex prevented them from pursuing goals that they wanted to pursue, even if those goals contradicted gender stereotypes.”
“Contrast the Soviet view with the laws embodied in the United States’ Women’s Armed Forced Integration Act of 1948, which limited the number of women that could serve in the American Air Force, Army and Navy to 2 percent of the total force. This act also prevented women from serving in combat positions or on vessels or aircraft that might see active combat (except hospital ships) and, with the exception of medical fields, placed a cap on the highest rank women could achieve. During Congressional testimony before the House Armed Services Committee in 1987, one national security expert explained that “in 1948, some in Congress believed that combat required physical strength that women did not possess. In addition, women’s role in society was such that a policy of having women in combat was almost unthinkable.”
When Pavlichenko painted her nails, performing her femininity while also performing the identity of a battle-hardened soldier fresh from the front lines, she highlighted a key difference between US and Soviet approaches to gender. Both the Americans and the Soviets accepted patriarchal notions of a fixed gender binary. But where the Americans believed it “unthinkable” that women could serve in combat positions because they were weak, the Soviets trained them for combat positions that did not require specific upper body strength (such as snipers, pilots, parachutists, and anti-aircraft gunners). Rather than de-gendering the category of “soldier,” Pavlichenko and women like her helped to create an idealized feminine version of it, something most liberal feminists would reject as problematically essentializing. Although Soviet policies may have reinforced stereotypes about the differences between men and women and could not erase the persistence of sexism, in the end, women in the Red Army progressed further and faster than their counterparts in the United States, who only achieved full combat parity with men in 2015.”
“While in Great Britain, Pavlichenko was appalled to learn that British women doing the same work as men did not earn the same wages, and she ached to return home. Her international tour ended in December 1942.
For her service, her government honored her as a Hero of the Soviet Union in 1943. Pavlichenko received a promotion to the rank of major and taught at a sniper school until 1944, when she applied for leave to finish her university degree in history. After the Allied victory, she officially worked as a journalist and military historian. In reality, Pavlichenko became a professional hero, polished up and trotted out for special occasions. The government celebrated and idolized her whenever Soviet citizens needed reminding of their triumph in the Great Patriotic War. Posters of Pavlichenko and her sniper’s rifle made their way onto the bedroom walls of girls in India and China. When women took up arms as part of revolutionary struggles in countries such as Cuba, Vietnam, or Mozambique, they did so in the spirit of Pavlichenko and the other Soviet heroines of World War II.”
“With the advent of the nuclear age, she mourned the loss of the sniper’s art and feared that another world war would destroy all humanity. Knowing that the next global conflagration would involve intercontinental ballistic missiles rather than frontline combat, Pavlichenko watched as her expertise and experience became obsolete. Pavlichenko still retains her title as the woman sniper with the highest tally in history, largely because no one has had the chance to beat her.”
“As with so many veterans, Pavlichenko self-medicated with alcohol, and sank deeper into depression. On October 10, 1974, at the age of fifty-eight, Lyudmila Pavlichenko died of a stroke in her grown son’s arms. Two years later, the Soviets immortalized her on a commemorative stamp.”
Alexandra Kollontai (1872–1952)
“The American press obsessed over her. They called her the “Red Rose of the Revolution,” the “Jeanne d’Arc of the Proletariat” the “Heroine of the Bolshevik upheaval in Petrograd,” and the “Proletarian Siren.” In 1918, Current Opinion announced to its incredulous readers that “she holds a cabinet portfolio, dresses like a Parisian, and does not believe in marriage.” In 1924, the Philadelphia Inquirer dubbed her the “Communist Valkyrie,” and a year later, the New York Times made the salacious accusation that she was arranging fake marriages to promote “red propaganda” in Norway, where she served as a diplomat. In 1927, the Washington Post revealed that the new Soviet ambassador to Mexico “who has had six husbands” had been refused entry into the United States because the government considered her a threat to public safety.
Although socialist, communist, and anarchist women had been fighting for the emancipation of women since the mid-nineteenth century, none of them had the practical power, platform, and lasting international influence of Alexandra Mikhailovna Kollontai. From our vantage point in the twenty-first century, Kollontai’s prescience is astounding given that she theorized, agitated, and organized for women over a hundred years ago.
She fought for women’s full emancipation and concomitantly reimagined the roles of love, sex, friendship, and family in a future socialist society, while also living out that reimagination within the constraints of fin de siècle Russia. As a left-fluid individual, Kollontai started her political life as a pacifist and social democrat, became a revolutionary communist, and then flirted briefly with anarchism before being sent off to exile as one of the world’s first women ambassadors.
Her courageous sex positivity attempted to liberate women from the suffocating strictures of Victorian morality. As historian Maria Bucur writes in her book The Century of Women:
More than any other communist revolutionary in imperial Russia, Kollontai developed an original analysis of gender inequality and proposed the ideology of free love doing away with the institution of marriage and parenting as they had been solidified through law and practice, to pave the way for a new form of equality and new types of communal loyalties … She envisioned a world in which any person could grow up to the full potential of his or her abilities, so that all would be ready to dedicate themselves to the common good without unequal burdens placed on their shoulders by virtue of their gender.”
“Now estranged from her husband, she set up a household with her young son and her Bulgarian friend, Zoya Shadurskaya. Kollontai and Shadurskaya had first met in Bulgaria as children in 1878, and had developed a special bond that lasted throughout their lifetimes. Shadurskaya went to Saint Petersburg to live with her newlywed friend after the birth of Kollontai’s son, Misha, followed Kollontai into exile in Western Europe between 1908 and 1917, lived with Alexandra and Misha in Moscow in the early years after the October Revolution, and frequently visited Kollontai while she served as a diplomat in Norway and Sweden.
Shadurskaya never married and supported herself as a writer and a journalist, making it easy to pick up her life and relocate when necessary — the very embodiment of Kollontai’s vision of “the new woman.” Kollontai described Shadurskaya as “the dearest person in the world to me, apart from my son,” and Zoya’s friendship and loyalty would outlast any of Kollontai’s marriages or love affairs. “Friendship is a more sociable emotion than sexual love,” Kollontai later explained when discussing her decades-long relationship with Shadurskaya. “You can have many friends at a time, because there are different strings which vibrate in contact with different people.” Kollontai understood the inability of monogamous romantic love to fulfill every emotional need, and although she approved of polyamorous relationships, she would have argued that polyamory also required developing friendship, comradeship, and kinship ties in addition to romantic ones.
During Kollontai’s time working in the Russian underground (both before and after her participation in the failed 1905 revolution), she developed close friendships with many other revolutionaries and began to formulate ideas about “comradely love.” “The stronger the ties of all members of the collective,” Kollontai explained in 1921, “the less the need for the creation of strong marital relations.” Kollontai argued that, in societies in which people were isolated and drained by the daily grind of economic competition and the basic struggle to survive, they placed inordinate demands on their romantic relationships. Her observations resonate today.”
“The ideal of the bourgeoisie was the married couple, where the partners complemented each other so completely that they had no need of contact with society. Communist morality demands, on the contrary, that the younger generation be educated in such a way that the personality of the individual is developed to the full, and the individual with his or her many interests has contact with a range of persons of both sexes. Communist morality encourages the development of many and varied bonds of love and friendship among people.”
“From her own experiences in Saint Petersburg, Kollontai knew that working men failed to understand the necessary role of the woman question within the larger socialist cause, particularly as the number of women workers grew in the textile industry. Russian capitalists preferred female labor because it was cheaper, more docile, and less prone to alcoholism. Many proletarian men initially resented the increasing presence of women in the factories and criticized their own wives when they attended meetings or classes rather than performing their domestic duties. But rather than abandoning men for their chauvinism, Kollontai insisted that women socialists must educate them:
In order to inculcate in their comrades the proper attitude to the question of equal rights for women workers in every sphere and draw them into the struggle to attain in practice equal civil rights for women, women have only one course to unite their forces around the party. Women workers must set up a women’s secretariat, a commission, a bureau within the party, not in order to wage a separate battle for political rights and defend their own interests by themselves but in order to exert pressure on the party from within, in order to compel their comrades to wage their struggle in the interests of the female proletariat as well.
This insistence on working together with her male comrades within existing party structures would eventually make Kollontai the most powerful woman in the first Bolshevik government.”
“Between 1911 and 1916, Kollontai also began a prolonged, on-and-off affair with the Bolshevik Alexander Shlyapnikov, a Russian metal worker and trade union leader also exiled in Western Europe (who would later become the People’s Commissar of Labor). They met in Paris in late 1911 when Kollontai was thirty nine and Salyapnikov was twenty six. According to Kollontaï’s diaries, there was a strong “spark” between them despite their differences in age and social class. In some of Lenin’s corres. pondence from this era, he referred to Kollontai as “Shlyapnikov’s Wife,” although the two were never married. In addition to their romance, Kollontai and Shlyapnikov developed a close political relationship, smuggling literature into Russia through Scandinavia.”
“As World War 1 dragged on, Russians grew increasingly angry at the prolonged economic upheavals and human costs of the conflict. In February 1917, after centuries of autocracy, a series of spontaneous strikes, women’s demonstrations, mutinies, and violent clashes forced the abdication of the Russian tsar. Suddenly, control of the vast empire fell to a bourgeois provisional government. Kollontai rushed back to Saint Petersburg (now Petrograd), where she led the city’s laundresses in the first strike under the new government of Alexander Kerensky, who had her arrested and imprisoned for two months. She was eventually released on bail and put under house arrest Since the Provisional Government refused to withdraw from the disastrous World War 1, Kollontai rallied for the Bolsheviks, becoming an invaluable ally of Lenin and ultimately voting in favor of armed insurrection to seize power. After the October revolution, Lenin named Kollontai the Commissar for Social Welfare on October 28, 1917.
The immediate aftermath of the revolution saw Kollontai at the very center of power. She set about realizing her long-standing ambition for women’s emancipation, the abolition of the sexual double standard, and the creation of a new socialist morality that liberated women from the social mores that bound them in domestic servitude within the family. In December 1917, with the help of a cadre of progressive Soviet lawyers, Kollontai orchestrated the passage of two decrees replacing church marriage with civil marriage and liberalizing divorce. When the American journalist Louise Bryant met her in 1918, she found herself in awe of Kollontai’s work ethic: “She works untiringly and, through persistence born of flaming intensity, she accomplishes a tremendous amount.”
In October 1918, the highest legislative body of the Soviet Union incorporated these decrees into a new Family Law: the Code of Laws concerning the Civil Registration of Deaths, Births and Marriages. The Code ruptured many centuries of patriarchal and ecclesiastical authority, overturning all laws that rendered women the property of their fathers and husbands and abolishing the church’s control over marriage and divorce. Women earned juridical equality with men, married women retained complete control over their own wages, and the new Code ensured that all children received parental support and orphans guaranteed state guardianship.
Kollontai also proposed a vast network of communally run state laundries, cafeterias, and children’s centers. Once women had been liberated from the duties of the home, Kollontai hoped that they would enter the public sphere on equal terms with men, pursuing their education and careers as they desired. As women developed their skills and talents, they would gain agency and control of their own lives, earning their own income in professions now open to members of both sexes. Financially independent women would be able to choose their romantic partners out of love and mutual affection rather than relying on the crass economic calculation that typified bourgeois marriages.
The new Code embodied the essence of Kollontai’s grand plan for women’s equality and the eventual obsolescence of the bourgeois monogamous family. After its passage, divorce rates skyrocketed as Russian women were finally free to leave abusive or alcoholic husbands and Russian men abandoned women they had been forced to marry after getting them pregnant. Kollontai imagined that this liberalization would usher in an era of new relationships based on her concept of “comradely love.” For his part, Lenin cared little for Kollontai’s intimate politics, but he did agree that women’s housework was unproductive drudgery. Russia had lost many men in World War I, and Lenin needed Kollontai to mobilize Russia’s women to defend the new state no matter the cost. The revolution’s very survival depended on women’s participation in the formal labor force and, for at least the first decade, the Bolsheviks were willing to challenge the very foundations of traditional family life if it created more workers to prop up the faltering economy.”
“Kollontai held her ministerial position until March 28, 1918, when she resigned in protest against the appalling terms of the treaty of Brest-Litovsk (which got Russia out of World War I but with huge territorial concessions to the Germans).21 Still committed to her work for women, Kollontai won herself a key victory when the Eighth Congress of the Communist Party passed her resolution demanding an intensification of the party’s work among women in 1919. The Congress committed itself to further growing the number of socialized laundries, cafeterias, and children’s homes. That same year, Kollontai, together with Inessa Armand, helped to create the Zhenotdel, a special women’s section established within the Central Committee of the Communist Party. In 1920, the Soviet Union also became the first country in the world to legalize abortion on demand during the first twelve weeks of pregnancy.
The years between 1919 and 1923 would be years of constant chaos and tumult as Russia lurched from revolution to civil war to famine to a New Economic Policy, which was a partial reversion to the capitalism that Kollontai abhorred. In early 1918, she had also agreed to marry her new lover, a Ukrainian peasant who had become a Kronstadt sailor and ultimately the leader of the Baltic Fleet. Pavel Dybenko was sixteen years her junior, and the difference in their ages and social positions scandalized even the most progressive Bolsheviks. Lenin worried that Kollontai’s unseemly love affairs distracted from the serious work of building a new government.”
“Her aristocratic background, her multiple lovers, and her penchant for younger, working-class men — combined with her open political support for the Workers’ Opposition and criticism of the New Economic Policy — eroded her domestic political credibility. After her personal appeal to Stalin, Kollontai left for Norway as a member of the Soviet legation. Within a year, she had become the first Russian woman ambassador and only the third woman ambassador in the world, beginning a diplomatic career that would keep her out of the Soviet Union until the end of World War II.”
“Kollontai’s theories about love and sex were decades ahead of their time. As she argued for a political economy of love, the fledgling state of the Soviet Union was reeling from years of conflict. The chaos of World War I and the civil war combined with a severe drought to precipitate a horrendous famine. The Bolsheviks lacked the resources to socialize all domestic work; public laundries, canteens, and childcare facilities cost too much for the struggling Soviet economy. And, in some cases, the very laws meant to liberate Russian women allowed men to become more cavalier in their paternal responsibilities, making women’s lives harder. By 1926, many women, especially in the rural areas, were clamoring for a return to the old ways. Their paltry wages were not enough to support children on their own, liberalized divorce laws meant that men abandoned women at the first sign of a pregnancy, and alimony provisions proved almost impossible to enforce. In the absence of reliable forms of birth control, free love produced hundreds of thousands of unplanned and often unwanted pregnancies. Because the state lacked the resources to care for them, homeless children swarmed the major cities. The 1920 liberalization of abortion allowed women to control their fertility, but this then precipitated a massive and (for the government) undesirable plunge in the birth rate. Given the choice, many women preferred to forgo motherhood, but the world’s first workers’ state needed more workers.
Kollontai’s inspired attempt to liberate women from centuries of patriarchal control also unleashed the worst in Soviet men. No longer the private property of their fathers and husbands, women faced an avalanche of sexual violence.”
“The Spaniard Isabel de Palencia worked closely with Kollontai in Stockholm on the eve of World War II and marveled at Kollontai’s ability to maneuver in a sometimes hostile diplomatic milieu. In her own auto-biography, Palencia described Kollontai as a close friend and as a woman of extraordinary intelligence, keen vision, and unconquerable will, together with a warm heart.”
“Despite her quasi exile from the center of Soviet politics, Kollontai enjoyed a long and celebrated diplomatic career and was twice nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize (in 1946 and 1947) for her negotiation of the Soviet-Finnish peace after the Winter War.”
“After one last vacation to restore her strength, and still hoping to build a better future for Soviet women, Alexandra Kollontai died at the age of seventy-nine, less than a month before her eightieth birthday in 1952. “One must write not only for oneself,” she explained in her memoirs. “But for others. For those far away, unknown women who will live then. Let them see that we were not heroines or heroes after all. But we believed passionately and ardently. We believed in our goals and we pursued them. Sometimes we were strong and sometimes we were very weak.””
Nadezhda Krupskaya (1869–1939)
“The events leading up to Krupskaya’s marriage to Lenin suggest that it served at least partially as a convenient cover for their political activities. During the years they attended or taught in various political circles, the police surveilled them. Lenin was arrested in December of 1895, but so minimal was the connection between him and Krupskaya that the police ignored her until May of 1896, when they began surveilling her, and arrested her in August 1896. In the eight months between Lenin’s imprisonment and Krupskaya’s, they sent each other messages using “invisible” milk ink, a common communication strategy to avoid the prying eyes of the secret police in which a secret letter would be written in milk between the lines of an innocuous letter written in ink. The milk would dry and become “invisible.” Because the chemicals in the milk weakened the paper, the milk ink would “develop” when the letter came into contact with heat and reveal the hidden message. Although political prisoners had no access to flames, they were often served tea hot enough to develop the invisible ink by holding the letter on or over the cup.
In addition to their hot tea and milk, political prisoners could receive unlimited visits from family members and from their spouses or fiancées. It is important to remember that many of these intellectual revolutionaries (including Lenin, Krupskaya, Kollontai, and Inessa Armand) hailed from the noble or bourgeois classes. The tsar perhaps saw them as angst-ridden youth rebelling against their high-status parents and dealt mildly with them, perhaps in hopes that they would grow out of their revolutionary zeal and eventually join their parents in the ranks of Russia’s elite. Political prisoners were allowed visits from those to whom they were engaged and radicals in the Russian underground abused this fiancée provision to their own advantage, assigning fake fiancées to imprisoned men for the duration of their confinement. Krupskaya and other politically committed women volunteered for these roles and became couriers of messages.”
“With the new rights to freedom of association granted by the Provisional Government, a variety of new youth organizations formed. Krupskaya involved herself with a pan-leftist group called “Light and Knowledge,” which organized coeducational activities where little boys and little girls both learned their way around hammers and nails as well as needles and thread. She would later help create both the Komsomol and the Young Pioneers, two coeducational youth organizations theoretically designed to raise all boys and girls as equal, independent, and cooperative citizens of the workers’ state. If you wanted to promote women’s equality with men, Krupskaya believed it best to start with the “small comrades” of the next generation.
Krupskaya also hoped to form a children’s union to advocate for the rights of child laborers (to a six-hour day, for instance) until such time that the Bolsheviks could abolish privately hired child labor completely. Instead, Krupskaya imagined a nationwide system of free, universal, and compulsory education for all children from ages seven to seventeen, which would include a work component following Marx’s dictum that all children should participate in some manual labor as part of their preparation for socialist citizenship. And since parents would inevitably hold outdated traditional ideas about class and gender hierarchies, Krupskaya supported Kollontai’s plans for children’s homes and kindergartens where trained nurses and teachers would help raise them with a new set of socialist values which included sexual equality. If the bourgeoisie used public education to keep workers in their place, Krupskaya proposed using it to set them free, So where Kollontai supported socialized childcare to beneft Soviet women, Krupskaya argued that socialized childcare would also be good for the children.
When the Bolsheviks seized power in October 1917, Krupskaya became the deputy minister in charge of adult education in the new Commissariat of Enlightenment (the Soviet name for the Ministry of Education), working together with the Ukrainian revolutionary Anatoly Lunacharsky. Based on her understanding of progressive democratic pedagogies, Krupskaya began developing a program for large-scale educational reforms. The new Soviet government proposed the first set of these reforms in 1919, and Krupskaya insisted on creating kindergartens and children’s colonies for toddlers under the age of four as well as a system of special training schools for those over seventeen. She had learned from her grassroots work in the Vyborg district in the summer of 1917 that workers “linked the revolutionary struggle with the struggle for mastering knowledge and culture,” and wanted to promote a pedagogy which allowed them to combine these two aims.” Many peasants had lived off the land in a relatively non monetized economy, but especially for peasants and workers who had recently migrated to the cities to take up factory jobs, becoming numerate allowed them to better understand how employers cheated them of their wages. Similarly, learning to read gave workers access to a world of laws and regulations designed to protect them as well as to the newspapers and pamphlets striving to radicalize them. Rather than learning to read from the Bible or from children’s books, why not use The Communist Manifesto?”
“Later, Stalin rejected the idea of an educational system which might produce free-thinking and independent Soviet citizens; he needed cogs in his big modernization wheel. Under his leadership, Soviet schools returned to lessons based on recitation and memorization (exactly what Krupskaya most criticized about bourgeois education in Geneva). Pull disciplinary authority returned to teachers, and the education system was centralized. Supplemental lessons on dialectical materialism turned into little more than state propaganda taught through drills and exams. Although the Soviets never fully embraced Krupskaya’s ideas for a unique socialist pedagogy, her theories did prove an essential foundation for later radical educators. When the Brazilian Paulo Freire, a great twentieth-century proponent of critical pedagogy, began investigating the ideal relationship between student and teacher, he drew inspiration from Krupskaya’s work. She dreamed of an educational system wherein teachers would serve as mere facilitators: intellectual midwives for independent thoughts and ideas. The truly liberatory potential of Krupskaya’s pedagogical vision is perhaps best confirmed by Stalin’s total rejection of it.”
“After Lenin’s death in January 1924, Krupskaya found herself caught in the political vacuum and internecine struggles that accompanied the scramble for power, At great personal risk, she smuggled Lenin’s “last testament” out of Russia so that Max Eastman could publish it in the New York Times in 1926, but Lenin’s negative assessments of Stalin failed to penetrate the censorship in the Soviet Union. Krupskaya could do nothing to prevent Stalin’s ascension, Never a fan of the Georgian, whom she considered rude and unsophisticated, she pushed back against Stalin’s policies as often as she could.”
“Whereas Kollontai capitulated to Stalin from the safety of her diplomatic mission in Stockholm, Krupskaya lived next door to him, surrounded by his spies, wounded by his slanders, and forced to compromise her ideals. She died in February 1939.”
Inessa Armand (1874–1920)
“When Vera Pavlova later falls in love with Lopukhov’s best friend, Kirsanov, Lopukhov fakes his own suicide with the help of Rakhmetov and leaves for the United States so that Vera Pavlova and Kirsanov can marry. Armand’s real life mirrored this story. She married Alexander Armand and bore him four children, but, when she became pregnant by Vladimir Armand (Alexander’s younger, radical brother), Alexander allowed her to be with Vladimir. Alexander eschewed jealousy and the bothersome process of divorce, and continued to pay for tutors, governesses, and schools for all five children while he and Inessa remained married, freeing Inessa to pursue her own education and political career in exile.
That all of this happened in 1903 might seem shocking to those among us who consider polyarhory a phenomenon of relatively recent and Western vintage. But leftists often challenged the amorous status quo as part of their progressive politics.”
“Feeling helpless and depressed, Inessa Armand died of cholera on September 24, 1920.”
Elena Lagadinova (1930–2017)
“In 1941, while Lyudmila Pavlichenko picked off fascists one by one on the Eastern Front, this child, now eleven years old, risked her life to run food and messages to the guerilla fighters hiding in the Pirin mountains around the small town of Razlog. Elena Lagadinova was the youngest girl partisan struggling against the Nazi-allied Bulgarian monarchy during World War II, earning herself the nickname “the Amazon.” Unlike Pavlichenko, who fired a rifle, Lagadinova had only a small pistol that she wore on a chain around her neck to avoid misplacing it.”
“He chose Lagadinova to lead a Bulgarian women’s revolution.
For her part, Lagadinova preferred to stay in her lab with her seeds, but ever the good communist, she accepted the responsibility that had fallen on her shoulders. Pregnant with her third child, she was elected the president of the Women’s Committee and busied herself with her new work. Adamantly opposed to an outright ban on abortion, Lagadinova did something only rarely attempted by communist leaders up to that point: she asked women about their problems. In 1969, Lagadinova and the editorial collective of the state women’s magazine, together with the National Statistical Institute, conducted a sociological survey of over 16,000 respondents. The questionnaire asked women about their daily lives, the challenges they faced, and their hopes for the future. The survey revealed that most Bulgarian women wanted more children but struggled to balance their responsibilities as both workers and mothers.”
“They devised a concrete set of policies combining child allowances and generous job-protected maternity leave for all women workers, including those in agriculture. Time on leave would officially count as labor service for the calculation of pensions, and women could later choose to share these leaves with fathers or grandparents. As with other states in the socialist bloc, the Bulgarians promised to build a wide network of new nurseries and kindergartens so that every child had a place in one if needed. Their proposals drained many resources from the state budget and Lagadinova in particular met constant resistance from her own party comrades, who considered women’s issues less important than the other urgent tasks facing the Bulgarian economy.”
“As with all planned economies, consumer shortages plagued the Bulgarian population, and the goods produced often reflected the priorities of male planners with little interest in the needs of women. A 1977 letter that Lagadinova addressed to the Ministry of Trade and Services critiqued the lack of quality and availability of women’s clothing: “Jersey dresses, which are very practical, are rarely available in the stores. When they are, there are only limited sizes and they are not in the most fashionable styles.” She went on to point out that the central planners did a good job of making men’s underwear, but undergarments for women and children were generally scarce and “not in all the sizes or patterns or colors that the population is seeking.””
“As in the early Soviet Union, socialist states subsidized meals eaten at school, at the workplace, and in neighborhood restaurants like the famous milk bars in Poland. Access to ready-made meals for all workers and students would reduce the housework required of working women. Lagadinova explained that while 40 percent of Bulgaria’s students in first through eighth grade ate their breakfast and lunch at schools, the committee hoped to dramatically increase this percentage in order to “shorten to [a] minimum the time women use to cook.” She also hoped that the canteens in workplaces would be able to prepare meals (or their components) for women to take home with them at the end of the day, cutting down the time associated with shopping and cooking. In one of my interviews with her, Lagadinova told me that she was famous for taking her lunches in the canteens and cafeterias when she visited schools and enterprises around the country to check the quality of the subsidized food. Lagadinova understood that public catering would only work if the food tasted good; otherwise children and husbands would continue to clamor for home-cooked meals.
The Women’s Committee also proposed that elementary and middle school students should have after-school clubs and activities. Furthermore, taking into account that the burden of homework supervision usually fell on mothers, they advised that all students should complete their homework at school so that “when they go back home they will be free from school obligations and will have more time to spend with their working parents.” Different levels of parental involvement in homework also exacerbated educational inequalities across families, and homework clubs could provide valuable support to students in need of extra guidance. Lagadinova and her comrades promoted concrete policy changes to incrementally reduce the hours working mothers spent on their second shifts.”
“Following five years of tireless effort, the ideas and proposals of the Committee of the Bulgarian Women’s Movement finally found success. Based on the surveys they conducted among Bulgarian women, the Committee’s policy recommendations were codified in a special 1973 Politburo decision: “Enhancing the Role of Women in the Building of a Developed Socialist Society.” This decision authorized massive budget expenditures to expand state supports for women and families. In addition, it called for the reeducation of boys and men to challenge gender stereotypes about “women’s work.”
The reduction and alleviation of woman’s household work depends greatly on the common participation of the two spouses in the organization of farmily life. It is therefore imperative a) to combat outdated views, habits, and attitudes as regards the allocation of work within the family, b) to prepare young men for the performance of household duties from childhood and adolescence both by the school and society and by the family.
While it is true that this Politburo decision used explicitly pro-natalist language, the document emerged from a “bottom-up” intervention in the workings of the socialist state, something that Western observers have considered impossible in a so-called totalitarian society. The surveys of Bulgarian women revealed that most wanted to both work outside the home and have children, but they needed more help in finding a sane balance between the two endeavors, which is what the Bulgarian state gave them. By the time that Elena Lagadinova led the official Bulgarian delegation to the United Nations First World Conference of Women in 1975, her small Balkan country had one of the most progressive social systems in place for working women.”
“The Women’s Committee also antagonized the male directors of Bulgarian enterprises who refused to grant pregnant women their legal rights, and relentlessly badgered state planners to provide the services that families needed. In 1975, for instance, Elena Lagadinova wrote a “warning note” to the vice president of the Council of Ministers and the president of the Commission on Living Conditions complaining that a certain factory in the town of Mihailovgrad did not yet have a workers’ cafeteria. This meant that the 830 women workers (out of 1,007 workers in total) ate meals they had brought from home at their workstations. The Committee insisted that a cafeteria be built immediately to give the workers a place to socialize and rest, and to save the women the time it took to make their lunches. This constant attention to the increased socialization of domestic work characterized all twenty-two years of Lagadinova’s leadership, and as her influence grew, so too did the internal surveillance of her actions. She knew the secret police had bugged her home and that every speech she made was scrutinized for any hint of betrayal to the wider cause of Bulgarian socialism. Lagadinova once explained to me that she could measure how much change she was affecting by the growing level of interest of Bulgaria’s secret police.
Lagadinova was active not only in Bulgaria, but also made efforts to bridge the worlds of women divided by geopolitics. After the United Nations Conference in 1975 she began to build a wide-ranging international network with women in what were then called “developing countries,” providing both material and logistical support for new women’s committees and movements in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. She even reached out across the Iron Curtain, joining forces with Western women advocating for peace and disarmament in the 1980s. Jean Lipman-Blumen, an American professor who wrote a book on “connective leadership.” lauded Lagadinova’s natural talent for working with others:
I first met Elena Lagadinova in Sofia in 1980, at a conference cosponsored by the U.S. National Science Foundation. The Cold War was still icy, but Lagadinova showed little patience for political impediments to collaboration. With pragmatic enthusiasm, she assured the conferees, “Do not worry about ideology and government barriers. The work we have to do for women in both of our countries is too important for that. We shall manage together!” The skeptical American visitors, initially on guard against communist manipulation, soon learned her word was as true as her vision.
The second time I met Lagadinova was in 1985, during the United Nations Conference of the Status of Women, in Nairobi. There, the conference delegates elected Lagadinova rapporteur, testimony to how much she was esteemed by an immense international network of policy makers, political activists, and academics.”
“In 1986, Lagadinova became a member of the board of trustees of the United Nations Institute for Training Women (INSTRAW), where she served for two years and continued to champion women’s issues on the global stage. She traveled around the world sharing Bulgaria’s experiences with socialist and non-socialist nations alike, including China, Korea, Cambodia, Yemen, Ethiopia, Nicaragua, Greece, and Turkey.”
“In 1990, at the age of sixty, Lagadinova found herself forced into retirement, pushed out of power, and soon forgotten as a relic of an unseemly past as Bulgaria dove headfirst into globalized capitalism. When I met her in 2010, she was spending long days on her own in a cold apartment because her small pension barely covered the costs of central heating. Her work for Bulgarian women and her contributions to the global women’s movement had been forgotten, but she never stopped believing that another world was possible.”
“Jerry Brown, then governor of the state of California, stumbled upon a copy of this book in the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco and contacted me to help arrange a meeting for him with Lagadinova in Bulgaria, In the summer of 2016, Governor Brown and his wife flew to Sofia to have tea in Lagadinova’s apartment. She reveled in the attention and did her best to convince Brown that politicians had a duty to provide social services to support working people, “She was so energetic,” Brown later told me. “Her English wasn’t so good, but I could feel her passion and vitality.””
“Elena Lagadinova died in her sleep just five months later at the age of eighty six. When I received the email from her daughter about her death, I recalled her last words to me. Lagadinova will never see the more perfect world she tried to build, but it consoles me to think that she passed from this world still dreaming of it.”
Conclusion
“Because of the Eastern Bloc’s attention to workers’ rights, women’s rights, and civil rights, Western governments have often been forced to respond to accusations that the West’s commitments to democracy only extend to protecting the freedoms of wealthy white (or ethnic majority) men. By highlighting the contradictions of capitalism, international accusations from the socialist countries helped to create essential cracks.”
“In the early postrevolutionary years, citizens who hated her policies literally chased Kollontai off of trams, and she faced almost daily slander in the press.”
“During that trip, on a day when I was feeling particularly frazzled by the demands of my project, I managed to pick up some last-minute tickets for me and Elena Lagadinova to see Tosca at the Sofia Opera and Ballet. I needed to decompress, and I thought she would enjoy the opportunity to see the renovated opera house. Lagadinova rarely ventured beyond her neighborhood in those days, so a last-minute hair dying session preceded our spontaneous outing. I remember her smiling as the first notes of Puccini’s overture filled the theater. Together, we sat and enjoyed the production, exchanging but a few words. Although we had been separated by oceans and generations, I marveled that somehow fate had led me into her life. At one point after the intermission, she reached out and placed her hand on my arm. We sat like that for the rest of the show, sharing the pleasure of the evening as we replenished our souls with music.”
