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SOVIET WOMEN-EQUAL BUILDERS OF THE SOCIALIST SOCIETYWomen in the Land of Socialism
N. Popova
II. Soviet Women – Equal Builders of the Socialist Society
Women begin to take an active part in government and public work
As a result of the victory of the proletarian revolution in the Soviet Republic “not a trace has been left of the laws that placed women in a subordinate position.”10
The great charter of the October Revolution, the Declaration of Rights of the Toiling and Exploited People, heralded the genuine solution of the woman question. No party ever fought for the emancipation of women so consistently as the Communist Party of the Soviet Union did and is doing now. “Not a single state, not even the most progressive republic, the most progressive democratic, bourgeois state, has granted women full equality. The Soviet Republic of Russia, on the other hand, promptly swept away all legislative traces of the inequality of women without exception and at one stroke ensured them full equality before the law,” said V. I. Lenin.11
No sooner was Soviet power established than all civil disabilities for women were abolished, and the Bolshevik Party set to work to draw working women and peasant women into the administration of the country.
“We are not utopians,” wrote Lenin just before the October Revolution. “We know that not every labourer or cook could at present undertake the administration of the state.... We demand that the class-conscious workers and soldiers should conduct the training in the business of state administration, and that this should be begun immediately, i.e., that all the toilers, all the poor should begin to be trained to this business immediately.”12 Lenin, who had deep faith in the creative powers of the people, wrote: “There is no doubt that there is far more organizing talent among the working women and peasant women than we are aware of, people who are able to organize in a practical way....”13
In a note to J. V. Stalin on State Control, Lenin wrote:
“In my opinion the following should be added to the decree on Control:
1) The establishment of central (and local) organs of workers’ participation.
2) Require by law the systematic participation of delegates from the proletarian population, stipulating that up to 2/3 of such delegates must be women.”14
Lenin repeatedly stressed that it is impossible to build a socialist society without the most active and extensive participation of women.
Lenin’s ideas were further developed by Stalin. “The working women,” Stalin said, “the female industrial workers and peasants, constitute one of the biggest reserves of the working class, a reserve that represents a good half of the population. Whether this female reserve goes with the working class or against it will determine the fate of the proletarian movement, the victory or defeat of the proletarian revolution, the victory or defeat of the proletarian government. The first task of the proletariat and of its vanguard, the Communist Party, therefore is to wage a resolute struggle to wrest women, the women workers and peasants, from the influence of the bourgeoisie, to politically educate and to organize the women workers and peasants under the banner of the proletariat.
“But the working women,” Stalin went on to say, “are something more than a reserve. They may become and should become – if the working class pursues a correct policy – a regular army of the working class operating against the bourgeoisie. To mould the female labour reserve into an army of women workers and peasants fighting shoulder to shoulder with the great army of the proletariat – that is the second and all-important task of the working class.”15
The wisdom and perspicacity of Lenin’s and Stalin’s approach to, and solution of, the woman question can be fully appreciated now that, with Socialism victorious in the U.S.S.R. and the country advancing gradually towards Communism, we see what a great role women have played and are playing in these achievements.
The Bolsheviks possess a “magic means,” V. I. Lenin wrote, whereby, with one stroke, they can multiply the strength of the state apparatus tenfold, a means which no capitalist state has or can have. “This magic means is to get the toilers, the poor, to share in the day-to-day work of governing the state.”16
Expounding the principles of the Soviet system, which consist in providing wide scope for the initiative and activity of the masses, Lenin repeated time and again that “...it is impossible to draw the masses into politics without also drawing in the women,”17 for women comprise one-half of the population, and “there can be no socialist revolution unless a vast section of the working women take part in it.”18
The working class, guided by the Bolshevik Party, successfully accomplished the tasks Lenin and Stalin set.
The introduction of equal political rights for working women was an important step towards enlisting the participation of the masses of women in state activities. Hundreds of thousands of advanced working women and peasant women became active builders of the new society. The Bolshevik Party took the lead in the Soviet government’s great effort to draw women workers and peasants into political activities. In the autumn of 1918 the “Working Women’s Committees,” which had been set up by the Party organizations, were supplanted by departments for work among women – factory workers and peasants. Their function, besides political education, was to enlist the participation of women in the practical work of government bodies and trade union and cooperative organizations.
In November 1918 the First All-Union Congress of Working and Peasant Women was held in Moscow. Despite the fact that the country was in the throes of Civil War, 1,147 delegates attended, including delegates representing government office workers, post and telegraph employees and domestic servants. Among the questions discussed were: women’s role in industrial production and in the home, female and child labour, and the tasks of social education. The resolution adopted at the congress declared that it was essential for working women to take an active part in the revolutionary struggle, in all its forms and manifestations.
That congress, as Comrade Stalin wrote, “was a landmark in the work of our Party among working women. The invaluable service rendered by that congress consisted in the fact that it laid the foundation for the organization of political education among the working women and peasant women of our Republic.”19
Questions of work among proletarian and peasant women were discussed at congresses of the Bolshevik Party along with the major problems on the solution of which the fate of the Soviet system depended.
The main points on the agenda of the Eighth Party Congress, held in March 1919, at the height of the Civil War and armed foreign intervention, were the Party Program, the policy toward the middle peasants, problems connected with the building up of the Red Army. The Congress also pointed out the necessity of paying the most serious attention to work among women. The resolution adopted says: “Recognizing the pressing necessity of consolidating our forces by enlisting the participation of working women and peasant women in the struggle for Communism and in the advancement of the Soviet system, the Eighth Congress of the Party calls upon all Party Committees to take practical steps to carry out this task.”20
Another decision concerning work among women was adopted one year later at the Ninth Party Congress (March 1920), in connection with the discussion of the immediate tasks confronting the Party and the Soviet Government. The Eleventh Party Congress, in 1922, stressed the special importance of enhancing the Party’s political influence among the broadest possible masses of working women and peasant women under the new conditions of life in the country. Every effort should be made, the resolution said, to get women workers to join the trade unions, and they should be elected to trade union and Soviet government bodies. The Congress stressed the role peasant women could play in raising agricultural output and in the development of farm cooperatives. The Twelfth Party Congress, held one year later, noted “considerable achievements in the work among women” and pointed out that the Party should “...increase its efforts to draw working and peasant women into work of Party, Soviet, trade union and cooperative organizations....”21 The Congress gave special consideration to work among women of the non-Russian nationalities.
A resolution “On Work Among Working and Peasant Women,” drafted by the Central Committee of the Party in accordance with a decision of the Thirteenth Party Congress, reads in part: “...the Congress considers it necessary to call the attention of the whole Party to the fact that the present extent of participation of working and peasant women in Party, Soviet, trade union and cooperative development is far from sufficient, and it is therefore of prime importance for the Party to carryon work among working women and peasant women. The conservative attitude towards women, an attitude inherited from capitalist society, must be combated.
“Our Party organizations should be the first to set an example.
“ ‘The construction of socialist society,’ as Comrade Lenin said, ‘will commence only when we, having achieved the complete equality of women, take up our new work together with women relieved from petty, stultifying, unproductive work.’
“It is by unswervingly following this path outlined by the hand of the great leader that the principles of Leninism will be realized in the Communist Party’s work among working and peasant women.”22
The Party of Lenin and Stalin attached great importance to the political education of women as a factor contributing to a really basic solution of the woman question, and it held that the way to ensure the political education of women was to get them to participate in the practical work of all Soviet government bodies. In 1920 Vladimir Ilyich Lenin wrote in a message to working women during the elections to the Moscow Soviet:
“What we want is that the working woman should achieve equality with the working man not only before the law but in actual fact. It is necessary for this that working women should take an increasing part in the administration of public enterprises and in the administration of the state.
“In this way women will learn fast and will catch up with the men.
“Therefore elect more working women to the Soviet, both members of the Communist Party and non-Party women.”23
In 1923, in an article entitled “Fifth Anniversary of the First Congress of Working Women and Peasant Women,” J. V. Stalin wrote: “Now, when power is in the hands of the workers and peasants, the political education of working women is of prime importance.”24
In the same article Stalin emphasized that success in industry and in the development of agriculture depended to a large extent on the political awareness and maturity of women, workers and peasants, working side by side with the men in the factories and in the fields. He pointed out that:
“Working women and peasant women are free citizens on an equal footing with men workers and peasants. They vote in the elections to our Soviets and to the management of our cooperatives. They are eligible for election to the Soviets and to the management of cooperatives. The working women and peasant women can improve our Soviets and cooperatives, strengthen and develop them, if they are politically educated. The working and peasant women can weaken and undermine them if they are backward and ignorant.”25
A great part in the work of organizing and politically educating the working women of town and village was played by some of the glorious daughters of our people, leading members of the Bolshevik Party who devoted their lives to the heroic struggle which the Party waged.
Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya is a shining example of a woman who selflessly served her country and fought for the happiness of the people. She was a young girl when she joined the revolutionary struggle – in the days when the Party was just coming into being – and she devoted all her life to the fight for the Party’s cause, for the welfare of the people, for Communism.
Almost sixty years ago, in 1890, Nadezhda Krupskaya joined a Marxist circle in St. Petersburg. In the winter of 1894, Nadezhda Krupskaya, who was teaching at an evening Sunday school, met Lenin. She remained the close friend and loyal helpmate of the great founder of the Bolshevik Party until the last day of his life. In 1895 Lenin united all the Marxist workers’ circles into a League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class, and Krupskaya took an active part in the work of this League. She was secretary of the editorial board of Iskra, in the days when Lenin was its editor, and later of the Bolshevik paper Vperyod, both published abroad. Hers was the difficult job of maintaining secret contacts with the Party organizations in Russia, and she helped in the preparatory work for the Second and Third Party congresses, in both of which she took a most active part. In 1905 she was living in Russia, where, working as secretary of the Central Committee, she took a leading part in the underground Bolshevik Party work. During the years of rabid reaction which followed the Revolution of 1905, Krupskaya was compelled to live abroad. But she maintained close ties with Party leaders in Russia. She was secretary of the Bolshevik newspaper Proletary, took an active part in the fight against the opportunist Liquidator and Otzovist trends, and maintained contact with the Bolshevik Newspaper Pravda (published in Russia) and the Bolshevik group in the Fourth State Duma.
During the imperialist war Nadezhda Krupskaya was very active in the work of rallying the revolutionary forces for the fight against imperialism, against defencism, and for turning the imperialist war into a civil war. She attended the International Women’s Congress in Berne at which the Russian delegates expounded the Bolshevik position on the war.
After the revolution of February 1917 Krupskaya, as a Secretary of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party, conducted extensive educational work among the working people and explained to working women and soldiers’ wives the Bolshevik slogans of struggle for a victorious socialist revolution in Russia.
Krupskaya took part in the work of the Sixth Congress of the Bolshevik Party, which set the aim of an armed uprising to overthrow the government of the imperialist bourgeoisie and to transfer power to the Soviets. She participated in the Great October Socialist Revolution and defended the Soviet government at the fronts in the Civil War. After the victory of the Soviet system and until her death Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya took an active part in the construction of Socialism in the U.S.S.R. She was an outstanding leader in the field of Communist education, a member of the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U. (B.) and a member of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R.
Maria Ilyinichna Ulyanova was born in 1878. Her whole life was closely bound up with the life and work of her brother, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (Ulyanov).
Maria Ilyinichna’s oldest brother, Alexander, was executed on orders of the tsar’s government in 1887. He had taken an incorrect path of struggle, the path of individual terrorism. “The path to follow is a different one,” said Vladimir Ilyich, and it was that different path, Lenin’s path, that his sister followed.
In those years a working-class movement was just beginning to appear in Russia.
Maria Ulyanova came to St. Petersburg in 1896, at a time when the working-class revolutionary movement was already making great strides. After three years of underground work she was arrested and exiled to Nizhni Novgorod (now Gorky). When her period of banishment was up she went to Moscow and there flung herself into revolutionary work with still greater energy. In 1901 she was arrested again, imprisoned and exiled, this time to Samara (now Kuibyshev), where she continued the struggle against the autocracy.
After her return from exile in 1904 Ulyanova was so closely watched by the tsarist police that it was impossible for her to engage in any revolutionary work in Russia. That year she went abroad to join Vladimir Ilyich. Maria Ilyinichna helped Lenin in his fight against the Otzovists and the Conciliators. She translated Marx’s Letters to Kugelmann, and took a course at the Sorbonne. In 1910 she removed to Saratov but was soon arrested and expelled to Vologda Province, where she engaged in revolutionary work among the railwaymen and did her full share to strengthen the Bolshevik Party organizations.
After the revolution Maria Ulyanova was appointed secretary of the Pravda and not long after was made a member of its editorial board. She became editor of Pravda’s “Working Women’s Page,” and her articles taught millions of women to fight persistently for the fulfilment of Lenin’s precepts. Warm-hearted and alert, she always took a particular interest in problems affecting working and peasant women.
At the Fourteenth Party Congress Maria Ulyanova was elected to the Central Control Commission and then to the Presidium of the Central Control Commission. At the Seventeenth Party Congress she was elected to the Bureau of the Soviet Control Commission and was put in charge of the complaints department. In this position Ulyanova fought for the correct Party line and worked persistently and capably to get all mistakes and distortions in the activities of Soviet organizations rectified.
Maria Ilyinichna Ulyanova died in 1937. Hers was the noble life of a staunch Bolshevik, a life of boundless devotion to the cause of the Party of Lenin and Stalin.
The Party carried on its organizational and educational activities among the masses of working women through the women’s departments of its Committees and through the women’s sections of the higher Soviet government bodies, which took care of the political and vocational training of women and saw to it that the interests of women workers, mothers and children were protected.
Woman delegate assemblies were another highly effective means whereby the Bolshevik Party conducted its work among women. It was mainly through these assemblies that the Party kept in touch with the broad non-Party masses of working women. In the year that elapsed between the Eleventh and Twelfth Party congresses (March 1922-April 1923) the number of women participating in the delegate assemblies rose from 16,000 to 52,000. Delegates were sent to work in various offices for a definite period and then reported back to the assemblies.
The appointment of women to take part in the work of various commissions and sections of the Soviets and in the investigation of the work of government offices was one of the means of drawing them into responsible government activity.
In the rural districts the Party conducted its work among women through village and volost delegates’ assemblies and through district conferences of peasant women. The following letter, sent to Nadezhda Krupskaya by an uneducated peasant woman from Ryazan Province, gives a clear idea of the specific difficulties the Party encountered at the initial stage of its work of getting peasant women to participate in public life.
“I am now chairman of the mutual aid committee and village women’s organizer. I just started this work this year. I have got quite a good deal done in my village. Firstly, I have organized delegates’ sections. That was very hard to do. The women of our village didn’t want to attend meetings. I asked my volost organizer for books and she gave them to me. Then I asked the women to come and listen to them read aloud. I told them it was interesting, but they wouldn’t come. They said they couldn’t leave their homes alone. So I decided to go to them. I went to each house and read aloud. The women liked it. They asked me to come again. Then I said to them: ‘You know what? Let’s get the women from ten houses to come together. You will be doing something, while I read aloud.’ They agreed. I did this for a long time. Then I suggested that they attend a meeting. I said a speaker would come from the volost and it would be very interesting. I persuaded them: and they came. The first time almost the whole village was there. If you knew how happy I was! But unfortunately it’s hard for me because I am not educated and don’t know how to go about these things....”
This letter, truly a human document, shows what striking results were achieved by the Party’s practical organizational work among the recently backward peasant women, and what great influence the ideas of Lenin and Stalin gained among them.
The aloofness and extreme individualism peculiar to peasants were becoming things of the past. The peasant woman began to feel that she was a citizen, a member of the great Soviet community. A radical change was taking place in her mentality, a mentality shaped by ages of submission and routine.
The Party of Lenin and Stalin organized special women’s clubs in the non-Russian regions for work among the extremely backward Mohammedan women.
All this organizational and educational work carried on by the Party and the Soviet State roused millions of working women of town and countryside to political activity.
In October 1927 an all-Russian congress of women members of urban and rural Soviets and of their executive committees was held. It reviewed the work done in ten years of Soviet government in getting women to take part in the work of all branches of state administration. The results recounted were impressive. In 1927 there were 21,221 women in urban Soviets, 146,251 in village Soviets, 45,741 in volost Soviets. About 20,000 peasant women participated in the work of the Peasant Mutual Aid Committees. In 52 provinces 102,146 women were elected people’s assessors. The total number of organized women workers and peasants who took part in public activities (delegates) was 620,000.
In just about ten years after the destruction of the foundations on which the bourgeois landlord society rested women in our country had become builders of the people’s Soviet State on a footing of really full equality with men. The force and wisdom of our Party’s policy, the policy of Lenin and Stalin, and practical socialist construction had utterly confounded the assertions of bourgeois ideologists concerning the inferiority of the female sex and put an end to the attitude towards women which had prevailed in class society for thousands of years.
The Soviet Revolution’s power of transformation was evident in the changes brought about in women workers and peasants. In her impressions of the congress, published in Pravda, Krupskaya wrote:
“The first thing that struck one at the congress was the altered language used by the delegates. Two or three years ago women workers and peasants did not talk that way. Their language has preserved all its originality, but many new ideas and expressions have been added to it. The speakers – poor peasant women and female farm labourers from various republics, women workers from the mines, textile mills, fisheries – spoke boldly and frankly about everything – the good and the bad. These women, with kerchiefs on their heads and their hands roughened by toil, spoke about planned economy, schedules, taxation, practical work, attendance at presidium meetings, farm inventory, the promotion of women, the fight against bureaucracy and red tape, improvement of quality, control, deficits, etc.”26
The Might of the National Economy of the U.S.S.R.
The doctrine of Lenin and Stalin says that women can attain full equality only on the basis of economic and social emancipation. Engels pointed out that the first premise for the emancipation of women is the re-introduction of the entire female sex into public industry.
The October Revolution destroyed all social, juridical and conventional barriers to the participation of women in public industry. This first premise for the emancipation of women was fulfilled as a result of the victory of the October Socialist Revolution and the abolition of private ownership of the instruments and means of production.
The Soviet economic system created all the conditions required for women to achieve what is most important for their emancipation – economic equality, an equal status with men in production and unrestricted opportunities for participation in public industry.
In capitalist society, as Lenin repeatedly pointed out, despite “emacipatory” laws, women remain enslaved and subordinate. The labour power they sold to the factory owner for a miserable wage was only a slight addition to the man’s income. It did not bring women economic independence, they still remained subjected to men and slaves to household drudgery.
Immediately the Soviet State was established tens of thousands of women entered all branches of industry and began to work shoulder to shoulder with their husbands, brothers and fathers helping the young Soviet republic to repulse the foreign interventionists and the whiteguards and to end the economic chaos and famine. Lenin declared that the success of the Soviet State, its growth and strength, directly depended on the participation of women in public industry.
“This work begun by the Soviet government,” said Vladimir Ilyich, “can be advanced only when, instead of hundreds of women, we have millions and millions of women, all over Russia, taking part in it. Then, we are confident, the work of socialist construction will be safe. Then the working people will show that they can live and manage without capitalists and without landlords. Then socialist construction will be so firmly established in Russia that the Soviet Republic will have no cause to fear any external enemies in other countries or within Russia.”27
The process of drawing women into industry advanced most rapidly since 1930, when unemployment was abolished in the U.S.S.R. Year after year, especially during the period when socialist industry and collectivized agriculture made gigantic strides forward, the number of women engaged in public production kept increasing. This was in great measure due to Comrade Stalin’s efforts. Stalin chose this moment, when it was necessary to muster all our people’s labour forces to cope with the grand tasks involved in the socialist transformation of the country “...to bring prominently to the fore the question of the status of woman, of her position in society and her contribution to the labour effort as a worker or peasant, and to stress the important role she had to play in public and social life. Having given the problem of woman the salience it deserved, Stalin indicated the only correct lines along which it could be solved.”28
An especially large number of women entered industry during the years of the Stalin five-year plans. The way for the First Five-Year Plan adopted by the Party “...had been prepared by the whole course of development of industrialization and collectivization and it had been preceded by a wave of labour enthusiasm which caught up the workers and peasants and which found expression in socialist emulation.”29 This was a grand plan for the construction of Socialism. The main object of the First Five-Year Plan was to create a heavy industry in the country which would make it possible to re-equip the other branches of industry, agriculture and transportation with modern machinery and reorganize them on the basis of Socialism.
The vast amount of work involved in the realization of Stalin’s plan to build up the foundations of the Socialist system of economy called for additional labour power in industry. In response to the appeal of the Party and the Soviet government hundreds of thousands of women from the towns and the villages came to work in the factories and mills, in heavy and light industries, on construction jobs, wherever labour power was needed.
Throughout the country rose the scaffoldings of giant plants of socialist industry under construction. At the rapids of the old Dnieper River work on the Dnieper Hydroelectric Power Station was in full swing. Construction work on the Kramatorsk and Gorlovka iron and steel plants and reconstruction of the Lugansk Locomotive Works had begun in the Donetz Basin. New collieries and new blast furnaces came into being. The Urals Machine-Building Works, the Berezniki and Solikamsk Chemical Works, the huge Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Plant were all built in those years. The erection of big automobile plants in Moscow and in Gorky was well under way, as was the construction of harvester combine plants and the biggest tractor works in the world. A second coal base, the Kuznetsk field, was being developed in the East.
The number of women taking part in this gigantic construction of socialist industry rose steadily, and the dividing line between “men’s” and “women’s” trades gradually disappeared. The technical re-equipment of all branches of the national economy, the introduction of machinery replacing manual labour, and the establishment of a wide network of vocational training courses and schools, as well as a system of training novices on the job, contributed to this in great measure. State social insurance for all workers, regulations for the protection of female labour, the growing number of nurseries, kindergartens, maternity centres, public dining rooms, free medical assistance and vacations with pay that could be spent at health resorts, likewise made it possible for more and more Soviet women to enter industry.
The figures showing the increase in the number of women employed in the national economy (not including collective farms) during the First and Second Five-Year Plan periods speak for themselves:
Years 1929 1930 1931 1932 1933 1934 1935 1936 1937
Number of women
(in thousands): 3,304 3,877 4,197 6,007 6,908 7,204 7,964 8,492 9,357
Compared with 1929 (per cent): 100.0 117.3 127.0 181.8 209.0 218.0 241.0 257.0 283.2
In contrast to the situation in capitalist countries, where the great majority of the female proletariat is employed on badly-paid jobs or doing the unproductive work of domestic servants, in the Land of Socialism there was a rapid increase in the number of women employed in large industrial enterprises. While, as we see from the above table, in the nine years from 1929 to 1937 the number of women employed in the national economy as a whole increased by 6,053,000, i.e., almost tripled, the number of women in big industrial enterprises increased during the same period from 880,000 in 1929 to 3,298,000 in 1937, i.e., nearly fourfold.
Thanks to their status of genuine equality, women in the Soviet Union quickly advanced to jobs requiring the highest technical skill, found wide scope for their abilities and every opportunity of developing their talents.
The Party’s policy of widely encouraging the teaching of industrial trades to women as well as men yielded excellent results. Here are some figures showing how greatly the proportion of women employed in industries formerly considered men’s exclusive sphere increased in the period covered by the first two five-year plans. In 1929, the percentage of women employed in the coal mining industry was 9.4 %, in iron and steel manufacturing – 9.3%, in machine building and metal processing – 10.3%. In 1938 the corresponding figures were 24.5%, 26.3% and 31.1%.
As employees of socialist enterprises women boldly tackled and quickly mastered jobs requiring much skill – they became turners, adjusters, moulders, railway engine drivers, coal-cutting machine operators. They learned to run the most complicated machinery.
More than 4,000 women worked as engine drivers on the railways of the U.S.S.R. just before the recent war. Not a single woman was then employed on this job anywhere else in the world.
Women took full advantage of the wide opportunities offered them by the Soviet system to acquire higher technical education. The number of women engineers and technicians increased year by year in all the branches of Soviet economy. In 1930 there were 3,600 women engineers and technicians in our industrial enterprises, in 1938 there were 140,000. In eight years the number was multiplied thirty-nine times! The Party boldly promoted capable women to positions of shop managers, factory directors, and other leading positions in industry.
With the Marxist-Leninist theory for its unfailing compass and with Comrade Stalin as its leader, the Bolshevik Party transformed our country into a mighty socialist industrial power, economically and technically independent of European and American capital. In 1940 Soviet heavy industry produced nearly twelve times as much as in 1913.
The Party accomplished this because millions of working people entered industry fully conscious of the fact that they were builders of a new society. And women made their great contribution to the magnificent successes of socialist industrialization.
Under the Stalin five-year plans, from 1928 to 1940, the number of women workers multiplied fourfold. On the eve of the Patriotic War there were 11,000,000 women employed in industry, transport and on construction jobs – about 40% of all workers employed. Over 170,000 of these women were engineers and technicians.
* * *
As more and more women entered public industry in the Soviet Union, with its prevalent socialist relations of production, and as they acquired skill and knowledge land advanced to positions of responsibility, technical and managerial, the complete and real emancipation of women workers became an accomplished fact.
It was not an easy task to bring this about, but the difficulties were even greater when it came to emancipating the millions of peasant women.
The Great October Socialist Revolution turned over to the peasants over 150,000,000 dessiatines30 of land which had formerly belonged to the landlords, capitalists, the tsar’s family and the monasteries. Under the Soviet system the peasants at last became masters of their own fate. The facts bore out the truth of Lenin’s words:
“Every factory from which the capitalist has been expelled, or in which he has at least been curbed by genuine workers’ control, every village from which the landlord exploiter has been smoked out and his land confiscated, is now, and has only now become, a field in which the workingman can reveal his talents, unbend his back, straighten himself, and feel that he is a human being.”31
However, during the first years of the Soviet system there remained in the countryside, along with the most numerous toiling class in the country, the poor and middle peasants, also the most numerous class of exploiters in the country, the kulaks, or rich peasants. Unlike the towns, which were developing along socialist lines, the villages were still in the grip of private-property relations. Therefore the process of emancipating women and investing them with economic and civil equality on a par with men was much slower and more difficult in the countryside. Peasant women, who comprised the vast majority of women in the country, were generally more backward and ignorant than women industrial workers, and the private-property psychology had a much stronger hold on them. This, naturally, made it all the more difficult to bring equality to women in the rural districts.
The abolition of the tsarist laws, which sanctioned women’s subordination and oppression, at once greatly altered the peasant women’s position. Like all working people they were granted political rights – the right to vote and to hold office. Every opportunity was given them to learn to read and write and to gain an education. Peasant women were drawn into public and government activities. During the periodic redistributions of village community land in old Russia women were not taken into account, and therefore the birth of a girl was regarded as a “visitation of the Lord.” Now, after the October Revolution, women had the same rights as men in every respect and, consequently, began to feel more independent economically. However, it was only after the collectivization of agriculture, and as a result of it, that peasant women became really emancipated and began to take part in economic, cultural and public life on a footing of full equality with men.
Not long before his death Lenin, with the insight of genius, sketched in his article “On Cooperation” an outline of the means by which millions of petty producers should be led on to the path of Socialism. Lenin regarded the struggle to make the countryside socialist as the last and decisive battle against capitalism. “As long as we live in a small-peasant country there is a surer economic basis for capitalism in Russia than for Communism,” he wrote. The way out, he said, was to build up large-scale heavy industries that could supply agriculture with machinery and, with this as a basis, to reorganize farming on socialist lines. Comrade Stalin developed Lenin’s precepts into an integral theory, the theory of the collectivization of agriculture. The Bolshevik Party persuaded the peasants to take the path of collective farming and led the toiling population of the countryside in an offensive against the fiercely-resisting kulak exploiters. Under Comrade Stalin’s wise leadership, the Party and the Government put into effect his teaching on collectivization. In the countryside, as in the towns, Socialism triumphed.
Collective farming put an end to poverty, pauperism, kulak exploitation; it switched millions of small individual peasant farms to the new, bright road of Socialism.
No longer were there millions of poor peasants in the countryside. The collectivization of agriculture was “a profound revolution, a leap from an old qualitative state of society to a new qualitative state, equivalent in its consequences to the revolution of October 1917.”32
During the years of socialist construction an entirely new peasantry arose in the U.S.S.R., a peasantry such as the world has never known before. The work of the peasants who have become collective farmers is not based on individual work in tilling small, privately-owned plots with primitive implements, as was the case in tsarist Russia and as is the case now in capitalist countries, but on collective work with up-to-date machinery and the application of scientific methods. This opened up wide vistas for the development of agriculture. The system of collective farming has been the basis of the Bolshevik Party’s epoch-making achievements which have fundamentally changed the social life and psychology of tens of millions of peasants and transformed them into active builders of a new way of life, of new social relationships.
The victory of collective farming brought about great changes in the condition of the Soviet peasantry as a whole and had a far-reaching, beneficial effect on the condition of peasant women. The system of collective farming gave women an equal economic status with men, enabling them to work on the same footing as men and receive the same remuneration for their work.
The system of collective farming freed women from much of the household drudgery. Along with the collective farms, electric power plants, children’s nurseries and maternity hospitals made their appearance in the rural districts. Collective fanning brought with it extensive opportunities for cultural advancement. Radio, the village reading room, library, club and cinema gradually became part of the Soviet village scene.
The First All-Union Congress of Collective-Farm Shock Workers demonstrated the great changes and improvements that had taken place in the countryside. Joseph Stalin said in his speech at that congress:
“Look at this congress, at the delegates, and you will realize that women have long since advanced from the ranks of the backward to the ranks of the forward. The women in the collective farms are a great force. To keep this force down would be criminal. It is our duty to bring the women in the collective farms forward and to make use of this great force....
“As for the women collective farmers themselves, they must remember the power and significance of the collective farms for women; they must remember that only in the collective farm do they have the opportunity of becoming equal with men. Without collective farms – inequality; in collective farms – equal rights. Let our comrades, the women collective farmers, remember this and let them cherish the collective-farm system as the apple of their eye.”33
Women worked zealously to carry out Stalin’s advice. They encouraged the introduction of machines and learned to handle them. By the beginning of 1941 over a hundred thousand women operated combine harvesters, tractors and other complicated farm machinery.
“In all branches of socialist construction – in industry, transport, agriculture, in science and art – tens and hundreds of thousands of Soviet women show splendid examples of socialist work,” the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U.(B.) said in a statement on the occasion of Women’s Day, March 8, 1941.
The millions of women engaged in socialist construction have helped strengthen our country and have made a valuable contribution to the cause of Communism. They, our glorious working women, share with the men the historic credit for having established Socialism in the U.S.S.R.
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Public ownership of the instruments and means of production, socialist industrialization and the development of collective farming gave rise to a wave of labour enthusiasm which caught up millions of manual and intellectual workers and found expression in socialist emulation. As Lenin foresaw, socialist emulation became an inexhaustible source of energy for the progress of Soviet society, an important method of building up Communism. Socialism made the working people the masters of their country and for the first time in history raised the common man, the toiler, formerly enslaved by capitalism, to the status which should be his by right. Labour in the U.S.S.R. became a matter of honour, a matter of glory, a matter of valour and heroism.
“The working people of the U.S.S.R. – workers, peasants and intellectuals – had undergone profound change in the period of socialist construction.34
The new attitude towards labour as towards a matter of public importance is characteristic of Soviet people. This new attitude manifested itself in the first Communist subbotniks, in the formation of shock brigades and the splendid achievements of shock workers; in the wave of socialist emulation in response to the call of the Sixteenth Party Conference (1929) for the fulfilment and overfulfilment of the plan in industry, transport and agriculture. Socialist emulation is one of the most wonderful features of the creative effort of the people to realize the Stalin five-year plans.
In his pamphlet, “A Great Beginning,” about the first Communist subbotniks, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin wrote:
“It is the beginning of a revolution that is much more difficult, more material, more radical and more decisive than the overthrow of the bourgeoisie, for it is a victory over personal conservativeness, indiscipline, petty-bourgeois egoism, a victory over the habits that accursed capitalism left as a heritage to the worker and peasant. Only when this victory is consolidated will the new social discipline, socialist discipline, be created; only then will a reversion to capitalism become impossible and Communism become really invincible.”35
This radical revolution in the attitude to work developed by leaps and bounds after the inauguration of the Stalin five-year plans.
And wherever new giant industrial plants were under construction, in desert steppes and in primeval forests, in bitter cold and torrid heat, Soviet women were to be found working shoulder to shoulder with men, showing splendid examples of a socialist attitude to work.
Many women initiated movements which acquired tremendous significance. Zinaida Troitskaya, for example, started a movement among women to become railway engine drivers. And 200,000 girls enthusiastically responded to the appeal issued by outstanding women tractor drivers for 100,000 girls to take up tractor driving.
Even housewives had the interests of public production at heart. Wives of factory workers, engineers and executives started a movement with the aim of promoting social and welfare work. In the opening speech at an all-Union conference of wives of engineers and executives in heavy industry, Orjonikidze expressed high appreciation of the efforts of these public-spirited women for cleanliness and order in factories, public dining rooms, clubs, nurseries, children’s homes, workers’ dormitories. He pointed out that in this way “the daughters our great country, our sisters, have joined the ranks of the active builders of Socialism, along with their husbands.”
The policy of the Soviet Government and the Bolshevik Party and the emancipatory influence of the collective-farm system awakened tremendous forces latent in the masses of peasant women, helped many of them to reveal their hidden talents. That is why women collective farmers, in step with women factory workers, were in the first ranks of the initiators and heroes of the Stakhanov movement, a movement which opened another glorious chapter in the history of our socialist construction.
“Only collective-farm life,” said Comrade Stalin in 1935 at a reception of women shock-worker beet growers, “could make work a matter of honour, could give birth to genuine heroines in the village. Only collective-farm life could abolish inequality and put women on their feet.”
Women were the first to raise the banner of socialist emulation for a high crop yield. Their initiative was supported by hundreds of thousands of collective farmers and a nation-wide movement developed for Stakhanovite harvests.
As the Stakhanov movement spread, hundreds and thousands of women in town and country joined it. They raised aloft the banner of struggle for increased labour productivity, for a high standard of work, for getting the most out of machinery.
The Stakhanov movement, said Stalin, is a movement of working men and women, which is destined to produce a revolution in our industry.
It was love for their socialist country, devotion to the cause of Lenin’s and Stalin’s Party, a desire to contribute the most they could to the noble aim of building a Communist society, that spurred Soviet women on to work selflessly and display extraordinary creative ability. Communism is what inspires the desire for great effort. It is the lofty aim which gives rise to the great energy of our people.
Women of Advanced Soviet Culture
During the first years of the Soviet system one of the most serious obstacles to the extensive participation of working women in public and governmental work was their cultural backwardness, a heritage of the past. Under the Soviet system, however, this cultural backwardness of women could not serve as an excuse for keeping them out of the great and creative work of building a socialist society. The Bolshevik Party and the Soviet Government held that the quickest way to raise the political and cultural level of tens of millions of women in town and country was to draw them immediately into public production, political life and governmental work, and on the largest possible scale. The rise in the cultural level of women, in its turn, was bound to lend momentum to the cultural revolution in the country and accelerate the process of socialist construction.
For thirty years the Party and the Soviet Government have spared no effort to help women acquire the knowledge and experience which would enable them to take part, along with the men, in the cultural development of the country. The achievements in this respect are so tremendous that at present there is absolutely no dividing line between the contribution made by men and by women in the creation of a new, socialist culture. Sufficient to say, women university and college graduates comprise 42.3% of all the specialists in our country – i.e., almost half of the country’s intelligentsia, the professionals who are helping the workers and farmers build Socialism, run socialist enterprises and govern the country. Nothing like this has been achieved, nor can it be achieved, in any capitalist country.
This alone is proof enough that in the U.S.S.R. the position of women is equal to that of men not only in law but in fact. And the fact that equality has been achieved in the sphere of culture, a sphere in which three decades is an extremely brief period, is of world historical significance.
A stupendous cultural revolution has taken place in the U.S.S.R. Illiteracy among the population has been completely eliminated as a result of the enforcement of the law making primary schooling obligatory. Millions of workers and peasants have joined the ranks of the intelligentsia. The technical and cultural standards of the workers and farmers, men and women, are steadily rising. The women of our country take full advantage of their right to education, a right guaranteed by the Stalin Constitution.
No other country in the world has such startling achievements to its credit. In capitalist countries a great number of working-class children are unable to acquire even an elementary education.
U.S. Attorney-General Clark admitted publicly that several million children in the United States do not attend school, and over two million children attend schools which are absolutely inadequate; three million adults have had no schooling at all and about ten million have had such insufficient schooling that they are virtually illiterate.
The fact that the peoples inhabiting the former border districts of tsarist Russia, including their most backward section, the women, have achieved a higher degree of literacy than the people of the United States is convincing proof that only a socialist system can ensure the true florescence of culture, for the degree of literacy is a most conclusive index of the cultural level of a nation.
The means by which the standard of culture among women improved during the more than thirty years since the establishment of the Soviet system were diverse: women flocked into schools of all kinds, from elementary schools for adults to universities; they participated in administrative work from the bottom up, from the lower rungs in the management of economic, public and governmental affairs to positions of high responsibility as factory directors and heads of whole branches of economy, and to positions of leadership in the central Party, trade union and Young Communist League bodies.
The figures for higher education in the U.S.S.R. eloquently illustrate the rise in the cultural standard of the masses of women.
The Soviet government inherited from the tsarist times 91 higher educational establishments with 112,000 students – the majority from families of the bourgeoisie and landlords. Compare this with 554,600 students who were admitted to Soviet higher educational institutions between 1938 and 1940. The contrast speaks for itself. Naturally, the number of women students in tsarist Russia was very, very small. Many universities and colleges admitted no women at all. For that matter, what was the use of giving women a college education when under the existing order they would have no opportunity of applying their knowledge?
The Soviet government attached great importance to the development of higher education in the country; it was part of the general plan of socialist construction. The success of the efforts to advance the national economy and of the cultural revolution largely depended on the training of highly-skilled specialists.
The Soviet government fostered the people’s desire for knowledge and education and opened wide the doors of colleges and universities to the working-class and peasant youth.
There are now 800 institutions of higher education in the Soviet Union training highly-qualified cadres of the most diverse professions, and there are more students enrolled in them than in all the universities and colleges of Europe taken together.
The steadily developing socialist economy requires an ever-increasing number of college graduates.
The very opposite is to be observed in capitalist countries. There the number of people with college education is diminishing. This is due to unemployment and the absence of a demand for intellectual labour. Thus, for example, in the U.S.A. the number of students in 150 technical colleges dropped to one-third, from 110,000 to 38,000, in the period between 1940 and 1946.
Within a short space of time the numerous Soviet colleges and universities graduated 1,500,000 young men and women, a veritable army of intellectuals who came from the ranks of the people, an army which has taken a most energetic part in the immense effort which has transformed our country into the most advanced in the world, into a Socialist State, with a mighty industry and great military strength. In the stern trial of the Patriotic War the Soviet intelligentsia, reared and trained by the Soviet system and the Bolshevik Party, fulfilled its duty to its people and to its country with credit.
From year to year the proportion of girls among Soviet students has been increasing. During the first ten years after the establishment of the Soviet system – 1917 to 1927/28 – the number of girl students rose to 28% of the total number of university and college students. By 1939/40 they already comprised 49.3% of the student body. During the war this percentage increased still further and today women comprise more than half of the student body in social-economic, pedagogical, medical and some other colleges.
Especially noteworthy is the fact that the proportion of women has been steadily increasing in industrial, transport, building and agricultural colleges and now amounts to about 40% of the total.
Thus, almost half of the future leaders in industry are women.
Before the revolution women engineers or technicians were practically unheard of. Fifty years ago there were 848 engineers in St. Petersburg, and only three were women. According to the 1939 census, there were 76,000 engineers in Leningrad (formerly St. Petersburg), and 24,000 of them were women.
Besides those attending regular schools, millions of women and girls learn a trade or profession by attending the numerous evening schools, training courses and circles at factories and collective farms. Correspondence courses are very popular too. At present there are approximately 500 special correspondence colleges and correspondence departments of regular colleges, with over 850,000 students on their rolls, a considerable percentage of them women.
The proportion of women is especially large in the educational and medical fields. There are over two million women working in public education. Women teachers dedicate their knowledge and strength to the noble task of educating the Soviet youth in the spirit of adherence to high principles and of loyalty to and love for their country. Over one million women are employed in the medical services, 126,000 of them physicians, whereas before the revolution there were in Russia two thousand women physicians all in all.
Before the revolution the woman scientist was a rare exception. The students of the Moscow Institute of Ethnography regarded Khalyuzina, who lectured on ethnography there, with curiosity and amazement. Doctor Tsiklinskaya, a bacteriologist, attracted universal attention when she taught at the Higher Courses for Women.
The world-renowned mathematician, Sophia Kovalevskaya, could obtain no permission to work and teach in Russia. In reply to her request for permission to return to her native land she received the following letter from the President of the Academy of Sciences, Grand Prince Konstantin Romanov: “Inasmuch as our university chairs are closed to women, regardless of their ability or knowledge, there is no place for Madame Kovalevskaya in our country.” That was typical of old Russia.
Under the Soviet system science has obtained unlimited opportunities for development, opportunities wider than any that exist or can exist in capitalist countries. In our country science serves the people and therefore boundless vistas open up before it. The Communist Party, the Soviet Government and Comrade Stalin personally devote unflagging attention to the development of science, and see to it that scientists are provided with all the necessary conditions for fruitful work. In thirty years Soviet science has multiplied our country’s cultural heritage and enriched all fields of knowledge by great discoveries and outstanding inventions. Soviet science, developing in complete accordance with the tasks of building Communism in the U.S.S.R., has greatly contributed to the conversion of our formerly backward country into an advanced and mighty socialist power.
And no small share in the progress of Soviet science has been contributed by women, for under the Soviet system they have unrestricted access to scientific research. The number of women engaged in research work has grown steadily and now amounts to approximately half the total number of researchers.
Thirty-five thousand women are doing research work in scientific-research institutes and in laboratories, four thousand of them in the institutions of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. Over 600 of the latter hold Master’s or Doctor’s degrees. During the war about 1,500 women earned their Master’s or Doctor’s degrees, became professors and docents. Science has ceased to be the privileged field of men.
Soviet women are working with creative ability and talent in all fields of culture. There is not a single scientific, artistic or technical sphere in which women do not freely display their abilities.
One hundred and eighty-seven women have won Stalin prizes in medicine, in physics and mathematics, in history, philology, agricultural and technical sciences, in literature and in art. Stalin prizes have been awarded to dozens of working women and peasant women for important inventions and radical improvements in production methods. Women, Stalin Prize winners, have distinguished themselves in Soviet art – in sculpture, drama, opera, ballet and the cinema.
By the inexhaustible creative powers Soviet women display in all fields of science and culture, by their initiative, political maturity and high sense of social duty, they have disproved the fabrications of bourgeois ideologists to the effect that women’s intellectual capacities are limited. Soviet women, who have attained to the pinnacles of culture and knowledge, who are builders of our economy and mothers and educators of the younger generation, are a shining example of high development and advancement.
The Soviet State affords women every opportunity for physical, as well as intellectual, development. “In our country of labour,” said V. I. Lenin, “millions of physically strong people are needed, people with strong wills, courage, energy and perseverance. It is to them that the future belongs, with their hands the right to build new foundations of human society will be won.”
Our physical culture celebrations and parades excite the admiration of the whole world. Of 3,696.000 members of Soviet sports organizations about 1,700,000 are women. The achievements of Soviet women in international sports meets testify to the high development of physical culture in our country.
Soviet women have brilliantly upheld their country’s prestige at the sports stadiums of many countries. Their achievements and records demonstrate to the whole world the superior, all-round development of Soviet people.
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The victorious development of socialist society would have been impossible without the most active participation of women.
We cannot picture the work of our factories and mills, collective farms and state farms, our governmental, Party, economic and public organizations without the participation of women.
We cannot picture successful work in the field of education, of the training of Soviet children, without the participation in this great work of a huge army of women teachers.
Women doctors and other medical workers are an important force in the public health services.
Soviet art owes its florescence in great measure to women, who comprise a good half of the people working in this field of cultural activity.
In his novel What Is To Be Done? the great Russian revolutionary-democrat Chernyshevsky made his hero Lopukhov say: “What sure, strong, penetrating intelligence women are naturally gifted with!... The history of mankind would advance... more quickly if this intelligence were active, if it were not rejected and killed.”
And in the same vein A. M. Gorky wrote:
“There is no doubt that if woman were not misdirected in her development, if the circle of her interests were not artificially narrowed, if her duties were not restricted to those of concubine, mother, housekeeper, if she were not held at arm’s length from wide public, cultural and political work, culture would progress twice as fast.”
Only under the Soviet social and state system, only under the leadership of the Party of Lenin and Stalin, did such unparalleled achievements of women in the technical and cultural fields become possible. The Communist Party and Soviet Government have to their credit truly extraordinary successes in bringing about such wide and active participation of women in the economic and cultural progress of the country.