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  SOVIET WOMEN-EQUAL BUILDERS OF THE SOCIALIST SOCIETY

Women in the Land of Socialism
N. Popova
 

I. The October Revolution Brought Working Women Freedom and Happiness
Ever since the dawn of history, when private ownership of the means of production first appeared, women’s position in society has been an inferior one. Engels traces women’s dependent position to the rise of class society, which at the various stages of its development produced various forms of inequality and social disabilities. The first class antagonism which appeared in history, he wrote, coincided with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in individual marriage, and the first class oppression with that of the female sex by the male. Women of the exploited classes, besides being degraded and kept in an inferior position to men, shared the hard lot of their class – first as slaves, then as serfs and lastly as proletarians obliged to sell their labour power to the capitalist.

From the slave societies of ancient times through to present-day capitalism the ideologists of the ruling classes have always argued, in accordance with the interests of the exploiters, that the existing form of exploitation and the existing order are “just,” “wise” and “natural.” They have spoken of “immutable laws of nature,” which, they have asserted, destine some to be rich and rule, and others to be poor and be ruled. The same arguments are used to justify the inequality and subjugation of nations. The exploiters have always found it convenient to claim that “nature” justifies exploitation.

All through the history of class society the shameful attitude towards women as inferior beings, inherently incapable of attaining the intellectual level of men, has prevailed. For two thousand years, wrote Maxim Gorky, the church and the state have instilled into women the belief that she is second-rate, and this idea prevailed, poisoning the minds of people. Women were treated as perpetual minors.

The ideologists of the ruling classes have filled innumerable volumes in the attempt to prove man’s “right” to rule over woman, to justify the subordinated and degrading position of women, to implant in women the false idea of the deficiency of their sex and the slavish psychology that this idea engenders. The champions of the reactionary bourgeoisie cynically assert that nature itself created woman inferior to man, made her subordinate to man, unfit for public activities, her interests confined to the family, the kitchen and the church.

Lenin summed up the position of women in capitalist countries in the following words: “It is the business of the bourgeoisie to promote trusts, to herd women and children in factories, to torture them there, to corrupt them, to condemn them to extreme poverty.”1

* * *

Hard and devoid of hope was the life of women in tsarist Russia. For the post-revolutionary generation of Soviet people, who have not known the yoke of the tsarist autocracy and life under the bourgeoisie and the landlords, fully to appreciate the freedom and equality women enjoy in our country today, they must be told about women’s hard lot in the past. The equality of women was won by our people in battle and in labour under the leadership of the Communist Party. The girls of the Soviet Union, said Maxim Gorky, can realize and appreciate all that the Bolshevik Party has achieved in the struggle to better the conditions of the people, only if they know about the hard lives their mothers and grandmothers led.

Especially hard were the conditions of women factory workers and farm labourers in tsarist Russia. In Russia, as in other countries of Europe, America and Asia, the increasing use of machinery reduced the need for big muscular strength in the factories. The capitalists were not slow to take advantage of this fact and began to employ women and children in large numbers, exploiting them most ruthlessly, forcing them to accept lower pay than men for the same work, and employing them on the least skilled jobs.

However, this influx of women into industry did not improve the well-being of the worker’s family, for according to the law of value operating under capitalism the value of labour power is determined by the minimum required to keep the worker and his family alive. Therefore, the more women the capitalists employed the more they lowered the wages of men workers.

There were no laws to protect the labour of women and children, not even elementary provisions for mother and child welfare. Women and children worked 13-15 hours a day. This system of appalling exploitation reduced the woman worker to the status of a mere slave. Chronic unemployment and starvation, inevitable under capitalism, bred prostitution, which often involved even children.

In tsarist Russia the wages of a man working in a factory were not sufficient to pay for the bare subsistence of his family. The wages of women workers, according to data compiled by Professor I. Yanzhul, well known in his day, averaged about one-half of what was paid to men. Svyatlovsky, a factory inspector in the Kharkov area, reported that the average wage of a woman worker was 71/2 rubles, of a man – 141/2.

The capitalist thought only of their profits, and flagrantly disregarded the most elementary requirements of women workers. There was no maternity leave, nor were nursing mothers given time off to nurse their infants. Capitalist methods of production rapidly ruined the health of working women, and this had a disastrous effect on the physical condition and development of their children. The barbarous conditions under which millions of working women lived resulted in an abnormally high death rate among children.

“How inhumanly working mothers were treated in tsarist Russia!” wrote Leningrad working women in a letter to Comrade Stalin. “If a woman became pregnant she was driven from the factory. Working women therefore concealed their pregnancy, tortured themselves until they were driven mad with pain, and frequently gave birth right in the shop. Immediately after childbirth the women would have to go back to work... what can be more terrible than a mother not wanting her child, and there were any number of working women who cursed their children.”

As a rule working women received no medical assistance at childbirth.

The condition of peasant women in old Russia was no better than that of the working women of the cities. A peasant woman had no right to own land. This alone was sufficient to deprive her of all rights and place her in a position of subservience in the village and in her home. She knew neither rest nor respite. Her back was ever bent in hard work for the landlord and the kulak, in the fields, in the house and in the barnyard.

An especially profound and vivid description of the condition of the peasant woman before the revolution has been given by Joseph Stalin:

“Indeed, just stop and think, what was the status of women formerly, in the old times. Before a woman was married she was regarded, so to speak, as the lowest among the toilers. She worked for her father, worked without respite, and still her father reproached her, saying: ‘I feed you’. After she was married, she worked for her husband, doing what her husband compelled her to do, and he too reproached her with the same words: ‘I feed you.’ The woman was the lowest among the toilers in the village.”2

The following contract, which the women employed on the estate of Count Potocki had to sign, provides a graphic illustration of the unbridled power of the landlords and the system of inhuman exploitation of women farm labourers.

I, a peasant woman from the village... of my own free will, contract to work on the estate of Count Potocki for a period of 144 working days, without broad, doing any kind of farm work I am told to do, for a wage of 34 rubles for the whole time. I have received an advance of 10 rubles, the remainder to be paid to me later, in accordance with what I shall have earned. I agree:

1). To work from sunrise to sunset.
2). If I leave work without lawful excuse I will refund double the advance and forfeit my wage for the work done.
3). I undertake to report for work whenever I am summoned.
4). If summoned to work on a Sunday or a holiday I have no right to refuse.
5). If I leave the estate without permission on a holiday or on a weekday I must work off the time.
6). If I get sick or die my family must work for the agreed period in my stead.
7). Under no circumstances may I leave my work before this contract expires.

I am aware of the above conditions and sign my name thereto.”

This outrageous contract bound the labourer even after death.

The few paltry laws protecting female labour, enacted after a stubborn struggle, were not observed at all whenever a lull in the labour movement set in.

The inhuman capitalist exploitation of women in tsarist Russia was further aggravated by the survivals of feudalism in the country’s economy, in the home and in the social and political organization. Women were denied electoral rights. They were excluded from political life. The tsarist civil service regulations banned women from “clerical or other positions in all government and public officers in which positions are filled by appointment or by election.”

The laws defining matrimonial rights and duties were most humiliating to the women. “The wife’s duty is to obey her husband, who is the head of the family,” reads Article 107, Volume X of the Code of Laws of the Empire of Russia, “to love and respect him, to submit to him in everything, to minister to his needs in every way and to show him every mark of attachment, for he is master in the home.” “The wife is in duty bound to comply above all with her husband’s wishes. If the husband changes his place of residence the wife is obliged to follow him.” “A woman may not seek employment without the permission of her husband.” These are all statutes of the tsarist code.

A married woman did not have her own passport but was registered in the passport of her husband. She had no right to dispose of her property. All this made women still further dependent on men.

As a rule, tsarist laws did not permit women to act as guardians of minors. Guardians were often appointed for children even while their mothers were alive. Girls were in the complete power of their guardians, who had full control over their property until marriage. It often happened that a guardian, unwilling to lose the income from the property of his ward, would refuse to allow her to marry.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin scathingly described marriage and family law in tsarist Russia as extremely odious, base and hypocritical.

Among the papers of an old Ryazan physician which are now in the town archives there is a description typical of the condition of children in pre-revolutionary Russia.

“Yesterday I was called to some sick children on Kasimovka Street. The oldest girl, Zina, seven, has the grippe. Lyuba, age five, and Liza, two, have the whooping cough. A five-month-old baby is sick too. The oldest boy, Kolya, age eight, lives with a relative, because there are too many mouths to feed at home. The father, a typesetter, died a month ago. The family has no means of support whatsoever. The mother, who used to be a village schoolteacher, cannot find any suitable work. The temperature in the house is no more than 80. They don’t heat the stove – there is only enough wood to last till tomorrow. The children shiver with cold, cough all the time and ask for food.”

Capitalist oppression of women in industry, the hard lot of the peasant woman who owned no land, the inferior position of women in society, their subservient status in the home combined to make women in pre-revolutionary Russia culturally backward and bowed down. Only 13% of the women in pre-revolutionary Russia had the opportunity of gaining an education, and these were chiefly from families of the privileged, wealthy sections of the population – the nobility, bourgeoisie, government officials and the clergy. Almost all working and peasant women were illiterate.

The condition of Russian women was wretched, but that of the women of the non-Russian nationalities in outlying regions of tsarist Russia was truly appalling. To the national-colonial oppression of tsarism and the yoke of the Russian bourgeoisie and the native landlords were added the traditions of feudalism, slavery and patriarchy which were strong in the Eastern colonial regions of old Russia. Women were kept in seclusion, and had to wear the horsehair veil in public. Polygamy, the marriage of minors and the sale of small girls as “brides” were common practices. This backwardness was not only the result of the history of the East, but was due also to tsarism’s brutal national policy.

The Uzbek, Turkmenian, Tajik, Kazakh, Azerbaijan women, as well as the women of all the other nationalities oppressed by tsarism, were beings without any rights, mere chattel at the disposal of their masters. Illiterate, locked in the house of father or husband who had the power of life and death over them, they led a miserable existence. “Many were the tears that watered the lands of Bokhara,” says a letter written by working women of Central Asia to the women of Transcaucasia. “Those tears, shed all through life, from birth to death, can never be forgotten.... In the Bokhara of the Emirs a woman had five masters: her first master was God, her second master was the Emir, her third master was her employer, the man who owned the land and the water, her fourth master was the mullah and her fifth – her husband. We were sold for money, for rice, exchanged for all sorts of commodities; while still children we were given away in marriage to old men who already had several wives. We were the slaves of our husbands.”

In terse, official language, documents preserved in our state archives paint a shocking picture of the attitude to women and children in the outlying regions of tsarist Russia. Here, for example, is a statement submitted to the town court of Kuba (Azerbaijan) by a resident of a nearby village, Nagy Karbimar Nur Ali ogly: “Concerning my serf and her four small children, namely: Naringyul, her daughters Gaibat and Saibat, her sons Karchagi and Fatulla; these five peasants I have voluntarily sold to Lieutenant Mahmed-Hanbek, resident of Kuba, for 500 rubles in silver, and therefore he, Mahmed-Hanbek, has the right to the possession of the above-mentioned peasants.”

Right up to the Great October Socialist Revolution and the establishment of Soviet government in these regions the women of the non-Russian border districts were mere slaves. Their whole world lay within the narrow confines of the family; their fathers and husbands had unrestricted power over them.

* * *

Despite their subordinate position and the shameful attitude of the exploiters towards them, women furnished many an example of patriotism, courage and pluck in the struggle for freedom and progress even under the conditions of class inequality. While, on the one hand, the medieval Domostrois3 recommended that women be kept under rigorous restraint, Russian folk-epics extolled the deeds of courageous women whose bravery was equal to that of the heroes of old. Vasilisa Kozhina and Nadezhda Durova covered themselves with glory in the Patriotic War of 1812. Even in the backward East, Tutibikeh, the wife of a progressive Azerbaijan statesman, Fatali-khan of Kuba, directed the defence of the fortress of Derbent in the eighteenth century.

The degrading, subservient position of women in tsarist Russia could not but evoke protests on the part of the progressive section of Russian society. Many a stirring page in the works of the foremost representatives of advanced social thought in Russia – Herzen, Belinsky, Dobrolyubov, Chernyshevsky – was dedicated to the struggle against the oppression of women. Belinsky vehemently denounced the ruling classes: “Your attitude towards women,” he wrote, “is purely utilitarian, almost commercial. All she is to you is capital plus interest, a village, a house with an income; lacking that, she is a cook, laundress, nurse; at best an odalisque.” A. I. Herzen wrote that a “world of universal interest” is open to a man – work, public activities, art – but a woman’s world is confined to the family and to housework. “The poor woman has nothing but her family life... her world is limited to the bedroom and the kitchen. It is a strange thing – nineteen centuries of Christianity have not succeeded in teaching regard for woman as a person. One would think it much more difficult to comprehend that the earth revolves around the sun, yet after some argument about it the matter was settled; but that a woman is a human being just doesn’t seem to penetrate the mind.”

A. N. Dobrolyubov pointed out that the spiritual and economic enslavement of women was the result of the entire system of relations in contemporary society. Like all the finest, most progressive people of those times, he voiced his angry protest against the enslavement of women; he regarded this enslavement as a characteristic feature of a society based upon the supremacy of one person over another, of the husband over the wife, of man over woman.

N. G. Chernyshevsky, one of the greatest Russian revolutionary democrats, declared that when man recognized the equality of woman he would cease to regard her as his property. Many pages of his novel What Is To Be Done? Deal with the means of achieving economic and intellectual independence for women.

The ideas of Belinsky, Herzen, Chernyshevsky were like a shining beacon to the democrats and enlighteners of the peoples of Transcaucasia, Central Asia, the Ukraine and Byelorussia. The fight against the autocracy and serfdom was the common cause of the Russian progressives and the foremost representatives of the non-Russian nationalities. In the nineteenth century they were drawn closer together, ideologically and politically, in what amounted to a united front. And it was the influence of the great Russian thinkers that led M.F. Akhundov, one of the most outstanding nineteenth-century enlighteners in the East, to voice his impassioned protest against the slavery in which Mohammedan women were held.

However, these representatives of progressive Russian social thought in the last century could not fully fathom the causes of the subjugation of women and were, therefore, unable to point out the road mankind must follow in order to achieve the emancipation of women.

Only revolutionary Marxism, only the Party of Lenin and Stalin could solve this problem both in theory and in practice. It was solved on the basis of the truly scientific principles that “where there are landlords, capitalist, merchants there can be no equality between men and women, even in law.”4

Equality for women can be ensured only by a fundamental change in the social relationships of the old bourgeois-landlord world.

Leninism-absorbed all the best traditions of the Russian revolutionary democrats of the nineteenth century, but freed them of the imperfections due to the historical conditions, laid bare the true causes of the inferior position of women in society and showed women the way to emancipation. Leninism exposed the lies of the scientific flunkeys who deliberately slandered women, attributing their unequal position to “nature” and asserting that women “always” have been and always will be inferior.” Leninism showed that the inequality and oppression of women is rooted in class inequality and caused by the system of private property and the exploitation of man by man.

Marxism, according to Stalin’s definition, is the scientific expression of the fundamental interests of the working class. The Utopian Socialists based their theories on a feeling of sympathy for the sufferings of the working class. Marxism-Leninism, which is the most humane of all social theories that ever existed, rose much above mere sympathy for the sufferings of the workers. It discovered the laws of social development and on this basis revealed in all its grandeur the mission of the proletariat as the class destined by history to head the movement for social progress and for the emancipation of all mankind. That is why only the founders of scientific Communism were able to point out how to achieve real equality for women. Marxism-Leninism proved that sympathy and pity alone for women would never gain this goal, which can only be achieved by women joining the struggle of the working class for Socialism, for the overthrow of the social system based on class inequality, on the exploitation of man by man.

Revolutionary Marxism closely links the fight for the emancipation of women with the general fight of the proletariat for its liberation, for the abolition of class society and for the victory of Communism.

From the very beginning of the Russian revolutionary working-class movement the most courageous and class-conscious women from among the workers and the intelligentsia joined the ranks of the Bolshevik Party. Any number of historical facts refute beyond question the reactionary theory that nature has fitted women for certain vocations only and that they are incapable of taking part in creative, public and government activities. Women have always taken an active part in the great movements for liberation in history and have contributed greatly to historical progress.

“There has not been a single great movement of the oppressed in history in which working women have not played a part. Working women, who are the most oppressed of all the oppressed, have never stood aloof, and could not stand aloof, from the great march of emancipation. We know that the movement for the emancipation of the slaves had its hundreds and thousands of women martyrs and heroines. Tens of thousands of working women took their place in the ranks of the fighters for the emancipation of the serfs. And it is not surprising that the revolutionary movement of the working class, the most powerful of all the emancipatory movements of the oppressed masses, has attracted millions of working women to its standard.”5

Since its establishment the Bolshevik Party has consistently followed Lenin’s precept that working women and peasant women must be taught to fight together with their brothers and husbands against tsarism and capitalism in order to achieve their full emancipation.

The Party of Lenin and Stalin, intimately bound up with the people, not merely in word but in deed, was the only party that persistently demanded full economic and political equality for women. No other party fought so resolutely and boldly against the enslavement of women as did the Bolshevik Party. As far back as in 1903, at the Second Congress of the R.S.D.L.P., demands for the franchise for women, for the protection of female labour and of working mothers and their infants were included in the Party program.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin pointed out that the experience of all emancipation movements shows that the success of a revolution depends on the extent to which women participate in it.

Lenin and Stalin taught that only a movement in which working women – factory hands and peasants – participate is a truly mass movement. They therefore attached great importance to the task of organizing women, of rallying them around the Bolshevik Party and of enlisting their participation in the fight for the abolition of the system of exploitation. It was a difficult task, because women were then the most backward section of the working population, the most inexperienced in the political respect, and it was they that had to be enlisted in the greatest emancipatory movement in history, that of the proletariat led by the Communist Party.

Prompted by their own class interests, the capitalist exploiters made various attempts to arrive at a bourgeois “solution” of the woman question. Bourgeois political parties strove to isolate the struggle of working women from the class struggle of the proletariat as a whole, to lure proletarian and peasant women away from the class struggle with flowery talk about “women’s common cause” and bourgeois-feminist illusions divorced from the underlying facts of social life. One of the harmful illusions which the movement known as feminism sought to spread was that women could attain equal rights with men without fighting for a radical, progressive change in the social system. The bourgeois feminists tried hard to make working women blind supporters of capitalism and of the imperialists’ colonial policy, to convert them into a women’s guard of capitalism.

By isolating the women’s movement from the fight for social progress the bourgeoisie aimed to weaken women’s efforts in the fight for freedom. The bourgeois feminists flaunted the flag of purely feminine interests and made a great deal of noise about political rights for women and about their right to education, ignoring the fact that for millions of women these rights, under capitalism, have no real meaning. At the Fifth International Assembly to Combat Prostitution one of the suffragette ladies expressed her admiration for the police surveillance over “fallen” women, “but all she had to say about raising the wages of working women was that they do not deserve better wages.”6

The leaders of the bourgeois-feminist movement distracted the attention of women from their chief enemy, the capitalists and the landowners. They insisted that not the exploiters but men in general are responsible for women’s subservient position. The bourgeoisie never could, nor can it, solve the woman question, for its rule is based on social inequality and class oppression. Even in a period of revolutionary upsurge in France in 1792, the bourgeois Convention opposed equal rights for women.

The Bolshevik Party’s struggle against bourgeois feminism was a struggle to free women from the influence of the bourgeoisie, to reveal the harmfulness of bourgeois-feminist ideas and illusions, to expose the efforts of the bourgeois-feminist organizations to keep the working women out of the class war waged by the proletariat.

The Bolshevik Party surmounted all difficulties. Under its leadership the working women of Russia organized in ever-increasing number and joined in the class struggle, in the struggle to overthrow the rule of the landowners and capitalists.

Women took an active part in many “riots” and strikes, as, for instance, at the Krenholm Textile Mills in 1872, in Orekhovo-Zuyevo and at the Yaroslavl Textile Mills in1885, in numerous strikes in St. Petersburg and in other Russian cities. In those years and in the years that followed women were very active in strikes, and in the mills where female labour was widely employed they frequently took the lead in the struggle.

Marfa Yakovleva, a working girl, played a prominent part in the famous strike at the Obukhov munitions plant in St. Petersburg in 1901. She fought fearlessly on the barricades, was arrested and put on trial. Lenin wrote in an article entitled “Penal Servitude Rules and a Penal Servitude Sentence”: “The memory of our heroic comrades killed and tortured in prison will multiply the number of new fighters tenfold and bring to their assistance thousands, who, like 18-year-old Marfa Yakovleva, will say openly: ‘We stand by our brothers!’ ”7

The Bolsheviks succeeded in organizing the women and in training many of them to become excellent revolutionary fighters against tsarism and capitalism. In this way a working-class women’s movement developed in Russia.

The results of the Party’s work in drawing women factory workers and peasants into the revolutionary movement were fully evident in the revolution of 1905. Many women joined the ranks of the Bolsheviks and took an active part in strikes and demonstrations, conducted agitation and propaganda among workers in factories and mills and among peasants in the countryside, helped conceal and distribute illegal literature.

Klavdia Ivanovna Kirsanova joined the Bolshevik Party at the age of sixteen, just before the revolution of 1905. For 43 years she was a fiery propagator of the ideas of Lenin and Stalin, a staunch, courageous fighter for the emancipation of the working people, for the cause of Communism.

In 1907 Klavdia Kirsanova was imprisoned, but this did not break her spirit. When she was released she worked in the military department of the Bolshevik Party and fearlessly spread Bolshevik ideas among the troops. In 1908 she was arrested again and confined in a fortress. Immediately upon her release she resumed activities in the underground movement. After her third arrest she was exiled to Siberia for life, but soon escaped and continued her work in underground Bolshevik organizations. Again she was arrested. Four years of prison and four years of exile steeled the will of this splendid daughter of the Bolshevik Party. After the victory of the Great October Socialist Revolution Klavdia Kirsanova was appointed to responsible positions in Soviet bodies and in the Party; during the Civil War she joined the ranks of the Red Army. For many years she held leading positions in Party educational institutions and was a lecturer for the Central Committee of the C.P.S.U.(B.). During the Patriotic War Kirsanova devoted all her knowledge and strength to the effort to defeat the enemy. Her fiery speeches inspired Soviet people in the rear and at the front to perform heroic deeds in labour and in battle.

Klavdia Kirsanova did much to further the organization of an international women’s movement that would unite democratic women all over the world in the fight against reaction and the instigators of a new war. Death, in October 1947, cut short this remarkable life, a life dedicated to work and struggle for the liberation of the working people from exploitation, for the victory of Communism.

Klavdia Ivanovna Nikolayeva began to work for a living at a very early age, while still a child. For several years she worked in printshops as a folder.

Klavdia Nikolayeva was also very young when she took the path of revolutionary struggle. In 1909, at the age of 16, she joined the Bolshevik Party. From that time on Klavdia Nikolayeva was an active underground worker. The tsarist police arrested her many times. Time and again she was exiled and imprisoned, but this only steeled her will. She fought on in exile too. During her exile in the Province of Vologda she conducted revolutionary propaganda among the working women of a linen mill.

Only after the February Revolution was Klavdia Nikolayeva able to return to her native Petrograd. Here the Party delegated her to carry on organizational work among working women.

After the Great October Socialist Revolution Klavdia Nikolayeva devoted herself entirely to work among women. She became head of the women’s department of the Petrograd Provincial Committee and of the working women’s department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party.

In acknowledgement of Klavdia Nikolayeva’s selfless work the Soviet Government decorated her with the Order of Lenin.

In 1936 she was elected Secretary of the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions. She visited factories and mills, took an interest in how the workers lived and worked, and with all the passion of a revolutionary called upon them to redouble their efforts to fulfil the tasks set by the Party and the Soviet Government.

From the very first days of the Patriotic War Klavdia Nikolayeva was active in the struggle against the German fascist invaders. She supervised the training of nurses and medical corps women, fixed up rest homes and sanatoriums as hospitals and set up a wide network of children’s homes. She was indefatigable in everything she did. Her speeches inspired workers on the home front to self-sacrificing effort for the cause of victory over the enemy.

Klavdia Nikolayeva died in 1944. Death took her at her post, a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, member of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the U.S.S.R. and Secretary of the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions.

In response to the Bolsheviks’ appeal to fight side by side with the men, working women took part in armed uprisings in various Russian cities in 1905.

“In the December days,” wrote V. I. Lenin with reference to the Moscow uprising in December 1905, “the Moscow proletariat taught us magnificent lessons in the art of ideologically ‘converting’ the troops,... when two working girls, carrying a red flag in a crowd of 10,000 people, rushed towards the Cossacks and cried: ‘Kill us! We shall not surrender this flag as long as we are alive.’ And the Cossacks were disconcerted and galloped away, followed by the shouts of the crowd: ‘Long live the Cossacks!’ Such instances of courage and heroism must live forever in the memory of the proletariat.”8

Those were the years when Maria Nikolayevna Kurkina, now on the staff of the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions, joined the revolutionary movement. Maria Kurkina took part in the general strike of Ivanovo weavers at the age of 18, and from that time on she fought tsarism and the bourgeoisie, always remaining true to the banner of Communism.

Led by the Bolshevik Party, proletarian women inaugurated the annual celebration in Russia of International Women’s Day, which comes on March 8. The celebration of International Women’s Day wakened the Russian working women to revolutionary consciousness and played an important part in rallying their forces.

A resolution passed on March 8, 1913, at a mass meeting of women in St. Petersburg said: “The proletariat demands that universal suffrage be extended to working women, in order that they too may participate in the struggle for the conquest of political power, which is a prerequisite for the achievement of Socialism.”

Great revolutionary enthusiasm reigned at the International Women’s Day meetings in 1914, held in an atmosphere of sharpened class conflicts. The Bolshevik slogans calling for a struggle against predatory war were the keynote of these meetings. In St. Petersburg working women held mass demonstrations on March 8. The Bolshevik newspaper Put Pravdy brought out a special edition with letters and articles from working women in factories and mills. The paper pointed out that March 8 was the concern of the entire proletariat and denounced the Mensheviks who asserted that this day was merely a women’s holiday and had nothing to do with the class struggle.

In 1915 the Bolsheviks observed International Women’s Day in spite of rigorous police persecution. An illegal proclamation issued by the Party and distributed among the working women read:

“Comrades working women!

“On this day we demonstrate our solidarity. Today working women, breaking their age-old chains of submission, slavery and oppression, proudly join the ranks of the international proletariat in the fight against the common enemy – capitalism.

“Working women! The government has sent our sons to be crucified for capital. So build your organizations, consolidate your ranks in the factories and workshops, in offices and stores, and let us fling our first mighty cry into the face of insatiable capital:

“Enough of blood! Enough of war! Let the criminal autocratic government be brought to trial before the whole people!”

Under the leadership of the Bolsheviks working women came out into the streets with the slogans: “Down with the imperialist war!”, “Send us our husbands back from the trenches!”, “Bread for our children!” Soldiers’ wives were among the initiators of the anti-tsarist, anti-imperialist popular demonstrations.

The militant protest of women against the imperialist war, starvation and tsardom was an important factor in the revolutionary struggle against the tsar’s government and against the bourgeoisie. In 1917, on International Women’s Day, February 23 (March 8) “at the call of the Petrograd Bolshevik Committee, working women came out in the streets to demonstrate against starvation, war and tsardom. The Petrograd workers supported the demonstration of the working women by a city-wide strike movement. The political strike began to grow into a general political demonstration against the tsarist system.”9

The bourgeois-landlord Provisional Government, set up after the overthrow of tsarism, was concerned with clearing the road for the imperialists and continued to wage the imperialist war which was ruining the country. It was evident that the imperialist bourgeoisie could not and would not save the country and carry out democratic reforms.

Rabotnitsa (The Working Woman), a Bolshevik magazine then published, rallied the masses of women to the fight for the revolutionary Bolshevik slogans, called upon the women to join trade unions and the Bolshevik Party, to fight against the imperialist war, against capitalism, and for the victory of the socialist revolution.

“Freedom and Equality for the Oppressed Sex!” was one of the immortal slogans of the October Revolution along with “All Power to the Soviets!”, “Land to the Peasants!”, “Peace to the Nations!”

Rallying around the Bolshevik Party on the eve of the October Revolution, working women marched in the front ranks of the revolutionary army of Lenin and Stalin, trained for the battle against the bourgeoisie, learned to administer first aid and bear arms.

On October 15, 1917, a general meeting of the working women of Moscow passed a resolution declaring that only a government of the Soviets could extricate the country from the difficult straits it was in, bring peace and save the revolution.

During the October uprising working women acted as nurses, managed the feeding centres of the Red Guards and revolutionary units, and took a direct part in the fight against the whiteguard Cadets, patrolled the streets and guarded factories, dug trenches, built barricades and defended them.

The masses of working women fought actively for the dictatorship of the proletariat, for the power of the Soviets, both in the period of preparation for the revolution and during the Great October Socialist Revolution. Together with the whole working class, under the leadership of the Bolshevik Party, they trod the difficult and heroic path of revolutionary struggle which led to the victory of Socialism in our country and, at the same time, to the establishment of complete equality for women.