The Heirs of Pasha: the Rise and Fall of the Soviet Woman Tractor Driver

Abstract

Throughout the 1970s clarion calls like this were repeated across the Soviet Union in newspapers and magazines, on TV and radio as the Communist Party, summoning up the images of 1930s stakhanovism, attempted to recruit a new generation of women — ‘to the tractor!’ Just a decade later, the entire rationale for this campaign was being called into question in a debate on women’s working lives which was ultimately to lead to the outright banning of tractor driving for women; appropriately enough, the demise of the woman tractor driver was one of the final enactments of a state which was itself about to be consigned to history. The archetypal figurehead of the Soviet road to sexual equality went down with the ship and, by this time, few either noticed or mourned her passing.

Your duty, your path, is to become the heirs of Pasha Angelina. We need your youthful energy.¹