Abstract
When the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia in October 1917, they had the enormous task of turning (arguably) the most undeveloped capitalist country in Europe into the world’s first socialist state. They would only succeed in this goal if they could involve the population as a whole, if they could turn them into ‘organisers and builders of a new society… warriors for a new way of life’.1 The notion that it was possible to create a new type of person, fully committed to the socialist cause and willing to put the interests of society above his or her personal desires, was fundamental to the Bolshevik project. According to Marxist theory there was nothing innate about human personality and behaviour; these were social constructs, formed through interaction with the social environment. It must be possible, then, to reconstruct them.
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Notes
Pinkevich (1927), ‘Outlines of Pedagogy’.
R.V. Daniels, A Documentary History of Communism, p. 182.
L. Stal’ (1927), Pechat i zhenskoe kommunisticheskoe dvizhenie, p. 14.
See B. Ehrenreich and D. English (1978), For Her Own Good, pp. 1–29.
J. Doane and D. Hodges (1987), Nostalgia and Sexual Difference: The Resistance to Contemporary Feminism, p. 9.
Ehrenreich and English (1978), For Her Own Good, pp. 20–1.
F. Engels (1972), The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, p. 56.
A. Bebel (1917), Woman Under Socialism, p. 344.
F. Engels (1972), The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, p. 88.
C. Zetkin (1965), ‘My Recollections of Lenin’, appendix to Lenin on the Emancipation of Women, p. 105.
The Woman Question: Selections from the Writings of Karl Marx, Frederick Engels, V.I. Lenin and J.V. Stalin (1971), p. 81.
C. Zetkin (1965), ‘My Recollections of Lenin’, appendix to Lenin on the Emancipation of Women, p. 101.
N.K. Krupskaya (1990), ‘Brachnoe i semeinoe pravo’, quoted in Mikhail Olesin, Pervaya v mire: Biograficheskii ocherk ob A.M. Kollontai, p. 21.
Kollontai (1921), Prostitutsiya i mery bor’by s nei, speech to the III All-Russian conference of the heads of provincial zhenotdels, p. 18.
A. Bebel (1917), Women under Socialism, p. 231.
Kollontai (1972), outlining Lenin’s views on the subject, in Izbrannye stat’i i rechi, p. 156.
Kollontai (1921), Prostitutsiya i mery bor’by s nei, p. 21.
See, for example, C. Porter (1980), Alexandra Kollontai: A Biography, p. 289.
Quoted by B. Farnsworth (1980), Aleksandra Kollontai: Socialism, Feminism, and the Bolshevik Revolution, p. 148.
N. Krupskaya (1984), ‘Zhenshchina i vospitanie detei’, from Deti — nashe budushchee, p. 41.
Krupskaya (1984), ‘Gde zhit’ detyam v sotsiallsticheskom gorode?’, in Deti — nashe budushchee, p. 53.
A. Kollontai (1919), Sem’ya i Kommunisticheskoe Gosudarstvo, p. 17.
A. Kollontai (1923), ‘Revolyutsiya i byta’, p. 173. Kollontai made little reference to the pleasures of childcare, or the emotional attachment of a mother to her child. As Farnsworth points out, she seems to have confused ‘freeing parents of worry about their children’s material future [with] freeing them of care or concern.’ Farnsworth, Aleksandra Kollontai, p. 53.
A. Bebel (1917), Women Under Socialism, p. 347.
B. Farnsworth (1980), Aleksandra Kollontai, p. 146.
A. Kollontai (1919), Sem’ya i Kommunisticheskoe Gosudarstvo, p. 16. Farnsworth suggests, however, that Kollontai may have been simply attempting to reassure women who were worried by the scale of the changes that their new roles would not be entirely unfamiliar: ‘Women would be outside the home, working cooperatively, but still caring for children; they would be in charge of laundry, but instead of labouring individually would deliver their clothing to central places to be washed and ironed.’ See B. Farnsworth, Aleksandra Kollontai, p. 148.
N. Krupskaya (1984), Deti — nashe budushchee, p. 207.
A. Bebel (1917), Women Under Socialism, p. 114.
A. Kollontai (1919), Novaya Moral’ i Rabochii Klass, p. 29.
A. Kollontai (1977), Selected Writings, p. 74.
See L. Attwood (1990), The New Soviet Man and Woman, pp. 32–66.
J. Scanlon (1995), Inarticulate Longings: The Ladies’ Home Journal, Gender and the Promises of Consumer Culture, p. 7.
M. Beetham (1996), A Magazine of her Own?, p. 3.
J. Scanlon (1995), Inarticulate Longings, p. 10.
K. Clark (1981), The Soviet Novel, pp. 180–1.
M. Honey (1985), Creating Rosie the Riveter: Class, Gender and Propaganda during World War II, p. 51.
See E. Waters (1991), ‘The Female Form in Soviet Political Iconography, 1917–1932’, in B. Evans Clements, B. Alpern Engel and C.D. Worobec, Russia’s Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation, p. 235.
See B. Evans Clements (1985), ‘The Birth of the New Soviet Woman’, in A. Gleason, P. Kenez and R. Stites (eds) Bolshevik Culture: Experiment and Order in the Russian Revolution, p. 232.
readers’ minds. See A. Valyuzhenich (1953), ‘Tragediya malen’kikh amerikantsev’, in Rabotnitsa, no. 5, p. 24.
M. Honey (1985), Creating Rosie theRiveter, p. 9.
M.L. Margolls (1985), Mothers and Such: Views of American Women and Why They Changed, p. 8.
M. Honey (1985), Creating Rosie the Riveter, pp. 9–10.
M. Lewin (1989), The Gorbachev Phenomenon, p. 22.
S. Davies (1997), Popular Opinion in Stalin’s Russia: Terror, Propaganda and Dissent, 1934–1941, pp. 63–4. Wives of the worker ‘elite’ — Stakhanovites, engineers in key industries, army officers and the like — were relived of the obligation to work because they were ministering to the needs of their super-achieving husbands. They were encouraged to become ‘obshchestvennitsy’, unpaid volunteers undertaking socially useful work.
W.Z. Goldman (1993), Women, the State and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917–1936, pp. 294–5. I have also been told by an elderly woman who had an abortion during the prohibition that she had been a fervent supporter of the Stalinist state and in principle supported the ban on abortion but was simply not in a position at that time to have a child.
H. Moore (1994), ‘The problem of explaining violence in the social sciences’, in P. Harvey and P. Gow (eds) Sex and Violence, p. 149.
E.A. Kaplan (1992), Motherhood and Representation: the Mother in Popular Culture and Melodrama, p. 10.
See, for example, R. Stites (1978), The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia;.
G. Lapidus (1978), Women in Soviet Society: Equality, Development and Social Change;.
M. Buckley (1989), Women and Ideology in the Soviet Union;.
W.Z. Goldman (1993), Women, the State and Revolution..
G.D. Hollander (1972), Soviet Political Indoctrination, p. 44.
Angus Roxburgh, discussing Pravda’s coverage of the purge of army officers in 1938, notes that pages of letters supporting the party’s tough action on the traitors appeared in the newspaper the very day after the trial, ‘a speed of coverage which stretched credibility’. See A. Roxburgh (1987), Pravda, p. 33.
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© 1999 Lynne Attwood
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Attwood, L. (1999). Introduction. In: Creating the New Soviet Woman. Studies in Russian and East European History and Society. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780333981825_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780333981825_1
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