History is Never Past

 “Red Valkyries – Feminist Lesson from Five Revolutionary Women” by Kristen Ghodsee, 2022

This is a good book to read for people who are rejecting bourgeois feminism.  While somewhat dated, it shows the emancipatory feminist thrust of socialist women connected to the USSR and Bulgaria.  It covers the stories of the WWII sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko, the Bolshevik Alexandra Kollontai, the organizer and educator Nadezhda Krupskaya, the Party worker Inessa Armand and the partisan and scientist Elena Lagadinova.  It could be the start of a whole series on socialist women from all over the world of course.

Ghodsee defines the huge differences between bourgeois feminism, which mostly seeks legal equality from the standpoint of upwardly mobile middle and upper class women; and socialist feminism, which advocates legal AND social equality in the form of state support for daycare, paid maternity leave, socialized housework and more.  They see that capital is the ultimate source of women's oppression. 3 of the women were typical feminists first, but saw the limitations.  As a Soviet woman, Pavilchenko observed how U.S. women were trivialized, second class citizens in the 1940s U.S. and Britain.  Lagadinova led the Women’s Commission in the Bulgarian workers’ state, counseling her 'Western' sisters. 

Pavlichenko killed 309 confirmed Nazis in WWII as a sniper, starting with a Moisan-Nagant.  She was skilled as she had been practicing marksmanship since she was a kid.  She was even a ‘counter-sniper’ whose job it was to take out German snipers.  After being injured 4 times and taking sick, she was sent on a trip to the U.S. during the war where she met Eleanor Roosevelt and the U.S. press.  She advocated a 2^nd front, which the U.S. and British ‘Allies’ had delayed for years on purpose. The questions from the U.S. press were mostly idiotic about whether a ‘woman’ could be a soldier and did she wear makeup and nice underwear and what-not.  800K women fought in the Soviet Army as snipers, pilots, parachutists, artillery and other roles that did not require upper-body physical strength.

Like the color issue in the U.S., Roosevelt saw that the U.S. treatment of women did not compare favorably to the Soviets.  Being one of the smarter women in the U.S. ruling class, she prompted a 1963 commission which looked at U.S. laws that discriminated against women.

Kollontai was appointed the first Commissar of Women in 1917.  Prior to that she led the first strike of Petrograd laundresses against Krensky’s regime.  She wrote profusely and also spurred the first Soviet laws advocating women’s liberation.  These allowed easy divorce, abortion, gay rights, maternity leave and were against ‘bastard’ designations, while promoting equal pay and jobs, state creation of orphanages, child care facilities, collective laundries, workplace canteens, and other social efforts to combat domestic drudgery. She also wrote about the development of new sexual and romantic relations if inheritance and women’s oppression were lifted.  She avoided the faction fights and purges of her Old Bolshevik friends in the 1930s by escaping to diplomatic posts overseas.  She saw nearly all her efforts for women’s liberation reversed by Stalin in 1936.  She died in 1952 after a series of strokes.

Krupskaya is the most interesting of all… as she always operated in Lenin’s shadow. Without Krupskaya, Lenin would have not been able to function as well as he did.  She maintained the home and the many relocations, and also translated, took dictation, organized correspondence, paid bills, edited Iskra, did cryptography and minutes, and other aspects of logistics.  While the Bolsheviks were politically for women’s liberation, the ‘old’ ways still persisted in personal contexts. 

Krupskaya, due to her extensive experience teaching workers and peasants, became a seminal advocate of progressive educational principles.  She was an inspiration for Paulo Freire, for instance and supported a ‘labor-arts’ approach.  After the revolution she set up libraries and reading rooms across the USSR and created a school pedagogy that encouraged critical thinking, practical skills and the development of individual understanding and talents.  She also set up kindergartens, the Komosol and the Young Pioneers. Her educational efforts were reversed under Stalin, who reinstituted rote learning, memorization and extensive testing.  She died in 1939 from a heart-attack in the aftermath of the Purge trials of her Old Bolshevik comrades.  

Armand became Lenin’s close confidant and a Bolshevik faction leader, though she grew sick of his arbitrary and demanding nature prior to 1917.  She became a representative of the faction, did translations, did dangerous courier work and extensive traveling.  She edited Rabotnitsa, (Woman Worker) in 1914, which was first issued on International Working Women’s Day.  At one point she was sent to Paris as a representative of the Zimmerwald left, which opposed WWI and supported civil war against the respective capitalist governments. At the same time she had 5 children and this conflict between personal and political continued her whole life.

She was in a close personal relationship with Krupskaya and Lenin at times, and the rumors of a ‘ménage a trois’ or something resembling that still exist.  Ghodsee does not find enough proof for that, though she does explain how traditional marriage and relationships were looked down upon by some revolutionaries.  After the revolution she was a leader of the women’s department of the CP with Kollontai, the Zhenotdel, but died in 1920 partly due to exhaustion.  The Zhenotdel was later eliminated by Stalin.

The 'Amazon' - Lagadinova in 1971

Lagadinova was a Bulgarian partisan in WWII as a girl, brought up in a poor peasant family as a red diaper baby.  After the guerilla triumph in Bulgaria against the fascists and the monarchy, she went on to be highly educated in agro-biology, once developing a seed hybrid of wheat and barley.  She was selected by the Bulgarian president to head the Women’s Commission in 1968, as Bulgarian women were legally equal as of 1946 but still labored in two shifts due to the lack of investment in mothers, daycare, maternity leave and household support.  The problem was a dropping birth rate.  She was ordered to rectify the situation to make it easier to have children.  After 5 years of struggle with her male comrades in 1973 Bulgaria passed and paid for one of the most comprehensive systems to aid women and children in the world according to Ghodsee.  Lagadinova later became an international figure, named ‘special rapporteur’ at the 1980 U.N. conference on women in Nairobi.      

Actual Left Feminism

All these women were socialists who understood the material roots of the oppression of women in the capitalist system itself, unlike middle-class and upper-class feminists who avoid that issue.  A system which demands free reproductive labor and cheap female labor to enable profiteering.  Ghodsee says that “Women’s bodies were as much a means of production as any textile mill or steam engine.”

Ghodsee identifies the USSR with the typical language of ‘actually existing socialism’ – which of course might not be actual socialism at all. She is anti-Stalinist in her perspective, recognizing the anti-female, conservative and bloody role the rigid Soviet bureaucracy played at that time. She does not define polyamory or ‘free love’ in her text, seemingly associating them with something that does not quite rise to that level. At one point she seems to say that ‘free love’ means not wanting to get married.  She notes that 3 of these women came from the middle-class or lower nobility in Russia, but grew apart from their class to pursue a revolution that united men and women. 

Ghodsee concludes with statistics on the huge improvements in the lives of working women in the workers’ states during this period.  She says these 5 women embodied comradeship, humility, auto-didacticism, receptivity, aptitude, tenacity and the ability to create coalitions – skills that a new revolutionary movement will need to succeed.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, using these terms to investigate our 15 year archive:  “Feminism” or “Abortion Referendum in Ireland,” “State Department Feminism,” “Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism” (Ghodsee); “Soviet Women – Walking the Tightrope,” “Really, Rape, Still?” “Socialist Feminism and the New Women’s Movement,” “Ireland – What’s Up?”  “Fortunes of Feminism” (Fraser); “Weird Conservative Feminism,” “Freedom Socialist,” “The Queen’s Gambit,” “Revolt. She Said. Revolt Again,” “Marxism and the Oppression of Women” (Vogel);“Stitched Up,” “Shopping World,” “Mistaken Identity,” “The Unwomanly Face of War” (Alexievich); “Reflections on the Olympics 2012,” “Women in Soviet Art,” 'Three Essays by Alexandra Kollontai," “Without Apology,” ‘What Is To Be Done?” (Chernyshevsky); "Patriarchy of the Wage" (Federici).    

And I bought it at May Day Books!

Red Frog

September 27, 2022