John Medhurst - No Less Than Mystic - A History of Lenin and the Russian Revolution for a 21st-Century Left

Beyond that, the Bolshevik regime launched a full-scale crusade against mass illiteracy, with all illiterate citizens between age 8 and 50 mandated to attend literacy classes. Libraries were ordered to stay open seven days a week. A Sovnarcom Decree of November 1918 mobilised literate citizens as “readers” to teach the illiterate to read communist newspapers. From its first days the Bolshevik government had ordered cheap, mass-produced copies of the classics be easily available to workers and peasants. Given the many and immediate threats to its existence in the first few years of its life, this was a policy that expressed the best of Bolshevism.

It prefigured and indirectly inspired the highly successful “Mission Robinson” literacy and primary education programme of the Venezuelan government, which between 2003 and 2012 taught 1.75 million poor Venezuelans to read and write. 6Mission Robinson enrolled over 247,000 Venezuelan citizens into the programme, supported by 33,000 volunteer teachers or “facilitators”. As an offshoot of Mission Robinson, in May 2009 the Venezuelan Ministry of Culture distributed free books, children’s stories, magazines, movies and documentaries, and hosted public theatrical and musical presentations in the central plazas of major cities across the country. The Mission was directly based on Cuba’s massive “Yes I Can” literacy project, which had achieved unprecedented success in raising literacy rates in Cuba, and which itself drew on Nakompros’ literacy programme for historical inspiration.

Education was vitally important to building a new society in Soviet Russia, but the biggest challenge facing the new regime, if it were to honestly claim that it was inaugurating a real social revolution, was to radically transform the lives and freedoms of Russian women. In comparison to the social situation of most women in Western European countries in 1917–no bed of roses–that of Russian women was incredibly hard. Peasant women, especially, felt the full force of Russia’s semi-feudal social relations. They had no legal rights, could not participate in the work of the Mir or the Zemstvo, spent much of their time pregnant, and had to fulfill all of the housekeeping and child-rearing duties as well as work in the fields. A village would celebrate the birth of baby boy, but not a girl. That girl would spend her entire life under the control of her male relatives and husband, the only exception being widows who were allowed to run their strip of land (though the pressure within the village to sell or re-marry was intense).

The only escape was to the cities of the Russian Empire, either as a seasonal labourer or a permanent resident. Between 1887 and 1914 the number of women employed in industrial factory work jumped from 192,000 to 723,000. The total increased markedly in 1904-06, as women replaced male workers mobilised for the Russo-Japanese war. It was only then that employers and socialists began to notice the female proletariat–employers because they found women workers cheaper and easier to manage, and socialists because, in spite of this, clusters of women workers were beginning to organise and exhibit a basic class consciousness.

Nothing demonstrated this process better than the strike at the Laferme Cigarette Factory on Vasilevsky Island, St Petersburg, in November 1895, in which between 800 and 1,500 women workers went on strike to protest a cut in wages and the abusive behavior of male managers. The response from the owners was to call the police, who surrounded the strikers and hosed them down with water. Martov, sent from the St Petersburg Combat Union to assist the strike, overheard the St Petersburg police chief tell female strikers that they should make up the wage cut by “picking up extra money on the street”. 7Thirty strike leaders were banished from the city but, faced with a mass strike, some of their demands, such as withdrawal of a fee for hanging up their coats, were conceded.

The majority of women workers in the cities were employed as domestic servants. As compliant peasant women with little to no experience of urban life, they were usually treated badly, sometimes given no more than a corner to sleep in. Many of them suffered sexual abuse and exploitation. The patriarch of the house would often take advantage of the new maid and then sack her if she became pregnant. In factories, the owner or supervisor saw it as his right to pick which of the young women workers he wanted. Male relatives regarded the informal arrangement as a means to make extra money for the family. 8The result was a tide of unwanted and illegitimate children, many of whom were simply killed in infancy as their mothers were forced into prostitution. The grim end-point was the notorious “Angel Factories”–gangs of baby-farmers who delivered baskets of malnourished or dead babies to the official shelters so as to collect the two-ruble fee for each one.

The record of Russian political parties on women’s emancipation was mixed. After the creation of the Duma in 1905 suggestions were made to extend the suffrage to women. Conservatives simply scorned the idea. The leaders of the Kadet Party felt it was premature, although some of its female members, drawn from the liberal intelligentsia of the capital, challenged this. This led to the creation of Russia’s first female suffragist organisation, the Union of Women’s Equality, which for a brief period attracted a large number of bourgeois women.

The SRs and Trudoviks looked both ways. As socialists they supported women’s emancipation, and the 1904 SR Programme included a demand for “universal suffrage without distinction of sex”. But the “Peasant Unions” from which the SRs drew support wanted this demand removed. In 1906, radicalised by the 1905 Revolution and the peasant seizures of landed estates, an alliance of urban-based SRs and peasant women pushed the All-Russian Peasant Union to the left. It officially affiliated to the SRS, which declared its support for full gender equality. The Marxists, on the other hand, had long supported equal rights for women as an integral part of their political programme, but seldom challenged deep-seated sexist attitudes within their own ranks. The leaders of both factions of the RSDLP were almost exclusively male.

Yet women were beginning to carve out small freedoms for themselves. At the turn of the century only 12% of women in the villages could read and write, but in the cities nearly 50% of women were literate. This inevitably led to greater interest and involvement in life outside the family. Whilst most female workers, especially those recently arrived from the villages, played no role at all in political parties or trade unions, a minority of the more independent-minded broke that tradition. The Laferme strike was the first sign, as a result of which the social democrats started to recruit women workers. At first all they had to guide them was August Bebel’s Woman and Socialism (1879), the only major Marxist work to directly address the issue of women’s oppression in capitalist society. 1900 saw the publication of the first serious treatment of the condition of working-class and peasant women in Russia, The Woman Worker , written by Lenin’s wife Nadezhda Krupskaya. It laid bare the conditions of female labour, the lot of the female peasant, systemic sexual exploitation in village and town, and the scandal of mass illegitimacy and prostitution.

The Woman Worker was widely read amongst female socialists. But despite the RSDLP’s progressive rhetoric, it consistently underestimated the extent to which exploited female workers might lead the way in mass strikes and protests. The textile industry, for example, was a centre of women’s trade unionism. Female textile workers led resistance during the war and took to the streets to protest about high food prices and low wages, thereby igniting the February 1917 Revolution. Having helped remove the biggest patriarch of all, the Tsar, they had no desire to go back in their box. The Bolsheviks were keenly aware that after October women workers looked to them to remove the legal shackles that bound them.