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

The primary responsibility for addressing these issues devolved to the Commissariat for Social Welfare and its People’s Commissar, Alexandra Kollontai. In The Social Basis of the Woman Question (1908), Kollontai had attempted a Marxist analysis of the family, marriage, sexual relations and childcare. The book arose from her struggles with Russian bourgeois feminists and the need, as she saw it, to draw women away from supporting a programme that suggested women of all classes had common aims and interests. Although Kollontai did not rule out tactical cooperation with feminists on specific campaigns, she was clear that Marxists must “reject the existence of a special woman question separate from the general social question of our day […] The feminists seek equality in the framework of the existing class society; in no way do they attack the basis of this society”. In later years she would defend radical, emancipatory notions about sex and personal relationships, but in 1908 she stuck to the more conventional Marxist position that before “free relationships” and “free love” could become common practice, “it is above all necessary that a fundamental reform of all social relationships between people take place”. 9

The October Revolution placed this fundamental reform on the agenda. On 16th December, 1917 Sovnarcom issued the Decree on Divorce, which stated a number of new legal precepts, the first of which was, “Marriage is dissolved at the request of both spouses or either of them”, the request to be addressed to the local court. Once the judge had ascertained whether the request was genuine he would “issue a certificate thereof”. If the husband and wife had children, the judge would also decide which of them would have care of them, the division of the financial upkeep of the children, and whether the husband was obliged to pay childcare maintenance to his divorced wife. 10The Divorce Decree was a truly collaborative document, written by the Menshevik lawyer A.G. Goikhbarg, overseen by the Bolshevik Kollontai and promulgated under the SR People’s Commissar for Justice Steinberg. It was “an accurate reflection of the Russian left on matrimonial matters”. 11

The government followed this later in 1918 with a Family Code, which simplified the proceedings further and abolished any legal distinction between children born in or out of wedlock. Kollontai was under no illusions about the new laws. “It is not essentially any more progressive than those existing in other progressive democracies”, she wrote in 1926, when the Code was revised again to allow for “registered divorce”, a procedure instigated by the couple without a judge’s approval. “On the divorce question we are on a level with North America, whereas on the question of illegitimate children we have not even progressed as far as the Norwegians”. 12

Nevertheless, the reform of the marriage law was the first shot in a historically unprecedented attempt to reform and improve the legal and social status of Russian women. Initially this arose from the Commissariat for Social Welfare. The Commissariat was responsible for provision of services to pensioners, orphans, the homeless, and wounded and disabled war veterans, although as Imperial Russia disintegrated it had been overwhelmed by the scale of its work and had virtually ceased to function (in late 1917 there were about 350,000 homeless children on the streets, falling into crime and prey to sexual abuse–by 1921 there were seven million).

When Kollontai arrived at the Commissariat a few days after 25th October she was denied entrance. When she finally forced her way in with a group of sympathetic junior staff she found chaos–the senior officials had destroyed much of the paperwork before leaving. With no administrative staff and no money, she was besieged by thousands of petitioners begging for assistance for starving children, homeless orphans, the disabled and destitute. While Kollontai struggled to secure funding so that the Commissariat of Social Welfare could fulfill at least some of its responsibilities, she began to organise an ambitious All-Russian Conference of Working Women and Peasant Women to determine the policies that women themselves desired. Even before it met she set up a special section of her Commissariat to implement policies of benefit to women and children, such as sixteen weeks paid maternity leave, free crèches and nurseries, and a new system of orphanages and foster homes. Unfortunately, there was no money to pay for them, and the Commissariat’s role was reduced to that of dispenser of advice, plastered with posters about contraception and breast-feeding.

The Conference, though, revealed a great desire for the services the Commissariat was offering. Kollontai estimated it would attract 80 delegates. In the event over 500 delegates representing 80,000 women attended and discussed issues such as equal pay, maternity leave, abortion, civil marriage and housework. Most of the decisions could not be actioned in conditions of social collapse and civil war, and complaints that policies of direct benefit to working women were being left unimplemented began to flood from women members of the Bolshevik (then Communist) Party. In response, in September 1919 Sovnarcom created a special Women’s Department, the Zhenotdel, headed by Inessa Armand, to give greater focus to its work on women and the family. It is unclear why Kollontai was not put in charge. Probably her explicit agitation on sexual and gender issues made the Central Committee distrust her more than the reliable party loyalist Armand.

After Armand died of cholera in 1920, Sovnacrom had little choice but to put Kollontai in charge. With its own journal, Communist Woman , and a network of regional organisers assigned to local Soviets, the Zhenotdel set out to enforce equality policies that to this point existed on paper only. It ensured that all teams of Factory Inspectors included a Zhenotdel representative, whose job it was to ensure that equality legislation–on maternity leave, protection for pregnant women on overtime and long hours, and hygiene rules–was being followed. Although exaggerated by a hostile, deeply sexist White press and by conservative peasants, the popular image of the Zhenotdel–an earnest young female Bolshevik from the city wearing its distinctive red headscarf–had a basis in reality. Often she would arrive in a village or town and demand to know how equality legislation was being carried out. She would then arrange for the care of homeless children, set up nurseries and ensure that abused women were protected. Sometimes she would lecture peasant women on hygiene and contraception. These lectures were not always welcome.

The most controversial elements of Zhenotdel’s work centred on its policies for the family and child-rearing. Kollontai, Armand and other leading Zhenotdel officials such as Krupskaya believed that for women to be truly emancipated from patriarchal social relations they had to be relieved of domestic and child-rearing duties, which should be provided by public institutions. As a result they organised communal nurseries, kitchens and laundries where children could be looked after and cleaning done while parents were at work.

The programmes had a positive aim, but they over-estimated the extent to which Russian women were ready to discard the social and family roles they had grown up with and to which many clung in the middle of a chaotic and frightening world. Barbara Evans Clements’ investigation of working-class and peasant women in 1917-23 found that whilst thousands of women joined the Zhenotdel programmes, “millions more did not, still intent on private concerns that they saw as unrelated to, or unalleviated by, Bolshevik promises”. 13Many peasant women, in particular, were frightened that the new government wished to take babies away from their mothers and to provide men (on whom they were dependent for protection and status) an excuse for sexual license and abandonment of their wives.