Engendering a People: Soviet Women and Socialist Rebirth in Russia

Abstract

1 The October Revolution was merely one victorious battle in the Bolsheviks' lengthy struggle for socio-economic and political change. The Bolsheviks expected their victory to be a step toward worldwide revolution and the socioeconomic transformation of Russia. When the international working class revolution failed to develop, the Bolsheviks knew that they could not overcome the breakdown in transportation, industry, communication, and administration unless they mobilised the people for reconstruction. They offered literacy courses, educational literature, as well as training in technological and administrative work. Even more importantly, they encouraged the people to identify with the Bolshevik Party as the newly-established symbol of socialism in Russia. Their revolutionary struggle was not merely over social and economic forms, but over human hearts. To realise their political, social, and economic programs, the Bolsheviks needed the people to identify themselves with the Revolution and with the Party that defined it. They needed the Russian people to become Soviet socialists. What did it mean for a Russian worker or a peasant to be socialist? Two women's journals put out by the Bolshevik Party in the 1920s-Rabotnitsa (The Working Woman) and Rabotnitsa i Krest'ianka (The Working Woman and the Peasant Woman-taught Russian women that socialists were not merely diligent workers who happened to study the works of Karl Marx. They were not merely obedient Party members; according to these journals, a man or woman had to be filled with a sense of personal dignity and power. Pursuing scientific and technological knowledge, a true socialist was supposed to oppose ignorance, illiteracy, greed, apathy, religion, drug addiction, and alcoholism. Manipulating the biblical images and stories familiar to Orthodox Russians, these journals insisted that the teachings of Marx and Lenin had spiritual significance. In the new community of revolutionary saints, Marxism-Leninism would not only transform society, but also the human person. In other words, to be a Russian woman had to allow Marxist ideas to transform her thought and her behaviour; she had to undergo a spiritual, Marxist rebirth. The spiritual and intellectual rebirth envisioned by those who contributed to Rabotnitsa and Rabotnitsa i Krest'ianka reflected a dimension of Russian Marxism which was profoundly religious and utopian. Their vision of human intellectual and spiritual development gave Marxism-Leninism a deeply personal and emotional appeal. By giving a mystical and religious depth to socialism, they sustained the religious Marxism which Lenin had condemned and prevented the religious impulses of the early revolutionary movement from dying away.' When writing to Russian women, Party journalists and propagandists turned Marxism into a language of belief and hope--that is, a language which could fill Russian women and their children with a faith in the Party and in the full socialism which it promised to bring. The bogostroiteli (god-builders) represent the most unrepentantly religious group found within the Russian revolutionary tradition. Although many of them were members of the Bolshevik party (whose leader condemned god-building ideas), these pre-revolutionary Marxists envisioned the Revolution in moral and spiritual terms. Like the pre-revolutionary god-seekers (bogoiskateli), these godbuilding revolutionaries hoped that Russia would be spiritually revitalised. But whereas bogoiskateli believed that this spiritual renewal would be achieved in and through Orthodoxy, bogostroiteli called for the formation of a new religion of humanity. Led by such influential figures as Maksim Gor'kii and Anatolii Lunacharskii, bogostroiteli (god-builders) proposed that the great men of science and technology be held up for veneration and imitation in much the same manner as Christ and the saints are upheld by the Russian Orthodox Church as models for the people to image, or imitate, in their own lives. …