Ethnographies expose dimensions of what workers have endured since the collapse of the Soviet Union that official data and journalists' accounts do not reveal. 'No newspaper report or set of statistics', writes Rob Ferguson in relation to the Kuzbass miners, 'can convey the accumulation of privations, nor the mix of bitterness, anger, despondency and loss of self-esteem that wage non-payment brings in its train.' 'The scale of injustice', he adds, 'invokes rebellion and fatalism in the same breath: "Something must be done...Thereis nothing one can do".'103 The contemporary factory (and mine) worker remains an endangered species in Russia and the other former Soviet republics.
103 Ferguson, 'Will Democracy Strike Back?', p. 461.
Women and the state
BARBARA ALPERN ENGEL
By the early twentieth century, far-reaching changes had begun to challenge Russia's traditional gender hierarchies. Industrialisation and the proliferation of market relations, the growth of a consumer culture and the expansion of education, among other processes, touched the lives of Russia's rural as well as urban population. Economic change expanded women's employment opportunities, while new cultural trends encouraged the pursuit of pleasure in a populace long accustomed to subordinating individual needs to family and community. At the same time, patriarchal relations served as both metaphor and model for Russia's political order. The law upheld patriarchal family relations, as did the institutions and economies of the peasantry, still the vast majority of Russia's people. Religious institutions governed marriage and divorce, which the Russian Orthodox Church permitted only for adultery, abandonment, sexual incapacity and penal exile, and then only reluctantly Marital law required a woman to cohabit with her husband, regardless of his behaviour.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, this system encountered a range of challenges. Liberal reformers sought to revise Russia's laws, those governing the family in particular, as a means to reconfigure the entire social and political order.[175] Among the challengers were women, who also strove to make their voices heard. Yet women were rarely in a position to influence decisively the discourse on women, or to exercise authority decisively on women's behalf. Instead, as a revolutionary wave mounted, broke and receded, women's voices grew muted, and a gendered hierarchy re-emerged that echoed pre-revolutionary patterns while assuming novel forms.
On the eve
Women had established a significant presence in public life by the early twentieth century Nearly half a million women, mainly of peasant origin, laboured in Russia's factories, constituting almost 30 per cent of the industrial labour force. Tens of thousands of educated women occupied professional or semi-professional positions. Approximately 750 women physicians practised medicine in 1904, many of them employed in the public sector. Less extensive and costly training as nurses, midwives and medical aides provided employment to thousands of others. The number of women teaching in rural schools grew from 4,878 in 1880 to 64,851 in 1911.[176] Although barred by law from the civil service, ever-increasing numbers of women held clerical positions in private and government offices. Women also took up their pens, becoming novelists, poets, critics, playwrights, journalists and editors or publishers of journals. By enabling women to earn their own living, employment opportunities eroded institutions that conservatives sought to preserve, such as the patriarchal family.
The burgeoning marketplace had much the same effect, encouraging the desire for individual pleasure and gratification, and fostering patterns of consumption that could cut across social divides. The advertising industry enticed women to consume the fashionable clothing and other items displayed in windows of department stores and on the pages of popular magazines. New pastimes such as bicycling enhanced women's mobility and personal independence. In fact, the ideology of domesticity that so dominated the world-view of the middle classes of Europe and the United States had never gained hegemony in Russia, despite support from the throne. To be sure, domestic ideas had circulated since the early nineteenth century, and after 1905, liberal professionals embraced a modernised version of them, according to which mothers, guided by scientific precepts, would exert a disciplinary influence on society by appropriately raising the future generation.[177] Members of the middle class expected respectable women to be good wives and selfless mothers, echoing Victorian ideals. Physicians campaigned to modernise motherhood in the countryside. Prompted by exceedingly high infant mortality rates - almost half of rural infants perished before the age of five - physicians sought to replace the traditional practices of village midwives with their own professional expertise, much as physicians had already done in the West. Nevertheless, domestic discourses faced considerable competition from others that endorsed women's productive role. Elite wives had long enjoyed the right to own and manage property independently of their husbands. Members of the progressive elite expressed scant sentimentality about the working class or peasant family, and stressed women's role in the workforce over motherhood. Socialists believed that the family confined women, and that women's workforce participation provided the key to their emancipation. Prominent women rarely identified themselves with the home. Marketing their own images, for example, women writers never embraced the 'rigorously domesticated' womanhood still prevalent in Western societies.[178]
The Revolution of 1905 briefly heightened women's public presence, while gaining them very little. Women industrial workers, clerical workers, professionals, even domestic servants, joined unions and walked off their jobs to attend mass meetings and demonstrations that called for an end to autocracy and representative government. Women's movements re-emerged on a substantial scale. Their primary goal was women's suffrage and an expansion of women's legal and political rights, including reform of marital law. The most active organisation, the Union for Women's Equality, also sought in vain to forge cross-class alliances. As one member lamented, to establish circles among labouring women was relatively easy, but when their political consciousness was raised, 'they quickly join the ranks of one of the [socialist] parties andbecome party workers'.[179] The October Manifesto enfranchised only men.
The Revolution of 1905 demonstrated that no organisation or individual could speak for women as a group. Undermined by political divisions, the women's movement lost membership and momentum in the post-1905 reaction. Educated women activists only rarely succeeded in melding socialism and feminism, and were more prone to join socialist organisations than feminist ones. Women constituted some 15 per cent of the membership of the
Socialist Revolutionary Party and 10 per cent of the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party on the eve of the First World War.[180]
War and revolution
The First World War set the stage for the upheavals to follow. It upset gendered hierarchies and drew out to work hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of women for the first time. Women replaced men on the factory floor, their proportion in industry rising to 43.2 per cent by 1917. Thousands volunteered as nurses. Women broke into new occupations such as the postal service and transport; some even took up arms. Women's vastly expanded roles in the public arena enhanced their claims for civil rights. Even soldiers' wives (soldatki) became assertive, gaining an unprecedented sense of entitlement to public resources because of their husbands' service. Mounting female dissatisfaction contributed to the collapse of the autocracy Although women workers played a relatively minor role in the strike movement, women were prominent in the subsistence riots that rocked Russia's cities and towns, and sometimes spilled over onto the factory floor. This is what happened on International Women's Day, 23 February (8 March) 1917, when angry working-class women staged an enormous demonstration, summoning workers to join them. Their actions sparked the February Revolution.
175
William Wagner,
176
Rose Glickman,
177
Diana Greene, 'Mid-Nineteenth Century Domestic Ideology in Russia', in RosalindMarsh (ed.),
178
Adele Lindenmeyr, 'Maternalism and Child Welfare in Late Imperial Russia',
180
Beate Fieseler, 'The Making of Russian Female Social Democrats, 1890-1917',