Maternal feelings

Recent re-theorizations of Soviet motherhood show that motherhood’s place in early Soviet ideology was always ambiguous, with the relationship between motherhood, the individual, the state and socialist labour constantly in flux. The Soviet mother was deeply embedded in the fabric of Soviet society as early as 1921 and her ‘resurrection’ by the 1930s, along with the resolution of the woman question, signified her legal legitimation rather than a substantive remodelling of gender relations. A source of ideological anxiety to be controlled and supervised, women’s bodies simultaneously constituted a chain binding them to the past while fulfilling a vital revolutionary function, and so a consensus on the nature of the maternal relationship was never reached among Bolshevik theorists.²⁵

In general terms, motherhood was cast as a social function, concerned with the quality of future generations rather than a private matter. Instructional literature such as the journal Voprosy materinstva i mladenchestva (Questions of Motherhood and Infancy) placed an emphasis on the conduct of ‘future mothers’, attempting to scientifically regulate both reproduction and childrearing according to contemporary European, masculine scientific standards.²⁶ Efforts to dissuade the Soviet population from engagement with folk healers or midwives, or from non-Russian cultural or medical norms, was a near constant characteristic of reproductive health advice throughout the first decades of Soviet power.²⁷ One poster commissioned by the Department for the Protection of Motherhood and Infancy in 1925, with the headline ‘What you must know as a woman’, juxtaposed the fates of pregnant women who consulted health professionals through pregnancy and childbirth with those who did not. A cluttered, cautionary panel on the poster featuring an elderly folk healer bore the caption ‘Births with a peasant woman-healer (babka) end up in the serious illness or even death of the mother and child’.²⁸

By 1930, childcare propaganda still conveyed the benefits of social care over parental care for children, despite the financial limitations upon the state’s ability to fulfil its goals.

Thus, motherhood was ideologically constructed simultaneously as a skill to be learnt (from state trained health professionals) and as a natural social function. Yet, as Olga Issoupova has shown, motherhood was not the only role for women, nor was the maternal bond her only significant relationship.²⁹ The new Soviet woman was one who ‘rejected femininity and sublimated personal desires, including motherhood, for the sake of building a new socialist society’, and although new roles were opened up to her, essentialist notions of maternalism and care persisted.³⁰ Although external to the nuclear family, the emergence of the obshchestvennitsa, or ‘wife-activist’ movement, whose members ‘nurtured, educated, instilled culture and provided comfort’, has typically been framed as part of the resurrection of the maternal family in the 1930s, and was described by state departments in typically patriarchal notions of stability and comfort. Although Lauren Kaminsky has argued that the Soviet Union’s social policy in the 1930s actually constituted ‘the continuation of a radical revolutionary tradition’ rather than the earlier traditions of nuclear family life that Engels had cast as the bedrock of capitalism, even within the initial impetus to completely socialize tasks related to domestic labour and childcare, men’s participation was conspicuously absent, and assumptions about women’s maternal natures went unchallenged.³¹ Writing to Krest’ianka, an organizer at the ‘AVANTGARDE’ commune described the day-to-day running of their commune in 1925. Explaining that the bulk of domestic labour on the commune had been socialized, she mentioned in passing that ‘each wife washes [laundry] for herself and her husband’.³² Rebecca Balmas Neary has shown that, despite the fact that some of their activities, such as tracking their children’s scholarly progress, did align with traditional notions of motherhood, the obshchestvennitsy of the 1930s ‘undertook an assortment of activities which could be assumed under the rubric of social mothering’, looking beyond the nuclear family.³³

Despite an emphasis on social over parental care, as Hannah Proctor has argued, ‘love remained central to post-revolutionary discourse’.³⁴ Several writers for Voprosy materinstva i mladenchestva openly recognized the problem of ‘hospitalism’, or the deprivation of emotional interaction from which children raised in overcrowded, underfunded post-revolutionary institutions suffered.³⁵ Ultimately, though the prioritization of nuclear family ties was controversial, what Proctor has termed ‘revolutionary maternal love’ retained its importance, establishing an ideological basis upon which legitimate maternal grief might be performed. I argue that ‘grief’ was a central but unacknowledged means of managing this tension: some women suffered under tsarism to domestic labour and ‘the male fist’; others carried the responsibility for future generations; all bore the sorrows of the tsarist past and revolutionary struggle, which could be mobilized behind the Revolution, dialectically resolving women’s backwardness and counterrevolutionary potential.

This trajectory is depicted in Pudovkin’s 1926 film Mother (Mat’), based upon Gorky’s 1907 novel of the same name.³⁶ In the film, the unnamed ‘mother’ is downtrodden by her husband, who is in conflict with their son both at home and in the workplace, an intergenerational conflict culminating in a workers’ strike in which the husband is killed and, accidentally betrayed by his mother, the son is arrested and imprisoned. During the son’s incarceration, the mother asks for his forgiveness and aids his revolutionary comrades in their plot to free the prisoners during a solidarity march. The uprising is suppressed by tsarist forces, killing son and mother, with her depicted in the final scene stoically holding a red flag in the face of the oncoming tsarist cavalry. Maternal grief could therefore be mobilizing – legitimizing the loss of loved ones by connecting it to the oppression of the proletariat and revolutionary struggle, a journey also depicted by the recurrent motif of grieving maternal figures in other contemporary cinema, such as Eisenstein’s 1926 film Battleship Potemkin.³⁷ Women were frequently shown to bear the emotional toll of the old regime and the struggle for the new, it being key to their subjective transformation into builders of socialism.³⁸ Therefore, though emancipated from tsarist oppression, women remained objects of ambivalence for early Soviet policymakers and theorists who were concerned by the simultaneously revolutionary and counterrevolutionary potential of perpetual cycles of childbearing and childrearing. The task was to ‘convert’ counterrevolutionary tendencies to an emancipatory form.

Motherhood and grief

As a material means of forging emotional connections with their recipients in the Soviet establishment, letter-writing constituted a way for Soviet citizens to establish common ground between the emotional communities they inhabited and that they established with the new society. Where the feelings they wanted to share with other members, and those who policed it, risked falling beyond its boundaries, women could reaffirm their membership by illustrating their maternal feelings. In requests for material assistance, women frequently described the implications of their need through an emphasis upon the emotional bond between themselves and their children. Writing in 1929 to Mikhail Ivanovich Kalinin, then chairman of the Central Executive Committee, one woman appealed for her children to be able to join her in Central Asia to assist her ailing husband by reflecting upon the emotional toll her absence would have on her boys: ‘They’re such marvelous little fellows and are so fond of me and if I die – it will be hard for them without a mother.’³⁹ This bond was often explicitly related to the children’s membership of the ‘next generation’ of Soviet society. A 1924 letter from Petrovskaia in Ekaterinburg in the Urals lamented the subordination of her women’s agricultural artel to the needs of the party. She was effectively no longer being paid for her work, which she argued was, above all, highly detrimental both to her children’s immediate material needs and to their future: ‘I have children and I need to live for them … they need to learn, their lives are ahead of them, and they need clothes and shoes.’⁴⁰ The concurrent constructions of past and future in Petrovskaia’s letter underline the centrality of maternal temporality to Soviet womanhood, an ‘essence’ that enabled women to elucidate their sorrows as mothers.

While the emotions of motherhood were bound with the fate of the child, the inheritance of grief might be alleviated through the rejection of traditions and behaviours associated with life under tsarism. A letter from Iaknina, a peasant woman from Moscow, in 1924 described the medical implications of Russian folk traditions, which she summed up as the ‘senselessness and inattention’ of the mother and the influence of ‘superstition and prejudice in the life of mother and child’.⁴¹ While reflecting her knowledge of infant mortality rates that were published by the Department for the Protection of Motherhood and Infancy (OMM), the liberation of the mother and child from sorrowing under tsarism was also depicted by Iaknina as a self-evident truth, testament both to the cycles of loss and grief borne by mothers and to the complicity of women themselves in these cycles:

Everyone knows how many children have died in the first year of life. They know that the reason for this is our darkness, ignorance, and illiteracy … We, not following the advice of grandmothers [babok] and midwives [povitukh], the village calls atheists, considering these people inveterate. And here we, the real atheists, must open all the ulcers of Russian life!⁴²

Elsewhere in her letter, Iaknina revealed the contradictory cultural hierarchies implicit in the construction of the New Soviet Man and Woman, pointing out that ‘[e]ven the Tatars, dirty dark and ignorant, lose half as many children each year, because under the law of Mohammed the child can only be fed by the mother’s breast’.⁴³ The association between ‘poor hygiene’ and tradition was thus feminized and conflated with non-Russian and non-Christian minorities, despite an established awareness amongst medical professionals of the obstetric benefits of some aspects of traditional childbearing practices across the former empire.⁴⁴

The implications of this heavy burden of care were not lost on Soviet mothers. Larisa Ia wrote to the deputy minister for education, Nadezhda Krupskaia, in 1930 to request leave from her school following the death of her infant daughter from measles. The school board had already denied her leave to care for her prior to her daughter’s death. Larisa’s letter describes her social role as a mother and professional role as a teacher as separate yet intrinsically linked identities and commitments: ‘I have come to the conclusion that we, who remain strong for the upbringing of the new generation, must not have our own children, the flowers that colour and illuminate our lives.’⁴⁵ Larisa may have been referring to the 1926 film Children – Life’s Flowers, which was shown at an OMM event; the motif also appears in a 1925 Georgian-Russian poster, ‘Children are the flowers of the commune’, which marked the ‘week of the child’ and depicts a woman holding her baby up while surrounded by flowers and pomegranates.⁴⁶ Despite the metaphor’s possible familiarity, Larisa’s equivocation between the flowers of life and one’s own children delivers a poignant insight into her sense of personal grief. She went on to describe the emotional conflict her grief caused her in her work cultivating the flowerbed of the new Soviet generation:

How could I, tired, and with a sick child in my arms, raise the productivity of the class, what now can I give my pupils? All the cheerfulness, the desire I have to build pupils’ freedom, is gone. I function mechanically and am afflicted by this … but such unfortunate teachers and children’s tales are scattered around … our Union.

Overwhelmed by her grief, Larisa ‘functions mechanically’ and thus implies the emotionality of the Soviet project – socialist construction should be undertaken enthusiastically, although crucially her painful loss prevented this. Continuing, Larisa framed her request in the language of labour regulation, relating her work both as a mother and as a teacher to the new Soviet generation:

For us there is no regulation … In the country of the Soviets, there must not be unfortunate children, and unsupervised, neglected children, who spend most of their time under the supervision of semiliterate nannies, with whom childhood passes by grey, and unprepossessing. I’m sorry, a thousand times sorry dear Nadezhda Konstantinovna, that I took from You an hour of precious time, but it is very hard.

Central to Larisa’s letter is revolutionary maternal love, its significance for the ‘happy childhoods’ of the Soviet children and its association with socialist values such as literacy (which had been a key project after the Revolution). Poor supervision and neglect by ‘semiliterate nannies’ suggest the lingering of roles associated with the old regime, whose oppressed and uneducated domestic workers were emotionally alienated from their labour – the care of children – establishing a stark contrast with the nurture and care provided by Soviet teachers. The letter reflects an understanding of maternal care as fundamental to Larisa’s work as a female teacher and to the wellbeing of the new Soviet generation, although motherhood itself is not seen as ‘the only’ or even the most desirable work available to women.

Grieving suicide

Particularly at the beginning of the decade, the emotional tone of Soviet society was rather mixed, reflecting the perception of ongoing struggle for the fate of the Revolution. A teacher writing from Cherepovets, who signed her letter for publication as ‘M’, suggested the ‘difference between 1917 and 1924’ was ‘not so far apart’.⁴⁷ The February Revolution and collapse of the Russian autocracy was well received in Cherepovets, she wrote. ‘After the overthrow of [Tsar] Nicholas we breathed a sigh of relief.’ The peasants ‘waited for what would be’, and in October they ‘learned of and welcomed’ news of the Bolsheviks’ success, returning to their homes content and ‘full of all sorts of sensations [oshchushchenii] and experiences [perezhivanii]’.⁴⁸ Soon after, however, confusion befell the peasants. Confronted for the first time with the question of power, they wondered, ‘How will it be without a boss? Are we really going to rule over everything ourselves?’ Likewise, a local Zhenotdel delegate, Makaeva, complained to Krest’ianka in 1924 that in Laptevo village in Tula region, where she was based, ‘Work among women [was] very bad’: there had previously been three Zhenotdel delegates, but now only she remained active.⁴⁹ In her letter Makaeva clearly acknowledged the limitations to her achievements – the impact of her efforts diminished as the only Zhenotdel delegate in Laptevo, and the local party congress often forgot to invite her to elections. Significantly, she sought to remedy this and requested acceptance as a correspondent for Krest’ianka: ‘Yes, I would like to share my thoughts and impressions with peasant women of other localities, and wish to [know] where and how work is carried out.’⁵⁰ Although clearly couched in the language of self-motivated women’s emancipation, Makaeva nonetheless had no qualms about sharing her dismay over the dismal state of affairs for women with the editors of a party press.

Key to the effective transmission of dissatisfaction with post-revolutionary conditions was engagement with the transformation wrought by the Revolution, frequently depicted in the nigh-eschatological language of the illumination of darkness. A woman named Viachkova illustrated this when she wrote a note of thanks to the journal, in 1924/5, for their previous issue, which had reached her remote farm:

Each magazine, like a ray of light cuts through the darkness, connecting us with the world of women, and does not give us the feeling that we are forgotten in our corners … Reading it we are proud, and follow events around the world. It is difficult and often nearly impossible work, but we see our leaders NK Krupskaia, and Clara Zetkin and other women, wanting to teach us to build our better women’s position, as well as to pull our more backwards comrades with us.⁵¹

The tribulations of life after the Civil War, therefore, constituted a central component of the struggle for revolutionary transformation, a struggle which was implicitly gendered both by women’s backwardness and by sexist or apathetic attitudes to women’s emancipation across the territories of the Union. The maternal role embodied by leading women in the Bolshevik Party – potentially reinforced by Krupskaia’s marriage to Lenin, the father of the Revolution – and their ‘nearly impossible’ work for the emancipation of all women perhaps consolidated the significance of mothering for the Revolution’s success.

Such was the discursive potential of revolutionary maternal love and sorrow, and its mobilizational potential, that women felt able throughout the 1920s to discuss, quite openly, their children’s suicides in the press and in dialogue with high-level officials. Although the emotional tone of the decade was mixed, the preoccupation with the ‘public mood’ and concerns about counterrevolutionary feeling in the 1920s heightened anxieties about suicide, which was seen as a prioritization of the ‘self’ over the collective and evidence of counterrevolutionary feeling.⁵² In a 1924 biography commemorating her daughter’s life in Krest’ianka for International Working Women’s Day, Maria paid tribute to her daughter. Her account opens: ‘On the international day of working women, I, mother of Liza and Volodia, want to share the grief and pride of women.’⁵³ Reflecting the affective potential of letter-writing to creating presence from absence between writer and recipient, Maria’s writing could also be read as a means of creating presence from loss. By documenting her daughter’s life in a biography intended for publication in a widely circulated print journal, Maria brought Liza back into being on the page.

In the biography, Maria described her daughter’s upbringing prior to the Revolution, telling of Liza’s generosity of spirit, contributions to her community’s work and refusal to live ‘as a parasite’. Liza was seventeen when the Revolution, which she joined, took place, and afterwards she undertook political work among women. In 1920, she joined the Red Army in the struggle for the future of the Revolution. Maria explains that Liza ‘came home pale, thin, and exhausted’. On 4 June 1921, Liza ‘ended her own life’. Liza’s brother, Volodia (‘also a communist’), was killed ‘by bandits’ a day earlier, on what Maria describes as ‘the eve of Liza’s death’. Maria ends the narrative with a eulogy to her children and a pledge to continue their work:

It is hard for a mother to lose her children, such as [I have lost] mine, and my old eyes weep, but I am proud of my own children Liza and Volodia, who sacrificed their young lives for the struggle against the bourgeoisie. Goodbye my dear children, sleep tight. Change is needed, and it will bring about an end [to the struggle], and your old mother as best [she can] helps Soviet power.⁵⁴

Written two years prior to the film’s release, Maria’s biography is echoed by Pudovkin’s Mother in her subjective transformation and subsequent assumption of the revolutionary struggle. Her account underscores her own love – and associated grief – for her own two children as a natural element of motherhood, while emphasizing its centrality to her mobilization for the Revolution. Narrating her daughter’s life, Maria took great care to show Liza’s good upbringing and selflessness, neutralizing her own apparent distance from the events of the Revolution. Liza’s death was eulogized as a sacrifice for the Revolution, legitimizing Maria’s grief and managing what Peter Juviler has termed ‘the contradiction between revolutionary ideals and the aftereffects of conflict’ by framing her political mobilization as an act of mothering.⁵⁵

By the end of the 1920s, while the emotional weather in the Soviet Union had brightened, socialism was still in construction. This ongoing project justified some acknowledgement of the emotional work still to be done, but the lingering presence of anti-Soviet elements had become more dangerous. The taboo surrounding suicide intensified correspondingly. Vlasova wrote to Nadezhda Krupskaia five years later in 1929 to demand action on gender relations in schools, introducing herself as a mother of two daughters, one of whom was ‘conquered by suicide’. Vlasova’s sixteen-year-old daughter, a member of the Soviet youth programme the Pioneers, had been ‘humiliated’ on her way home from school by three boys. Vlasova’s suggestion that her daughter, an active participant in the Soviet project as a Pioneer, ‘was conquered’ by suicide, rather than having chosen it, posthumously absolved her of responsibility for the presumed rejection of the collective.

Reflecting the negative influence that parents and teachers could have on Soviet children, Vlasova’s letter details her protracted struggle with school staff over their approach to gender equality, and responsibility for her daughter’s death, remarking: ‘I’m even more condemning the teachers here.’ Vlasova sought to legitimize her conflict with the workers at the school by evoking her ‘natural’ maternal feelings, with the entreaty ‘I ask you to forgive me, a distressed mother.’ Vlasova’s motherhood and love not only for her children but for their generation as a whole mitigates the disruption her complaint causes the local Soviet schools. At the end of the letter, Vlasova reiterated the tangible significance of this mission, relating her living daughter to the struggle for gender equality, plainly stating that ‘[b]etter relations between boys and girls are necessary … I know you are busy, but I have my daughter to protect’.⁵⁶

Next to Vlasova’s file in the archive was a copy of the letter’s reply from Krupskaia, itself a relative rarity. In it, Krupskaia corroborated Vlasova’s appraisal of gender relations in schools, writing:

Dear comrade,

You are right that there is still a lot left of the old in relations between boys and girls. There is no simple, pure comradeship. I have recently written on that topic. There is a lot of gossip, gossip, suspicion. We have much of the old [regime] in children’s homes and schools. We talk all the time about schools’ work. By working together, relationships between boys and girls become comradeships. But the poverty of our country has prevented us from implementing polytechnic schools, and ordinary school study is not able to fundamentally change the old [ways]

I am very sorry for the loss of your girl so early.⁵⁷

Krupskaia’s letter is surprising in its acknowledgement of the Union’s shortcomings regarding gender relations in schools – though the women’s department, the Zhenotdel, was winding down by 1929, and Krupskaia herself would fall out of favour with Stalin, at this time she was still deputy minister for education. Acknowledging the Union’s financial shortcomings, her letter implicitly encourages Vlasova’s struggle in her local school system against the persistence of sexist attitudes. The suicide of Vlasova’s daughter, along with Vlasova’s grief, were formally, if tacitly, de-stigmatized.

Conclusions

Public letters were a key site for citizens to negotiate their social identity and belonging in the decades that followed the October Revolution. As texts, they demonstrate that women reproduced Bolshevik language carefully and creatively as meaningful historical actors, to accommodate their own circumstances and feelings firmly within the dominant discourses of Soviet power. Materially, these missives allowed their writers to forge connections with representatives of Soviet power across great distances. ‘Hand-crafted’ by their writers, often amid material scarcity, letters acted as emotional ‘agents’ on their behalf, seeking to evoke a desired emotional response from their readers. Whether the intended effect upon the reader was to provoke material aid, practical advice or simply confidence and sympathy, as ‘efforts to create presence out of absence’ letters textually and tangibly emphasized their writer’s location in their social and emotional landscape, and dialogue with the Soviet project.

As demonstrated by their letter-writing, ordinary women were capable of inhabiting and utilizing the liminal space assigned to them in early Soviet ideology. Although motherhood was pointedly not considered to be an essential role for women in the Soviet interwar years, its centrality in women’s letters as a justification for the otherwise ideologically ambiguous individualism of personal feelings such as grief and mourning reflects its significance, not only as an economic and emotional resource but also as a means of shoring up social and ideological cohesion. Although ambivalent in their (counter)revolutionary potential, the grief and sacrifice associated with maternal love could mobilize women behind the Revolution. Women themselves were finely attuned to this discursive nuance, a fact reflected by the careful shift in the tone of their letters throughout the decade. This ideological facet meant that even when lost to suicide, mothers were able to eulogize their children, wielding their emotional power as revolutionary mothers to write their lives back into the Soviet narrative. Despite a clear discursive emphasis upon social mothering, and the ambiguous role of the individual mother–child bond, mothers preserved their individual emotional bonds with their children. Engaging a strong sense of revolutionary commitment to future Soviet generations, and a strong sense of the collective, women deftly navigated the Soviet emotional landscape.

Notes

1. 1.  Rossiiskoi Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Ekonomiki (RGAE), f. 396, op. 2, d. 30, l. 42.

2. 2.  Krest’ianka started publication in 1922 and, along with its counterpart for working women, Rabotnitsa, continued to circulate for the duration of the Soviet period. K. Romanenko, ‘Photomontage for the Masses: The Soviet Periodical Press of the 1930s’, Design Issues, 26 (2010), 29–39; A. Rowley, ‘Spreading the Bolshevik Message? Soviet Regional Periodicals for Women, 1917–1941’, Canadian Slavonic Papers, 40 (2005), 111–26.

3. 3.  RGAE, f. 396, op. 2, d. 33, ll. 461–2.

4. 4.  Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii (GARF), f. 7279, op. 17, d. 38, l. 1.

5. 5.  I. Halfin, From Darkness to Light: Class Consciousness and Soviet Salvation (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), p. 2. Similar metaphors are found frequently in women’s descriptions of Soviet life; for example, RGAE, f. 396, op. 2, d. 29, l. 381; RGAE, f. 396, op. 2, d. 33, l. 222; GARF, f. 7279, op. 8, d. 15, l. 24; GARF, f. 7279, op. 6, d. 8, ll. 33–5.

6. 6.  B. Rosenwein, ‘Worrying about Emotions in History’, The American Historical Review, 107, 3 (2002), 821–45.

7. 7.  N. Eustace et al., ‘AHR Conversation: The Historical Study of Emotions’, American Historical Review, 49 (2012), 1525.

8. 8.  J. Brooks, Thank You, Comrade Stalin! Soviet Public Culture from Revolution to Cold War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), p. 83. See also G. Alexopoulos, ‘Soviet Citizenship, More or Less: Rights, Emotions, and States of Civic Belonging’, Kritika, 7 (2006), 487–528.

9. 9.  A detailed overview of the evolution of policies aimed at the liberation of women can be found in W.Z. Goldman, Women, the State, and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917–1936 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).

10. 10.  Yulia Gradskova has published widely on this subject: see, for example, ‘Emancipation at the Crossroads between the “Woman Question” and the “National Question”’, in M. Ilic (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Women and Gender in Twentieth-Century Russia and the Soviet Union (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), pp. 117–31.

11. 11.  V.I. Lenin, ‘International Working Women’s Day’, in On the Emancipation of Women: Lenin, V.I. (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), p. 82. The theoretical roots of this argument are found in F. Engels (trans. E. Untermann), The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (Chicago, IL: Charles H. Kerr & Co., 1902), available at www.gutenberg.org/files/33111/33111-h/33111-h.htm (accessed 1 June 2018). Although an ambivalence towards the ‘woman question’ dominated Bolshevik circles in the early twentieth century, innovated and lively discourse on women’s liberation was driven by women, such as Aleksandra Kollontai, Inessa Armand and Konkordia Samoilova.

12. 12.  K. Zetkin, ‘My Recollections of Lenin’, in On the Emancipation of Women (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977), p. 103.

13. 13.  J. Kristeva, ‘Women’s Time’, Signs, 71 (1981), 13–35. Kristeva’s account of the ‘monumental time’ of women locates the individual woman in a ‘cyclical’ women’s time, characterized by the reproductive cycle; H. Proctor, ‘Women on the Edge of Time: Representations of Revolutionary Motherhood in the NEP-Era Soviet Union’, Studies in the Maternal, 7 (2015), at 14–15.

14. 14.  S. Fitzpatrick, ‘Supplicants and Citizens: Public Letter-Writing in Soviet Russia in the 1930s’, Slavic Review, 55 (1996), 78–105.

15. 15.  S. Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 1997).

16. 16.  E. Naiman, ‘On Soviet Subjects and the Scholars Who Make Them’, Russian Review, 60 (2001), 311. For an explanation of ‘usable selves’, see S. Fitzpatrick, Tear Off the Masks! Identity and Imposture in Twentieth Century Russia (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). For ‘Speaking Bolshevik’ as a means of appropriating the bases of social solidarity, see Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain; for letters to the press as an ‘instrument of power’, see M. Lenoe, Closer to the Masses: Stalinist Culture, Social Revolution and Soviet Newspapers (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), especially chapter 3. Anna Krylova argues that there existed a ‘Stalinist subject that is neither lost in Stalinist culture, nor securely untouched by its ideals and demands’, in ‘Identity, Agency and the “First Soviet Generation”’, in S. Lovell (ed.), Generations in Twentieth Century Europe (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 41. See also A. Krylova, ‘The Tenacious Liberal Subject in Soviet Studies’, Kritika, 1 (2000), 119–46.

17. 17.  S. Fitzpatrick, ‘Happiness and Toska: An Essay in the History of Emotions in Pre-War Soviet Russia’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, 1 (2004)’, p. 357.

18. 18.  P. Moullas, The Discourse of Absence: Essay on Epistolarity, with 40 Unpublished Letters of Fotis Politis (1908–1910) (Athens: Ikaros, 1992), pp. 151, 158, cited by D. Vassiliadou in ‘The Idiom of Love and Sacrifice: Emotional Vocabularies of Motherhood in Nineteenth-Century Greece’, Cultural and Social History, 14 (2017), 286.

19. 19.  M. Dobson, ‘Letters’, in M. Dobson and B. Ziemann (eds.), Reading Primary Sources: The Interpretation of Texts from Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century History (London: Routledge, 2008), pp. 64–5. Sheila Fitzpatrick also argues that citizen letters reveal a ‘remarkably personal flavour’ in her study of citizen letters in the 1930s, ‘Supplicants and Citizens’, p. 82.

20. 20.  M. Wassell Smith, ‘ “The Fancy Work What Sailors Make”: Material and Emotional Creative Practice in Masculine Seafaring Communities’, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies Special Issue: Making Masculinity: Craft, Gender and Material Production in the Long Nineteenth Century, 14 (2018), www.ncgsjournal.com/issue142/smith.html. One anonymous letter, collected by the editorial board of the daily newspaper Pravda and forwarded to the Central Committee, lambasted the shortages faced by their community, exhorting: ‘Shame on you comrades … There is no vegetable oil, no cereals, no fat, nothing, and ¾lb bread.’ (GARF, f. 3316, op. 16a, d. 426, l. 50.)

21. 21.  J. Brooks, ‘The Breakdown in Production and Distribution of Printed Material, 1917–1927’, in A. Gleason, P. Kenez and R. Stites (eds.), Bolshevik Culture: Experiment and Order in the Russian Revolution (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1985), especially pp. 153–4.

22. 22.  RGAE, f. 396, op. 2, d. 33, l. 83.

23. 23.  Vassiliadou, ‘The Idiom of Love and Sacrifice’, pp. 285, 286.

24. 24.  A. Krylova, ‘Soviet Modernity: Stephen Kotkin and the Bolshevik Predicament’, Contemporary European History, 23 (2014), 167–92.

25. 25.  Goldman, Women, the State, and Revolution, p. 1.

26. 26.  O. Issoupova, ‘From Duty to Pleasure? Motherhood in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia’, in S. Ashwin (ed.), Gender, State and Society in Soviet and Post-Soviet Russia (London: Routledge, 2012), p. 31.

27. 27.  For the older, peasant woman as the antithesis of Soviet hygiene and medicine, see R. Glickman, ‘The Peasant Woman as Healer’, in B.E. Clements, B. Alpert Engel and C. Worobec (eds.), Russia’s Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 148–62.

28. 28.  Poster, O. Gri︠u︡n, 1925.

29. 29.  T. Starks, ‘A Fertile Mother Russia: Pronatalist Propaganda in Revolutionary Russia’. Journal of Family History, 28 (2003), 420; Issoupova, ‘From Duty to Pleasure?’, p. 38; see also A. Rowley, ‘Where Are All the Mother Heroines? Images of Maternity in Soviet Films of the 1930s’, Canadian Journal of History, 44 (2009), 37.

30. 30.  T.M. Durfee, ‘ “Cement and How the Steel Was Tempered”: Variations on the New Soviet Woman’, in S. Stephan Hoisington (ed.), A Plot of Her Own: The Female Protagonist in Russian Literature (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1995), p. 96.

31. 31.  L. Kaminsky, ‘Utopian Visions of Family Life in the Stalin-Era Soviet Union’, Central European History, 44 (2011), 64.

32. 32.  RGAE, f. 396, op. 1, d. 5, ll. 74–6.

33. 33.  R. Balmas Neary, ‘Mothering Socialist Society: The Wife-Activists’ Movement and the Soviet Culture of Daily Life, 1934–1941’, The Russian Review, 58 (1999), 400.

34. 34.  Proctor, ‘Women on the Edge of Time’, p. 2.

35. 35.  Issoupova, ‘From Duty to Pleasure?’, p. 36.

36. 36.  Mat’ (feature film), dir. Vsevolod Pudovkin. Mezhrabpomfilm, 1926, 89 mins.

37. 37.  Battleship Potemkin (feature film), dir. Sergei Eisenstein. Mosfilm, 1925, 75 mins.

38. 38.  Proctor, ‘Women on the Edge of Time’, p. 13.

39. 39.  Rossiiskoi Gosudarstvennyi Arkhiv Sotsial’no-politicheskoii Istorii (RGASPI), f. 78, op. 1, d. 350, ll. 27–8.

40. 40.  RGAE, f. 396, op. 1, d. 5, l. 95.

41. 41.  RGAE, f. 396, op. 2, d. 29, ll. 1–3.

42. 42.  RGAE, f. 396, op. 2, d. 29, ll. 1–3.

43. 43.  Yulia Gradskova has explained the gendered cultural hierarchies related to the ‘woman question’ in late imperial Russia and the early Soviet Union in more detail, arguing that ‘Early Bolshevik policies for the emancipation of non-Russian women were based on a mixture of proletarian slogans and old imperial ideas relating to the need to civilize and educate non-Christian people, who, theretofore, had preserved traditional occupations, hierarchies, and beliefs’, in ‘ “The Woman of the Orient Is Not the Voiceless Slave Anymore”: The Non-Russian Woman of Volga-Ural Region and “Women’s Question”’, in M. Neumann and A. Willimott (eds.), Rethinking the Russian Revolution as Historical Divide (London: Routledge, 2017), p. 170.

44. 44.  Issoupova, ‘From Duty to Pleasure?’, p. 35.

45. 45.  GARF, f. 7279, op. 7, d. 18, l. 42.

46. 46.  ‘Deti – tsvety kommuny’, artist unknown, Russkii revolutsionnyi plakat (Moscow, 1925), p. 192, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Неизвестный_художник._Дети_—_цветы_коммуны.jpg (accessed 14 June 2023).

47. 47.  RGAE, f. 396, op. 2, d. 33, l. 442.

48. 48.  RGAE, f. 396, op. 2, d. 33, l. 442.

49. 49.  RGAE, f. 396, op. 2, d. 33, ll. 271–2.

50. 50.  RGAE, f. 396, op. 2, d. 33, ll. 271–2.

51. 51.  RGAE, f. 396, op. 2, d. 33, l. 270.

52. 52.  K. Pinnow, Lost to the Collective: Suicide and the Promise of Soviet Socialism, 1921–1929 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010), p. 250. In the absence of the deceased, the attribution of ‘blame’ for the practice was assigned to local authorities or the deceased’s own family, thereby ‘absolv[ing] the socialist environment from any liability’. One letter sent from Yartsevo, Smolensk, which reported cases of worker suicides, was forwarded to the highest rungs of Soviet government and demonstrates the connection of suicide with counterrevolution: ‘The mood of the workers is terrible, they are dissatisfied with the existing system, they say that before they lived better, especially the old [workers] … At Yartsevo factory in connection with the dismissal there were cases of suicide’ (GARF, f. 3316, op. 16.a, d. 426, l. 1).

53. 53.  RGAE, f. 396, op. 2, d. 30, l. 42.

54. 54.  RGAE, f. 396, op. 2, d. 30, l. 42.

55. 55.  P.H. Juviler, ‘Contradictions of Revolution: Juvenile Crime and Rehabilitation’, in A. Gleason, P. Kenez and R. Stites, Bolshevik Culture: Experiment and Order in the Russian Revolution (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1985), p. 273.

56. 56.  GARF, f. 7279, op. 7, d. 18, ll. 15–16.

57. 57.  GARF, f. 7279, op. 7, d. 18, l. 14.

References