The Proletarian Family
In their writings on social values and social mores Proletkult theorists emerged as thoughtful critics of the proletarian family, which they felt inculcated the class-alien values of careerism, competition, and individualism. Proletkult analyses revealed a clear understanding of the influence of the family on social behavior. However, they also exposed a deep hostility to the privacy of the home and hearth. The family was viewed primarily as a negative force that posed a powerful threat to proletarian collectivism. Thus Proletkultists proposed to circumvent the family by drawing all family members into the public, collective world of the labor movement.
Before 1917 the Russian socialist movement, like its European counterparts, gave scant attention to family issues. It was widely held that the emancipation of women would inevitably follow in the wake of a socialist revolution, just as expanding labor opportunities for women would restructure family patterns. In the meantime most Russian socialists did not believe that these problems were of burning importance. Only with great difficulty and perseverance did some women organizers convince the Social Democratic Party to develop programs geared specifically to women workers.[41]
[40] See, for example, "Obshchestvenno-nauchnyi kruzhok," Rabochii klub , no. 1 (1924), pp. 5–9; and V. F. Pletnev, Rabochii klub: Printsipy i metody ego raboty , 2d ed. (Moscow, 1925), pp. 22–38. For more on club education during the New Economic Policy see Chapter 8.
[41] On the organizing efforts of the Social Democratic Party among working women see Richard Stites, The Women's Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism and Bolshevism, 1860–1930 (Princeton, 1978), esp. pp. 233–78; Rose L. Glickman, "The Russian Factory Woman, 1880–1914," in Women in Russia , ed. Dorothy Atkinson, Alexander Dallin, and Gail Lapidus (Stanford, 1977), pp. 79–83; idem, Russian Factory Women: Workplace and Society, 1880–1914 (Berkeley, 1984), pp. 242–80; and Anne Bobroff, "The Bolsheviks and Working Women, 1905–1920," Soviet Studies , vol. 26, no. 4 (1974), pp. 540–67.
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Radicals in the Proletkult had a better record on these issues than many of their Bolshevik counterparts. Although the student participants at the Capri and Bologna schools were all men, Aleksandra Kollontai came to Bologna to lecture on agitation among women workers.[42] In his Vperedist writings Aleksandr Bogdanov attacked the narrowness of proletarian family life. His utopian novel Red Star, written to popularize his political and social theories, was in part about the redefinition of sexual roles he felt the revolution would bring. Children were raised communally on socialist Mars. Women, freed from the tyranny of the home, held the same jobs as men and even looked similar to them. The Martian Netti, the book's heroine, was a gifted doctor and intergalactic explorer. Bogdanov's utopia held no place for the nuclear family.[43]
When the Bolsheviks came to power, they made the family a key part of their broad social agenda by purging family law of its most oppressive qualities. Divorce was simplified, abortion legalized, and economic provisions dictated equal pay for equal work. Women activists founded a special division of the Communist Party, the Zhenotdel, to ensure that women were informed of their new rights and encouraged to take leadership roles.[44] These measures met resistance from men, who
[42] S. Livshits, "Partiinaia shkola v Bolon'e, 1910–1911 gg.," Proletarskaia revoliutsiia , no. 3 (1926), p. 133.
[43] Bogdanov's 1911 article, "Sotsializm v nastoiashchem," addressed family matters. See Bogdanov, O proletarskoi kul'ture , pp. 94–99. See also Bogdanov, Red Star , pp. 23–140, esp. pp. 68–74.
[44] On the Zhenotdel see Stites, The Women's Liberation Movement in Russia , pp. 317–46; Carol Eubanks Hayden, "The Zhenotdel and the Bolshevik Party," Russian History , vol. 3, no. 2 (1976), pp. 150–73; and idem, "Feminism and Bolshevism: The Zhenotdel and the Politics of Women's Emancipation in Russia, 1917–1930" (Ph.D. diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1979).
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were reluctant to give up their privileged position inside and outside the home, and also from women, who saw state measures as a frightening threat to the security that marriage had provided.[45] But for some, like the Bolshevik feminist Aleksandra Kollontai, the revolutionary programs did not go far enough. Like Bogdanov, she envisioned a society where the nuclear family would no longer be a social necessity.[46]
In the early Soviet debate on the family's future many Proletkult members sided with the radicals. They wanted to see the family's social functions, and particularly its child-rearing responsibilities, replaced by public organs, a course that would lead to the end of the old family. However, there was a curious gap between ends and means. Neither national nor local organizations developed realistic programs to implement their ideas. Bogdanov's own views were symptomatic. Although he offered a cogent criticism of the family's debilitating power,[47] he did not suggest how to move from the individualist tyranny of the old system to the communalist society depicted in his novels.
The failure of Proletkult organizations to place the proletarian family at the center of their practice was in part owing to these organizations' roots in the prerevolutionary socialist movement. Many local groups grew from a base in union and
[45] On the social consequences of Bolshevik family laws see Barbara Evans Clements, "The Birth of the New Soviet Woman," in Bolshevik Culture , ed. Abbott Gleason, Peter Kenez, and Richard Stites (Bloomington, 1985), pp. 220–37; Beatrice Farnsworth, "Village Women Experience the Revolution," in Gleason, Kenez, and Stites, Bolshevik Culture , pp. 238–60; and Wendy Goldman, "Freedom and its Consequences: The Debate on the Soviet Family Code of 1926," Russian History , vol. 11, no. 4 (1984), pp. 362–88.
[46] Barbara Evans Clements, Bolshevik Feminist: The Life of Aleksandra Kollontai (Bloomington, 1979), pp. 149–77, 225–41; and Alexandra Kollontai, Selected Writings , ed. and trans. Alix Holt (New York, 1977), pp. 113–50, 201–92. For a broad range of contemporary views on the family see William G. Rosenberg, ed., Bolshevik Visions (Ann Arbor, 1984), pp. 73–141.
[47] See A. A. Bogdanov, Elementy proletarskoi kul'tury v razvitii rabochego klassa (Moscow, 1920), pp. 48–49.
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factory clubs, which served mainly a male clientele. Efforts to solicit female participation before 1917 had been at best half-hearted.[48] Numerous Proletkultists retained these views after the revolution. When Pavel Lebedev-Polianskii examined the role of Proletkult clubs at the first national conference in 1918, he assumed that they would serve as a refuge from the family. He argued that each club needed a library because workers' apartments were too small and dark and the eager learner was too often interrupted by the noise of children. "It is imperative to create an atmosphere in the club where a person can learn to work in public life, freed from the clutches of petty family life."[49] Just what would happen to those left behind in the dismal, noisy apartment—presumably women and children—did not seem to concern him.
Proletkult artistic products reinforced this image of the working class and its institutions as an adult male sphere. The most common representation of the worker evoked in verse, placards, and song was the mighty male blacksmith with muscled arms and calloused hands, a recurrent theme in Western European socialist art as well.[50] The only family that really mattered was the surrogate family of the working class, with the conviviality of the shop floor and the warmth of workers' organizations. This surrogate family was almost exclusively a male preserve. Women and children were minor, almost missing, themes in the factory-centered thematic of Proletkult creation. "I am the son of labor," proclaimed one proletarian author.[51] Mikhail Gerasimov reserved his most tender lyrics for the workplace. In one poem he evoked his beloved factory under its kerchief of smoke with its melodious steel voice.[52] It was the factory, not a woman, that was the
[48] See I. N. Kubikov, "Uchastie zhenshchin-rabotnits v klubakh," Vestnik kul'tury i svobody , no. 2 (1918), pp. 34–37.
[49] Protokoly pervoi konferentsii , p. 96.
[50] On Western European imagery see Eric Hobsbawm, "Man and Woman in Socialist Iconography," History Workshop Journal , no. 6 (1978), pp. 121–38.
[51] Martyn, "Ia syn truda," Krasnoe utro , no. 1 (1919), p. 18.
[52] Mikhail Gerasimov, "Vozvrashchenie," in Stikhotvoreniia , by Mikhail Gerasimov (Moscow, 1959), pp. 95–96.
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object of his desire. In other works women only served to restrain male action in the world, as in the popular Civil War play Don't Go (Ne khodi ), in which the heroine begged her husband not to join the Red Army.[53]
Because Proletkult leaders presented the organization as the cultural vanguard of the working class, they had no pressing reason to find an innovative way to restructure the family. The movement could only include the family if it extended itself to women workers, but women were traditionally much less skilled members of the proletariat. Russian working women also had very poor literacy levels because they had had far fewer educational opportunities open to them before the revolution. The prejudices of parents, fellow workers, and even women themselves often led to the attitude that female education was an unnecessary luxury.[54] For many male workers and political activists women remained a symbol of the unformed, superstitious attitudes that the working class had to leave behind.[55]
The solutions Proletkult participants devised to transform the proletarian family revealed the privileged position they tendered the male-dominated world of socialist institutions and also their deep-seated suspicions of female authority inside the home. They aimed to minimize the family's power by drawing women and children into the Proletkult and, wherever possible, by replacing private tasks with public ones. This policy would serve a dual function; it would reeducate women to accept their new role under socialism while limiting the family's ability to distort the values of future generations.
Discussions about the family were often really discussions about women and the power that they had to destroy the goals