[66] E. Bagdat'eva, "Detskii Proletkul't," Griadushchee , no. 6 (1918), p. 14.
[67] Moskovskaia konferentsiia , p. 39.
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homes at an early age. This was necessary, according to one male participant, in order to combat the conservative influence of their parents, especially their mothers.[68]
Such grandiose schemes far surpassed Proletkult resources and would hardly have been sanctioned by either Narkompros or working-class families themselves. A more modest course taken by some local circles was to open special "Children's Proletkults" (Detskie Proletkul'ty ), which catered to young people ages eight to sixteen. The most successful of these opened in Tula in 1919.[69] It even published its own newspaper, staffed and edited by the young participants themselves.
The contents of the Tula paper, titled Children's Proletkult (Detskii Proletkul't) , reveal young people's hostility to the confines of conventional family life. Enthusiastic revolutionary youths expressed their hopes for a special proletarian culture for children that would be based on a highly developed sense of children's self-worth and autonomy. In these articles children and youth appeared as the real revolutionaries who needed to inspire recalcitrant, backward adults to revolutionary acts. "We have to do more than awaken and organize other children," wrote one fourteen-year-old girl. "We have to awaken and organize our fathers, mothers, older brothers, and sisters to come to the defense of the revolution."[70] According to the organization's young leader, Dmitrii Pozhidaev, the Children's Proletkult would liberate young people from the despotism of the petty-bourgeois family and give them useful social tasks.[71]
Although no other provincial organization developed a net-
[68] Protokoly pervoi konferentsii , pp. 62–717, 53.
[69] Report from V. V. Ignatov, July 8, 1919, TsGALI f. 1230, op. 1, d. 1538, ll.9 ob.–10.
[70] Aleksandra Vagina, "Tovarishchi-deti," Detskii Proletkul't , no. 4 (1920), p. 2; see also A. Sokolova, "K rabochim," ibid., no. 1 (1919), p. 3.
[71] D. Pozhidaev, "Detskii gubernskii Proletkul't," Proletarskoe stroitel'stvo , no. 2 (1919), pp. 28–29.
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work as large as Tula's, many sponsored special activities for children. The Rybinsk and Syzran Proletkults had separate children's sectors, and the Tver, Rzhev, Vladikavkaz, and Pushkinskii raion groups opened children's studios.[72] Some factory circles supported child-care facilities. According to one organizer in Cheliabinsk, the most enthusiastic response to his attempt to found a Proletkult came from the female secretary of the local soviet, who told him that mothers wanted to start groups for their children.[73]
None of this, however, amounted to a consistent or coherent policy. Proletkult programs were simply not equal to the colossal task of social transformation. Like many other early Soviet radicals, Proletkult organizers assumed that the family would wither away on its own as its basic child-rearing tasks were assumed by state and workers' institutions. "It seemed to us that the bourgeois world had crashed down and that its remains—former family and property relations, the dependence of women, and even the 'domestic economy'—were already buried forever," reminisced a woman who had attended the first Zhenotdel congress in 1918. "Reading the reports and resolutions of this congress now, one is simply astonished [to see] the ease with which they projected the complete transformation of the old world, state sponsored child-rearing, changes in marital relations, the destruction of the domestic economy, and so on."[74]
By the start of the New Economic Policy it was obvious that
[72] Local questionnaires from Rybinsk, TsGALI f. 1230, op. 1, d. 117,ll.96–97; from Syran, d. 114, l.125; and from Tver, d. 1527, l.55. For Rzhev see Griadushchee , no. 9/12 (1921), p. 100; and for Vladikavkaz see Proletkul't (Vladikavkaz), no. 1 (1919), p. 13.
[73] There were child-care facilities at the Tula Armaments Works and the Tomna factory in Kineshma; see the local questionnaires in TsGALI f. 1230, op. 1, d. 1540, ll. 4–4 ob. and d. 117, l.34. On efforts to start child-care in Cheliabinsk see the May 25, 1920, report by a local organizer, d. 1238, l.5 ob.
[74] V. Golubeva, "Vserossiiskii s"ezd rabotnits i krest'ianok," Kornmunistka , no. 11 (1923), p. 18. See also Hayden, "Feminism and Bolshevism," p. 139.
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old social mores could not be so easily uprooted. The state was not going to take over all of the home's functions, and the family would not melt away on its own. Only then did Proletkultists begin to take the need for pragmatic measures more seriously, rather than loudly predicting the family's demise. Focusing their efforts primarily on workers' clubs, Proletkult organizers tried to devise methods to increase female participation, such as offering day-care centers and special discussion groups that addressed women's needs. Once in the club women would be taught about socialism and the accomplishments of the revolution and would also receive special courses in child-rearing.[75]
Most of these suggestions hardly challenged socially accepted gender roles; women were exhorted to become better socialists by becoming better socialist mothers. Rather than proposing that men assume part of the onerous burden of housework, Proletkult literature suggested that women form collective kitchens and rationalize their labor in the home. These proposals were light years away from the world of Bogdanov's Martian heroine, but they did acknowledge that the working class was made up of both men and women, something earlier proletarian circles had been loath to do.