Kremlin Wives

Although the role of women at the pinnacle of the Kremlin society isn't the most important aspect of the history of gender during the Soviet experiment, Larissa Vasilieva's book, Kremlin Wives, is a surprisingly illuminating good introduction to the subject of communist women's history. Published only shortly after the collapse of the Soviet state, Vasilieva was able to interview a number of important Kremlin women as well as to attain relevant files related to their frequent brushes with Stalin's security organs.  Vasilieva, who was herself a relatively privileged member of the Soviet apparatchiki, tells the story of Soviet womanhood through the biography of elite Soviet women.  These women include the wives of Lenin, Stalin, Beria, Budyonnaya, Molotov, Khrushchev, and Gorbachev, to name just a few of Vasilieva's fascinating subjects.

For the most part, the Kremlin wives were highly intelligent leaders in their own right.  Certainly Lenin's wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, as well as Lenin's mistress, Inessa Armand, made important contributions to the revolutionary movement, and Krupskaya in particular helped to shape the Soviet worldview, especially regarding education.  Even so, both women always put Lenin first, and their willingness to take a back seat to Lenin's political primacy was a portent of things to come.  Although revolutionary history is filled with examples of heroic female Russian revolutionaries, male Soviet leaders were never entirely comfortable  Until Raisa Gorbachev proved that the Soviet Union was able to accept another dynamic, educated, and highly visible woman in public affairs  (and many Soviet citizens retained serious reservations about Raisa's public role), Krupskaya was the last wife of the Party's leader who exercised a clear position of leadership in her own right.  

With the rise of Stalin, the role of elite Soviet women became much more conservative.   Whereas many revolutionaries had at least entertained ideas about free love, female emancipation from child reading duties, divorce, and the link between bourgeois family structures and capitalism, the cult of Stalin soon reconciled Soviet political culture to pre-revolutionary gender norms.  While Stalin's own wife (or his second wife to be more accurate), Nadezhda Alliluyeva, worked, and maintained her own professional identity, her suicide ( if not murder) seemed to mark the limits of Stalin's tolerance for independent women.  

Of course the predominent theme of Kremlin Wives is, almost necessarily, a description of how women dealt with all-encompassing terror.  Marshal Budyonny's second third wife is illustrative. While making the Marshall a happy home by playing the role of a traditional domestic housewife, Maria Vasilievna, also had to contend with the fact that the Marshal's second wife, Olga Stefanovna, had been imprisoned on trumped up charges. Molotov's wife, Paulina Zhemchuzhina, was actually imprisoned even as her husband continued to serve Stalin.  Beria's wife, Nina Beria, had to contend with the fact that her husband was systematically raping young women, in addition to overseeing the state's more formal mechanisms of terrorizing its citizens.  Nina seems to have chosen to live in denial, although the Vasilieva is right to point out that it can be very difficult to pass judgement on any of the Kremlin wives when they were fearful of being sent to the gulag or killed of they voiced any criticism of Stalin or his henchmen. 

With Stalin's death, the daily regime of terror soon subsided.  However, it's difficult to say that the effects of terror didn't last until the very end of the Soviet Union, if not beyond.  Nina Kukharchuk, Khrushchev's wife, had survived the terror by remaining in the shadows.  She wasn't a glamorous woman, but she had once served to promote Soviet power in its infancy.  Born poor,  Nina Kukharchuk remained a stalwart communist functionary who accompanied her husband on a few famous diplomatic missions but mostly strove to support her husband in his domestic life.  Her successor, Victoria Pretrovna, also adopted a low profile, accommodating her husband, Leonid Breshnev, even as he moved from one mistress to another. While not necessarily personally corrupt, Victoria Pretrovna supported her relatives even as they abused the privileges of the communist elite.

Taken as a whole, the Kremlin wives were both similar to, and different from, ordinary Soviet women.  The Kremlin wives were, generally speaking, a confident group of women, at least insofar as anyone living so close to the edge of terror could be considered confident.  The Kremlin women were extremely privileged in many respects, and many made use of the special stores, dachas, and governesses that were available to them.  However, their lives were extremely complicated.  The Soviet Union never fully worked out its attitude toward women.  Were they supposed to work outside the home or in the home?  Were nannies okay or a sign of bourgeois privilege?  Was it possible to play a public role in public affairs?  Did women have an important role to play in the formation of policy related to childhood, education, or family life in general?  How much education, and what type of education, was desirable?  The Soviet Union collapsed even as these debates raged around Raisa Gorbachev.

Some quotes from the book:

"If she doesn't shut her mouth the Party will appoint old Elena Stasova as Lenin's widow in her place!"  Vasilieva citing Stalin.

"Intelligent, beautiful, and as delicate-looking as porcelain, Alexandra Kollontai put women's sexuality at the center of the Communist agenda."

"What is rarely mentioned is that the revolutionaries fought a small detachment of palace gaurds and the Petrograd Battalion of Women.  In other words, the Bolsheviks' victory that night was over women."

"The Kremlin, the seat of Soviet power, was also a vast communal apartment complex."

"Even the best parents ruin their children by bringing them up at home."  Lyadov-Mandelstam.

"Can a collective person be produced in an individual family?  To this we must say a categorical no."  Lyadov-Mandelstam.

"No Kremlin wife's opinion was ever officially welcomed.  Those who challenged that fact--such as Molotov's wife, Zhemchuzhina, as we shall see--were promptly arrested."

"We're creating a new state," she wrote.  "People need us.  It would be hypocritical to deny ourselves the things people always acquire when they come to power."

"Larissa Reisner was a tangle of contradictions.  She could turn simple immorality into an exploit. Osip Mandelstam recalled that Larissa once threw a party solely to enable Cheka agents to arrest the guests."

"She cast her lot with him like a tiny sailboat drawn to a giant ocean-going steamer."  Svetlana Alliluyeva describing her mother's relationship to Stalin.

"He went so far as to offer to shoot his wife, an impulse evidently familiar to many Kremlin men in those days."

"This time she found the beaches empty.  All the fashionable women from last season were now in jail."

"As the Soviet system scythed and leveled its human resources, fear was a daily staple and worked its way deep into the Russian character."

"The personal has no social significance."  Kaganovich.

"A large quantity of male debauchery."  From an official inventory of Beria's office.

"Stalin wanted to create a mighty state, and he succeeded.  Of course there had to be victims.  But no politician then could see any other path that would us to our precious goal without victims."  Nina Beria.

"...Kremlin life is part of a complex distribution system of privilege that must always be kept a secret."

Russian Women

I want to thank my colleague in my college's social sciences division for telling me about an upcoming conference on Russian women at Loyola University on 3 May 2010. I've been meaning to test the waters of academia after a long interlude by attending some Russian conference, and this free, local event will have the advantage of offering me some additional material on women's history. As readers no doubt notice, this blog hasn't been very vigilent about posting information or even ruminations about gender, sexuality, or women's history. We hope this will change. Already, I've been searching out texts on Soviet women and I hope to address these books very soon. The conference should give me additional incentives to get serious about gender in modern Russian history.

Information about this conference can be found at this link: http://www.luc.edu/gannon/Women_in_Russia.shtm. It's a political science event thinly disguised as an interdiciplinary happening. But talks on civil society, maternity policies, migration and demography, artic sciences, politics, and law sound promising. Speakers include Yoshiko Herrera, Vicki Hesli, John Ishiyama, Kathyrn Hendley, Janet Johnson, Richard Matland, Michele Rivkin-Fish, and Regina Smyth. It's at from 9:30am to 4:30am. Gannon Center for Women and Leadership, Piper Hall, first floor, Loyola, Lakeshore Campus. Register now and don't be late.

Thanks to the CLC Social Science Department for the alert. Visit their blog at the following link:

http://clcsocialsciences.wordpress.com/

Women in Exile

Thus far this blog hasn’t made use of oral history to map the history of the Revolution. Yet oral history helps to see how the Revolution as an abstract phenomenon manifested itself in the particular. In history, it’s the little things that sometimes matter more than the big things. Is it more important to know what happened to autocracy or is it more relevant to ask what happened to windjammers, snow-filled food storage well, oil lamps, dachas, public parks filled with attendant-operated “tricks and follies,” full-length dress school uniforms, French-speaking nannies, and German tutors? Another advantage of oral history is that it helps us to recover the voices of women, whose stories often unfold in the context of the private sphere as opposed to the more masculine public sphere. Although women haven’t produced a large percentage of the documentary evidence for large portions of history, their life experiences are no less important for that.

Memories of Revolution: Russian Women Remember isn’t an objective book and it’s not even about ordinary Russians. The ten women who sat for interviews with Frances Welch and Elena Snow were extraordinary. They were exiles, almost all White Russian exiles, and all grew up in considerable privilege before 1917. One was 98 at the time of the interviews. The stories are remarkable. Some of the exiles knew famous people and participated in public life on a political or artistic level. Leo Tolstoy helped to arrange the adoption of one, who remained in Tolstoyan circles throughout her life. She even painted one of the most famous pictures we have of the master. Another woman’s father served on the Tsar’s personal yacht and went to a school that was tied to the life of the Tsar’s court. She herself became a sculptor of note, soon tied by marriage to a revolutionary of some note.

The histories of these women—as told by the women themselves—shed light on a many facets of Russian history. We learn about how aristocratic and bourgeois families operated, in terms of dating rituals, entertainment, musical preferences, education, servant support, nourishment, and technology. Most poignantly, we see how the trauma of history works. As the book’s authors assert, many of these women see the pre-revolutionary period as an idyllic period, never to be repeated. 1917 came with a fury. Fathers and brothers and male cousins were often murdered or tortured or killed on the battlefield. Properties were confiscated. Many were put to work. Some came close to starvation. Many were jailed, their wives left to plead that as admirals they had at least treated their men with fraternal love and respect.

The book is most powerful in its understatement. As one women remembered, one year she was too young to participate in a school dance. She watched as the older girls danced with elite, uniformed cadets, and thought: “Oh well, next year I’ll be allowed to dance. But next year never came.” Another woman recalled her mother devoting specified days to writing letters for illiterate hired help. The letters often listed each and every member of the letter-sender’s village, including all of their patronymics. The story-teller recalls asking her mother why they had to write such monotonous letters all of the time. The mother explained that if the letter-sender neglected to mention the name of a single member of the peasant commune, he or she would be gravely insulted.

One woman remembers how the Bolshevik victory resulted in the wholesale sale of valuable private property on the black market to avoid the danger of outright confiscation. This woman, relocated to London, believed she had purchased some of Catherine the Great’s earrings and wore these earrings most of her life. One woman said she lost touch with her peasant nanny but then rediscovered her in Paris two decades later. The nanny immediately asked her how old she was, since she only knew her age in relationship to the woman she raised.

It’s remarkable really, to hear these women describe the way their lives were overturned. One minute their servants are preparing picnics for them, the next they are impoverished, landless, crowded, unemployed, and under suspicion. Some of the women remember hearing about the political events as they unfolded. They remember hearing when the First World War broke out, when Rasputin was murdered and they allegedly found his shoe in the Neva river, when the February Revolution occurred and people stood around talking on the streets about what should happen next, when the Bolsheviks disarmed troops who were loyal to the Provincial Government, when Bolshevik forces started hunting down opponents, etc.

One woman remembered seeing the tsar’s girls riding merrily in a troika before the Revolution, then seeing the tsar shoveling snow for exercise and being told that he was a prisoner in his own palace. The same woman remembers living next to Gorky who, she said, bothered the children by trying unsuccessfully to play with them. Most revealing, this woman also remembers that her aunt was sent away to the gulag where she survived owing to her talent as a painter. For two decades, the woman employed her talents to draw portraits of a man she must have hated—Stalin--for Communist officials.