Big words with big meanings are powerful – if you know how to use them.
Among the
biggest, and most frequently used, of these words I’ve found students using is ‘patriarchy’.
Behind the word lies a highly complex concept, which students tend to reduce to
the startling simple formula of ‘a male dominated society’.
Like all
simple formulas, this has a very large element of truth to it. Like all simple
formulas, it also overlooks the inherent complexity of the concept.
From the perspective
of Russian and Soviet history, what did patriarchy look like in
practice? Here, I’ll pick up on three elements of a dynamic patriarchal society that
come through clearly in this context.
1. Peasant Russia: Tyranny of the Elder Male
While patriarchal
societies are defined by male dominance, they often also have a strong age
bias. In peasant Russia during the Tsarist era, it was the eldest male who led
the household, giving fathers and grandfathers positions of authority over not
just women, but also younger male and children. In certain respects, age was more
important than gender in establishing who held authority, at least within
the home. While women were often marginalised from public life, it was
typically women who managed the household day-to-day, giving mothers and
grandmothers considerable power of their own in practice.
The power of
elder males, however, was often seen as particularly overbearing. The startlingly
unfavourable depiction of peasant life in Anton Chekhov’s short story,
The Peasants, hinges in large part on the abusive treatment of Marya,
whose drunken husband beats and torments her openly while family and neighbours
watch on.
Young men in
Russian villages also felt the burden of their father’s position, leading many
to seek a more liberated life in towns and cities beyond the control of the
village household. Semen Kanatchikov, whose memoirs of leaving the
village and becoming a worker before the revolution were later published in the
USSR, recalls that:
My father was strict in disposition and despotic in
character. He kept the entire family in mortal fright. We all feared him and
did everything we could to please him. […] Not infrequently he would drink to
the point where he was seriously ill, and there were even occasions when he was
close to death. When his binges were over and he’d begun to recover, Father
would become gloomy, morose, and demanding. A heavy silence reigned over our
home, and everyone would tremble. […] My life in the village was becoming
unbearable. I wanted to rid myself of the monotony of village life as quickly
as possible, to free myself from my father’s despotism and tutelage, to begin
to live a self-reliant, independent life. It was not long before the opportunity
presented itself, and Father, after long arguments and discussions, decided to
let me go to Moscow. My joy and delight were boundless![1]
When the
1917 revolution first overthrew the old Tsarist autocracy and then brought the Bolsheviks
to power, Russia’s new rulers pledged to liberate women. The Provisional
Government in 1917 instituted full female suffrage. The Communist
government in 1918 introduced a new marriage and family code. And the
Communist Party established a dedicated Women’s Section (the Zhenotdel)
in 1919.
The Communists,
often taking the lead from visionary Bolshevik feminists such as Alexandra
Kollontai and Nadezhda Krupskaya, publicly proclaimed their
intention (and successes) to free women. This was a particularly proletarian
feminism. Indeed, Kollontai and Krupskaya were openly dismissive of ‘bourgeois’
feminists associated with middle class liberalism.
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| Credit: Wikipedia, public domain |
Yet early Soviet culture was infused with a militant masculinity in which young male Communists asserted their gendered power through course language, military dress, and everyday violence. Much of this went back to the Russian civil war of 1918-21 (and before it, the 1917 revolution and First World War), which resulted in a more general militarisation of social and cultural norms. Male members of the Komsomol (Communist Youth League), supposedly in the vanguard of the Communist movement to liberate women and the proletariat, were frequently noted to drink heavily and subject their female comrades to sexual harassment and violence.
As historian
Sean Guillory notes:
The ethos of a young communist was coded masculine. Even if a girl
negotiated boys’ torments, her very femininity precluded her from becoming a
true communist. In order to craft a “new everyday life” in the 1920s, young
male communists denied all signs of the feminine in mannerism, dress, and
emotions. The most visible symbols were the leather jacket; knee high leather
boots, a Sam Brown belt, and a pistol. Emotions like sentimentality were
rejected for a cold, hard demeanor. The ability to spit out a string of curses
was a feat of admiration and respect, a test of manhood, and a means of male
bonding. By swearing, young men created a toxic environment for girls. Young
communist speech was so offensive that sometimes girls avoided meetings to
avoid the embarrassment of overheated conversations.[2]
3. Family
and Work in the USSR: Unequal Sexual and Labour Relations
On paper, there
was huge progress towards gender equality in the USSR (the multi-ethnic state,
officially established in 1922, which succeeded the old Russian Empire). Marriage
became a union of equals, divorce became freely available, contraception and
abortion were legalised, and children were no longer subjected to their parents’
tyrannical control at home.
In practice,
vestiges of male domination and gender bias remained and even became entrenched
in new ways in the first years of Communist rule. With civil marriage and no-fault
divorces legally established, young men by the early 1920s were noted to enter
into a series of short-term ‘marriages’ which they then walked away from, abandoning
spouses (possibly with a child). Abortion, legalised in 1920, was in reality
seen as a ‘necessary evil’.
Prostitution,
which spiked during and after the civil war, was also legal but often stigmatised
as a sign of female immorality. This was despite official attempts to reframe
it as a result of exploitation and poverty. According to historian Siobhán Hearne:
Attempts to shift the blame for prostitution onto the
shoulders of brothel keepers, pimps and clients, rather than women who worked
as prostitutes, did not reconcile the contradictory nature of early Soviet
approaches to female emancipation […]. In campaigns of sanitary enlightenment,
the Soviet government clung to pre-revolutionary negative stereotypes of women
who sold sex and depicted them as the source of all venereal infections. In
discussions regarding prostitution, the Soviet government divided prostitutes
into two types: those who sold sex to escape poverty and a small minority of
so-called ‘professionals’. Official discourse categorized the latter category
as ‘malicious’ (zlostnyi)
or ‘hardened’ (zakorenelyi) lost causes, and they made effective
villains in health propaganda.[3]
As the
Soviet system developed, unequal sexual and labour relations between men and
women became entrenched. Under Stalin, the USSR rapidly industrialised and the
number of women steadily increased. Between 1929 and 1939, the percentage of
workers in large-scale industry who grew from 28.5% to 43.3%. Nevertheless, deep
structural inequalities remained.
Women were
far more likely to be employed in traditionally feminised (and lower-paid) workplaces,
particularly in clothing and textiles manufacturing. Within the workplace,
meanwhile, positions of authority continued to be dominated by men. Complaints
of sexual harassment from abusive foremen were common. At home, the burden of
childcare rested overwhelmingly on women (despite attempts to rather limited effect
to establish state childcare facilities). Women, in other words, faced the ‘dual
burden’ of gainful employment and childcare at home.
By the
mid-1930s, the Stalin dictatorship had turned away from the progressive family
values seen after 1917. The institution of marriage was strengthened, divorce
became harder, and in 1936 almost all cases of abortion were made illegal in
1936 (except when the mother’s life was in danger). Officially recorded cases
of abortion plummeted in the late 1930s, while infant mortality rates increased
by around 10%.
The shift in
Soviet family policy was framed by declining birth rates and growing
international tensions – particularly the looming threat of war in Europe. Students
often think they’ve ‘seen this before’ in the case of Nazi Germany. But in fact
the case of the USSR is a reminder not only that patriarchal structures could
be (re-)established in left-wing states, as well as right-wing, but also that patriarchal
labour relations under different regimes were also somewhat different in substance.
However much
students might try to tell me that this was a reversion to ‘traditional’ family
structures and that women were ‘expected to stay at home’ (as they learned of Nazi
Germany), this wasn’t the case. As proletarians contributing to the rapidly
developing Soviet economy, women were expected to stay in work (ironically,
this was in practice rather similar in practice to Nazi Germany, which bythe late-1930s expected women to stay at home in principle while in practice demandingthey contributed their labour to industry and agriculture). The result was
that the pressures of the ‘dual burden’ simply increased.
Patriarchy,
Patriarchy, and Patriarchy? A Concluding Thought
None of this
is to say that Tsarist Russia and the USSR wasn’t a ‘male dominated
society’. In many ways it was. But patriarchal structures in practice shifted
as gender (as well as sexual and broader socio-economic) relations shifted. At
various times certain types of men came to prominence, repressing not only
women but also children and adult sons, not to mention other social and
economic groups.
Ultimately,
like any big powerful words, ‘patriarchy’ needs to be contextualised and given
substance by being rooted in social experience. A single, snappy definition
just won’t capture it.
[3] Siobhán
Hearne, ‘Liberation and Authoritarianism in the Early Soviet Campaign to
‘Struggle with Prostitution’ in Lara Douds et al eds., The Fate of the
Bolshevik Revolution: Illiberal Liberation, 1917-1941, Bloomsbury (2020),
pp. 231-244, here pp. 232-233.
[2] Sean
Guillory, ‘Revolutionary Manliness’, (ND) online at Seventeen Moments in Soviet
History: https://soviethistory.msu.edu/1924/revolutionary-manliness/,
retrieved 27.04.26.
[1] Semen
Ivanovich Kanatchikov, A Radical Worker in Tsarist Russia: The Autobiography
of Semen Ivanovich Kanatchikov, ed. and trans. Reginald E. Zelnik, Stanford
University Press (1986), pp. 4-5.
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