WOMEN IN THE SOCIALIST PARTIES

The socialist parties, the largest of which were the Socialist Revolutionaries and the two factions of Social Democrats–the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks–grew rapidly in 1917. Women, as in the past, were among the recruits. None of the parties kept good records in that tumultuous year, so it is impossible to determine how many such women there were. Probably they constituted 10 to 15 percent of party members. It is somewhat easier to reconstruct what women did. Among the Bolsheviks, they held a greater percentage of party offices than ever before or after, and the same may have been true of the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries.⁴⁵ Most of these women worked in the lower ranks, on neighborhood or city committees, where they spread their party’s message through speeches, leaflets, and newspapers. Some, particularly Bolsheviks in Petrograd, reached out to women workers. A handful of women rose to the top leadership of their parties. Of these, the most prominent in 1917 were Maria Spiridonova and Alexandra Kollontai. Kollontai became a popular stump speaker and Spiridonova headed the Left Socialist Revolutionaries.

MARIA SPIRIDONOVA (1884–1941) AND ALEXANDRA KOLLONTAI (1872–1952)

Spiridonova was a fabled terrorist. Born into the lower‑ranking nobility, she became a Socialist Revolutionary in her late teens. The Socialist Revolutionaries were socialists much influenced by Marxism but loyal as well to the populist mission of inspiring the peasants to revolt. They kept alive the populist tradition of assassinating brutal tsarist officials, and it was as an assassin that Spiridonova first became famous. In 1906 she gunned down a police commander in broad daylight. Spiridonova fit the profile of the female martyr‑revolutionary: she was a pretty, young noblewoman who shot an evil man and then made no attempt to escape. Her case, including the fact that she had been severely beaten while under arrest, was widely publicized by her comrades and by the press. The publicity elicited an outpouring of sympathy for a frail girl who had killed a brute, and that sympathy in turn convinced the government to cut its public‑relations losses by commuting her death sentence to life imprisonment in Siberia. As she headed east by train, crowds gathered at the stations through which she passed to greet her.

Freed in the spring of 1917, Spiridonova went to Petrograd to claim a place in the Socialist Revolutionary leadership. Prison had neither softened her radicalism nor weakened her self‑confidence. After a few weeks in the capital, she decided that the Socialist Revolutionary leadership was too cautious and the Bolsheviks were right in calling for the overthrow of the Provisional Government. She did not become a Bolshevik, as did other socialists who agreed with their strategy. Rather she joined with like‑minded Socialist Revolutionaries to set up a new organization, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries. They supported the Bolshevik seizure of power and worked in the new government for a few months afterward, but Spiridonova soon realized that the Bolshevik leaders had no intention of sharing power with her party. She was also repelled by the peace treaty Lenin signed with Germany in March 1918, because it ceded vast amounts of Russian territory to Germany. Spiridonova and her group broke with the Bolsheviks soon thereafter, and in the summer of 1918 she helped organize the assassination of the German ambassador. The police arrested her, then released her. She refused to stop speaking out against the new government and in 1919 was arrested again. Spiridonova spent most the rest of her life in prison. She was executed in 1941.⁴⁶

^{Alexandra Kollontai in 1912. Author’s collection.}