WOMEN RESPOND TO THE COMMUNISTS

They had their work cut out for them. The Revolution had begun in anger, grief, and hope. While hope for a better future continued to inspire millions throughout the civil war, grief and anger remained their constant companions, for the civil war completed the ruin of the economy that World War I had begun. Armies rampaged through cities and countryside; transportation collapsed and food supplies dwindled further; cholera, dysentery, influenza, typhoid, and typhus carried off first the old and young, then malnourished people in their prime. Millions of peasant women were widowed. Some had to leave their villages when their neighbors, also struggling, would not help them. They took their children to the cities, where they begged for food in markets and churchyards. “We are dying,” wailed desperate women in the streets of Ivanovo‑Voznesensk in 1921. “The people are dying off.”⁴⁸

Many city folk passed the beggars by, for they too were hungry. Even in Moscow, the capital of Soviet Russia from the spring of 1918 onward, food and fuel were scarce. People watched when wraith‑like cart horses came down their streets, hoping that the poor creatures would drop dead in the traces and provide meat for the neighborhood. There was no heat because there was no fuel to feed boilers. There was no running water because the pipes had burst in the unheated buildings. People fled back to their home villages, and so Moscow’s population fell by more than 50 percent between 1918 and 1920, Petrograd’s by 72 percent.⁴⁹ The returnees were mostly men because men were more likely than women to have close family in the countryside. Men also left the cities when they were drafted into the army.

For urban women of all classes, these developments were disastrous. It was difficult for an intact family to survive, and still more challenging for single women. The lucky ones were those working in the few factories that continued to operate. By 1918, women made up 45 percent of the much‑shrunken industrial work force.⁵⁰ Others took jobs newly opened to women in the arts, clerical work, the court system, education, journalism, medicine, the police, and social services. Wages were low when they were paid at all, many merchants and nobles were denied food rations, and inflation devalued the currency. Childcare became increasingly problematic, because of the difficulty of keeping schools open and hungry children engaged in learning. Soon thousands of runaways, mostly boys, were living on the filthy streets, where they begged and stole to survive.

The hardship alienated many working women from politics and from the communists. At meetings in the fall of 1918, they angrily demanded that the party make good on its promise to improve their lives by bringing home their husbands and getting more food to the markets. Had the party been able to ease these difficulties, more peasants and workers might have listened to the communists’ talk about women’s emancipation. Had the government not requisitioned the peasants’ crops, often without paying for them, peasant women might have been more welcoming. Instead many poor women in city and countryside came to believe that the people who had said they would make things better had only made them worse. So they rejected the communists’ overtures and drove the party workers away.

Some women did answer the communists’ calls. More than thirty thousand joined the Communist Party in the civil war years and thousands more participated in Zhenotdel conferences and programs. Sixty‑five thousand women enlisted in the Red Army, making up 2 percent of that force and serving in a greater variety of jobs than ever before. They were clerks, couriers, drivers, nurses, spies, and political workers who propagandized the troops. A few women, following the precedent set in World War I, enlisted in combat units.⁵¹

The women who supported the communists believed that they were part of a righteous movement. Evdokia Poliakova, a factory worker who joined the party in 1917 at the age of seventeen, wrote in her memoirs, “In the Bolsheviks I saw people who had entered a decisive struggle with despotism and injustice, a struggle with a bright future for working people. I wanted to be with them and I was justly proud that they had taken me into their great, stern family.”⁵² Such women saw the Revolution as a liberation and the civil war as a struggle between good and evil, the future and the past. Less political women, the artists of the avant garde, for example, also were buoyed by the sense of limitless possibilities that the Revolution had fostered. When the civil war ended, these women hoped that a new world of peace and equality would be built on the ruins of tsarist Russia.