PEASANT WOMEN DURING NEP

Peasant women passed the NEP years working to rebuild their families and villages. Many of the customs of rural life endured, as the peasants continued their long‑standing practice of accepting those innovations from the cities that they found useful or attractive, and fending off those they did not. Male elders still ran the villages, and women stayed away from the organizations established by the communists. Very few voted in local soviet elections; fewer still served as elected officials.

The peasants’ traditional notions about marriage and family endured as well. Parents and children worked the land together and shared ownership of family property. Most peasants, therefore, took a dim view of the Family Code of 1918 and the Land Code of 1922, which together legalized divorce and granted female family members the same property rights as their male relatives. Many saw these laws as an invitation to economic disaster, for dividing up poor people’s meager possessions during a divorce would leave everyone poorer. There were other questions. Did the amount of property a wife was entitled to depend on how long she had been married? Did divorced women have claims on the property of their natal families? Women who were determined to leave their husbands and to receive the share of marital property that the law allowed now had the courts on their side and also got support from local communist activists. Most rural people struck to their long‑established customs–that is, they stayed married.⁶⁴

Communist values and city influences did promote more egalitarian arrangements and understandings. The power of the elders continued to wane, as more young people than ever asserted their right to choose their spouses and live in their own households. The Komsomol, the communist youth organization, recruited male and a few female peasants to its ranks, and they in turn propagated ideas about women’s emancipation in the villages. A typical poem in the first issue of the Zhenotdel magazine Krest’ianka declared,

The people’s time has come.

The old powers are no more.

The women’s share is freedom!

The soviets are run by everyone!⁶⁵

These ideas also arrived in the newspapers available at reading rooms set up by the communists, and in movies, slide shows, and plays put on by itinerant propagandists.

The government tried to improve the lives of peasant women. Most importantly, it expanded primary education for children and established literacy classes for adult women. The Zhenotdel organized conferences at which peasant women were encouraged to discuss the difficulties of their lives, including their problems with abusive men, and it set up women’s cooperatives, whose members farmed or manufactured handcrafts together and shared the profits. It also established summer daycare programs in the countryside. The cooperatives and the daycare centers were small pilot projects and peasant resistance to the Zhenotdel, as we have already seen, was considerable. Had the government chosen to do more, peasant women might have been more receptive.

THE LISHENTSY

One category of women, those labeled lishentsy or “former people,” were persecuted by the new regime in the 1920s. The term suggests the nobles and the prosperous business owners, whom the Revolution and the communists had stripped of their political and economic power. These people were no threat in the 1920s. Huge numbers of them had emigrated from Russia, and the rest were struggling to adjust to the NEP world. But the communists, beset by the difficulty of governing an unruly, poverty‑stricken country, worried that those they had overthrown were still working against them. Furthermore, they did not trust the peasants, or the clergy, or the Socialist Revolutionaries, or the Mensheviks, all of whom had resisted their control and in some cases had fought against them. So they continued their civil war practice of arresting people whom they suspected of seditious activity.

In the mid‑1920s, the party undertook the first of many campaigns to root out lawbreakers or, far more ominously, potential lawbreakers. The central government ordered school administrations, housing bureaus, soviet election commissions, tax collection agencies, and trade unions to identify people who had committed crimes such as illegal buying and selling or who belonged to groups under suspicion. Individuals identified as guilty–more than 4 million from 1926 to 1936–were labeled lishentsy. This stripped them of their right to vote, and, more importantly, of their eligibility for education, employment, health care, housing, and rationed goods.⁶⁶

In its effects on women, this purge resembled those that would occur in the late 1920s and 1930s. The majority of the lishentsy were men, probably because officials assumed that men were more likely than women to actively oppose them. Most women were disfranchised not because of their own bad economic deeds, but because they were related to male offenders or were housewives who, by not working outside the home, were refusing to participate in building socialism. Wives of priests were particularly at risk, for they met both of these criteria. Nuns also came under suspicion. Officials who wanted to meet the required quotas of lishentsy to be identified without sacrificing their friends or disrupting the local economy targeted as well the disabled, elderly, and mentally ill, among whom there were many women.⁶⁷

The “former people” could appeal, and many women did so. Golfo Alexopolous has found that women were particularly likely in their appeals to sing the ancient refrain that they were weak, ignorant unfortunates who deserved protection by the government. These cries for help often worked, particularly if the plaintiffs could make the case that they were hard‑working, loyal citizens, married to hard‑working men. Others who feared that their appeals would not be granted moved to new towns, got false identity papers, and started over again. The nation was too big and the government too inefficient to track all these migrants. We do not know how many women won pardons and how many managed to make new identities for themselves. Less successful female lishentsy swelled the ranks of the unemployed in the 1920s.⁶⁸