THE NEW SOVIET WOMAN

The 1930s saw the completion of the process, begun in the 1920s, of blending the revolutionary gender ideas espoused by the Bolshevik feminists with liberal contemporary notions and older ones inherited from Russia’s past. The official results of this syncretism were the “New Soviet Man” and “New Soviet Woman,” icons of masculinity and femininity that were rolled out in the arts and mass media throughout the decade.

As we have seen, the New Soviet Man first surfaced in the 1920s. He was a competent, diligent, responsible, and self‑disciplined worker; a modest comrade who worked well with others; and a considerate, faithful husband who provided for his family and disciplined his children. He was “cultured,” which meant that he dressed neatly, bathed regularly, appreciated the arts, read for pleasure, and did not swear, gamble, or get drunk with his pals every payday. The New Soviet Man strongly resembled both the respectable worker ideal of the pre‑revolutionary era and still older paragons. He obeyed his superiors–a trait emphasized by Nicholas I, Peter I, and the author of The Domostroi. He was energetic and progressive, as Peter’s ideal nobleman had been. These resemblances emerged from similar circumstances. Stalin was as dependent on loyal servitors as Peter and Nicholas, and he too wanted to make the people of his nation into model, modern Europeans.

The New Soviet Woman required more remodeling to serve the priorities of the 1930s. The party continued to praise women such as Pasha Angelina who devoted themselves to building socialism. They were held up as model workers, whom lesser women were supposed to emulate, and as living proof of the success of women’s emancipation. Once women had been oppressed and backward; now they marched in the vanguard of the working class and, in so doing, freed themselves from the sexist traditions of the past and contributed to the building of a just society.¹⁹

The leadership also felt it necessary to address itself to the domestic side of women’s lives, and so its spokespeople began encouraging wives to create cozy homes, teach socialist values to their children, and provide emotional support to their husbands. A. M. Poliakova, the wife of a blacksmith, declared in a speech in 1936, “Now if a wife welcomes her husband home with love and tenderness, if she respects him and talks to him, then the husband will go back to work in a good mood and will think only about his work. It’s obvious that in this case his labor productivity will increase.” Women could also help their husbands become New Soviet Men by teaching them the virtues of kulturnost (“culturedness”). Poliakova said proudly of her own spouse, “I’ve trained him to the point where he brings home books himself.” She advised women to quiz their mates about movies they had just seen together, to make sure that the men had not nodded off during the show.²⁰

The notion that women could teach men about the higher things in life had been around since medieval Europe. It was a theme in the cult of domesticity. Now in the 1930s, the age of the masses having arrived, Soviet communists taught that working‑class wives could lead their menfolk toward kulturnost by supervising their drinking and making them stay awake in the movies. The accoutrements of domesticity enjoyed by the model wives featured in the press–the comfortable apartments, the good food, the movie tickets–testified to the accomplishments of their husbands, the New Soviet Men, who were making the money that bought such luxuries. Thus the idealized Soviet wife, like the bourgeois lady of the cult of domesticity, both nurtured and attested to male achievement.

The New Soviet Woman, indefatigable worker and civilizing wife, set standards and inspired emulation. She was no more out of touch with the reality of most women’s lives than the long‑suffering saint or the dainty bourgeois housewife. What she shared with those archetypes was a responsibility to realize her true nature by serving her family and her society. She was an updated affirmation of the very old ideal of female self‑sacrifice– justified now by the promise that, through all her work, she emancipated herself even as she helped to build a better world and repaid the state for freeing her from patriarchal bondage. Her liberation, unlike that envisioned by feminists later in the twentieth century, was not sufficient unto itself. It served the greater good of building the world’s first truly just and prosperous society.