VOLUNTEERING IN THE 1930s

The New Soviet Woman played a part in inspiring female volunteerism. The government had a prodigious need for people to help with a host of tasks, from cleaning streets to building dams, so it used every appeal it could fashion, including gendered ones. To reach women, it called out to both sides of the New Soviet Woman, the emancipated worker and the happy homemaker. Homemakers responded with the obshchestvennitsa movement.

Between 1934 and 1941, tens of thousands of unemployed wives of army officers, engineers, managers, and party officials became obshchestvennitsy, which roughly translates as “socially engaged women.” Organized into clubs, obshchestvennitsy donated supplies to workers’ cafeterias, childcare centers, dormitories, and medical clinics; they spruced up workplaces and neighborhoods; they planted flowers and hung curtains. Some obshchestvennitsy lectured workers, particularly female ones, on personal hygiene and housework and coached them on how to be supportive of their husbands. Others joined “control brigades” that inspected retail shops for cleanliness and good customer service, pitching in to dust the shelves when necessary.²¹

The obshchestvennitsy publicized the Soviet emancipation of women and organized projects for working‑class women, as the Zhenotdel had done, but they possessed little of the zhenotdel’s feminism. They were more like the wives of nineteenth‑century Russian governors who ran local charities. Empowered by their status as spouses of the new bosses, they saw themselves as bringing a woman’s soothing, beautifying touch to the workers’ world and setting an example of responsible citizenship, good taste, and good mothering to women less fortunate than they.²²

The women who were most faithful to Bolshevik feminist ideals were the ones who answered the party’s calls to pioneering work in the countryside, in the cities, and on the frontiers. Angelina was such a woman, and like so many others, when she became a model worker, she was a member of the Komsomol. The Komsomol was the Communist Party’s youth organization, open to people in their late teens and early twenties. In the 1930s it and the secondary schools from which it recruited new members were nurturing a generation of ambitious, idealistic women who were eager to participate in the building of socialism and to realize in their own lives the equality the party promised. Women were a minority in the Komsomol; perhaps the girls who joined were unusually assertive and independent. There is no question that many of them took seriously the proclamations of women’s equality. They were often able to overcome male resistance because they were Komsomoltsy, that is, female Komsomol members, which gave them standing with party officials, and because they got support from managers eager to employ all the workers they could get. Once again, autocracy and need opened up possibilities that activist women were able to exploit.²³

One of these women was Anna Egorova, a peasant who came from the countryside to Moscow in 1934 to work on the subway then under construction. The tall sixteen‑year‑old (she persuaded her employers that she was older) joined a unit of steel‑fitters. When she heard that a flying club was seeking members, she eagerly signed up, and fell in love with planes and flying. Egorova ran into male hostility occasionally, but she managed to overcome it, and to build warm friendships with the other young men and women with whom she worked. She also found supportive male superiors, who encouraged her. As the great tunnels and stations of the metro came into being, as she learned to fly, as the government showered praise on the young volunteers, Egorova’s self‑esteem grew. “I began to acquire a certain confidence,” she remembered in the 1990s, “a sense that I could do anything.”²⁴

The largest single example of Komsomoltsy volunteerism was the Khetagurovite campaign, which began in early 1937 when Valentina Khetagurova, a Komsomol activist who worked in the Siberian far east, published an article urging women to come east and help build that region’s infrastructure. The response was overwhelming. In the next eight months, sixty‑seven thousand women, most of them members of the Komsomol or of the party, wrote in to express interest. Elena Shulman has found that these people were idealistic patriots, drawn east by dreams of a pristine frontier where women were needed. Twenty thousand of them actually came in the next two years and found jobs as clerks, factory workers, medical personnel, party workers, prison‑camp guards, teachers, and tractor drivers. Some Khetagurovites eventually moved back home; many made their peace with the rigors of the far east and remained.²⁵

Among the Khetagurovites were women who spoke up against sexism. At conferences and in letters, they decried the refusal of managers to hire them, to pay them as much as men once they had hired them, and to assign them to skilled jobs. They also drew attention to sexual harassment. Pasha Angelina was making the same claim that gender barriers should not prevent women from taking equal parts in socialist construction. The willingness of all these women to protest against sexism spoke to the self‑confidence they had learned as Komsomoltsy and pioneering workers, and portended the refusal of some of them, in 1941, to accept their exclusion from the military.²⁶