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Chapter 1 the Birth of “Miss Bolsheviki”: Women, Gender, and the red scare in the winter of 1919, the moral danger posed by Bolshevism was detailed for american newspaper readers by a representative of the u.s. department of commerce. after suffering a stint in jail in the new soviet republic, roger e. simmons returned to the united states, where he testified to a crowded senate hearing room that radical policies had transformed more than factories , farms, and political institutions. He told his audience that it was russia’s women who were suffering most cruelly in the aftermath of the 1917 revolution . He recounted how Bolsheviks had forced women of “frail physique” and “gentle breeding” at bayonet and gunpoint to dig potatoes and wield pickaxes on road gangs. He swore that red Guards routinely stripped aristocratic womenoftheirclothinginpublic,oneofmanyindignitiesthatdrove“refined” women to suicide. Most lurid were his assertions about the “nationalization of women.” simmons read from a purportedly official decree to illustrate the Bolshevik determination to degrade women, subvert the traditional family, and pervert conventional sexual relations. the diktat proclaimed women “exempted from private ownership” and thereafter “the property of the whole nation.” Women were required to present themselves to the authorities, who would then distribute them equally among working-class males, who were granted the “right to use one woman not oftener than three times a week, for three hours.” this system, the decree declared, was meant to rectify the inequities of capitalism, which had reserved “the best species of all the beautiful women . . . [as] the property of the bourgeoisie.” anyone refusing to succumb to this arrangement would be declared “enemies of the people.”1 simmons had been summoned before the senate Judiciary committee to illustrate how revolutionary radicalism imperiled women, traditional 20 chapter 1 gender roles, and by extension civilization itself. His testimony contributed to a congressional investigation that was charged with documenting the atrocities of the new revolutionary regime, whose leaders sanctioned mass murder, desecration of churches, systematic rape of upper-class women, corruption of children, appropriation of everything from jewelry to land, and social policies that undermined parental authority and marital bonds.2 the senate focused on reports from postrevolution russia to demonstrate why the Bolshevik dogma was, in the words of secretary of state robert lansing, “the most hideous and monstrous thing that the human mind has ever conceived.”3 Bolsheviks aimed to destroy more than an economic system, according to Montana senator Henry l. Myers. they were working toward social and sexual apocalypse, hoping to annihilate “marriage, the home, the fireside, the family, the corner stones of all civilization, all society. they have undertaken to destroy what God created and ordained. they defy alike the will of God, the precepts of christianity, the decrees of civilization, the customs of society.”4 simmons was commended by senator lee slater overman for bringing americans the “real story of the chaos, anarchism, and immorality that prevail in russia as a result of Bolshevist domination.”5 the final report of what came to be known as the overman committee concluded that the radical revolution in russia had inaugurated “a reign of terror unparalleled in the history of modern civilization, in many of its aspects rivaling even the inhuman savagery of the turk and the terrors of the French revolution.”6 in a nation roiled by labor unrest, the overman committee found a receptive audience for its warning of an international radical menace.7 the relevance of this message was obvious for american readers, who believed that their country faced a real threat from Bolshevik-inspired revolutionaries . the senate Judiciary committee launched this inquiry after the declaration of the seattle general strike, which many americans viewed as an attempt to start a north american proletarian revolution. over the decade that followed, government officials used Bolshevik abuses of women to justify the need for the repression of radicals in the united states, where a wave of labor protests, vigilante violence, and race riots continued to feed fears that revolution was imminent. these stories helped recast domestic repression as necessary to shield women and children from the effects of radicalism ; they gave moral legitimacy to efforts to crush quests for political, economic, and racial justice. traditional histories of the red scare have cast the american response the Birth of “Miss Bolsheviki” 21 to the communist revolution in russia as something of a short-lived national “hysteria” that started in 1917 and petered out by 1920 as government officials came under increasing scrutiny...

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