The Rural Batrachka (Hired Agricultural Laborer) and the Soviet Campaign to Unionize Her

This article explores the Soviet campaign in the mid-1920s to unionize the poorest women in rural villages: hired, agricultural laborers known as batrachkas. The goal was to make them literate, class-conscious workers who saw themselves not as peasants but as the vanguard of a rural proletariat. The mobilization movement met with little success--the majority of batrachkas remained outside the union--in part because the Soviet regime was ambivalent toward recruiting women and in part because it was ill-prepared materially to reach an often isolated and largely temporary work force. Moreover, the predominantly urban communists did not understand the needs or cultural assumptions of female agricultural laborers. Poor peasant women tended to rely on traditional village structures and were reluctant to risk losing the meager beneÞts they derived from the "bosses" by joining a union that seemed mainly to make promises.