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Soviet Women's Voices in the Stalin Era
- Journal of Women's History
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 16, Number 2, Summer 2004
- pp. 197-208
- 10.1353/jowh.2004.0049
- Review
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Journal of Women's History 16.2 (2004) 197-208
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Soviet Women's Voices in the Stalin Era
Karen Petrone
In the last decade, the reading public has gained unprecedented access to the individual voices of women describing their lived experience in Stalin's Soviet Union. As these previously repressed voices have been added to the historical record, scholars have sought to interpret how women's experiences challenge or corroborate Soviet official narratives and previous scholarly interpretations of Soviet women's history. The six books under consideration all contribute to this process of reframing and rethinking the history of women under Stalin. Four of the books contain first-person narratives (three collections of writings and interviews, and one book-length memoir) that make the thoughts of Soviet women of the Stalin era available to English language readers. These memoirs take their place among a growing number of translated women's memoirs.1 The two secondary [End Page 197] works reviewed here include a book-length monograph that uses the history of International Women's Day as an entrée into Soviet public discourse about gender, and a broad-ranging, interdisciplinary essay collection on women in the Stalin era.
All of these works must be situated within ongoing debates about Soviet women's history as the "master narrative" of women's experience in the Soviet Union is hotly contested. Melanie Ilic, in her introduction to Women of the Stalin Era, outlines the official Soviet narrative of women's liberation. According to Soviet historians, after the legal equality of men and women was declared in 1917, the Soviet state sought to make women economically independent of men by drawing them into the workforce. The Communist Party set up the Zhenotdel, or Woman's Department, to address women's needs. In 1930, the Zhenotdel, supposedly no longer necessary, was disbanded, and "hereafter, the equality of women and men was a declared achievement of the Soviet regime" (4). Women entered the labor force in unprecedented numbers during the First Five-Year Plan, fought alongside the men and were "heroines of the home front" (4) during World War II, and actively participated in postwar reconstruction. Soviet official history used the unique professional opportunities and the social services offered to women in the Soviet Union as evidence of the progressive, emancipatory, and modern socialist project.
While both Soviet and Western narratives concur that women played an extraordinarily active role in building the Soviet economy and defending the country in wartime, they differ sharply over the meaning of women's participation. Western scholars have interpreted the disbanding of the Zhenotdel in 1930 as the most significant turning point in Soviet women's history, when the feminist and emancipatory aspirations of the 1920s were replaced by Stalin's exclusive focus on industrial production. As women flooded into the workforce, heavy industry was prioritized over the social services that were supposed to ease women's domestic labors, creating a double burden for women. At the...