Soviet Women's Voices in the Stalin Era

Choi Chatterjee. Celebrating Women: Gender, Festival Culture, and Bolshevik Ideology, 1910-1939. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002. x + 223 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-8229-4178-3 (cl).

Melanie Ilic, ed. Women in the Stalin Era. Houndmills, Hampshire: Palgrave, 2001. xiii + 256 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-333-77930-4 (cl).

Mary Leder. My Life in Stalinist Russia: An American Woman Looks Back. Ed. by Laurie Bernstein. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002. xiv + 360 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-253-21442-4 (pb).

Anne Noggle, editor. A Dance with Death: Soviet Airwomen in World War II. Introduction by Christine A. White. College Station: Texas A & M University Press, 1994. xiv + 318 pp.; ill. ISBN 1-58544-177-5 (pb).

Veronica Shapovalov, ed. and trans. Remembering the Darkness: Women in Soviet Prisons. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2001. xiii + 375 pp.; ill. ISBN 0-7425-1146-4 (pb).

Cynthia Simmons and Nina Perlina, eds. Writing the Siege of Leningrad: Women's Diaries, Memoirs, and Documentary Prose. Foreword by Richard Bidlack. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002. xli + 242 pp.; ill. table. ISBN 0-8229-4183-X (cl).

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 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...