Equality and Revolution: Women’s Rights in the Russian Empire, 1905–1917

Chapter 3

3 The Limits of Liberation Brothers, fathers, comrades When you sit at the noisy table On the holiday of freedom Proudly lifting your glasses high— Remember us, and look around you! Can your celebration be truly complete If next to you the chains are clanking If next to you, under the yoke of injustice Silent, and with bitter tears your sisters stand! —Populist activist Vera Levandovskaia-Belokonskaia,  I --- Russia, political rights was not specifically a woman’s issue. The meager amount of political participation possible depended as much on class as on sex. Both female and male property owners could vote in rural and municipal government elections, although the women balloted only through a male proxy.₁ The Russian intelligentsia’s commitment to egalitarianism raised expectations that both women and men would equally benefit from democratic reforms. In almost every aspect of the great social struggles convulsing Russia in the last third of the nineteenth century, women were active. They went to the people, plotted against the tsar, were imprisoned, exiled to Siberia, and were hung on the gallows alongside men. They worked as doctors and teachers in rural areas and in city slums; they volunteered to help victims of the famines and epidemics that plagued so many during this time.² War weakened the tsarist government, opening the door to revolution. Russia went from defeat to defeat in the Russo-Japanese War (–). Opposition 41 forces had been gathering strength for some time. At the turn of the century, moderates, liberals, and revolutionaries organized politically to seek changes ranging from a constitutional monarchy to the complete abolition of tsarism. The Union of Zemstvo-Constitutionalists and the Union of Liberation, established in  and  respectively, demanded democratic reforms and a national legislature . The Socialist Revolutionaries, founded in , representing the peasant majority of the population, favored a Russian socialism in which all rural land became the property of peasant communes. The Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, founded in , immediately split into two factions, the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks, both favoring a workers’ revolution to overthrow the monarchy. The spark for popular uprisings that turned the burgeoning opposition into a full-fledged revolution came on Bloody Sunday (January , ). Fearing a repeat of the French Revolution, the authorities ordered troops to fire on unarmed worker demonstrators led by the Orthodox priest Father Gapon marching peacefully to present a petition to the tsar. Demonstrations of protest quickly spread throughout the empire. The political crisis precipitated by the autocracy’s disastrous military adventure and its brutal suppression of a nonviolent demonstration further spurred hopes for a democratic legislature. With the outbreak of the  Revolution, the language of rights filled the air, and women expected to be included. “There was no corner in which in one way or another, the voice of a woman speaking about herself and demanding new rights was not heard,” observed Alexandra Kollontai, then a Menshevik.³ The struggle over women’s place in an evolving society in which political rights were now possible occurred in many venues, on many levels of society. As the year progressed, public battles about women’s rights were waged with central and local government bodies, within the Liberation movement , and between feminists and some socialist party activists. Largely by their own actions, women won inclusion in the demands for equal rights, especially political rights, from the various elements of the Liberation movement. In the process they further raised government suspicions. On the other end of the political spectrum , they encountered hostility from some socialist women advocating for class rather than gender solidarity. Initially the government gave mixed signals on women’s suffrage.The Shidlovskii Commission (headed by Senator N. V. Shidlovskii), established by the tsarist government on January , , was to include representatives of the government, manufacturers, and workers “to determine without delay the causes of workers’ discontent.” Women workers took the issue of their rights seriously, but any remaining illusions of help from the autocracy in achieving their rights were soon 42 THE LIMITS OF LIBERATION dashed. In this “first parliament for Petersburg workers” women were permitted to vote but not to be elected as representatives. Confusion about the rules resulted in the election of five women to the commission. Informed that they could not serve, women workers from a number of factories petitioned Shidlovskii, protesting his “unjust” decision and arguing that only women could “explain the oppression and humiliation that no male worker can possibly...