Revolutions - 10.62- International Women's Day

Episode Date: July 26, 2021

The February Revolution began on International Women's Day Meanwhile...Lafayette Events! Aug 20 Politics and Prose with Jamelle Bouie Aug 23 Midtown Scholar with Ben Rhodes Aug 24 The Strand with Alexis Coe Aug 31 Harvard Bookstore with Patrick Wyman.

Hello and welcome to revolutions. Episode 10.62, International Women's Day. Today, we move beyond the dangerous but still solid ground Nicholas and Alexandra had been walking along for the past several months, the past several years, the past several decades. They had been warned repeatedly they walked towards an abyss, warned repeatedly they stood on a precipice, but those warned repeatedly they stood on a precipice, but those warnings had not been heated. When the Tsar boarded a train and headed back to Army headquarters on February 22nd, 1917, he left solid ground behind forever. That train carried him right over the edge into the free fall of revolution,

and any further attempt to twist, turn, or maneuver now resulted in mere futile spinning in the face of gravity. He was on a straight line to the rocks below. In Nicholas's ever-so-teeny-tiny defense, we ended last week by discussing that a prevailing belief had set in among nearly all sides in the ongoing political struggle, disaffected aristocrats, high-ranking military officers, bourgeois businessmen, duma delegates, working-class organizers and revolutionaries of all stripes, that Minister of the Interior, Proto Popov, had successfully defused the political bomb that looked set to explain. on February 14, 1917.

By arresting all the leaders of the workers' group, the police believed they had severed the link between popular protesters in the streets and the leaders of the progressive bloc in the Duma. And with those progressive bloc leaders already incredibly hesitant and nervous about turning to the streets for help, the moment came and went,

and nobody took decisive action. Among the rest of the working class political organizers not targeted in the sweep, among them revolutionary Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, and SRs, the word went around to lay low, husband their resources, and prepare for May Day. That would be the next best time to strike. But obviously, we know that there was no May Revolution of 1917. It's the February Revolution of 1917. But we've already taken events to February 22nd, so there's not much time left to stage a revolution,

especially as all the leaders seem to be pulling back, not driving forward. So what happened? Well, two things happened. Mother Nature happened, and the women of Russia happened. They combined on February 23, 1917, the morning after the Tsar left Petrograd, to launch the February Revolution of 1917. Now, to set up how and why the women of Russia, and in particular the women of Petrograd, managed to precipitate the fall of the 300-year-old Romanov dynasty and bring about the collapse of the Tsarist regime,

we need to back up a bit and trace the development of the women's rights movement in Russia, and in particular the relationship between liberal, democratic feminists coming out of the more bourgeois classes and their sisters inside the working classes, who were sometimes allies, sometimes opponents, but who would come together on February 23rd to mark International Women's Day together, and in so doing change world history forever. So to trace these threads, let's go all the way back to nearly the beginning of our series when we started talking about the origins of the countercultural revolutionary underground in the 1860s. This is back in the days of the nihilists, right?

Those hippie beatniks, who, among many things, were hoping to break down all gender norms. They cohabitated with each other on an equal basis, even outside of marriage. So right from the start, the Russian revolutionary character was laced, at least in the abstract, with the idea that gender equality was among the things any revolution worth its name would achieve. This remained true all through the first great revolutionary epoch from the mid-1860s up to the assassination of Tsar Alexander in 1881. And you'll remember when we discussed what this first generation got up to, for example, going to the people, there were at least as many women as men involved in all of this, especially as one of the main components of going to the people

was educating the peasants. And as I talked about when I introduced Krupskaya, she was probably first radicalized as a young girl by an idealistic revolutionary teacher with connections to people's will. That young teacher wasn't herself more than 18 years old, and she wound up arrested and completely disappeared from history. Then after the going to the people failed and people's will turn to terrorism. Among their heroes were Vera Zasulich. And then when they finally got

the Tsar in 1881, a couple of women were in the inner circle of that plot, one of them Vera Figner, the other Anna Yakimova. And if you're looking for a dynamite book, read Memoirs of a Revolutionist by Vera Figner or the defiant life of Vera Figner surviving the Russian Revolution by Lynn Anne Hartnett. But despite all this, many of the women active in the ranks of the socialist revolutionary underground, were acutely aware that despite the outwardly progressive politics of their male comrades in talking up equal rights, when it came to meetings, priorities, and leadership, the men all still tended to dominate, and they expected a certain degree of subservience from their female comrades.

Katerian Breskovskaya, the Babushka of Revolution, later recalled that at meetings back in the old days, she and her revolutionary sisters were of course allowed to, and to be full members and attend meetings, and they were expected to participate in all party activities, but it was super rare for women to actually get up and speak their minds on an equal basis at those meetings, and that when she herself dared to do so, she could feel the uncomfortable shifting of her male comrades. Now, we know that this first wave of revolutionary activity was more or less crushed after the assassination of the czar in 1881, But despite the hyper-reactionary, hyper-anti-revolutionary tenor of the 1880s and 1890s, there were actually still plenty of progressive social reforms that accompanied the regime's attempt to modernize

and keep up with their neighbors to the West. Among these reforms was a great push to increase access to education. This was from basic primary education and literacy programs at the village level, all the way up to expanding advanced universities. university programs in the major cities of the Russian Empire. Women were not shut out of this expanded world of education, and an entire generation of young women now advanced through what we would today consider high school. Now, the universities were still almost exclusively male, though by now we are starting to hit

the first round of trailblazing women who pushed for admittance into the universities and then attained degrees. They were still, however, very much the exception rather than the race. rule. But even after hitting a ceiling imposed on them by their acutely misogynistic and patriarchal society, these women took the education they received from the state and used it as the foundation to continue on with their own self-education. And that brings us into contact with a group we have not yet talked about in this series, and that is progressive liberal feminists in pre-revolutionary Russia. And most of what I'm about to discuss comes mainly from a great book by Rochelle Goldberg

Ruth Child called Equality and Revolution, which discusses the role of Russian feminists and suffragists in the tumultuous milieu of early 20th century Russia. These women form the Russian chapter of the wider international women's rights movement unfolding throughout the world in the late 19th and early 20th century, and they were aiming for the same basic goals of equal rights, political and legal equality, the right to vote, run for office, and act as free and autonomy. individuals. In Russia, the leaders of the feminist movement typically drew from the ranks of the middle and upper classes who received a good education and lived in comfortable material circumstances and who found themselves justifiably dissatisfied with their second-class citizenship.

These women could travel, acquire foreign books and periodicals, and they eagerly joined, supported, and contributed to the broader international women's rights movement. Now, the thing that makes Russian feminism somewhat different from their Western counterparts was the state of political freedom in Russia before the Revolution of 1905, which is to say there wasn't any. So while, say, British and American and French feminists struggled inside a political system that already mostly allowed for broad-based universal male suffrage, the Russian women struggled inside a system that had no broad-based universal suffrage whatsoever.

and this was a great tactical advantage to the Russian feminists, because their calls for the right to vote entered into harmony with their male counterparts who were also trying to get the right to vote, which is to say that in the West, women were having to fight to convince men who already had the right to vote to extend it to women, whereas in Russia, women were pitching themselves to men

who also did not have the right to vote. And thus, the whole movement for democracy and universal society, suffrage in Russia, came to embrace the call that universal meant everyone without distinction of sex. So men and women were standing shoulder to shoulder demanding voting rights, and both sides found it tactically advantageous in their struggle against Tsarist absolutism. Though it should come as no surprise that the women were among the first to be told, well, not yet, we must wait, let's set your demands aside when the revolution came. and this is basically how the Revolution of 1905 went for them.

As the revolutionary energy grew and the Union of Liberation Movement got going, women's rights organizations supported the broad coalition of all anti-autocratic factions. This included a group called the Mutual Philanthropic Society, as well as new organizations like the Women's Equal Rights Union. But as the Revolution of 1905 exploded, women struggled to keep their goals above water, and plenty of men out there believe pursuing women's equality would be counterproductive and turn off undecided elements of society.

Conservative liberals tended to see feminists as way too radical, making unrealistic demands for gender equality that would threaten the whole democratic movement. The women argued that it wasn't very democratic if half of the population could not vote, but that didn't get them very far. While they endured being called too radical by those conservatives, they were also accused of being too conservative by the socialists. The socialist did not much like these feminists coming out of the bourgeois circles,

who were focused too narrowly on winning legal equality and the right to vote. They believe that gender-based organizing and focused on gendered issues would be a distraction from the real-class conflict. Verazaz Ullich, by this point Amenshevik, called these women's rights groups, quote, unnecessary if not harmful, because in her opinion everything worth achieving for women had to be achieved along with the socialist revolution, and that these liberal bourgeois feminists would ultimately hinder that larger project. Now, slightly more nuanced politics came from several other socialist women, the most famous and outspoken of them being Alexandra Colontai,

who was until World War I allied with the Mensheviks, and then after that became a very prominent Bolshevik. She believed it was vital to both head off the ultimate social and economic conservatism of the bourgeois feminists, but also to organize working-class women as women and speak to the issues that affected them as women, that recognizing the primacy of the class struggle did not mean being blind to the special ways women were oppressed. And they believed that tactically it made sense to reach out to them as fellow women, even if they didn't quite embrace the class struggle as fellow workers. When the October

manifesto of 1905 came around, it was a very bittersweet moment for women's rights activists of all stripes, as it achieved so many of their liberation dreams, but made absolutely no mention of women, their rights, their right to vote, or to run for office. And they were now in in fact, dangerously close to the predicament of their sisters in the West, where the menfolk gained the right to vote and suddenly did not care much about supporting the women folk. This definitely played out in the first and second Duma's. The feminists went in with high hopes as the cadet Congress that hammered out their platform heading into the First Duma had voted narrowly to include a demand for gender equality.

But unfortunately, Pavel Milyakov, who ran the First Duma from the T-Roeuvre, was skeptical of women's rights at that moment, and believed the party had much bigger fish to fry. Women's rights was certainly not a hill he planned to defend. The group that wound up doing the most to aggressively bring up the issue of women's rights in the Duma were the Trudeviks, who put forward motions to support women's rights, even as they landed on ears deafened by allegedly more important concerns. Now, eventually the feminist groups, along with their Trudevick allies,

lobbied hard enough that they got the Duma to create a commission to study women's equal rights, but then the first Duma was shuttered before the commission could even meet. Now, the first major victory for feminism inside the Russian Empire actually occurred over in Finland. Now, as I've noted a couple times, Finland enjoyed a special position inside the Russian Empire. Now, Zar Nicholas was Zar Nicholas, but in controlling Finland, he did so as the Grand Duke of Finland. On July 7, 1906, as Grand Duke of Finland, Nicholas signed off on a law giving women the right to vote and run for office, which was the first time both of those had been achieved in the same country.

New Zealand has kind of a claim to fame for being among the first to grant women the right to vote, but they still could not stand for office, so this is a distinction that goes to the Finns. and the reason Finland got to earn this distinction is that the struggle for women's rights got tied up in the national struggle for Finnish autonomy from Russian dominance. And for them, the Revolution of 1905 was also about national liberation. And so a broad coalition of nationalists and liberals and socialists all tended to see Finnish women as allies in that struggle. Now, with this victory in Finland and with events in Russia seeming to constantly move, in the direction of more democracy. It seemed like brighter things were ahead for the women of Russia.

But instead, July 1906 turned out to be the high water mark. The second Duma then came along and was even less enthusiastic about pushing women's issues, and then it too was dissolved. And then along came Stilippin's coup, and the momentum for democracy just drained out of the Russian Empire. Anyone who was committed to any kind of progressive social reform, or change or revolution saw their fortunes plummet between 1907 and 1912. But there were a few highlights sprinkled in there.

In December 1908, there was a Russian Women's Congress in St. Petersburg, and by now, Pavel Mielakov said that he had come to see the error of his ways. He sent a telegram welcoming the Congress to St. Petersburg expressing his profound conviction and the need to establish women's political and civic equality. And then he later spoke at a reception of attendees and apologized for underestimating the problem of equal political rights for women. But this All-Women's Congress also triggered a walkout of some of the more working-class women leaders as the Congress adopted a platform calling merely for universal suffrage

using very vague language without making it explicit that everything must be written nor discriminated against on the basis of sex. So it wasn't all solidarity inside the movement, but they were all still pointed mostly in the same direction. Then a couple of years later, International Women's Day was born. The prototype for this was staged by the Socialist Party of America in February 1909 in New York City. Then, in August 1910, there was an international socialist women's conference in Copenhagen, leading up to a Congress of the Second International.

Leading socialist delegates like Clara Zetkin proposed an annual Women's Day to promote the special needs of women's workers and the need for equal rights and the right to vote. This motion passed, and they set a date of March 19, 1911 as the first International Women's Day. And on that day, all over Central and Northern Europe, about a million people took part, both men and women. And in the main, it was about equal legal rights and equal political rights and the right to vote and run for office and against general sex discrimination. International Women's Day was first celebrated in Russia in 1913 on the last weekend in February. Then, World War I came along and changed everybody's calculations everywhere. Now, at the very beginning of the war, most of the feminist publications in Russia were very supportive of the war, and they patriotically supported the Tsar and Russia.

They believe that their visible support for the war effort and constant professions of loyalty and support would earn them official gratitude, and that after the war was over, they would be rewarded with something like equal rights and the vote. they believed they had come very, very close to achieving this back in 1905 and 1906, and they believed the time had come to try again, this time, not by trying to overthrow the Tsar, but by trying to help him. But then also, of course, when it comes to the debate between the defensivists and the defeatists, that is, between people who hoped Russia would win the war and people who hoped Russia would lose the war, women's rights activists were almost uniformly defensivists. No feminists could stomach the idea of losing the war to Germany

and then having a German army subsequently invade and occupy the country. Women do have a special opposition to occupying foreign armies for obvious reasons. Has rape and abuse has historically been one of the first things that all conquering armies throughout history have considered their spoils of war. Now, Russian women's rights, activists pretty much went on the same journey that every other group in Russia did, and by 1916, they had gone from supporting the Tsar and supporting the war to opposing the Tsar and opposing the war.

Official Russia told them that the rapid fire decline in standards of living and the plight suffered by women all over the empire was just something they had to endure. They needed to sacrifice for Russia. But women were sacrificing a lot for Russia. A group started called the Women's Economic Union, whose goal was to improve the economic and social situation of women everywhere. And when the war really started to go badly, they aligned their interests with the progressive bloc. And whether it was working-class women or these bourgeois liberal feminists, they all came around to the notion that the Tsar had to go. But thanks to the war, they had some economic heft that they themselves could lift.

The war brought way more women into the urban industrial workforce. In 1913, women accounted for about 25% of the working classes in Petrograd. By 1917, that was up to 33%. Across all of Russia, though, they went from 26% to fully 43%. There was also an acceleration of women participating in the various professions, most especially the medical fields like doctors. They were also now being admitted into uniform. on an almost equal basis, filling the empty slots left behind by men who had been carried

off to war or who had then been carried off to meet their maker. But out in the streets, all of these working women saw their entire quality of life just plummet. They were the ones standing in the freezing breadlines to get basic food to feed their family. And so while there was something like gender solidarity floating around out there, there was still a lot of class conflict. And a great deal of the wrath coming out of the working class women was directed not just at the czar or his ministers or men generally, but also at rich women who were able to come into the store, flash around a load of valuable stuff or cash, and buy things

at prices that now put everything out of the reach of the poor families. As the war went on and the supply chain broke down completely, there started to be riots, disorder, strikes. and these were staged by male and female workers alike. Among the many police reports coming out of January 1917, warning of imminent disturbances, one said, The mothers of families exhausted from the endless standing in line at the stores, tormented by the look of their half-starving and sick children,

have made them incredibly volatile. The police report continued that these women are very likely closer now to revolution than Milikov and Rozinka and company, and of course they are more dangerous, because they represent that stored-up inflammable material for which one spark will set off a fire. So that brings us to February 23, 1917, when one spark set off a fire.

February 23, 1917, was the date set aside for celebrating International Women's day in Russia. Feminist groups, as well as working-class women, decided they wanted to mark the day with special demonstrations, marches, and strikes. This, even as male organizers and leaders, both among the socialists and the liberals, said don't waste your time, don't make a big deal out of it, we can't expend a bunch of energy on women's rights issues right at this particular moment. And in fact, on this particular February 23rd, the women workers went on strike in direct defiance of orders from male leaders not to go on strike. Trotsky later wrote of this.

February 23rd was International Women's Day, and meetings and actions were foreseen, despite orders to the contrary. Textile workers left their work in several factories and sent delegates to ask for their support in the strike. Pretty soon, tens of thousands of women were demonstrating throughout Petrograd. With the chief of police being so out of touch, he didn't know what was happening or why.

There was a gathering near the headquarters of the League of Women's Equal Rights, another out at Nevsky prospect. There were demonstrations near the Duma as well as in all the working-class districts. Women were suddenly everywhere. In the working-class districts where the women were employed as metal workers and in textile factories, they went out on strikes and joined various demonstrations that became more raucous and turbulent as the day progressed. The general demands of this international women's day were three-fold, one social, one military, and one political. Bread, peace, and down with the czar. Now, initially, it was mostly just women marching around out there, but they decided they didn't want to be alone. So they started going around to various factories, demanding that their

husbands and brothers and comrades come out and join them. Oftentimes they were chucking rocks and tiles and snowballs at factory walls and windows trying to disrupt and shame the men who were still working into coming out to join them. And it worked. They started shutting down factory after factory, one by one. Hundreds marched off the job here, several thousands over there. Soon, 50,000 were out in the street, then 100,000, then 200,000, then 250,000. All of them parading throughout Petrograd, calling for a new government and the overthrow of the Tsar.

But you will recall that at the beginning of this episode, I said that two big things combined on this particular February 23rd, that one of them was the women of Russia and the other was Mother Nature. Because remember last week we talked all about how it had been just freezing cold this particular winter. Temperatures had been hovering well below freezing for months. Now, suddenly, on this particular February 23rd, temperatures shot back up to a pot of positively balmy, 46 degrees Fahrenheit. If you have ever lived in sub-freezing temperatures for a prolonged period of time, and then magically overnight it suddenly shoots up above freezing, you know that it's like t-shirt and shorts weather.

It's not like spring out there. It feels like summer. And we're talking about 46 degrees Fahrenheit here. This is like pretty chilly under most normal conditions, but compared to sub-freezing temperatures, it feels fantastic. So when it's suddenly 46 degrees out, people are opening up their doors and their windows. It feels like summer.

They've all been cooped up inside. They've all been freezing. They've all been starving. And now everybody is pouring out into the streets. And they feel this crazy mix of anger, but also exhilaration, jubilation, and a kind of chaotic, hopeful energy just bursting forth from everybody. The police forces in Petrograd were caught completely off guard and completely unprepared. And when the police and soldiers and Cossacks were dispatched to try to head off these demonstrations, they found a majority of those in the front lines were women.

And here the subtle patriarchal biases worked to the advantage of the women. Soldiers and Cossacks, who might not otherwise have hesitated to crack skulls or opened fire on unruly crowds, hesitated to beat and murder women. And it was at this point of contact between the forces of order and the women leading the demonstrations that the line into revolution was breached. The soldiers, as we discussed last time, were already on the verge of mutiny.

And when they were ordered to fire on the women, they simply couldn't do it, especially as the women were calling out to them saying, we're your wives and your mothers, don't fight us, join us. And so they did. By the end of February 23rd, 1917, the situation in the Capitol was completely out of hand. The opposition leaders in the Duma belatedly realized whether they liked it or not, the streets were now out in full force, and they could either be leveraged to the advantage of the Duma opposition,

or the Duma opposition could just be swept away along with everything else. Socialist leaders in the working-class districts belatedly realized there was no waiting for Mayday. The women had forced the issue. The time to strike was actually right here and right now. They hadn't planned for it. They hadn't expected it. They weren't the drivers of it. But the revolution was at hand.

Less than 24 hours after the Tsar left Petrograd, the capital had turned decisively against him. And next week, the reckoning for Nicholas and Alexandra had finally come. Minister of the Interior Protopompoff believed he had successfully stopped the union of elite-level political opponents of the regime with working-class street demonstrators, but he was clearly wrong. And next week, the Tsar will be told in no uncertain terms

that the only option left to him now was abdication.