Microsoft Word - Document2


Volume 20, Number 1 

THE EMBODIED SOLUTION OF ‘THE WOMAN QUESTION’ IN POST-
REVOLUTIONARY RUSSIA 

Ioulia Gradskova,  
Moscow State Lomonosov University 

© 2002 Ioulia Gradskova All Rights Reserved 
The copyright for individual articles in both the print and online version of the Anthropology of East Europe Review is 
retained by the individual authors. They reserve all rights to the text. Please email the managing editor for details on how to 
contact these authors. Permission is granted for reproducing these articles for scholarly and classroom use as long as only 
the cost of reproduction is charged to the students. Commercial reproduction of these articles requires the permission of the 
authors. 

At the center of my essay is the problem 
of woman’s representational changes in Russia 
during the 1920-30s.  On the one hand, this period 
could be characterized by the equality-discourse; it 
is a period when women were declared equal to 
men in juridical, social, and political senses.  
Frequently this period is called the period of 
Marxist feminism (Bryson).  On the other hand, 
the whole Soviet period is well known as a period 
of “false equality.”  Thus, for an understanding of 
the significance and meanings of  “equality” for 
Russian women in that period, it is necessary to 
study more carefully what that “equality” was in 
the postrevolutionary era.  The problem of body 
representations and experiences from my view 
point could put more light not only on the dark 
problem of the “false equality” of women and men 
in the Soviet Union, but also on the postsoviet 
gender problems - seen by many women as 
exemplified by an unimportance of equal rights, 
antifeminist attitudes, lack of political activity, 
declarations of traditionalism, and no desire to be 
leaders.  The analysis of body politics could help 
us to enter the microhistory of such a complicated 
phenomenon as women’s liberation in the Soviet 
Russia and its consequences. 

 The sources for this essay are 
publications about the so-called “sexual question” 
and “change of the everyday life.”  Many books 
were written in Russia and outside on this topic; 
however, the problem of women’s subjectivity and 
women’s identity was not the central theme of 
those publications (i.e. Golod, Lebina, Etkind, 
Engelstein, Stites).  My interest is on only part of 
this big problem.  I analyze how the difference 
between femininity” and “masculinity” was 
constructed at that time.  

First I would like to mention briefly the 
participants in this discussion.  They included 
Bolshevik party and Komsomol activists with 

different positions in the hierarchy of these 
organizations, including persons responsible for a 
“solution of women’s question” (Trotsky, 
Smidovich, Kollontai, Semashko) and 
psychologists, clinicians, and psychoanalysts 
(Zalkind, Nemilov, Rubinstein).  The future of 
these participants was different: while some of 
them in the next 10-15 years became victims of 
repression and were excluded from the Soviet 
history, other participants entered the 
encyclopedias as prominent figures of culture and 
science (Semashko, Ketlinskaya). It was a time 
when the interdependent women’s organizations 
were declared bourgeois, and the pre-
Revolutionary liberal feminists’ slogans were not 
mentioned.  All the participants in the discussions 
were to follow strict “class” positions.  

The patterns of everyday life were 
changing dramatically at that time.  All the 
participants in the discussion undoubtedly felt the 
“subversive influence of the  transformation of 
intimacy on the contemporary institutions” 
(Giddens: 3).  They saw the solution of the sexual 
question as an important task.  The name “sexual 
question” pretended to overcome sexual difference 
and presented the problem of sexuality as 
relationships “out of gender.”  

        How did the participants view the human 
body?  What parts of the old cultural canon were 
included in the communist one?  What gender 
differences were declared disappearing and which 
ones remained?  How did new ideas about 
women’s body influence everyday life and 
politics?  

The  male/female oppositions from the view of 
social evolutionary theory  

All the participants in the discussion valued the 
scientific data, especially that coming from the 
“natural sciences.”  “Every Marxist should be 

Jen
Typewritten Text
49



Volume 20, Number 1 

biologist” (Nemilov: 208).  But, the human being, 
the “crown of the nature,” also had its natural part, 
which should be cultured.   

         The declaration of  “natural” as “correct” 
was bringing with itself an old  justification of 
gender differences as “natural differences,” and 
thus, justification of different moral and social 
norms for male and female behavior.  However, 
the social equality between man and woman was 
declared by the communist regime and could not 
be discussed openly.  The attempt to critique the 
social equality could be qualified as a rupture of 
the fragile border between “our” and “alter,” 
revolution and counterrevolution, and mean an exit 
from the frame of legal discourse.  The 
consequences of differences were presented as not 
connected to the “main” (social, collective) life of 
women and were presented as accompanying the 
description of  everyday life or family relations.  
While the family life as a form of “private” had to 
die as the result of the cultural changes, all the 
polemic was accompanied by words aimed to 
stress the temporality of the problem: “while,” “till 
now,” “yet.”  

Now and in some future years the 
young girl would be responsible for the 
home-keeping and family and not only 
may but has to make part of the 
homework.  It would be very bad if she 
started to “liberate herself” by the price 
of the harder work of her mother, aunt, 
or other members of the family. 
(Ketlinskaya: 51) 

“Yet the state is so poor that it is not able to 
support your marriage, children, education, or care 
for parents”(Semashko 1926: 27). 

       The authors of many publications directly 
followed the Enlightenment traditions describing 
“nature.”  The main actor and recipient of the 
reviewed publications are constructed as the 
masculine subject.  

From the early childhood the child is 
growing in the conditions of  renovated 
matriarchal society having women 
around him. The father among them is 
frequently an alien person. The first 
signs of the sexual life in man have 
impersonal character, he still did not 
elaborated the personal demands to 
woman. (Tomilin: 29)  

 It was considered that women, when they 
are adults, keep inside of them the vivid part of 
their nature - the reproductive system.  It makes 

her different from men, who are presented as not 
connected to the reproduction process at all.  This 
part of “nature” is especially pictured in many 
schemas as signifying “otherness.”  The structure 
of women’s reproductive system is responsible for 
the differences from men - she is “less stable,” has 
a psyche exhibiting “less equilibrium.”  This 
problem at the behavioral level should be 
compensated by the special moral qualities: 
shamefulness and restraint.  “The long time sexual 
partner is the best solution for woman according to 
her psychophysiology” (Zalkind: 53).  “Free love, 
casual connections and unstable relationships are 
against the nature of woman” (Ketlinskaya: 64).  

The rise in women’s cultural level and the 
problem of personal choice 

“The sexual question,” which served as a frame for 
the discussion, did not  take into account the 
sympathies, preferences, and desires of the 
concrete man and concrete woman.  The 
discussion about the “sexual question” mostly had 
a global approach and was viewed as a 
consequence of the crossing of “nature” and 
“culture.”  Following the psychoanalysis of early 
Freud, many participants claimed the necessity of 
sublimation, understood as a translation of the 
animal energy of human beings into cultural 
forms.  The sexual instinct was presented as one of 
the most dangerous of instincts.  Thus, the most 
important problem was how to teach the masses 
the “new culture,” which would help them to 
translate the wild energy of the animal part of 
human beings into the energy of collective 
creativity. 

The bourgeois culture from this view 
point was seen as badly functioning, a wrong 
sublimation which covers the “natural” essence of 
human beings with “false culture.”  Among the 
biggest problems of the false bourgeois culture 
was sexual hedonism - defined as sexual 
intercourse for pleasure.  “The most unrestrained 
animal is a bourgeois who gave freedom to his 
spoiled essence” (Smidovich: 28).  

The “new culture” had a meaning of 
connections with the victorious class and insisted 
on the limitations of joy for saving energy for 
social activity.  “More frequently remember about 
science, the lessons of revolution: educate yourself 
collectively, ‘suppress’ low instincts, make open 
the social instincts.  If you want to solve a sexual 
problem - you should work for society, be 
comrade, not male or female” (Semashko 1926: 
53).  

Jen
Typewritten Text
50



Volume 20, Number 1 

It is possible to suppose that negative 
attitudes toward hedonism and limitations on 
private, personal, and animal traits are gender-
neutral.  But, the precise analysis of the texts does 
not give us the possibility to agree with this 
supposition.  “An old tradition to see women as 
more moral, more modest in relation to sex person 
than men practically is not a ‘prejudice’ but an 
instinctive (unconscious) representation of the 
special features of male and female sexual life” 
(Semashko, 1927: 11). 

Behind commonly abstract categories of 
“nature,” “class,” “culture,” and “collective,” it is 
possible to see real differences only in works by L. 
Trotsky and A. Kollontai.  These two authors, 
while discussing the “sexual question,” were 
mentioning “personality” - not only instincts.  
“The main form of the fight for stability and 
culture of the family ties and relationships consists 
in raising of human personality” (Trotsky in 
Zukker, 10). 

    In spite of the fact that these two 
authors were speaking about human personality 
only with the aim of enriching collective life, it is 
necessary to stress A. Kollontai’s position, which 
supposed the possibility of a hedonist scenario of 
sexual relationships between men and women and 
the possibility of women’s initiative in these 
relationships.  In spite of the tradition to see 
Kollontai’s writings of the 1920s as “free love 
defense” (usually interpreted now in Russia as an 
irresponsible attitude toward sexual relationships - 
Golod, Aivazova), it is possible to see her writings 
as the creation of a theory of new personal and 
dialogical (in place of instinctive-reproductive or 
disembodied-friendly) relationships between men 
and women.  This was a theory, unfortunately, that 
could not be developed. 

If the blind and demanding force would 
be weaker in the love relationships, if 
the feeling of love-property and desire 
to ownership over the lover for ever 
would dye, if the superiority of men 
and criminal self-negation of woman 
could disappear, then the other 
moments in love could be developed. 
The esteem to the personality of the 
other would be more strong, the mutual 
feeling would be developed, the desire 
to show love not only in kissing and 
touching, but also in common action, 
unity of will, in common creativity 
would grow.” (Kollontai: 181) 

Many publications at that time contained 
phrases about freedom and equality, new everyday 
life (noviy bit) and new morals, but they did not 
pay much attention to two other conditions of 
women’s liberation without which it is hard to 
imagine the Western feminist revolution of 1960s.  
First, is the problem of contraception.  As it is 
known, the feminist revolution of 1960-70s was 
directly connected with the sexual revolution and 
beginning of the massive use of contraceptives by 
the new generation - the pill.  The material 
discussed with regard to the “sexual question” in 
Russia in 1920s paid little attention to this 
problem.  Even medical abortion frequently was 
declared to relate more to the issue of poverty than 
revolutionary gain (Semashko, 1927: 10-11). 

It is necessary to mention that in pre-
Revolutionary Russian, as much as in foreign 
publications on the “sexual question” (including 
several times reedited in Socialist Russia work of 
German clinician A. Forel), the problem of 
contraception was discussed.  Forel, for example, 
gives very detailed description of means of 
contraception which could be used by men and by 
women, especially stressing that women, for 
example, have the right to defend themselves from 
drunk husbands’ sexual aggression (Forel: 250-
251). 

At this later time, Soviet publications 
practically unanimously rejected every means of 
contraception, qualifying its use as perversion.  
Having sexual intercourse with contraception was 
also classified as a “false culture.”  S. Smidovich, 
for example, writes that that French bourgeois 
have all the newest condoms” (Smidovich: 124).  
Thus, the same use of contraceptives that was 
welcomed before the revolution, was, in the 1920s, 
presented as a sign of bourgeoisness, 
counterrevolution, and violation of nature.  

The second absent topic in this discourse 
is the topic of equal distribution of parental duties.  
In the majority of the publications, women are 
presented as tied (staying in some kind of 
symbiotic connections) to children, while it is 
stressed that men “according to their nature” are 
free from the consequences of the sexual act.  In 
spite of the declaration of Bolshevik theory that 
private and closed bourgeois families should give 
a place to a collective education of children, as in 
the case of home duties, the texts are full of 
reminders that women are “still” responsible for 
children.  

The rise of the cultural level as a way of 
constructing differences  

Jen
Typewritten Text
51



Volume 20, Number 1 

One of the most important problems discussed in 
the instructive literature at that time was the 
difficulty of control over the “natural part” of 
human beings as a whole.  The majority of the 
participants who took into account the difficulties 
of changes in economic policy first of all insisted 
on educative measures.  Maybe it sounds strange, 
but as one of the examples of the “correct” 
regulation of the “sexual question” Rousseau 
(“Sofia”) is mentioned (Rubinstein: 61). 

       It could be inspired from these ideas that 
men and women should make similar efforts to 
control their instinctive natures.  However, in the 
publications, it is possible to see multiple 
examples of the different, gendered requirements 
for control.  According to the authors of the 
majority of the publications, the nature of women, 
which was different from men’s and as a 
consequence of her low cultural level and special 
natural structure that gave only her the possibility 
to bear, give birth, and educate small children, 
needs more strict control from society.  “The class 
demand from woman the conscious selection of 
the father of her child” (Zukker: 10). 

According to the ideas of many 
participants in the discussion, this kind of control 
does not limit the freedom of women, because in 
any case she has a different nature.  Trying to 
illustrate, V. Ketlinskaya writes: “It is interesting 
such an example one of the followers of the ‘new 
everyday life moral’ who used to wear a leather 
jacket, and short nails and hair desired to be 
married to a Komsomol member. … And to her 
red marriage party she brought shoes with high 
heels, panties, clear short skirt…” (Ketlinskaya: 
63). 

What conclusion did Ketlinskaya, a 
Komsomol leader herself, reach about the behavior 
of this Komsomol member?  That she should think 
more about ideology?  That she is following “false 
culture”?  No, the Ketlinskaya remark was 
different: “when you try to throw nature out the 
door, it will enter through the window” 
(Ketlinskaya: 63).   

It is possible to say that many participants 
it the discussion on the ‘sexual question’ used 
“natural differences” to rethink the declared 
equality with the aim of vindicating first sexual 
and then, in a hidden form, social inequality.  The 
discussion shows the maintenance of the double 
standard and its previous form of justification: 
women’s nature would mean tragedy in the world 
of culture.  “Those few moments of happiness 
which brings to woman her service for the “genius 

of gender” can not reimburse all that suffering and 
problems which fill the life of every, even 
absolutely normal woman” (Nemilov: 61). 

To make the tragedy connected to her 
nature smaller, woman should be more conscious 
or more controlled than man.  “It is necessary 
cruelly to prevent a widely spread view, even 
among conscious women: “When man is allowed 
to do something (speaking about sexual life) why 
cannot woman as well?  This is inequality, 
prejudice.  The rule is “as man, as woman.”  This 
view is very dangerous.  The sexual life of woman 
is not equal with man’s.  That is why woman is a 
woman and man is a man” (Semashko, 1926: 79). 

          Thus, it is possible to say that the analysis of 
the discussion on the “sexual question” makes us 
suppose that the natural differences among men 
and women are so big, that the declared equality is 
practically annulled by them. 

Conclusion 

On the basis of the material analyzed here, it is 
possible to say that the main condition of the 
definitions of “masculinity” and “femininity” in 
post-revolutionary Russian discourse is of 
difference defined by nature - reproductive system 
differences. This helps to divide gender 
differences, making part of them “the product of 
the old system” (which should be renewed) and the 
other part presented as simply “natural,” obvious.  
The “obvious” part of differences is constructed 
not on the basis of sexual differences, but on the 
basis of the social meanings of their consequences 
in the context of the new morality.  Thus, to the 
mid-1920s, doubts about the possibility/necessity 
of full equality are present.  At the same time, it is 
possible to say that ambiguity and a non-
articulated border between “biological difference” 
and “social equality” in the field of cultural 
revolution could help in understanding the 
phenomenon of Soviet and post-Soviet gender 
problem formulations.  “The biological tragedy,” 
the capability of bearing children, slowly is 
converted in Soviet politics of difference, which 
undoubtedly made woman not simply different, 
but worse with respect to man.  However, not only 
women, but men as well were lacking control over 
their bodies, which helped to convert the cultural 
differences among them in hidden and silent ways 
during the whole Soviet period.  

References 

Jen
Typewritten Text
52



Volume 20, Number 1 

Aivazova, Svetlana  
1998  The Russian women in the 
labyrinths of equality, Moscow: RIK 
Russanova. 

Attwood, Linn 
1990  The New Soviet Man and Woman.  
Bloomington: Indiana University Press. 

Bryson, Valery 
2001  Feminist political theory : an 
introduction.  Moscow: Idea Press 
(translated into Russian) 

Engelstein, Laura 
1998  The key to happiness: sex and the 
search for modernity in fin-de-siecle 
Russia. (transl in Russian).  Moscow: 
Terra. 

Etkind, Alexander 
1993   The Eros of impossible, the history 
of psychoanalysis in Russia. Saint 
Petersburg: Meduza. 

Forel, August 
1928  The sexual question, Kharkov: 
Kosmos. 

Giddens, Anthony 
1993  The transformation of intimacy: 
Sexuality, Love and Eroticism in modern 
societies. Stanford: Stanford University 
Press. 

Golod, Sergei 
1998 XX-th century and traditions of 
the sexual relations in Russia, Saint 
Petersburg: Aleteia. 

Kollontai, Alexandra 
1924  The way to an Eros which has 
wings / The questions of the life and 
fight, Moscow: Molodaya Gvardia. 

Ketlinskaya, Vera 
1927  The girl and the Komsomol.  
Leningrad: Priboi. 

Lebina, Natalia 
1999  The everyday life of the soviet city: 
the norm and anomalies, 1920-30s.  Saint 
Petersburg: Neva. 

Nemilov, Alexander 
1930  The biological tragedy of woman, 
the review of female physiology.  
Moscow: Seyatel.  

Rubinstein, Mikhail 
1926  The sexual education from the 
viewpoint of the interests of culture. 
Moscow-Leningrad: Moskovskoye 
Akzionernoie Izdatelskoye Obszhestvo. 

Semashko, Nikolai 
1926  New “byt” and the sexual question, 
Moscow: Gosizdat. 
1927 Against the alimony epidemic or 
believe in alimony, but thing what you 
are doing.  Moscow: Okhrana 
Materinstva i Mladenchestva. 

Smidovich, Sofia 
1925  About love / Sexual question.  
Moscow: Molodaia Gvardia. 

Stites, Richard 
1978  Women’s liberation movement in 
Russia.  Princeton: Princeton University 
Press. 

Tomilin, Semion 
1926  The sexual problem.  Kharkov:  
Nauchnaya Misl. 

Zalkind, Aron 
1926  The sexual question in the 
conditions of the soviet society. 
Leningrad: Gosizdat. 

Zukker, Alexander 
1928  Introduction.  In: The sexual 
question, by August Forel.  Kharkov: 
Kosmos. 

 

 

Jen
Typewritten Text
53