A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

one Soviet poster. The gradual dissolution of the 'bourgeois' family through liberal reform of the laws on marriage, divorce and abortion would, it was supposed, liberate women from their husbands' tyranny. The Women's Department of the Central Committee Secretariat (Zhenotdel), established in 1919, set itself the task to 'refashion women' by mobilizing them into local political work and by educational propaganda. Kollontai, who became the head of Zhenotdel on Armand's death in 1920, also advocated a sexual revolution to emancipate women. She preached 'free love' or 'erotic friendships' between men and women as two equal partners, thus liberating women from the servitude of marriage' and both sexes from the burdens of monogamy. It was a philosophy she practised herself with a long succession of husbands and lovers, including Dybenko, the Bolshevik sailor seventeen years her junior whom she married in 1917. and, by all accounts, the King of Sweden, with whom she took up as the Soviet (and the first ever female) Ambassador in Stockholm during the 1930s.

As the Commissar for Social Welfare Kollontai tried to create the conditions for this new sexual harmony. Efforts were made to combat prostitution and to increase the state provision of child-care, although little progress could be made in either field during the civil war. Unfortunately, some local commissariats failed to understand the import of Kollontai's work. In Saratov, for example, the provincial welfare department issued a 'Decree on the Nationalization of Women': it abolished marriage and gave men the right to release their sexual urges at licensed brothels. Kollontai's subordinates set up a 'Bureau of Free Love' in Vladimir and issued a proclamation requiring all the unmarried women between the ages of eighteen and fifty to register with it for the selection of their sexual mates. The proclamation declared all women over eighteen to be 'state property' and gave men the right to choose a registered woman, even without her consent, for breeding 'in the interests of the state'.²⁵

Little of Kollontai's work was really understood. Whereas her vision of the sexual revolution was in many ways highly idealistic, she was widely seen to be encouraging the sexual promiscuity and moral anarchy which swept through Russia after 1917. Lenin himself had no time for such matters, being himself something of a prude, and condemned the so-called 'glass-of-water' theory of sexual matters attributed to Kollontai — that in a Communist society the satisfaction of one's sexual desires should be as straightforward as drinking a glass of water — as 'completely un-Marxist'. 'To be sure,' he wrote, 'thirst has to be quenched. But would a normal person lie down in the gutter and drink from a puddle?' Local Bolsheviks were dismissive of 'women's work', nicknaming Zhenotdel the 'babotdel' (from the word 'baba', a peasant wife). Even the women themselves were suspicious of the idea of sexual liberation, especially in the countryside, where patriarchal attitudes died hard. Many women were afraid that

communal nurseries would take away their children and make them orphans of the state. They complained that the liberal divorce laws of 1918 had merely made it easier for men to escape their responsibilities to their wives and children. And the statistics bore them out. By the early 1920s the divorce rate in Russia had become by far the highest in Europe — twenty-six times higher than in bourgeois Europe. Working-class women strongly disapproved of the liberal sexuality preached by Kollontai, seeing it (not without reason) as a licence for their men to behave badly towards women. They placed greater value on the old-fashioned notion of marriage, rooted in the peasant household, as a shared economy with a sexual division of labour for the raising of a family.²⁶