Revolutionary social democratic work in Russia during the First World War faced enormous difficulties. The Party and the unions were illegal. But by 1915 the movement was recovering from the blows it received in the first months of the war. One area where it began to make important gains was among women, who were being drawn into the industrial work force in large numbers. By the outbreak of the war, women made up roughly one-third of industrial workers, and a still larger portion of those in the textile industry. This increased even further during the war as men were mobilised for military service. The situation of women worsened during the war as many became the sole support of their families and necessities became scarcer and more expensive. Women workers took part in many strikes and demonstrations against the economic hardships created by Russia’s involvement in the war.
Pitiful as the lot of the worker is, the status of the woman is far worse. In the factory, in the workshop, she works for a capitalist boss, at home – for the family.
Thousands of women sell their labour to capital; thousands drudge away at hired labour; thousands and hundreds of thousands suffer under the yoke of family and social oppression. And for the enormous majority of working women it seems this is the way it must be. But is it really true that the working woman cannot hope for a better future, and that fate has consigned her to an entire life of work and only work, without rest night and day? (Lenin’s Struggle for a Revolutionary International, p. 268.)
The preceding lines are from a leaflet entitled ‘To the Working Women of Kiev’, distributed by the Bolsheviks in Kiev (Ukraine), on 8 March (International Women’s Day), 1915. The leaflet gives us an idea of how the Bolsheviks posed the question in their public agitation. Their appeal linked the oppression of women to the suffering of male workers, and to a programme for the liberation of all working people.
The war was a disaster for the people of Russia. From the outset, the Germans dealt the Russian forces one devastating blow after another. In the Summer Campaign of 1915 the Russians were kicked out of Galicia[1] and the German army was poised to take all Poland, the Baltic, and Belorussia. Ill-prepared for war, the tsarist armies suffered one humiliating defeat after another. As early as the summer of 1914, 150,000 Russians were prisoners of war. By the end of the war, the number of Russians killed at the front rose to a staggering 1.8 million. Slowly but surely, the seemingly mighty armies of the Tsar were being ground to a bloody pulp. To replace such horrendous losses, millions of workers and peasants were called up – nearly 16 million by the end. And to make up for the lost numbers in industry, new layers were drawn into the factories – women, youth, and peasants – all without any previous experience of factory life and the class struggle. This caused further difficulties for the revolutionaries who still remained. But the harsh conditions of wartime soon educated the new layers.
The main victims of the war were women. The suffering and death at the front were only one face of the war. The other, less well-known but no less appalling, was the fate of those numberless women from working-class and peasant homes who saw their world collapse into ruins as if by the command of some pitiless and all-powerful God. Drafted into the factories to replace their menfolk sent to the front, the proletarian women had to bear the brunt of the social problems of the war. Formerly backward and unorganised, they soon learned a harsh lesson in the school of factory life, and became transformed. Exploited and oppressed in the factory and in the home, working long hours under bad conditions only to find at the end of the month that their wages had been eroded by the remorseless rise in prices, the women saw that the rich owners were literally taking the bread from the mouths of their children. Sweeping aside all the traditional prejudices about a woman’s role, they occupied the front line of battle.
An investigation carried out into 700,000 war workers by the Special Council for Defence in 1917 found that 17 per cent of them were women and 12.5 per cent adolescents. In manufacturing industry generally the proportion of women rose from 27.4 per cent in 1914 to 34.2 per cent in January 1917; the corresponding figure for adolescents and juveniles (of both sexes) were 10.9 per cent and 14.0 per cent. In the engineering industry female labour accounted for a mere 1.1 per cent of the total number of employees in 1913 but for 14.3 per cent in January 1917; the percentage of adolescents and juveniles rose slightly from 9.4 per cent to 11.7 per cent. In the textile industry, where women had always played a very important part, their proportion now doubled, reaching 43.4 per cent. Women were even recruited for underground work in the mines, although at least not as face-workers. On the records of the factory inspectorate there were virtually as many women and young people as there were men. (J.L.H. Keep, The Rise of Social Democracy in Russia, p. 49.)
Lenin constantly emphasised the revolutionary potential of these women proletarians and insisted that the party take special measures to win them to the revolutionary cause. To this end, in 1914 they launched a woman’s newspaper called Rabotnitsa (Woman Worker). Already in the revolutionary upsurge of 1912-14, the party had begun consistent work among women, and had organised the first International Women’s Day meeting in Russia in 1913. Simultaneously, Pravda began to publish a regular page devoted to questions affecting women. The first issue of Rabotnitsa came out on International Women’s Day, to coincide with a demonstration organised by the party. Rabotnitsa was financed by collections organised by women in the factories, on the same lines as Pravda. It carried material on the conditions of women workers and reported on their struggles. It also reported on the position of women in other countries. The same year that Rabotnitsa appeared the Mensheviks also began to publish a woman’s newspaper. However, these publications shared the same fate as the rest of the workers’ press in Russia after July 1914.
The work of the Bolshevik Party among women had nothing whatsoever in common with bourgeois or petty-bourgeois feminism, but was impregnated with an implacable revolutionary and class spirit. From the beginning, the Bolsheviks encouraged women to get organised and join in the struggle of the male workers, and urged them to turn their backs on the movements set up by bourgeois women after the defeat of the 1905 Revolution. In the leaflet already quoted we read the following:
Comrades! Working women! The men comrades toil along with us. Their fate and ours are one. But they have long since found the only road to a better life – the road of organised labour’s struggle with capital, the road of struggle against all oppression, evil, and violence. Women workers, there is no other road for us. The interests of the working men and women are equal, are one. Only in a united struggle together with the men workers, in joint workers’ organisations – in the Social Democratic Party, the trade unions, workers’ clubs, and cooperatives – shall we obtain our rights and win a better life.
Of course, the party took up those demands of special interest to women – benefits for pregnancy and maternity; full equality of civil and family rights for men and women, and so on. But all these demands were seen as part of the general struggles of the working class as a whole and inseparably linked to the perspective of socialist revolution: “Comrades! Working women, let’s go to work! Wake all those who are still sound asleep; unite in the struggle for the demands of the whole working class.” (Reprinted in Lenin’s Struggle for a Revolutionary International, p. 268 and p. 269.)
As the conditions worsened, so women began to participate more and more in strikes and demonstrations against the appalling conditions brought on by the war. Nor did they stop at merely economic demands. The women textile workers of Kostroma distributed a leaflet to the troops with the title ‘To the Russian soldier from the Russian Woman’. The regime, in a panic, lashed out. Troops and Cossacks were sent into Kostroma and on 5 July, there were bloody clashes in which 12 people were killed and 45 wounded. In the whole of 1915, 20 per cent of all strikes were political. In the war months of 1914 the figure was only 11 per cent. The work of the Bolshevik Party among women bore important fruits. During the dark days of the war, the women Bolsheviks played a key role in agitating against the war and fighting against chauvinism. It is no accident that the Russian Revolution of February 1917 commenced on Woman’s Day, and that the first initiative came from the women workers who had received their baptism of fire during the war.
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Galicia was the part of Poland that was under Austrian rule before the First World War.