Kristen Ghodsee - Red Valkyries: Feminist Lessons From Five Revolutionary Women

Red Valkyries

Red Valkyries

Feminist Lessons from
Five Revolutionary Women

Kristen R. Ghodsee

For Daisy,
because canines can be comrades, too

Contents

Both Russian and Bulgarian are Slavic languages written in the Cyrillic alphabet, and many competing conventions exist regarding the romanization of Cyrillic letters into the Latin alphabet. The Cyrillic letter can be transliterated as the Latin letters j, i, or y, which means that Alexandra Kollontais last name can be spelled Kollontaj, Kollontai, or Kollontay. The Cyrillic letter can be transliterated as a combination of the Latin letters j ia, ya, or the unwieldy i, meaning that Krupskaya can be Krupskaja, Krupskaia, or Krupskai. Similarly, the Cyrillic letter can be Romanized as ju, yu, or iu, giving us Ljudmila, Lyudmila, or Liudmila. Generally speaking, I try to be consistent with the romanization of names, but unfortunately, my English language sources use different romanization conventions and so there will be inconsistencies in the text when I use direct quotes. I also try to use the popular romanized spellings of more familiar names like Trotsky or Tolstoy, and I generally use the anglicized versions of Russian names that are more familiar to readers (such as Leo Tolstoy rather than Lev Tolstoy). Finally, in some Slavic languages, surnames have masculine and feminine endings: Lyudmila Pavlichenkos maiden name was Belova, but her fathers was Belov. In the same way, Krupskaya was the daughter of a Krupsky and Lagadinova was the daughter of a Lagadinov.

Dates in tsarist Russia are often confusing to Western readers because of the differences between the Julian and the Gregorian calendars. In Europe, the Julian calendar came into effect in 45 bce and was the primary calendar of the Roman Empire and throughout medieval Europe for about 1,600 years. Unfortunately, the mathematical and astronomical calculations on which the calendar was based were a bit off, and it picked up an extra day every 128 years. In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII issued a papal bull that created a new Gregorian calendar, which is the calendar that Western countries use today. The Russian Orthodox Church never accepted this Roman Catholic calendrical reform, however, and continued to use the old Julian calendar. Significant events in Russian history, therefore, have been named according to their dates on the Julian calendar, which can be confusing to Western readers; the 1917 October revolution, for example, took place on November 7 by the Gregorian calendar (October 25 by the Julian calendar), and the February revolution that same year lasted from March 8 to March 12 (February 24 to 28). I use terms such as October revolution in this text but all dates listed are according to the Gregorian calendar.

Note that the Russian city of Saint Petersburg was renamed Petrograd in 1914. After Lenins death in 1924, the city became Leningrad. In 1991, it reverted to Saint Petersburg. I use all three names in the text, depending on the time of the events I am describing.

I use the terms state socialism and state socialist to refer to the governments of the Soviet Union and Bulgaria during the twentieth century. Although ruled by communist parties, both nations considered themselves to be in the socialist stage of the Marxist developmental framework, in which communism was the ideal society toward which they were striving. They referred to themselves as socialist states, or societies living under what they called really-existing socialism, to distinguish their still imperfect systems from the communist ideal. This is why the USSR stands for the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and why the ruling party in East Germany was called the Socialist Unity Party. In no East European country was the goal of communism achieved, nor did any state claim to have achieved it, and so I prefer to avoid this term. However, Western scholars and politicians tend to use the terms communist and communism to refer to these countries. To the extent that these words appear in this book, they can be more or less used interchangeably with socialist and socialism, although there exist important theoretical and practical differences between the two political frameworks. Also, it is common among womens historians to refer to women like Kollontai as socialist feminists, Marxist feminists, and left feminists, even though Kollontai herself rejected the term feminist throughout her life. Where possible, I have used the term socialist womens activists instead. The use of the word feminist in the subtitle of this book was the decision of the Verso marketing department.

My use of terms such as woman and man, male and female, and mother and father in these pages primarily denote categories as they were understood within the context of the struggles of nineteenth- and twentieth-century socialist womens activists in Eastern Europe, even as I recognize that these words are used more inclusively today. These activists focused their revolutionary efforts on the emancipation of what are now called cisgender women, most of whom were assumed to be heterosexual and interested in becoming mothers. The experiences and political interests of queer, trans, and nonbinary people at the time dont make an appearance, not because they are unimportant, but rather because they merit more attention than I can devote to them here.

I have tried to be sensitive to ableist and other outdated language in my own prose, but where it appears in direct quotations, I have left it unaltered.

I have included citations in the endnotes for direct quotations and statistical figures. Most readers can feel free to ignore these citations unless they are interested in a particular source or the clarification of a specific term or historical event. The Timeline of Key Events gives readers a sense of how the lives of these five women intersected with major global events such as World War I, the Russian revolution, World War II, and the Cold War.

Finally, because this entire book was written during the COVID-19 lockdowns in 2020 and 2021, I relied heavily on digitally-accessible or internet-orderable primary and secondary sources for the four Russian/Soviet women. These introductory biographical essays only provide an initial glimpse into the fascinating lives of these five Red Valkyries. The many sources cited in the endnotes and in the Suggestions for Further Reading are a good place to start for readers who wish to dive deeper.

1861 Emancipation of the Russian serfs

1863 Publication of Nikolai Chernyshevskys novel What Is to Be Done?

1869 Nadezhda Krupskaya born

1870 Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin) born