Although Stalinist industrialization saw women enter en masse into industries and trades from which they remained excluded in the west, throughout the Soviet period they were marginalized into feminized industries, where work discipline was tighter and wages lower; if they worked in industries alongside men, they found themselves stuck in the lowest pay grades and were assigned the heaviest, and often the most hazardous, manual labor. In the late Soviet period it was common that when manual jobs were mechanized, women were removed from them and the jobs were given to men. The Soviet labor hierarchy was, therefore, highly gendered. So, too, was the home, where women took on the lion’s share of housework and childcare, receiving little if any help from their male partners.

In this well-researched and conceptually rich study, Alissa Klots examines an important but little-known aspect of this hierarchy, domestic labor. In 1937, Klots notes, there were more than 512,000 domestic servants working in Soviet urban households. This made them one of the largest occupational groups in the economy, vastly exceeding the numbers of weavers, turners, foundry workers, chemical workers, or workers in the food industry. Unlike these other groups, however, these women, and they were virtually all women, did not work in a collective workplace, but were isolated in private homes. Although seen by the state as bona fide workers, they were, Klots argues, at the very bottom of the labor hierarchy, while their acceptance served to reinforce the universal presumption that housework was exclusively a job for women.

Domestic workers were almost all young migrants from the countryside, mostly in their early to mid-teens. They lived with their employers, and whilst their pay was low, they received room and board. This much remained constant from the early days after the October Revolution until domestic service died away in the 1960s. What did not remain constant was the state’s attitude towards them and their work. In the years after the revolution and during NEP, there was an assumption that employers would be mainly former bourgeois or nepmen, and the employer-worker relationship was exploitative. The women were therefore unionized, and strict laws were introduced to protect them. They had to have a formal labor contract, they received statutory days off and holidays, and were paid overtime. In 1926, however, these regulations were relaxed: with growing urban unemployment the state sought to give employers greater incentives to hire. But what if employers were themselves workers? Was it okay for workers and even communists to hire domestic servants? Yes, provided that the domestic freed up the man and the woman of the household to take up more valuable work in industry.

This argument carried over into the first years of Stalinist industrialization, and domestic workers were feted as playing a vital role in the construction of socialism. Domestic service was seen, in fact, as a steppingstone to advancement: the girls were encouraged to study and move on to better and more productive work in industry. But by the mid-1930s the argument changed. As only the best-paid skilled workers, technical specialists, and government officials could afford to hire domestic help, they became seen as just one of the many privileges received along with better housing, access to scarce goods, and a dacha. Klots notes that new apartment blocks for the elite were now designed to contain a separate room for the servants.

One of the book’s most interesting discussions is the Terror. Klots discerns three categories of domestic workers. Some were themselves seen as class aliens and came under suspicion as spies. Others denounced their employers as enemies of the people, sometimes materially benefitting from their arrest. A third group took responsibility for the children after the parents were arrested and kept the family together.

During the war the number of domestic workers plummeted, but rapidly built back up to near prewar levels during late Stalinism. After Stalin’s death there was a heated debate about whether domestic labor was consistent with socialist egalitarianism, but none of the reforms proposed to limit or even abolish it were enacted. Only from Leonid Brezhnev onward did live-in domestic work fall away. Instead, families with the means hired help for specific jobs.

There is much more in this book worth noting, for example, domestic workers’ role in socializing children and bolstering the family as part of Stalinist pro-natalism, or the affective relationships that often developed between families and the girls they employed. This, however, would require a much longer review. I would only say, get your library to buy this book and go read it.