Adele Lindenmeyr and Melissa Stockdale have edited a collection of sixteen essays to address the paucity of scholarship on women and gender for the period 1914–22. Sixteen essays cannot of course redress the enormity of the problem of HIS-tory, but they are nevertheless significant.
Arising from a 2018 workshop at the University of Illinois's Summer Lab, the book's scope is wide-ranging. The editors include contributions from a diverse group of scholars from the US, Europe, and the former Soviet Union, addressing a range of subjects, from art and literature, religious practice, concepts of masculinity, philanthropy, and political activism. Attention is paid to women and men of different classes, to those who stayed, as well as those who emigrated. The essays are organized thematically rather than chronologically, into four sections: “Women and Gender Roles,” “Men and Gender Roles,” three case studies of prominent women, and gender and memory.
In the first section, three articles address issues of women and work. Anthony Heywood focuses on women in the railroad industry, concluding that the first Five Year Plan in the late 1920s, not war and revolution, substantially increased the percentage of female railroad workers. Aleksandr Astashov discusses Russian women's labor during World War I. He commendably casts a wide net, including sex work, in his survey. Katherine McElvanney analyzes women in the Soviet press, concluding that initially activists occupied the most prominent positions, but observing a “shift to a more professional culture of journalism” (149) by the second half of the 1920s. Peasant women, the great majority of the population, are the subjects of two essays. Christine Worobec insightfully challenges narratives about religious pilgrims, citing photographic evidence as proof that women formed a significant portion of these believers. In the only essay focusing on other ethnic groups in the Russian empire, Denis Davydov and Olga Kozlova analyze Soviet approaches to emancipation and the reactions of rural Tatar women, arguing that resistance to gender equality ideology was perceived as a survival strategy by many.
The second section contains four articles on concepts of masculinity, spanning the outbreak of WWI to the early Soviet period. Ronald P. Bobroff analyzes Russian elite masculinity and its influence on the decision to enter the war. Steven G. Jug discusses evolving concepts of military masculinity among officers and frontline soldiers in the face of battlefield setbacks and revolution. Boris Kolonitskii analyzes the ways in which negative portrayals of Aleksandr Kerenskii were expressed often through his feminization, a characterization deployed by right and left-wing critics, and contributing to his political isolation by the time of the October Revolution. Kolonitskii contrasts Kerenskii with Lev Trotskii, another politician portrayed as “theatrical,” but definitely not feminized. Finally, Pavel Vasilyev uses evidence from several criminal cases of former soldiers in the early Soviet period, to analyze gender differences and the ways that class and concepts of wounded masculinity in the context of war and revolution could be employed to win judicial leniency.
The third section contains three case studies of women adapting to war and revolution. The three are all women of privilege. Galina Ulianova's subject, Empress Mariia Fedorovna, the mother of the last Tsar, Nicholas II, was of course, at the pinnacle of imperial power. Danish by birth and a cousin of Queen Alexandra, wife of the British King Edward VII, she is said to have counseled her son during the 1905 Revolution to grant a constitution. Aged sixty-six at the beginning of WWI, she distinguished herself as the head of the Red Cross, her own philanthropic organization, and as the patroness of dozens of public organizations. Having last seen her son in Mogilev soon after he abdicated, she evacuated from Crimea with the British, outliving her son by ten years.
David Borgemeyer portrays Natal΄ia Goncharova, the famed Russian female artist, noting the ways in which her experiences between 1914–22 affected her art. Unlike many of her male contemporaries, Goncharova “offered none of her male colleagues’ chauvinistic bravado in her war-related art” (267). Stuart Finkel surveys the life of Ekaterina Peshkova, who married Maksim Gor΄kii (Aleksei Maksimovich Peshkov), eight years her senior, in 1896, when she was twenty. They had two children before he left her in 1903. Active in the Socialist Revolutionary Party, she forged an independent life. After the Bolshevik Revolution, when political activism became increasingly untenable, she moved to greater philanthropic activity. Saved from repression by her connection to Gor΄kii, she maintained contact with her émigré friends until 1935, and outlived her ex-husband, dying in Moscow in 1965.
The fourth section contains an essay specifically devoted to narratives of the 1917 revolutions and one about memory and the Civil War. Karen Petrone addresses the mixed legacy of the Civil War, arguing that dueling interpretations of the conflict, some emphasizing the victimization of the Romanovs and the villainy of “foreign” (often meaning Jewish) revolutionaries have contributed to “the lack of a coherent narrative” (355) and the marginalization of this event in current Russian memory. The culture of the substantial Russian emigration is addressed in Olga Volkova's survey of the short-lived community in Harbin, China and the work of the poets Arsenii Nesmelov and Marianna Kolosova. Both express the pain and loneliness of emigration, but in gendered ways; Nesmelov in nostalgia for the sense of family represented by the tsar and tsarina, and Kolosova in utilizing the symbol of “Mother Russia” as representing resistance to the revolution.
Although many of the articles in this collection address women and gender, the actual voices of women are too often absent. For example, in her essay Katy Turton presents interviews with ten men prominent in the February Revolution, conducted in May 1917. The interviewees notably omit mention of women's roles in revolutionary events, denying women's political agency. Interviewee Nikolai Chkheidze, notably confronted by feminist leader Poliksena Shishkina-Iavein and the thousands of marchers participating in the path-breaking March 19 women's suffrage march, fails to mention the march in his account. Turton powerfully demonstrates the influence of such boy-stories on so many subsequent accounts of the revolutionary period. In seeking to correct the historical record, she includes Alexandra Kollontai, but erroneously places her in Russia during the February Revolution. Kollontai arrived in Petrograd on March 18. Turton also claims that Kadet Party leader Paul Miliukov, whose opposition to women's suffrage in 1905–1906 is well known, took a decade to change his views. But by the time of the 1908 Women's Congress, Miliukov was publicly supporting the female vote.
This collection of essays adds importantly to the scholarship about women and gender in the critical years of war and revolution, but I missed more inclusion of the voices of Russian and non-Russian women. Sources, very much underutilized, include feminist journals, pamphlets, memoirs, eyewitness accounts, photographs and films.
