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This story begins and ends at the gates to the working class. These “gates” have served as a metaphor for policy, or, more specifically, for the state's attempts to define and control the size, composition, and behavior of the working class. By dividing those who were permitted to enter from those who would remain outside, the state used the gates to construct the working class from above. The gates were not, however, maintained by the state alone. Put up in the 1920s to exclude women and peasants, the gates also privileged and revived an older “kadrovye” working class that had all but disappeared during the civil war. The gates were staunchly defended by the unions and contested by the Zhenotdel. In 1930, they were toppled by a vast and mobile crowd of peasants, women, and other unemployed people in search of work. As job opportunities opened up and managers everywhere faced severe labor shortages, new workers streamed into jobs and onto construction sites, forming a new working class that now encompassed formerly excluded elements. The Party struggled to keep pace with a labor-market expansion that its own industrial policies had created. Veterans of the Zhenotdel, organizers from KUTB, and female members of the planning brigades cheered as the gates fell and women edged forward toward the best of the once-protected working-class positions: production jobs in heavy industry. The unions, labor exchanges, and local labor organizations all lost their place as gatekeepers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The creation of a new communist state demands from all participants in socialist construction a firm, genuinely proletarian labor discipline, the fullest use of every working day, every working hour, and the decisive elimination of all types of disorganized production, in particular absenteeism. Why do we need a second five-year plan when we have not gotten anything from the first one? Purge the Towns of Social [i.e., Human] Garbage! By the end of the term of the first five-year plan, 10.7 million new workers had entered the labor force. The cities and construction sites were teeming with people, but housing, running water, electricity, sewage disposal, and food distribution were all still woefully inadequate for the needs of the new population. People lived amid horrific conditions: crowded into single rooms and corners in subdivided apartments, in hastily erected, rickety barracks, in primitive tent and cave dwellings, even in the factories and shops themselves. Thousands of new, badly needed workers arrived each day at the country's sprawling construction sites, only to leave again for lack of housing. Turnover rates soared as workers sought better living situations in other places. Everywhere labor was on the move, trudging from building site to city, thronging the railroad stations, packing the trains. The plants and sites were extremely disorganized. Dining halls and kitchens built to serve several hundred workers now turned out meals for thousands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fulfillment of the plan in 1931 and the following years demands a series of maneuvers from the labor force: a group of men must leave work, and women must replace them. Men, after retraining in their positions, will be sent to jobs that would be harmful to the female organism. In the summer of 1930, as hundreds of thousands of unemployed workers, peasants, and women poured through the tumbled gates to the working class, planners quietly tucked away a set of elaborate blueprints for the deployment of women in the files of the Commissariat of Labor (NKT), the State Planning Commission (Gosplan), and the Council of People's Commissars (SNK). The plans, redrafted many times, had resulted in a final, detailed document entitled “The Five-Year Plan for Female Labor.” Never published or publicly discussed, this plan had emerged from countless meetings of NKT, Gosplan, the Committee to Improve the Labor and Life of Women (KUTB), and other commissariats and departments throughout the spring and summer of 1930. Planners based their plan for female labor on intensive research into Soviet industry in 1930. Surveying the advances of rationalization and mechanization in various industries, they set target figures and training quotas for women throughout the economy, specifying their numbers and placement in various sectors, industries, shops, and jobs. The plans, preserved in the State Archive of the Russian Federation (GARF), are fully revealed and analyzed for the first time in this chapter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We must broaden the circle of registration of the unemployed to include those who have not had the right to register with the organs of labor up to this time. We need to spend the minimum on housing to guarantee the maximum tempo of industrialization. This can be done only if we maximize the labor resources of the present urban population and those in the new towns. This means the maximum involvement of women. Throughout 1930 and 1931, labor officials struggled to apprehend and gain control of the vast changes taking place in the economy. Employees in the labor exchanges (birzhi truda) stood in the front line of the transformation, desperately trying to create order out of chaos. Caught between the insistent demands of managers for labor and the hordes of incoming workers on the one hand, and an increasingly obsolete labor policy on the other, they were largely ineffective in their efforts to direct and deploy the labor force. As labor shortages rapidly replaced unemployment, the state was forced to replace a policy based on exclusion with a scheme for recruitment. The Commissariat of Labor (NKT) was confronted with the new and difficult tasks of understanding, directing, and mastering the roiling waves of movement and migration stirred up by collectivization, the socialization of retail trade, and industrialization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Zhenotdel has already ceased to be a progressive force and has become a hindrance. Throughout the 1920s, the Party's exclusionary labor policy was strongly contested by women. Many of their objections and complaints were articulated by the Zhenotdel (women's department), an organization created in 1919 by the Central Committee in response to strong pressure coming from both inside and outside the Party. The Zhenotdel struggled to broaden the definition of the working class by highlighting the problems faced by women, including unemployment, prostitution, low-waged work, and lack of skills. Although the Central Committee backed the Zhenotdel, the department's activists still came into sharp conflict with uneducated male rank-and-file Party members whose attitudes toward women did not differ substantially from those of their peasant fathers and grandfathers. From its very inception, the Zhenotdel was at loggerheads with the unions over how to organize women. Despite its difficulties, however, it represented a genuine “proletarian women's movement.” In the period before World War I, Europe's social democratic parties, including the Bolsheviks, embraced the notions of women's equality and emancipation more wholeheartedly than any other political parties. When the Bolsheviks came to power, they immediately passed progressive legislation concerning marriage, divorce, abortion, property, illegitimacy, and equality – legislative programs that many capitalist countries have yet to adopt. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Millions of women – wives and family members of workers and employees, servants, women in handicrafts and artels, landless women, poor peasants, collective farmers, eastern tribal women – this entire mass, once occupied with exhausting and dulling household labor, is now joining the great socialist construction of the country. The composition of the new working class takes its shape in large measure from unused reserves in the working-class family. In the spring of 1929, the Party adopted the first five-year plan. The plan, taking up three volumes and more than two thousand pages, allocated 64.5 billion rubles to investment, 78 percent of which was targeted for heavy industry and 50 percent for new construction. Adoption of the plan, in the words of one economist, was “tantamount to turning the country into a vast construction site.” After a decade of unemployment and exclusion, the gates to the working class came tumbling down. Almost 2.3 million people entered the waged labor force in 1930, followed by 6.3 million more in 1931. Party leaders, labor officials, and planners critically noted at the time that this mass influx of new workers occurred “samotek,” or independent of any state plan or policy. The building of huge new industrial complexes and hydroelectric stations such as Magnitostroi, Kuznetsstroi, and Dneprostroi drew thousands of workers. Hungry town dwellers and dispossessed peasants massed at new construction sites and factory gates in search of work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the 1920s, the male labor force poured in from the countryside and began to replace women in production. This frequently occurred under the banner of “rationalization,” but in fact, one group was laid off and another hired. Women fared badly in the mass layoffs on the railroads. When men and women held the same job, women were the ones to be laid off. There was a definite tendency to lay off women whose husbands were working. At the end of the 1920s, a poor peasant woman named Zaminskaia was abandoned by her husband. Left to fend for herself and her two children, she went to the city in search of work. She tried to register at the labor exchange, which dispensed both jobs and unemployment benefits, but was told she was eligible for neither. “You must first work six months for wages,” an official explained. Feeling increasingly hopeless, she ran from one state agency to another, from the Department of Labor to the local soviet to the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate. She heard the same story from every official. Without previous work experience, she could not register to work. Finally she wrote a despairing letter to Rabotnitsa, a journal for women workers. “I am sick and I am starving,” she noted. “I have appealed everywhere.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We should not aspire to a highly stable family and look at marriage from that angle. Strengthening marriage and the family – making divorce more difficult – is not new, it is old: it is the same as bourgeois law. These “theories” were reflected also in denial of the socialist character of Soviet law, in attempts to portray Soviet law as bourgeois law – as law resting on the same bourgeois principles and expressing the same social relationships inherent in the bourgeois order. These persons trod the well worn path of Trotskyite-Bukharinist perversions… In the two decades between 1917 and 1936, the official Soviet view of the family underwent a complete reversal. Beginning with a fierce, libertarian commitment to individual freedom and “the withering away” of the family, the period ended with a policy based on a repressive strengthening of the family unit. Similar shifts occurred in the ideology of the state and the law as the Party systematically eliminated the libertarian currents in Bolshevik thought. A legal understanding of crime based on social causation and rehabilitation yielded to a new emphasis on personal culpability and punishment. Open intellectual exchange gave way to fearful caution, honest debate to a stiff, brittle mockery of discussion. By 1936, newspapers trumpeted support for a strong socialist family, elaborate legal codes, and a powerful state. The concepts of socialist family, law, and state, more reminiscent of Constantine Pobedonostsev than Marx, had become the new holy trinity of the Party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What I eat and drink, how I sleep and dress is my private affair, and my private affair also is my intercourse with a person of the opposite sex. It is necessary to put an end to the anarchist view of marriage and childbirth as an exclusively private affair. The prohibition on abortion in June 1936 was accompanied by a campaign to discredit and destroy the libertarian ideas that shaped social policy throughout the 1920s. After the ratification of the 1926 Family Code, the problems posed by divorce, alimony, family instability, and besprizornost' continued to mount. The process of forced collectivization created fresh streams of homeless, starving children, and rapid industrialization subjected the family to new and terrible strains. As women poured into the wage labor force at the end of the first Five Year Plan, the press drew increasing attention to a new phenomenon of “unsupervised and neglected” children (beznadzornos'). By 1935, the state had begun to crack down heavily on juvenile crime and the children of the streets. In 1936, jurists repudiated many of their earlier ideas, and in a clear ideological shift, demanded the strengthening and stabilization of the family. Couching the new policies in a populist appeal for social order, the Party aban-doned its earlier vision of social relations in favor of a new reliance on mass repression. The “withering-away” doctrine, once central to the socialist understanding of the family, law, and the state, was anathemized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aron Sol'ts: It seems to me that the draft suggested by the Commissariat of Justice is only a formal “step forward.” It has nothing in common with the real steps forward we must take in the areas of culture, life, and development. Nikolai Krylenko: So, Comrade Sol'ts wants what we now already have. All these countless babi with children, wives suing communists, and communists running from their wives … in one word, all those who protest to him about the current situation. Are they really protesting against the draft? What does Comrade Sol'ts want to change? The draft, which is not yet in effect, or the current law? Sol'ts: The draft and the current law! Krylenko: How do you want to change it? Tell us, Comrade Sol'ts, do you want to provide a legal basis for only the first marriage, to establish the right to enter marriage only once? Is that what you want? Is this so, or not so? Sol'ts: Not so. Krylenko: No, it is so. If we are to call ourselves Marxists, we must affirm that we cannot struggle with a definite phenomenon of life by punitive norms. Sol'ts: I didn't suggest this. Krylenko: Then tell us concretely, what are you suggesting? By October 1925, the final draft of the new Family Code was affirmed by Sovnarkom (Council of People's Commissars) and submitted to the Central Executive Committee (VTsIK) for ratification. Jurists had taken two years to agree on an acceptable draft, discarding at least three previous versions in an attempt to meet various needs and interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The primary means of regulating the birthrate within the family was artificially induced miscarriage or abortion. In the spring of 1920, when abortion was still prohibited in the Soviet Union, Nikolai Semashko, the commissar of health, was deluged by letters concerning the frightening popularity of the practice. One worker from a factory staffed largely by young women wrote, “Within the past six months, among 100 to 150 young people under age 25, I have seen 15 to 20 percent of them making abortions without a doctor's help. They simply use household products: They drink bleach and other poisonous mixtures.” The letters, from Party members as well as workers, indicated that the law against abortion did little to deter women who wanted to terminate their pregnancies. The practice of abortion had been widespread in Russia prior to the Revolution despite the strict legal prohibition against it. The Criminal Code of 1885 defined abortion as a “premeditated act” of murder. It prescribed stiff punishment for both those who performed and those who underwent the procedure. After 1905, many doctors and jurists urged reform of the abortion laws; prominent professional organizations recommended legalization. Yet despite criticism of the existing legislation, only a few advanced the feminist argument that women had the right to make their own reproductive choices. The October Revolution and subsequent civil war did little to halt the practice of underground abortion. In fact, famine, hardship, and economic ruin spurred increasing numbers of women to seek illegal abortions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The process of divorce is so simple that there is a loss of neither money nor time. Under the current law, the act of dissolving a marriage can be completed in fifteen minutes. The broad mass of people do not regard registration of marriage as the basis of marital relations. De facto voluntary unions are becoming ever more widespread. The Bolsheviks believed that the freedom to divorce – to dissolve a union no longer founded on love – was essential to the freedom of the individual. The right to divorce was particularly important to women, whose true feelings and abilities were so often stifled by the unbreakable bonds of marriage. This idea was widely shared by most of the progressive, prewar intelligentsia. Liberal jurists tried repeatedly to reform Russia's unbending divorce laws. Tolstoy immortalized the desperate plight of a young mother in her struggle to free herself of a loveless marriage in his famous novel, Anna Karenina. And both Vera Figner, the leader of the terrorist People's Will, and Alexandra Kollontai, among countless others, struggled to escape the control of husbands and families. Yet the issue of divorce had a class as well as a gender dimension. The young women rebels who fought for their rights to emotional fulfillment, education, and careers at the end of the nineteenth century came mainly from upper-and middle-class families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is a curious fact that with every great revolutionary movement the question of “free love” comes into the foreground. [The family] will be sent to a museum of antiquities so that it can rest next to the spinning wheel and the bronze axe, by the horsedrawn carriage, the steam engine, and the wired telephone. In October 1918, barely a year after the Bolsheviks had come to power, the Central Executive Committee of the Soviet (VTsIK), the highest legislative body, ratified a complete Code on Marriage, the Family, and Guardianship. The Code captured in law a revolutionary vision of social relations based on women's equality and the “withering away” (otmiranie) of the family. According to Alexander Goikhbarg, the young, idealistic author of the new Family Code, it prepared the way for a time when “the fetters of husband and wife” would become “obsolete.” The Code was accordingly constructed with its own obsolescence in mind. Goikhbarg wrote, “Proletarian power constructs its codes and all of its laws dialectically, so that every day of their existence undermines the need for their existence.” In short, the aim of law was “to make law superfluous.” Goikhbarg and his fellow revolutionaries fully expected not only marriage and the family to wither away, but the law and the state as well. Lenin had carefully analyzed the future of the state in his famous essay, The State and Revolution, completed in September 1917, merely a month before the Bolsheviks took power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In March 1921, an organizer for the Detkomissiia (Commission for the Betterment of the Life of Children), traveled south from Moscow into a famine-stricken area. Deeply shaken by what he saw, he wrote in his report: Our train arrived at night and stopped not far from Samara. For some reason we could not go any farther. It was one or two in the morning. It was quiet and there was frost on the beets. Our train slept, all was silent, but suddenly, I could make out a thin, weak, remote wailing. I listened – the wailing grew strong and then fell again. I went out onto the platform. In the moonlight, at a great distance, lay some kind of gray rags. As I looked I could see them turning, and from the bosom of these rags came a weak, lingering wail: “Kh-le-b-tsa-, kh-le-b-tsa.” One could scarcely distinguish the separate voices, but due to their faintness, they all merged in a weak drawn-out wail. They were children, perhaps three, maybe four thousand, and at my disposal I had ten pounds of bread. By 1922 there were an estimated 7.5 million “starving and dying” children in Russia. Many, having lost one or both parents, fled broken families and desolate villages, and descended on the towns in search of food. Known as the besprizorniki (homeless waifs), they traveled alone and in bands, illegally riding the rails from one end of the country to another. They gathered in shifting crowds in the railroad stations and marketplaces, stealing, begging, picking pockets, and prostituting themselves to survive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]