The raucous nightlife seemed particularly unpalatable to Bolsheviks because it flourished alongside extensive social misfortune, especially during the decade's early years. In the second halfofi92i, a famine withered countless villages in the Volga basin, all the way from the Chuvash Autonomous Region and the Tatar Republic through Simbirsk, Samara, Saratov and Tsaritsyn provinces down to Astrakhan' on the Caspian Sea. Beyond the Volga region, starvation extended as far north as Viatka province, as far east as Cheliabinsk and the Bashkir and Kirghiz republics and west as far as southern Ukraine. Severe drought that year, combined with the legacy of protracted warfare, had given rise to a catastrophe destined to claim at least 5 million lives. Not until the end of 1922 did a better harvest and a relief campaign mounted by foreign organisations (notably, Herbert Hoover's American Relief Administration) provide reason for hope. Alarm over the nation's food supply faded through the following year, but other evidence of human trauma persisted.
Millions ofjuveniles had already found themselves abandoned or otherwise homeless in the seven years before 1921, as families disintegrated through violence, starvation or disease brought by the First World War and the civil war. The subsequent Volga famine played an even greater role in severing youths from their parents, and destitute juveniles flooded numerous Soviet cities at the beginning of NEP. Street children gained recruits not only through the deaths of mothers and fathers but also whenparents abandoned dependants they could no longer feed. Principal municipalities in the Volga epicentre of the famine accumulated hundreds of new waifs each day by the spring of 1922, and cities at major rail junctions in the region contained tens of thousands.
In the early 1920s, estimates of the nation's contingent of street children settled at around 7 million, including tens of thousands drawn to Moscow itself. Whether in the capital or provincial towns, they laboured to sustain themselves through begging, petty street trade, theft and prostitution. Almost at once they overwhelmed orphanages into which they were crammed. Revolutionary visions of collective childcare - to emancipate women from household chores and instil socialist principles in a new generation - dissolved in the reality of institutions that could offer little more than a piece of bread and a spot on the floor, and from which children often departed as fugitives or corpses. Not until the middle of the decade did the number of street children decline steadily, providing reason at last for optimism that a blight the Bolsheviks associated with capitalist society could be removed from their own.[189]
For that to happen, however, the circumstances of families and especially single mothers would have to improve considerably, and here NEP generated mixed results. Industry, for example, revived briskly, but women seeking employment encountered new obstacles at the factory gate and inside. They had poured into the proletariat during the First World War and represented close to half of the industrial labour force that remained at the beginning of 1921, many of them working in branches of production where they could not have expected employment in 1913. As labour patterns reverted during NEP to gender divisions more common before 1914, women were concentrated in textiles and other light industries and in lower-paying, lower-skilled occupations - if they were able to escape the 'last hired, first fired' retrenchment at enterprises placed on khozraschet. A variety of other factors appear to have played a part in augmenting the ranks of unemployed women, including a belief among employers that men, on average, possessed a higher level of industrial skills and could cope more readily with heavy physical labour. Party organisations also instructed state labour exchanges to assign priority to placing demobilised soldiers in jobs, while labour laws barred women from certain industrial occupations and stipulated that they receive substantial time off for maternity and the care of sick children. All of this hindered women in competing for jobs against male candidates who arrived on the scene in large numbers beginning in 1921. By 1923, women and juveniles (also protected under labour laws that restricted their use by factory directors) accounted for over half of all unemployed workers.[190]
Thus, labour laws formulated to benefit women with such rights as generous maternity leave yielded results in practice that were difficult to celebrate. Much the same could be said of broader Bolshevik legislation on women and the family. Less than ayear afterthe revolution, a Code on Marriage, the Family and Guardianship had proclaimed equal standing for men and women regarding divorce and alimony, while removing legal stigmas attached to 'illegitimate' children and their mothers. In 1926 a new Family Code recognised de facto marriage, effectively eliminating the legal distinction between common-law and officially registered unions. Modified alimony and child-support provisions from the first code were joined by a declaration that property acquired during marriage belonged jointly to husband and wife. When a relationship turned sour, divorce could be obtained as easily as sending a postcard of notification to one's partner.
These measures, intended as a stride towards emancipation and equality, met with a chilly reception from most Soviet women during NEP. Three out of four were peasants, and patriarchal views on family relations proved tenacious in the countryside. Even in the cities, reformers found women more cautious than exultant over the new freedom of divorce and the legal acceptance of unregistered relationships. They suspected, correctly, that alimony would be difficult to collect, and that men, more than women, would avail themselves of the new opportunity to secure divorce on demand at a time when NEP had opened a forbidding landscape before single mothers. The same budget-cutting imperatives that had prompted the state to place factories on khozraschet also led to reductions in government spending on childcare facilities and other social services sorely needed by women left to support children on their own. For the jurists who drafted these codes, talk of liberation clashed with reality throughout the period and found little support even from the intended beneficiaries.[191]
Nowhere was this more glaring than in Soviet Central Asia, once activists embarked on a drive to emancipate Muslim women from a variety of customs deeply rooted in the region. During the mid- to later years of the decade, a series of laws banned such practices as polygamy and the abduction of a fiancee, while strengthening women's property rights in marriage. Mutual consent paved the way for divorce, and courts favoured women more often than not in cases where spouses failed to reach agreement. Taken together, the laws invited women to enjoy public rights equal to men - an endeavour described by Bolsheviks as vital to modernise a region they viewed as backward. The Women's Section of the party and the Communist Youth League (Komsomol) often led the charge by staging public events at which women removed their long veils or renounced other traditions. These efforts assumed the form of an all-out campaign by i927, but most Central Asian women (let alone men) saw little to tempt them. The few who did unveil, adopt Russian clothing or join the Komsomol risked ostracism and, in scattered instances, murder. Eventually, at the end of the decade, Moscow reined in the endeavour. The hostility it caused had come to seem counter-productive and a distraction from goals more important to the new Stalinist leadership bent on industrialising the nation.[192]
The frustrating venture in Central Asia underscored one of the challenges faced by the Bolsheviks from the moment of their revolutionary triumph. They presided over scores of non-Slavic regions whose inhabitants had not always relished their experience as part of the tsarist empire and now contemplated warily a union of soviet republics. In i92i the fragmented remains of the tsarist empire included six republics bearing the name Soviet - the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (by far the largest) and counterparts in Ukraine, Belorussia, Georgia, Armenia and Azerbaijan - along with more nebulous 'republics' in Central Asia and the Far East. Bilateral treaties signed between the Russian Republic (RSFSR) and the other five created a confusing impression that suggested both an understanding between independent nations and an administrative reform of a single state, depending on the portion of the document consulted. As Bolshevik leaders prevailed in the civil war, they gained the opportunity to exert their will in outlying regions and thereby address this unstable equilibrium. From 1920 to 1922, taking advantage of the leading role played by the Russian Communist Party in all six republics, Moscow transferred an ever-larger share of authority to itself. Even the Commissariats for Foreign Affairs, symbolic bastions of independence in the other five republics, yielded to the Kremlin and allowed Russia to speak for all six at the Genoa Conference early in 1922. This vexed Ukrainian officials in particular, but dismay over evaporating sovereignty rang out most loudly in a smaller republic further south.
189
Alan Ball,
190
Wendy Goldman,
191
Wendy Goldman,
192
Helene Carrere d'Encausse,