“The best revolutionary actions,” Kollontai reportedly once pronounced, “are pure drama.” Anna Alexeevna and the feminists had their coup de théâtre: The veil had to go! Few Soviet revolutionary actions were more sensational than the hujum (onslaught), the Central Asian campaign of unveiling.
March 8, 1927: International Women’s Day. In Uzbek cities veiled women go tramping en masse, escorted by police. Bands and native orchestras play. Stages set up on public squares swarm with flowers. There are fiery speeches by Zhenotdelki. Poems. Anna is on Tashkent’s main stage no doubt when the courageous first ones step up, pull off their horsehair mobile prisons, and fling them into bonfires. Thousands are inspired to do the same then and there—ten thousand veils are reportedly cast off on this day. Unveiled women surge through the streets shouting revolutionary slogans. Everyone sings. An astounding moment.
The backlash was wrathful and immediate.
Trapped between Lenin and Allah, Moscow and Mecca, the unveiled became social outcasts. Many redonned the paranji. Many others were raped and murdered by traditionalist males or their families, their mutilated bodies displayed in villages. Zhenotdel activists were threatened and killed. The firestorm lasted for years.
By decade’s end the radical theatrics of unveiling were abandoned. And all over the country the Zhenotdeli were being dismantled because Stalin pronounced the “women’s question” solved. By the midthirties, traditional family values were back, with divorce discouraged, abortions and homosexuality banned. On propaganda posters the Soviet Woman had a new look: maternal, full-figured, and “feminine.” And for the rest of the USSR’s existence, female comrades were expected to carry on their shoulders the infamous “double burden” of wage labor and housework.
And my great-great-grandmother, the New Soviet feminist?
In 1931 Anna Alexeevna moved with the teenage Alla to Moscow, to follow her boss Isaak Zelensky. A longtime Party stalwart, Zelensky was one of the engineers of War Communism’s grain requisitioning; he’d been brought back now to the capital from Central Asia to run the state’s consumer cooperatives. In 1937, in the midst of the purges, Zelensky was arrested. A year later he was in the dock with Bolshevik luminary Nikolai Bukharin at Stalin’s most notorious show trial. As ex-head of cooperative food suppliers, Zelensky breathtakingly “confessed” to sabotage, including the spoiling of fifty trainloads of eggs bound for Moscow, and the ruining of butter shipments by adding nails and glass.
He was promptly shot and deleted from Soviet history.
A year later my great-great-grandmother Anna was arrested as Zelensky’s co-conspirator and also deleted from history. From our family history, by my grandma Alla, who destroyed all photographs of her and stopped mentioning her name. Then one day, after the end of World War II, shaking with fear, Alla opened a letter from the gulag, from Kolyma in furthest Siberia. With blood-chilling precision, Anna Alexeevna had detailed the tortures she’d been subjected to and pleaded with the granddaughter she’d adopted and raised to inform Comrade Stalin. Like millions of victims, she was convinced the Supreme Leader knew nothing of the horrors going on in the prison camps. In my dad’s various retellings, Alla immediately burned the letter, flushed it down the communal apartment toilet, or ate it.
Only when drunk, very drunk, and much later, when I was a child, would Alla chase her shot glass of vodka with herring and crocodile tears and bellow how her grandma Anna Alexeevna had been stripped naked in minus-forty-degree weather, beaten in the cellars of the secret police’s Lubyanka Prison, kept from sleep for weeks. Then Dad would whisper to me the inheritance story. How Anna Alexeevna had been released in 1948 at the age of seventy, without a right of return to Moscow, and had lived in the Siberian city of Magadan. How Alla never visited her, not once. How Anna died in 1953, a few months before Stalin.
So imagine Alla’s surprise when in the mail arrived a death certificate; the photo of her grandmother, the only one that remains, taken in the gulag; and a money order for a whopping ten thousand rubles, most likely Anna Alexeevna’s hoardings from performing black market abortions in the prison camps.
Alla and Sergei burned through the inheritance at Moscow’s best restaurants. Alla favored the soaring dining room at the Moskva Hotel, fancying it for its green malachite columns and famously tender lamb riblets—and not, incidentally, because the mustachioed maestro of the gulags had liked to celebrate his birthdays there. Dad spent his gulag money at Aragvi, the Georgian hot spot on Gorky Street, again not because it was a favorite of Stalin’s last chief of secret police, Lavrenty Beria. It was just that the iron rings of Soviet life overlapped with all others.
With the rest of Anna Alexeevna’s rubles Alla bought a pair of suits for Sergei, which he wore for two decades. Also two blankets under which I slept when I stayed at Alla’s kommunalka near the mausoleum as a kid. They were wondrous blankets, one green, the other blue: feather-light and exquisitely silky-soft.
And there it was: two Chinese silk coverlets, two fancy suits, and a dish of Uzbek lamb—the only legacy of a Bolshevik feminist with her round, high-cheekboned Slavic face, a fierce crusader for women’s rights in the early days who helped in the assault, so dramatic, so ill-conceived, against the horsehair veil. And then disappeared.
The radical Bolshevik identity policies expanded rights for women, for Jews, for even the most obscure ethnic minorities, be they Buryat, Chuvash, or Karakalpak.
But one category of the disempowered got pushed off into the shadows of the Radiant Future, treated as an incorrigible menace. They happened to be 80 percent of the population, the ones feeding Russia. The peasants.
The “half-savage, stupid, ponderous people of the Russian villages,” as Maxim Gorky, village-born himself, called them in 1920.
“Avaricious, bloated, and bestial,” as Lenin termed them—specifically the kulaks, whose proportion was small, but whose name made an easily spread ideological tar.
The NEP offered a temporary lull in the ongoing conflict between town and country, but by the end of 1927, a full-blown grain crisis erupted once more.
Cue the cunning Georgian: Iosif Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili.
Stalin, as he was known (his Bolshevik pseudonym derived from “steel”), had since 1922 been the Party’s general secretary—a supposedly inconsequential post by which he’d maneuvered to be Lenin’s successor. (Trotsky, his chief rival, thought him slow-witted. It was brilliant, arrogant Trotsky, however, who was banished in 1929, and who had an ice ax driven into his skull in 1940.)
The 1927 grain crisis arose partly from fears of war—of an attack by Britain or some other vile capitalist power—that seized the country that year. Panic hoarding flared; peasants shied from selling grain to the state at low prices. Raising these prices might well have solved things. Instead, crying sabotage, the government turned again to repression and violence. On a notorious 1928 trip to Siberia, Stalin personally supervised coercive requisitioning. As his henchman Molotov later explained: “To survive, the State needed grain. Otherwise it would crack up. So we pumped away.”
The NEP market approach was effectively dead. About to replace it was Stalin’s final solution to the “peasant problem”—the problem of a reliable supply of cheap grain.