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their control, and who remained there as a result of the will or whim of other individuals. But even those who deserve our respect and recognition have been so frequently portrayed in a manner which is likely to alienate them from us. Russia's literary heritage is focused on works which have brought to millions of readers around the world the concept of 'dusha' or 'soul', meaning the inner strength and beauty of a person. These officially recognised heroes of the revolutionary movement appear to be curiously devoid ofthat soul. Of course, the use of such a word as 'tverdokamennaia' ('steadfast', literally meaning 'made of hard rock') as a laudatory term to describe Bolshevichki did nothing to endear them to subsequent generations. After all, can a rock have a soul? I did not experience shortage of material in general, but I did find it difficult to locate material on specific individuals. Throughout my research I continued to look for information on revolutionary women workers, in particular Vera Karelina, who, I believe, deserves to be among the female revolutionary elite. But even at this point I do not have any data confirming her date or place of death, beyond the knowledge that an article written by her about the early days of the social democratic movement appeared in a journal in 1930. However, my aim was by no means to create a 'pantheon' to outstanding Russian revoliutsionerki, as Clements did with the Bolshevichki she included in her study Bolshevik Women. By means of a prosopographical study I was aiming to create a collective biography where individuals and their experience of life and revolutionary work will not be obscured by the dry figures of statistical analysis or put into the shadows by a few from the ranks of their comrades-in-arms, especially the ranks of'party officers'. From the very beginning I realised that given the limitations of time and resources, I would not succeed in tracking down every single female revolutionary who had contributed to the cause. I would not have achieved that even if I had limited 141 my research to a very narrow chronological band. It takes greater bodies of people and considerable financial resources to do that. I came to understand that I did not need to find every individual, no matter how deserving, to create a balanced impression of what a revoliutsionerka was. I did need, however, to find as many as possible and try to fill in the gaps in their individual biographies. I set out to look at women throughout the entire period of the history of the revolutionary movement in Russia for I was just as much interested in the development of the movement they helped to shape as I was in the developments of individual revoliutsionerki whose characters and life stories were shaped by that movement. I concentrated my research on the following aspects of the revoliutsionerki's life: age (including dates of birth and death, time they entered the movement), social origins (included information on revoliutsionerki's parents and siblings), educational experience, occupations and professional experience, marital status and their children and finally, but no less importantly, their revolutionary activities. There were a number of areas which I did not scrutinise specifically though I did collect information about them: revoliutsionerki's religious denomination and faith, and geographic origins. In studying female revolutionaries' lives, I soon came to the conclusion that while religion may have been important in their childhood, it did not influence women's decision to enter the revolutionary path. Geographically, women's origins are extremely diverse and representative of the Russian state in the given time period. The overwhehning majority of revoliutsionerki came from the European parts of Russia and Ukraine. However, there is a substantial body of those who came from Poland, the Caucasus, Siberia and the Baltic states. For instance, Rahil Abramovich came from Kiev, Evgeniia Adamovich came from Poltava province, Ekaterina Aleksandrova came from Georgia, Nina : Aladzhalova was born in Azerbaijan, Inessa Armand was born in Paris, Liubov' Aksel'rod was a native of Vilnius province, Anna Boldyreva was born in Tver' guberniia, Margarita Fofanova was born in Perm guberniia, Aleksandra Kollontai was j< born in Moscow, Nadezhda Krupskaia was born in St. Petersburg, while Konkordiia Samoilova was born in Irkutsk. The only provinces absent from the list are those in Moslem Central Asia. I shall start my final analysis with the age. As has been demonstrated in the previous chapters, most revoliutsionerki joined the movement in their late teens or early twenties. I did not find any strong correlation between female revolutionaries' 142 social origins and the age at which they began their revolutionary work. The main difference lies in the place of initiation. For the women of intelligentsia it was their gimnasiia or Higher Courses days, while for women workers it was the factory floor; and at the beginning of this century their home was becoming increasingly more important not simply in shaping their beliefs but also in involving them in direct revolutionary work. The latter is especially true of women workers. For example, Klavdiia Kiriakina from Ivanovo became an activist before she reached the age of 16. Introduced to the social democratic movement by her elder brother, Klavdiia began by keeping and distributing clandestine literature, and attending illegal meetings. In 1901, at the age of 17 she was already a member of the RSDRP. Mariia Nagovitsyna, another woman worker from Ivanovo also joined the movement as a young teenager. Evgeniia Adamovich was only 15 when she joined a revolutionary student circle in her gimnasiia, while Feodosiia Drabkina was already carrying out tasks for the local social democratic organisation in Rostov when she was 15. However, there were also considerable numbers of women who were late arrivals in the movement. Vera Zakharova was 30 when she first became attracted to a social democratic circle. At the same age Natal'ia Aleksandrova turned her attention to a Populist organisation. The woman worker Sergeicheva was 40 when she joined a workers' circle. Still, such examples were less frequent. In chapter 2,1 looked at the age of Narodniki women and the age at which they were tried. The data showed that on average these female revolutionaries were under the age of 26 (see Table 2). B.Itenberg in his study of the 1870s revolutionaries made an analysis of 1,665 Narodniki. According to his calculations 27.5 per cent of them were under the age of 21, 38.4 per cent were between 21 and 25 years of age, 21.3 per cent were from the age group of 25 to 30 and only 13 per cent were over 30.1 Barbara Clements calculated that 25.8 per cent of the old Bolshevichki joined y the party between the ages 15 and 19,42.4 per cent between 20 and 24,13.5 per cent between the ages 25 and 29, 6.2 per cent were in the age group of 30 to 34.2 In other words, even in comparing revolutionaries of two different generations we can see that the most common age for joining the revolutionary movement was if not static, then at least largely unchanged. 1 B.Itenberg, Dvizhenie revoliutsionnogo narodnichestva, 311 2 B.Clements, Bolshevik Women, 34. 143 It is the life span of many revoliutsionerki that presented the most interesting 'discovery', with so many of them living on well into their seventies and eighties; From Table 1, E.Subbotina was 77 when she died, from Table 4 E.Koval'skaia was 92 and from Table 9 K.Kiriakina was 84. Bearing in mind that the majority of the revoliutsionerki spent years in imprisonment and exile, and ran constant risks to their own safety, these figures are certainly remarkable and are even more impressive as those tables show that such longevity was by no means an exception. Barbara Engels and Clifford Rosenthal gave the following summary of Elizaveta Koval'skaia's life after her imprisonment: During two decades of Siberian exile and imprisonment, Koval'skaia waged an unyielding struggle against the authorities: hunger strikes, two more escape attempts, a suicide attempt to call attention to prison conditions, a knife attack on a prison official who had administered corporal punishment to one of Koval'skaia's woman comrades. In 1903, twenty-three years after she was sent to Siberia, she was released and went abroad with her second husband. In Geneva, Koval'skaia joined the populist Socialist Revolutionary Party, but she quit within a month and formed a group of'maximalists' - people who accepted only the 'maximum program' of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, which provided for the socialisation of all means of production, not just the land. Shortly before the October Revolution of 1917, she returned to Russia. Under the Soviet regime, she worked in the State Archives and served as a member of the editorial board of a journal devoted to the history of the revolutionary movement in Russia. She died in 1933.3 The 1992 edition of Granat gives her date of death as 1943. The pattern of the social origins of female revolutionaries, however, did change, with increasingly more women from the working class and peasantry joining the movement from the beginning of this century and certainly after the 1905 Revolution. In 1922, an analysis of the social origins of Bolshevik women who joined 3 B.Engel and Clifford Rosenthal, ed., Five Sisters, 248-9 144 the party between 1905 and 1922 was carried out. According to its findings, among women who joined it before 1905 (just 156 of them), there were 94 (60.2 per cent) women from intelligentsia and 44 (28.2 per cent) women workers. Only 4 (2.6 per cent) of women came from junior employees, which refers to people whose main occupation was that of a house servant, hospital orderly, or nurse. Leading up to the February revolution the percentage of women workers joining the party began to grow and among those who became party members in the period between 1914 and 1916 it reached 45.7 per cent. At the same time the number of junior employees was growing too: among those who joined before 1905 they made up 2.6 per cent while among those who joined between 1914 and 1916 the figure grew to 12.3 per cent. In the period which witnessed an upsurge in the workers' movement (1912-13), the proportion of women workers in the total recruitment reached 59.2 per cent. At the same time there was a fall in the numbers of women from the intelligentsia and those referred to as senior and middle-ranking employees who joined the party. Thus among those who joined during the First World War they constituted 24.6 per cent. After the February Revolution the proportion of women workers among party members had risen once again and was 45.6 per cent. At the same time the proportion of junior - employees in 1917 was 15.3 per cent, while that of peasant women joining the party was only 1.8 per cent. The proportion of female intelligentsia and senior and middle employees continued to fall and in 1917 they made 25.1 per cent.4 The changes in the social make up of the women revolutionaries from my database, between 1870 and 1904, was reflected in the two charts I included into the thesis. It was not possible to make a comparison with B.Fieseler's tables of social origins not only because she had a different chronological division, before and after 1905, but also because she divided her women into the following five groups: a) nobility and merchants (2, or 4.5%); b) meshchane and raznochintsy (sluzhashchie) (26, or 59.1%); c) clergy (4, or 9.1%); and d) peasants and workers (12, or 27.3%). I consider the numbers on which she based these calculations for the post-1905 period (44) extremely low and unrepresentative, bearing in mind the fact that the mass movement dates back to this particular period. Moreover, in the post-1905 table there was no information on four of the revolutionaries which would bring the total in the (table to 48. Yet Fieseler fails to include them in her final calculations which is 4 E.Smitten, 'Zhenshchiny v RKP\ Kommunistka, 8-10 145 surprising as they make up over eight per cent of her group. Indeed, given that data on many female revolutionaries is so fragmented, the exclusion of such a high percentage of individuals inevitably distorts the final results. It is also difficult to agree with Fieseler's decision to put peasants and workers into one group after 1905.5 By that time, workers made up a considerable proportion of the Russian population, with at least two generations of workers in many families. As has been pointed out above, the research into social origins frequently presented me with conflicting information, even within accounts written by the revoliutsionerki themselves. I have already highlighted the case of the two Itkind sisters. Such examples were not uncommon. For instance, in her autobiography Anna Bychkova at first gave her origins as a peasant, but later in her account she explained that her father had taught in a village school for over 17 years. In fact her father came from a peasant family and was an autodidact. At some point the entire family moved to Ekaterinburg where he became a sluzhashchii in a railway company. Bychkova does not give any data on what her father's occupation was when she was born, and based on the available information she can easily be entered into one of two different social groups: peasants or sluzhashchie.6 The educational level of women was directly linked to their social origins, with women workers and peasants having the lowest level of education and the women from the nobility reaching the highest levels open to Russian women. However, most female revolutionaries paid close attention to their education, constantly seeking ways to raise their standards. In this desire to improve themselves women from different social groups were united. Many women workers began their revolutionary life in study circles and Sunday schools where they went to learn basic literacy. In addition to the examples which had been cited before, there are many others. Nina Tret'iakova, born in 1893, Download 88.01 Kb. Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
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