Revolutionary Sex-3 Things You Can Do To A Woman
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‘We don’t have sex in the USSR, and we are categorically against it.’ When a female hotel manager said this on Soviet state television in 1986, the studio audience laughed. The line soon became a catchphrase, exposing the gap between official discourse and a reality that was markedly less pure. But Russia’s conservative self-conception, which continues to this day, conceals a more interesting and neglected period in its history: when, in the first decade after the October Revolution of 1917, high-ranking women in the Communist Party advocated free love as government policy, hoping to achieve the destruction of ‘bourgeois’ institutions such as monogamy and the nuclear family.
But the promise of sexual revolution did not last long. When Joseph Stalin rose to power in the mid-1920s, he promoted the opposite idea — that the nuclear family, and not sexual freedom, was the true basis of socialism. What might account for this political about-face? Does the episode represent a political path-not-taken, or was the government’s initial, emancipatory stance just an interregnum in the broader, more repressive arc of Russian history?
Shifting our historical gaze westward, by the 1920s the suffragettes had secured the franchise for many Western women with property rights (in the UK, women over 21 with no property could vote only from 1928). But in the Soviet Union, women’s rights were much more sweeping. In addition to universal suffrage, they had access to higher education and the right to equal pay. Abortion was legalised, a world-first, and freely available to factory workers. Children, whether born in or out of wedlock, were granted equal status in law. Marriage became secular, divorce was simplified and streamlined, sex outside wedlock was destigmatized, and male homosexuality decriminalised.
One of the foremost activists of this generation was the aforementioned Alexandra Kollontai, the first Commissar of Social Welfare and the most prominent woman in the Kremlin government. Kollontai was the key ideologist of sexual freedom. Born in 1872 to an aristocratic family in Saint Petersburg, as a young woman Kollontai spoke seven languages, and was expected to embrace the bourgeois ideal of making a ‘good match’.
In defiance of her parents’ refusal to let her go to university, she took an exam for a teaching certificate. Her aim was to earn enough to supplement the small engineer’s income of her cousin Vladimir — the man whom she married and then separated from years later. ‘I still loved my husband, but the happy life of a housewife and spouse became for me a “cage”,’ she explained in "Autobiography of a Sexually Emancipated Communist Woman" in 1926. ‘More and more, my sympathies, my interests turned to the revolutionary working class of Russia.’
While still married, in 1896 Kollontai started giving lessons to working women, and helped to set up filters to clear the polluted air in factories. But after seeing the squalor in which workers spent their days and nights, she realised that there was only so much she could do with charity. Distancing herself from the more aristocratic strand of feminist activism, Kollontai started to think that economic relations would have to change at a more fundamental level — in other words, that women’s inequality could be addressed only through a socialist revolution.
In search of answers, Kollontai left her husband and her four-year-old child, and went to Zurich to study economics before returning to Russia. She went on to set up the first legal club for working women in Saint Petersburg, organise marches, write numerous articles and books, and give lectures across Europe and the United States on working life, sexuality and motherhood, under titles such as ‘The New Woman’ and ‘The Social Basis of the Women’s Question’.
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