Soviet Women and their Art: The Spirit of Equality

Zinaida Serebryakova (1884–1967). Self-portrait in a White Blouse, 1922, oil on canvas, 69 × 56 cm. State Russian Museum, St Petersburg

CONTENTS

TITLE PAGE

INTRODUCTION: REVOLUTION AND THE LIBERATION OF WOMEN

Rena Lavery and Ivan Lindsay

1 GREAT FEMALE ARTISTS OF THE AVANT-GARDE: FROM EMBROIDERY TO THE REVOLUTION

Natalia Murray

2 FIZKULTURA AND SOVIET IDEALS OF FEMALE BEAUTY

Ivan Lindsay

3 THE BEAUTY AND DISCIPLINE OF THE BALLERINAS

Rena Lavery

4 THE FEMALE ROLE IN SOVIET SOCIETY

Rena Lavery

5 SOVIET FEMALE SCULPTORS

Katia Kapushesky

6 ‘PRE-KRASNOE’: WOMEN AND ‘UNOFFICIAL’ ART IN MOSCOW, FROM ABSTRACTION TO CONCEPTUALISM (1960s–1980s)

Elizaveta Butakova

SOVIET WOMEN ARTISTS

Exter, Alexandra

Serebryakova, Zinaida

Rozanova, Olga

Popova, Lyubov

Mukhina, Vera

Yanson-Manizer, Elena

Lebedeva, Sarra

Stepanova, Varvara

Sandomirskaya, Beatrisa

Belashova, Ekaterina

Yablonskaya, Tatiana

Masterkova, Lydia

FURTHER READING

INDEX

COPYRIGHT

INTRODUCTION: REVOLUTION AND THE LIBERATION OF WOMEN

Rena Lavery and Ivan Lindsay

Researcher: Borimir Totev

‘Nowhere in the world, nowhere in history, is there such a thinker and statesman who has done so much for the emancipation of women as Vladimir Ilyich.’

Alexandra Kollontai, 1963¹

There were, however, Russian women who had been struggling to improve their situation before Vladimir Lenin came along. From the mid-nineteenth century, for instance, the ‘triumvirate’ of Anna Filosofova, Nadezhda Stasova and Maria Trubnikova had lobbied for women to be admitted to universities, and in 1878 they were among the founders of the Bestuzhev Courses for female higher education in St Petersburg, which were named after the first director, Konstantin Nilolayevich Bestuzhev-Rumin. Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, who later played a key role in the Soviet education system, was among the early graduates of the Bestuzhev Courses, which, following the Revolution, were incorporated in 1919 into Petrograd University.

Anna Filosofova (1835–1912), c. 1880. Wikimedia Commons

Nadezhda Stasova (1822–1895), Archive PL / Alamy Stock Photo

It is also helpful to remember what was happening to women in other countries at the time. Due to the efforts of Russian suffragists, women had received the right to vote just before the Revolution and before women in Britain. It is believed that by the early years of the twentieth century there were more women teachers, doctors and lawyers working in Russia than in most European countries. This, however, was progress that was largely confined to the educated classes. Despite improvement in literacy levels overall, Russia’s peasant communities remained predominantly patriarchal, with females expected to produce children: preferably sons to help work the land and continue the family name, as well as to cook, clean and look after their families.

Maria Trubnikova (1835–1897), 1912. Sputnik / Alamy Stock Photo

Nadezhda Krupskaya (Lenin’s wife) (1869–1939), 1922. Lebrecht Music & Arts / Alamy Stock Photo

With the Revolution came Lenin’s rallying cry for gender equality:

The Government of the proletarian dictatorship, together with the Communist Party and trade unions, is of course leaving no stone unturned in the effort to overcome the backward ideas of men and women … That will mean freedom for the woman from the old household drudgery and dependence on man. That enables her to exercise to the full her talents and inclinations …²

Immediately following the Russian Revolution of 1917 the Bolsheviks passed legislation to emancipate women, while giving them rights and freedoms unheard of elsewhere in the world. The Revolution became a political and social turning point, with ramifications far wider than even the wildest dreams of those who were on the front lines of protest. The response of artists, in particular female artists, to these momentous changes and Soviet ideals of feminine beauty is a theme that is explored in this book.

Lenin claimed to view the full engagement of women in society as not only a moral imperative but also as essential for progress: ‘For every day of the existence of the Soviet State proves more clearly that we cannot go forward without the women.’³ Alexandra Kollontai admitted that while Lenin’s advocacy of women’s rights may have been admirable, putting theory into practice would not happen overnight: ‘From the very first days of the October Revolution, Soviet power accorded women full rights; however, not all women were as yet able to avail themselves of it.’⁴

Alexandra Kollontai (1872–1952), c. 1934. Photo by Alfred Eisenstaedt / The LIFE Picture Collection / Getty Images

Kollontai was a committed Communist and in 1923 she became the Soviet Ambassador to Norway, the first woman to hold such a high-level government post. She envisaged a society in which the family unit, then perceived as bourgeois and oppressive, would be superseded by the role of the state, presumably enabling women to participate in the world of work on a par with men. There are shades of Brave New World thinking in some of Kollontai’s pronouncements against traditional family life: ‘The worker-mother must learn not to differentiate between yours and mine; she must remember that there are only our children, the children of Russia’s communist workers.’ Perhaps realising that this might sound a little harsh, she also gave a reassurance that although ‘Communist society will take upon itself all the duties involved in the education of the child … the joys of parenthood will not be taken away from those who are capable of appreciating them.’⁵ Who should decide on a woman’s capability to appreciate parenthood is not clear.

Valentina Tereshkova (b. 1937), Russian cosmonaut, Baikonur Cosmodrome, USSR, 16 June 1963. Credit: Heritage Image Partnership Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo

But if Kollontai’s message was one of potential liberation, would women then be free to develop their talents and pursue careers? The reality for the vast majority of Soviet men at that time, as well as women, was a life of toil on the land or in the factory. In Lenin’s vision, if toil were inevitable, at least it should be on equal terms between the sexes: ‘To effect her complete emancipation and make her the equal of the man, it is necessary … for women to participate in common productive labour. Then women will occupy the same position as men.’⁶

In 1936, the ‘Stalin Constitution’ recognised the equal rights of men and women and the latter were encouraged into higher education and the professions, although a glass ceiling effectively reserved the higher echelons of public life and influence for men. A series of Five-Year Plans included provision for women to enter traditionally male-dominated professions such as engineering, leading to Valentina Tereshkova becoming the first woman in space in 1963.

Women, however, were still expected to maintain their domestic responsibilities alongside having a paid job. Hedrick Smith gives a satirical view of the situation:

Under capitalism, women are not liberated because they have no opportunity to work. They have to stay at home, go shopping, do the cooking, keep house and take care of the children. But under socialism, women are liberated. They have the opportunity to work all day and then go home, go shopping, do the cooking, keep house and take care of the children.⁷

The devastation caused by the First World War led to a desperate situation for many Russians. On 8 March 1917 thousands of women walked out of the textile mills in the Vyborg district of Petrograd and went from factory to factory encouraging other workers to join them in a protest. Soldiers were reluctant to fire on women and the female presence helped de-escalate confrontations between the protesters and the military. By the end of the day 100,000 people had joined the strike.

Inessa Armand (1874–1920), 1910. Photo © Sovfoto / UIG via Getty Images

Women demanded improvements in workers’ conditions, supplies of bread and the end of the war. In 1930, in History of the Russian Revolution, Leon Trotsky wrote, ‘A great role is played by women workers in the relationship between workers and soldiers. They go up to the cordons more boldly than men, take hold of the rifles, beseech, almost command: Put down your bayonets – join us!’⁸ This strike, among other events, led to the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II on 15 March 1917.

Supporting those on the barricades was a group of educated women from wealthy backgrounds. Women such as Nadezhda Kruspkaya, Inessa Armand, a Communist and feminist, and Alexandra Kollontai were at the forefront of demanding emancipation for women. The energy of the Revolution fuelled Russian feminism and the Soviet state was eager to support it.

As to women’s rights over their own bodies, Lenin regarded abortion as a ‘social evil’, yet contraception was also difficult to obtain. Both Lenin and Trotsky echoed the ideas of Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx that women should be freed and educated in order to participate in the workforce. In quick succession the Bolsheviks legalised abortion and divorce, made cohabitation socially acceptable and replaced religious marriage with a simple registration procedure. Such measures were designed to liberate women from male domination and to allow them to choose to join the workforce over raising a family. However, the speed of change caused upheaval and led to the breakdown of the family unit, homelessness and a falling population. In the 1930s, keen to improve birth rates and bolster morale, Joseph Stalin reintroduced policies that supported the formation of traditional families while undoing many of the gains. (The continuing abortion ban inevitably allowed the trade in unsafe backstreet operations to flourish throughout the Soviet Union, along with a high death rate for the women, prompting another repeal of the law under Nikita Khrushchev’s ‘thaw’ in 1955.)

Some years before the first signs of the Revolution, women were already established in the world of Russian art, so their post-Revolutionary emergence as artists was through evolution as well as revolution. The art of the period was a product of those stirring times, when women at the turn of the twentieth century were experimenting with the social understanding of the female condition. This is explored further in the following chapters, with the aim of showing that, without women, the art of women and the liberation of both, the trajectories of Russian society would have taken off in different directions.

The book looks at what it meant for women to be liberated and examines whether such liberation improved the life of the average Russian woman. In patriarchal Tsarist Russia women had few rights and 90 per cent of them were illiterate. If that is our only measure for judgement, then the liberation of women with the ascent of the Bolsheviks, and later the Soviets, was a phenomenal accomplishment, not least in the light of how forward-thinking some of the ideas and reforms were that followed, in comparison to those then current in the rest of the world.

Before the Revolution women were seldom involved in public life. One of the few existing channels available to wealthy women was philanthropic and charitable causes. If such rare initiatives were to become acceptable, they required the blessing of the Russian Orthodox Church, chief director of values in Russian public life. As the great poet Alexander Pushkin wrote, it was Peter the Great who opened the window to Europe. During Peter’s reign court ladies began appearing in public alongside their men. In addition, he had his wife Catherine crowned Empress. Later on, during the reign of Catherine the Great, the first female president of the Russian Academy of Sciences was appointed, while Catherine herself became the first patron of the St Petersburg Academy of Arts. Ordinary women, however, were still restricted by convention in public roles. They were excluded from the civil service and had limited access to education.

In the 1870s, after the generation that came of age following the Great Reforms, a number of educated young people, including women, dispersed to the villages to preach self-liberation. By the 1890s, however, the campaign for sexual equality fell silent before the louder calls for class justice from the exploited workers. Further, in purely semantic terms, the potential to represent women was veiled behind the androgynous noun chelovek, literally meaning both man and person. As it came into use, this gender-neutral word overshadowed any greater push for the New Soviet Woman to take firm hold as a concept in her own right or category.⁹

Perhaps, then, we should judge this liberation not by its overall achievement or ability to create a legacy, but in the brief moments of change when women could breathe, even if just for a second. There were times when art was empowered by the attention it could create, during which women strongly manifested change. This urge, after all, was an emotion that the new women of the Soviet Union proved they knew how to enact.

In chapters covering avant-garde women, fizkultura (physical culture) and Soviet ideals of female beauty, ballet, the expectations of Soviet women in society, women sculptors and nonconformist artists, this book examines the lot of Soviet women and the response of artists to all that followed. More specifically, the great female artists of the avant-garde and their emphatic contribution to the arts are looked at closely, including: Natalia Goncharova, Olga Rozanova, Lyubov Popova, Alexandra Exter, Varvara Stepanova and Nadezhda Udaltsova.

Sarra Lebedeva and Vera Mukhina are discussed as examples of the leading women sculptors of the time, and their place within the Union of Soviet Artists is considered. The chapters on fizkultura, sport and ballet focus on the physical presence of women and their beauty in the public arena, as well as the potential obstacles and restrictions that they faced there. The depiction of the female form and the meshing of instruments of propaganda into a nation’s fitness routine are explored. The cultural importance of figures from the rich world of Russian ballet – such as Galina Ulanova and Maya Plisetskaya – who are household names to generations of Russians are noted.

The interpretation of the female role in wider society is also discussed at length. The depictions of women in Soviet art, reflecting them as mothers, as workers and at war, have fostered a discussion about the possibility of change in gender roles that is worth delving into at a much deeper level, perhaps even finding connections to contemporary Russia.

It is rare for any examination of the art of Soviet women to give an overview of the monumental influence of female artists and their pioneering of new directions during the early stages of the Revolution. These women were sometimes referred to as the ‘amazons of the avant-garde’, a term, coined by the Cubo-Futurist poet Benedikt Livshits, that soon became a description of the life and work of the great avant-garde female artists listed above. All these women were born between 1881 and 1894, and their innovation stemmed from an analysis of the reality in which they lived.

Their work was uncompromisingly independent, both creatively and logistically. Goncharova organised exhibitions in Moscow and St Petersburg, during a period in which younger artists sought to distinguish themselves from established exhibition societies, while the utopian and experimental goals of the Revolution opened up a new avenue for Udaltsova to begin intense teaching and organisation in various art schools. Rozanova started her career as a graphic artist illustrating books, whereas Popova, Exter and Stepanova all participated significantly in stage design, decor and costumes as well as contemporary magazines, demonstrating the sheer scope of their involvement and influence.