De Rebelde a Revolucionario: KRUPSKAYA – 154 years since the birth of Nadezhda Krupskaya

https://derebeldearevolucionario.org/2023/02/26/krupskaya-154-anos-del-natalicio-de-nadezhka-krupskaya/  [in Spanish]

From Rebel to Revolutionary of Puerto Rico  

KRUPSKAYA – 154 years since the birth of Nadezhda Krupskaya  

February 26, 2023 ~ giokollontai  

 

Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya was born in  St. Petersburg on February 26, 1869 and died in Moscow on  February 27, 1939. Better known as Nadia Krupskaya, she was a recognized figure of the  Communist Party of the Soviet Union and one of the main people responsible for the creation of the Soviet educational system and pioneer of the development of Russian libraries. Her husband was the Bolshevik revolutionary Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, Lenin.  

Born into an impoverished noble family, her mother was a governess and her father an army officer with radical political leanings. Despite the economic hardship suffered by the family when her father died in 1883, she managed to complete her education at a prestigious girls' school in the Russian capital. She remained a professor at this institution until 1891. Won over to Marxism at the beginning of the decade, she joined the League for the Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class, where she met Lenin in 1894. In 1896, after a weavers' strike, the police made numerous arrests, including that of Krupskaya. After spending time in prison, in 1898 she was sentenced to exile, and in that same year Lenin and Krupskaya married in Siberia. During her exile, she wrote in various newspapers, was part of the International Conference of Socialist Women and between 1905 and 1907 she served as secretary of the Central Committee of the Party.  

She later went into exile in Western Europe and became secretary of the socialist publication Iskra and then of the Central Committee of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. In exile he wrote several works on education.  

After the October Revolution, she obtained important positions in the Ministry of Education. From May 1922, with Lenin ill, she reduced her work in the ministry to attend to him. In the mid-20s together with Stalin she joined the campaign against the internal opposition of the party. She remained deputy commissioner for education from 1919 to 1939 and a member of the party's Central Committee from 1927 to 1939, when she died.  

Krupskaya was a prominent revolutionary communist woman who, together with other great communist women such as Clara Zetkin, Alexandrina Kollontai and Inessa Armand, fought for the rights of working women, but did not consider themselves feminists, on the contrary, they took up a strong distance from feminism by considering it as part of bourgeois demands. They embodied in their writings and political initiatives the importance of talking about women within the labor movement. However, they were critical of feminism because they regarded it as a part of the bourgeois political agenda. Both Krupskaya and Kollontai were certain that the struggle for women's rights would be established from the struggle of the proletarian class. For example, Kollontai, at the First All-Russian Women's Congress in 1908, in her text "Working Women in Contemporary Society," exposed the differences between bourgeois feminism—which at the time called for the right to work and have access to the privileges that men of her class possessed—and the demands of working women—who demanded better conditions within the world of work where they were exploited.  

The socialist women's current in Russia closely followed Germany's women's movement, with Clara Zetkin as the most representative leader and figure. This activist concentrated great efforts on obtaining rights for women's political participation but, despite advocating universal suffrage, she did not believe in the possibility of a workers' feminism. According to Zetkin, "feminism and Marxism differ not only in their demands and their forms of organization, but also in their theoretical foundations: the natural theory of bourgeois revolutions, in one case, and historical materialism (i.e. class struggle), in the other."  

At the Third Congress of the Socialist International, held in Zurich in 1893, there was an "official break of socialists with feminist ideology, when Clara Zetkin introduced the demand for protective legislation for women's work". This request for protection for women's work proposed by Zetkin is summarized at the end of the text "The Working Woman", written by Krupskaya in 1899. Since that first pamphlet, Krupskaya already made a clear criticism of the economic dependence that women traditionally had on their fathers or husbands. She noted how this situation began to change when women entered wage labour, but how bitterly the lower wages of women in certain jobs led to "the flourishing of prostitution, openly encouraged by the employers as a 'supplement' to wages".  

Krupskaya, Armand, Zetkin and Kollontai play a fundamental role in women's history. Despite of the complex relationship that existed at that time between feminism and socialism, the debates that these women initiated have still been the subject of reflections, studies and reworkings by Marxist feminism.  

Krupskaya stated, in an editorial article in the first issue of Rabotnitsa, [Working Woman] published in 1914, the following:  

Bourgeois women defend special "women's rights", always oppose men and demand their rights from men. For them, contemporary society is divided into two main categories, men and women. Men own everything, they have all the rights. The point is to achieve equal rights. For working women, the question of women is very different. Politically conscious women see that contemporary society is divided into classes. The bourgeoisie is one class, the working class is another. Their interests are opposed.... The "question of women", for workers, is how to involve the backward masses of working women in the organisation, how to make their interests clear to them, how to make them quickly transformed into comrades in the common struggle (Krupskaya, quoted in Frencia and Gaido, 2018: 61-62).  

For Krupskaya and the other comrades, the defense of women is based on class differences, and it is from this political position that they project their struggle. Krupskaya, despite firmly believing in the workers' struggle as a political objective, does not leave aside in her texts a critical look at patriarchal attitudes within the Soviet government or in the Komsomols. Without going so far as to establish that the problem lies in patriarchy, it does go so far as to denounce the unequal and unfair treatment of women, especially in access to politics and education (Krupskaya, 1978).  

Despite the ideological opposition to feminism of that time, the actions and achievements of Russian socialist women have marked real milestones in the history of women, and therefore are part of the historical struggle of feminism. The period from 1917 to the 1930s saw great changes flourish in relation to women's rights in Russia: divorce was facilitated and granted automatically, it was established that sons and daughters in or out of wedlock had equal rights, maternity leave was guaranteed, Women were granted more rights at work and equality of spouses in relation to sons and daughters was established. Moreover, the actions of Russian socialist women are not only limited to the policies promoted after the establishment of the Soviet government. Since before the 1917 Revolution, more women than men were deported to Siberia for organizing revolts against the tsar, denoting their widespread participation in pre-revolutionary movements.  

It is not usual to explicitly recognize that the beginning of the February Revolution of 1917 took place in St. Petersburg, when, during the celebration of International Women's Day – March 8 (February 23 in the Russian calendar) – textile workers demonstrated massively demanding bread and peace. This is what Kollontai claims, clearly and emphatically, in reference to Working Women's Day:  

But this is not a special day just for women. March 8 is a historic and memorable day for the workers and peasants, for all Russian workers and for workers all over the world. In 1917, on this day, the great February Revolution broke out. It was the working women of St. Petersburg who started this revolution; they were the first to raise the banner of opposition to the Tsar and his cronies. And so, for us, the day of the working woman is a day of double celebration (Kollontai, 1920).  

Written from excerpts from Wikipedia and https://www.redalyc.org/journal/4559/455962140002/html/, Nadezhda Krupskaya and socialist women in the Russian Revolution, a feminist view [Spanish]