This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
From NPR-Chronicling
Ernest Hemingway’s Relationship With The Soviets-And Then Some -
CIA archivist Nicholas Reynolds discusses his new book,Writer,
Sailor, Soldier, Spy: Ernest Hemingway's Secret Adventures.It describes Hemingway's relationship
with Soviet intelligence.
Click on link for a
piece of Papa Hemingway’s link with the Soviets during World War II
The Autobiography Of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein, Vintage Books, New York, 1990
Okay, Gertrude so there was no there, there in Oakland. (I agree, having lived there for a period at a much later time-San Francisco, however, is a different matter). So, by hook or crook, Miss Gertrude Stein gets herself (along with her older brother) by a circuitous route to turn of the century Paris (turn of the 20th century that is) and becomes not only an international literary and cultural figure in her own right but a veritable magnet for every "advanced' bourgeois cultural tendency in the then known Western civilized world. Starting with the nova Paris anti-academy art world as the likes of Picasso, Braque and Matisse and their schools take it by a storm on through to the sparse World War I years when the flower of European culture was almost destroyed to a re-emergence in the aftermath of that war with "lost generation" types like Hemingway and Fitzgerald we get a bird's eye view of important trends in modern cultural history during the first third of the 20th century. And of Stein's own struggle to get the kind of literary recognition she craved and desired.
What we do not get is anything that, even with the looser standard for such endeavors in the beginning of the 21st century, that we recognize as autobiography either of the ostensible subject of the book, Stein's long time companion (to use a quaint term of the time for two women living together) Alice B. Toklas or Ms. Stein herself. Nor as we suppose to. What we are treated to is a `modern' writing sensibility trying to free up the language (and grammatical constrains) from their 19th century moorings. More conventionally we are given a travelogue, gossip column, some helpful hints and some very witty writing that gives tidbits of what Ms. Stein thought of literature, her place in it and the place of others in her literary pantheon.
In some sense this book, while quite readable even today, is not for the faint-hearted, or those who are not modern Western literature majors or readers of something like "The New York Review Of Books". Fortunately I am a devoted reader of that magazine and therefore the seemingly hundreds of literary figures that Stein `name drops' along the way I had at least passing familiarity with. Some of the many art figures that passed through I was less sure of. What is clear is that Ms. Stein's `mobile salon' (for lack of better words to trace this pair's movements) and her literary achievement here is an echo from a bygone era. Nobody today, as least in the circles I run in or want to run in, could stand up to the `precious' visits by English and other celebrities that dropped in Stein's residences. Or the standard variations on the European grand tour by American college students or young marrieds that made a stop obligatory. Or the stifling aimlessness and routinism of many the various denizens of the Paris of the day, famous or not. But in a world that currently suffers from serious disconnects with its cultural past it is interesting to read about those who had time to "do' the literary scene. But, mainly, get this book for some very clever writing by Ms. Stein.
Out In The
Be-Bop Drive-In Theater Night-Circa 2015-With Laura Perkins In Mind From The
Pen Of Bart Webber
Josh Breslin was a man, is a man of
institutionalized memories. Part of that came, comes from his long ago minute
career as a budding journalist in the alternative media world of the late 1960s
and early 1970s when anyone with access to pen and press could, and did, print
plenty of interesting material before the hammer fell down and that whole
universe fell under the ebb tide of the big bad movement, the
counter-revolution as one political wag called it, when the other side,
symbolized by the master criminal Richard Milhous Nixon who also happened to be
President of the United States, let the whirlwinds of reaction have a field day
on our heads. (A couple of the journals that had weathered the storm that he had
written for like Rolling Stone which is today just a glossy reprint of Vogue
or Vanity Fair for the quasi-hip audience it appeals to in its articles
and the consumer-driven advertisements it displays which pay the bill, hence
the tiller’s placid reward, and the local Boston Phoenix which went
belly up a few years ago after subsisting as a “hook-up” venue do not undermine
that ebb tide understanding on the media front.)
Part of Josh’s respect for memory also
came from his association with the long gone, long moaned over Pete Markin whom
he had met out in San Francisco in the high tide summer of love, 1967 and who
came to a bad end in the mid-1970s down in Sonora, Mexico after a high-end drug
deal went down the wrong way and he wound up face down in a dusty back alley
with a couple of slugs in the back of his head who always, always lived to have
about two thousand juicy memory references handy on the off chance that, for
example, somebody might quickly need to know Millard Fillmore’s standing
among American Presidents (just above Richard Nixon at last check) and the
practice had rubbed off on him.
On a recent night that memory business
got a full workout as Josh went back deep into his youth (and the youth of his
lady friend, Laura Perkins, who is key to this particular memory flash)
returning to the scene of many a youthful misadventure-the still functioning
Olde Saco Drive-In up in Maine.
Drive-In? Well, yes, for those who have
only heard about this institution of the high golden age 1950s and 1960s
automobile and have no personal knowledge that they really still exist in spots
except in “generation of ’68’’ nostalgia movies like American Graffiti the
drive-in. Here’s the skinny (or if you are still in disbelief then go to Wikipedia
and check the information out). Back when everybody was dying to have a car
from old grand-pappies to barely sixteen year old boys (and it was mainly boys,
girls were usually okay grabbing the family car for a night out with the girls,
a night “cruising’ the boulevards looking for the heart of Saturday, looking
for boys just as Josh and his crowd were “cruising” looking for girls or
sitting, sitting in the front close to some hunk with a “boss” car and glad to
be the subject of some salacious Monday
morning girls’ lav gossip) the whole axis of night-life changed once everybody
realized that you were no longer tied to the house (or at most the
neighborhood), were not tied to constantly eating at home, sleeping at home or
watching the new-fangled television or go to the local box movie house. In a
car-fixated time you could travel and stay in a motel overnight, you could eat,
if you dared, at a drive-in restaurant or while away the evening in the
snugness of your automobile at the drive-in theater. Hail god
car.
Of course while anybody, child or
adult, could do all those things the drive-in movies became along with the
drive-in restaurant one of the moments of the teen ritual, although we were all
back then brought up on parents taking their children to the drive-in as an
easy way to get out of the house what with a double-feature, a snack bar and a
playground to entertain the kiddies. That kids’ stuff is just that. The teen
drive-in movie scene is the stuff of nostalgia. Josh wasn’t sure when he
stopped going to the drive-in except sometime in the 1970s, wasn’t sure when drive-ins
kind of folded up and died away of hubris or indifference at some point that he
did not remember (after in some cases serving up some soft-core porn to keep an
audience) and wasn’t sure if they even existed anymore. Wasn’t sure that is
until he was heading to Portland, Maine for a conference and decided to take
Route One instead of U.S. 95 up from his home in Boston.
Now that was no random decision
since Josh had grown up in Olde Saco a few miles south of Portland and
had been for a lot of reasons of late in an Olde Saco frame of mind after the
passing of Rene Dubois his old high school classmate and runaround corner boy
back then. As he worked his way up Route One when he got to Olde Saco he
happened to look to the right and there kind of hidden from view was an ancient
dilapidated crude handmade sign for the Olde Saco Drive-In and moreover that
the place was still open for business. He did not have time to stop but that
sign, that memory kind of festered in his mind for a few weeks until he decided
to go spent a few days (along with Laura) up at an old friend’s house in Wells
(an old friend of Markin’s really from North Adamsville down in Massachusetts
where they had grown up which is how he had met Jimmy Jenkins the owner of the
place back after the summer of love, 1967). One day Josh fervently asked Laura
to “take the ticket, take the ride,” an expression that he used when he wanted
them to do something out of the ordinary. And going to a drive-in, the Olde
Saco Drive-In was not something that he had done in about forty years so he was
really doing a memory stretch. Laura at first didn’t want to go, said she had
no history and hence no memory for drive-ins since between her shoulder-to-the-wheel
no-nonsense parents not being the drive-in movie types and living out in Podunk
in upstate New York where she could not remember if there were drive-ins in the
area Josh’s big deal was a deflated balloon to her. But she eventually relented
after he promised her to do about fourteen different things from taking her to
dinner, cleaning up a laundry list (her laundry list) of stuff, to cooking in
return which he took as a fair bargain under the circumstances, so they were
off.
Now this drive-in thing back in the day
had a certain ritual to it, a Josh and his gang ritual anyway. He had already
thought after seeing the old place about the travails of childhood when after a
long shift at the MacAdams Textile Mill where his father, Prescott,
worked as a machinist before the mills that sustained the town headed
south (first to American South then the world South to places like Indonesia
and Singapore in search of that greedy increased profit wrought by cheaper wage
packets), and Delores (nee LeBlanc and hence her hometown of Olde Saco one of
the work stopping points heading south from native Quebec a generation or two
before her own), his mother, both work weary would bundle up he and his four
sisters and head to the “Olde Saco” for the night’s double feature, some
illicit snacks (you were not supposed to bring your own foods in but what was
to stop you and it would not be, despite five Breslin children howls, until he
went there with his gang that he would learn of the delights at the snack
bar-the buttered drenched slightly stale, maybe popped from the night before,
popcorn, the fizz-less sodas sickenly sweetly syrup and caffeine clogged, the
desiccated cardboard-like pizza light on cheese, sauce and flavor, the greasy
grimy hamburgers only saved by slathered ketchups and mustard, no onions, no,
onions if you wanted to go in to that good night with a certain she but more of
that later, and the food-free, calorie free hot dogs in their grave-like mushy
white flour enriched buns that would become his staple on drive-in nights, his
sisters too from what they said, from what they said on their date nights if
the guy wanted to get anywhere, anywhere at all with them, no cheapskates need
apply their motto), and the playground conveniently located at the end
just below the movie screen where he and his sisters would climb the jungle
jim, slide the slide, mangle the see-saw and seek heaven on the swings. Kindly
childhood thoughts as almost all children would think (and later measured,
nicely measured in his parents favor since they really did not have the surplus
dough to spent on such “frills” when the rent was always behind and his mother
made something of a secular rosary out of her weekly white envelopes on the
kitchen table bill-paying chores always short, always damn short although that
remembrance too late to do him, or them, any good since they had been estranged
so long).
No, what drove Josh these days were the
teenage drive-in movies where he had come of age in the Olde Saco night. Of
course it started with larcenous intent (nice legal term courtesy of Sam
Lowell, the lawyer friend of Markin also met after they headed back East
together in the summer of love year 1967) when the late Rene Dubois, a year
older than the rest of the guys since he had just come down from Quebec and was
in a special language immersion class (although they didn’t call it that then
but something like special needs, or for dumb kids or something) for a year
before joining the regular class who got his driver’s license first and more
importantly since he worked at La Croix’s Garage over on Main Street after
school and on weekends his first car an old beat up ‘53 Chevy that he worked on
to bring back to life (as he would do with a succession of cars up to a “boss”
’57 two-toned white and cherry red naturally Chevy that was nothing but a
“babe” magnet and not just for teeny-bopper girls either). But before the girls
started cluttering up Rene’s life (as they would through four freaking
marriages, a bushel of kids, and a bevy of grandkids) he was the “max daddy” of
the road taking his corner boys like Josh to the Olde Saco Drive-In.
Here is where the larceny comes in
though. In those days admission was something like three dollars a head for the
nightly double-feature (Josh urged that he not be quoted on that price for like
lots of things these days that number seems to have come out of the mist of
time and may be totally wrong but the price cheap anyway although not cheap
enough for “from hunger” working class projects kids like him) so what they
would do is pig-pile three or four guys in the big ass trunk (occasional
sightings of 1950s automobile models still on the road and a recent visit to an
automobile museum out in San Diego only confirmed to Josh what he remembered
about how big the trunks were then, and how big bad ass the engines were too,
and although today’s are quite a bit more efficient there was some
psychological lift then in being seen in those big ass cars, certainly the
girls would turn their heads something he had not seen anybody with today’s zip
cars and minis), maybe depending on size a couple of guys in the rear seat
wells so for about six bucks (remember the guess-aspect please), the
admission Rene and whoever was riding shot-gun paid (later correctly split up
among the total number admitted since that was the whole point) half the
freaking neighborhood got into the show for less than a dollar.
Now one might ask, aside from the silly
question of the morality if not the legality of such moves whether the
admission booth attendant would not get wise to the whole scene. What are you
kidding this poor cluck probably got about a dollar an hour for his or her work
and was not worried about playing “copper,” not when that person probably was
running the same scam when he or she was going to the drive-in. The important
thing is that later, later when it wasn’t about “from hunger” guys but meeting
carloads of girls from the neighborhoods who were using the same “technique”
sometimes Josh and the boys would con some poor girls into the trunk and since
it was tight quarters “cop” a quick feel wherever that stray hand landed (the
only really acceptable kind of “copping” when you thought about it) a quick
feel and maybe get them “in the mood” for the fogged up window scene every guy
dream of. (Later Josh would tell one and all out in California he blushed
more than the girls when he pulled that maneuver although he caught more than
his fair share of “in the mood” girls, he was not known by the moniker the
“Prince of Love” in the great summer of love night, circa 1967, for
nothing).
Josh laughed when he thought about that
silly larceny and that “copping” kids’ stuff but later, come junior and senior
years of high school the ritual became much more serious when three was a crowd
time, when it was important to be able to separate out a bit and go to what was
named the “sweat box” by the local guys, the place where the single guy with a
single girl placed their automobile away from the prying carload of younger
teen guys or girls and better still from prying eyes of young parents, grown
suddenly old and responsible once the kids started coming, shielding their kids
from the fogged bound cars at the back of the lot. The “sweat box” was the
section where if one asked a quick question about the plot of the film one
would get some strange answers while the parties were straightening out their
clothes. Josh said if you really thought about it no parent would go within
fifty yards of that “passion pit.”
Not all of Josh’s memories of the Olde
Saco Drive-In were great big cream puff dreams. Later after the big “cultural
revolution” that was the 1960s lost steam guys like Josh (and more dramatically
the moaned for late Pete Markin) were left stranded for a while, lost their
moorings. Like the time Josh was down on his own luck and forced to sneak back
to Olde Saco and stay low for reasons that best not detain us here. Here’s how
he told the story:
“Mimi Murphy knew two things, she
needed to keep moving, and she was tired, tired as hell of moving, of the need,
of the self-imposed need, to keep moving ever since that incident five years
ago with her seems like an eternity ago sweet long gone motorcycle boy, Pretty
James Preston. Poor Pretty James and his needs, no, his obsessions with that
silly motorcycle, that English devil’s machine, that Vincent Black Lightning
that caused him more anguish than she did. And she gave him plenty to think
about as well before the end. How she tried to get him to settle down a little,
just a little, but what was a sixteen old girl, pretty new to the love game,
totally new, but not complaining to the sex game, and his little tricks to get
her in the mood for that, and forget the settle down thing. Until the next
time.
Maybe, if you were from around North Adamsville way, or maybe just Boston, you
had heard about Pretty James, Pretty James Preston and his daring exploits back
in about 1967 and 1968. Those got a lot of play in the newspapers for months
before the end. Before that bank job, the one where as Pretty James used to say
all the time, he cashed his check. Yes, the big Granite City National Bank
branch in Braintree heist that he tried to pull all by himself, with Mimi as
stooge look-out. She had set him up for that heist, or so she thought. No, she
didn’t ask him to do it but she got him thinking, thinking about settling down
just a little and he needed a big score, not the penny ante gas station and mom
and pop variety store robberies that kept them in, as he also said, coffee and
cakes but a big payday and then off to Mexico, maybe Sonora, and a buy into the
respectable and growing drug trade.
And he almost, almost, got away clean that fatal day, that day when she stood
across the street, a forty-five in her purse just in case he needed it for a
final getaway. But he never made it out the door. Some rum brave security guard
tried to uphold the honor of his profession and started shooting nicking Pretty
James in the shoulder. Pretty James responded with a few quick blasts and
felled the copper. That action though slowed down the escape enough for the
real coppers to respond and blow Pretty James away. Dead, DOA, done. Her sweet
boy Pretty James.
According to the newspapers a tall,
slender red-headed girl about sixteen had been seen across the street from the
bank just waiting, waiting according to the witness, nervously. The witness had
turned her head when she heard the shots from the bank and when she looked back
the red-headed girl was gone. And Mimi was gone, and long gone before the day
was out. She grabbed the first bus out of Braintree headed to Boston where
eventually she wound up holed up in a high-end whorehouse doing tricks to make
some moving dough. And she had been moving ever since, moving and eternally
hate moving. Now, for the past few months, she had been working nights as a
cashier in the refreshment stand at the Olde Saco Drive-In Theater to get
another stake to keep moving. She had been tempted, a couple of times, to do a
little moon-lighting in a Portland whorehouse that a woman she had worked with
at her last job, Fenner’s Department Store where she modeled clothes for the
rich ladies, had told her about to get a quick stake but she was almost as
eternally tired at that prospect as in moving once again.
Then one night Josh came in. Came in for popcorn and a Sprite she remembered,
although she did not remember on that busy summer night what the charge was. He
kind of looked her over quickly, very quickly but she was aware that he looked
her over and, moreover, he was aware that she knew that he had looked her over.
The look though was not the usual baby, baby come on look, but a thoughtful
look like he could see that she had seen some woes and, well, what of it. Like
maybe he specialized in fixing busted-up red-heads, or wanted to. She knew she
wasn’t beautiful but she had a certain way about her that certain guys, guys
from motorcycle wild boy Pretty James Boy to kind of bookish college guys like
this one, wanted to get next to. If she let them. And she hadn’t, hadn’t not
since Pretty James. But she confessed to herself, not without a girlish blush,
that she had in the universe of looks and peeks that make up human experience
looked him over too. And then passed to the next customer and his family of
four burgeoning tray-full order of hot dogs, candy, popcorn and about six zillion
drinks.
A couple of nights later, a slow night for it was misting out keeping away the
summer vacation families that kept the drive-in hopping before each show and at
intermission, a Thursday night usually slow anyway before the Friday change of the
double-feature, Josh came in again at intermission. This time out of nowhere,
without a second’s hesitation, she gave him a big smile when he came to the
register with his now familiar popcorn and Sprite. He didn’t respond, or rather
he did not respond right away because right behind him there were a couple of
high school couples who could hardly wait to get their provisions and get back
to their fogged-up car and keep it fogged up. They passed by him and hurried
out the door.
Just then over the refreshment stand
loudspeaker that played records as background music to keep the unruly crowds a
little quiet while they waited for their hamburgers and hot dogs came the voice
of Doris Troy singing her greatest hit, Just One Look. Then he broke
into a smile, a big smile like he was thinking just that thought that very
minute, looked up at the clock, looked again, and looked a third time without
saying a word, She gave him a slight flirty smile and said eleven o’clock and
at exactly eleven o’clock he was there to meet her. Maybe she thought as they
went out the refreshment stand door she would not have to keep moving,
eternally moving after all.
A couple of fretful months later one
nigh Mimi slipped out the back door of her rooming house over on Atlantic
Avenue and Josh never heard from her again. Josh figured that after telling him
about Pretty James one lonesome whiskey-drinking night she had to move, keep
moving tired or not.”
So not all the old time Olde Saco
Drive-In dreams worked out. And in the big scheme of things in Josh’s life,
some ups, some downs stirred memories, good or bad, of drive-in movie times
would usually rate pretty far down on the list. But these semi-retired days
Josh has had time to think about old time things. Like a lot of guys, gals too
but he wouldn’t speak for them since he had only talked to his guys about those
old days he wished to have a re-run on such things knowing full well that you
“can’t go home again,” the past is dead and gone. Hell, didn’t he know that
when he tried to rekindle some old high school friendships and wound up giving
it up after he realized that time had swept whatever they all had in common
away. Know too when he tried that last reconciliation with his family that it
was too late. Hell even a simple thing like planning to go to class reunion got
all balled up when some old flame, or kind of old flame, wanted to start
something up again now that she was “single” (after three divorces) and Josh
too (ditto on the divorces, the number as well). So he had had to nix that
plan.
And that is where Laura came in, Laura
who had “saved” him from some tiresome lonely old age when they finally got
together, finally figured they were “soulmates” as she called it (and he
agreed). See Josh figured some things maybe can’t be worked out from the
past but something simple like a trip down memory lane at the Olde Saco
Drive-In might be a kick. Like was mentioned before Laura was very cool to the
idea but since they were staying nearby, the weather was warm and the double-bill
(yeah, they kept the double-bill tradition alive) while not her usual arty
films were probably passable flicks she finally agreed. So on a Wednesday night
they drove the twenty miles or so up to Olde Saco from Wells with a certain
amount of excitement now that they had decided to do the thing (Laura with her
drive-in-less youth was now curious about the whole ritual).
When Josh drove up to the admissions
booth he noticed that the old standard per carload idea was also still in
effect, verifying what he had already told Laura about the old time larcenies.
(By the way he can confirm that times had changed, that inflation had worked
its ways in the forty or fifty years that have passed since now a carload was
twenty dollars and that is a number that he had no trouble remembering since it
was his treat.) As he passed his money along he kiddingly mentioned to the
attendant that he had twelve people in the trunk but instead of some
incomprehension on his part the kid told Josh that he had a few nights before
had to check a couple of trunks and found them filled with teenagers. The
tradition lives! (Although Josh felt some chagrin later over the kid playing
“copper” on the deal).
As Josh and Laura found a spot, a
little out of the way since they had passed a number of carloads of families
with kids not sitting in the cars like the old days but spread out in front of
their spots with lawn chairs so they could have a little quiet. Josh remarked
that except for some overgrown grass the place looked pretty much the same as
in the old days with a few exceptions. First off there were no speakers, you
know, the ones on the posts that you clipped to your slightly opened front door
window (and half the time in your rush to get out of the place in less than an
hour as the traffic jam began at the exit you forgot the damn thing and not a
few would be down on the ground after a night’s work). Nowadays, as Laura
noticed on the screen, you tuned into a numbered station on your car radio.
Okay, progress can’t be stopped and those silly speakers were really a
nuisance. Another thing was that the old time playground that he and his
sisters played in as kids were gone, replaced by a couple more rows of car
spots. The most striking thing though was, probably as a matter of saving
dough, the refreshment stand area looked almost exactly as it had, except maybe
a new coat of paint about ten years ago, when he spied Mimi behind the counter
back in the 1970s with the same “menu.” (Don’t tell Laura, please don’t tell
Laura that Josh had some pangs about Mimi on seeing that stand, okay).
Actually the most striking thing about
the evening though was not the same old stand but that there was not a speck of
an indication that the old “sweat box” section was still around. And it made
sense when he and Laura were talking about the subject during intermission.
Kids have about twenty other ways of entertaining themselves, are more
committed to mall-rat-dom and other locales these days so things do move on.
Josh had not expected any such replication although it would have heartened him
if it had. It was okay and they had a nice evening.
Hey, what about the double-feature,
what about the movies. Well, Josh said he was not sure but he thought one was a
spy movie, something out of the Cold War, and the other was a flipped out
romance. And he said Laura agreed. When he named the two titles though when I
checked they had nothing to do with spies or romances, one was a star-wars type
movie, the other a gangster movie. Yeah, some things never change at the
drive-in, well almost never except Josh complained about how hard it was to
maneuver these days with these damn bucket car seats and the console in the
middle, and about how they forgot to bring paper towels to wipe off the fog
from the windshields.
Click on the headline to link to the "Leon Trotsky Internet Archive' online copy of his 1923 article, "From The Old Family To The New".
Markin comment:
The following is an article from the Spring 1988 issue of "Women and Revolution" that may have some historical interest for old "new leftists", perhaps, and well as for younger militants interested in various cultural and social questions that intersect the class struggle. Or for those just interested in a Marxist position on a series of social questions that are thrust upon us by the vagaries of bourgeois society. I will be posting more such articles from the back issues of "Women and Revolution" during Women's History Month and periodically throughout the year.
**********
Return to the Road of Lenin and Trotsky
How the Bolsheviks Fought fo Women's Emancipation
On the second anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, Lenin announced, "In the course of two years of Soviet power in one of the most backward countries of Europe more has been done to emancipate women, to make her the equal of the 'strong' sex, than has been done during the past 130 years by all the advanced, enlightened, 'democratic' republics of the world taken together" ("Soviet Power and the Status of Women," Collected Works). This truth has a fundamental materialist basis. Only a socialist revolution, breaking the bonds of private property, can create the conditions necessary for the emancipation of women. It's more than ever true today: amidst the barbarous social decay of the imperialist "democracies" like the United States, where reactionary bigots target women's rights, even a mere statement of formal equality like the ERA can't make it into law.
Women and Revolution here reprints three early Soviet decrees addressed to the emancipation of women. Codifying the hard-fought gains of the Bolshevik Revolution, these decrees laid out a perspective for the introduction of new social forms to replace the institution of the family and to draw women into the socialist construction of society. As Lenin said in November 1918, "The experience of all liberation movements has shown that the success of a revolution depends on how much the women take part in it. The Soviet government is doing everything in its power to enable women to carry on independent proletarian socialist work" ("Speech at the First All-Russia Congress of Working Women," Collected Works).
Women in the Russian Revolution
The Russian Revolution was sparked by the working women of St. Petersburg, when, 71 years ago, they celebrated International Women's Day with a spontaneous strike and march through the streets. Thousands of women standing in bread lines joined them; hastily improvised red banners rose above the crowd, demanding bread, peace and higher wages. Years of imperialist war had brought the mammoth social tensions of tsarist Russia, where modern capitalism existed superimposed upon entrenched medievalism, to the breaking point.
The Bolsheviks had long been active in organizing Russian proletarian women. The journal Rabotnitsa (The Working Woman), founded in 1914, was only one means by which the Bolsheviks sought to win the ranks of working women over to revolutionary socialism. Social backwardness and poverty in Russia before the revolution fell doubly hard on its women: even mai the minimal gains which capitalism had made possible in the more advanced industrialized countries Europe did not exist in semi-feudal Russia, where serfdom had been abolished a mere 56 years earlier, life lay in the grip of the Orthodox church an priests; religious prejudices were deeply rooted in poverty and ignorance. Peasant women in particular lived under indescribably primitive conditions, cultural impoverished that in 1897 the illiteracy rate was as as 92 percent.
The Bolsheviks understood that the oppression of women could not be legislated out of existence family as the capitalist economic institution for bearing the next generation could not simply be swept away by decree. It had to be replaced with socialized child and housework to remove the burden of doing chores from women, enabling them to participate fully in social and political life. Such a revolutionary restructuring of society could occur only with large-scale industrialization, necessarily years in the future. While fully committed to this revolutionary program, the Bolsheviks were handicapped by terrible objective conditions. For the first few years of Soviet rule their meager resources were absorbed by the Red Army's drive to defeat the imperialists and White Guards who launched a counterrevolutionary war against the young workers republic.
Sweeping Away the Filth of Tsardom
Once in power, the Bolsheviks moved immediately to end all the old legal impediments to women's equality. Women were given the vote, at a time when only Norway and Denmark had legalized women's suffrage. Marriage and divorce were made a simple matter of civil registration, while all distinctions between "legitimate" and "illegitimate" children were annulled. In 1919 the Communist Party created the Department of Working Women and Peasant Women, Zhenotdel, for special work among women, which included organizing over 25,000 literacy schools.
In 1920 the Soviet government legalized abortion and made it free. The People's Commissariat of Health pressed for development of and education about birth control methods, which barely existed in Russia at that time, while discouraging abortion as a threat to health in this age before antibiotics. Even more crucial was the workers government's commitment to eliminating the poverty which drove many women to abortion for sheer lack of ability to provide for their children. The Bolsheviks' aim was to build childcare centers and socialized dining halls to enable women to work knowing their children would be well cared for and fed; single mothers were to receive special help. Despite the severe objective limits facing Soviet society, the birth rate went steadily up and the infant mortality rate steadily down.
The workers revolution in Russia, in sweeping away the rotten filth of tsardom, also abolished in December 1917 all the old laws against homosexual acts. As Dr. Grigorii Batkis, the director of the Moscow Institute of Social Hygiene, pointed out in "The Sexual Revolution in Russia," published in the Soviet Union in 1923:
"Soviet legislation bases itself on the following principle:
'It declares the absolute non-interference of the state and society into sexual matters so long as nobody is injured and no one's interests are encroached upon.... "Concerning homosexuality, sodomy, and various other forms of sexual gratification, which are set down in European legislation as offenses against public morality—Soviet legislation treats these exactly the same as so-called 'natural' intercourse. All forms of sexual intercourse are private matters." [emphasis in original]
The Fight for Women's Rights in Soviet Central Asia
Nowhere was the condition of women more downtrodden than in the primitive Muslim areas of Soviet Central Asia. The Bolsheviks believed that women, having the most to gain, would be the link that broke the feudal chain in the Soviet East, but they could not with one blow abolish oppressive Muslim institutions. The Bolshevik approach was based on ma¬terialism, not moralism. The Muslim bride price, for example, was not some sinister plot against womankind, but had arisen as an institution central to distrib¬uting land and water rights among different clans (see "Early Bolshevik Work Among Women of the Soviet East," W&R No. 12, Summer 1976, for a fuller discussion).
Systematic Bolshevik work among Muslim women was only possible in 1921, after the end of the bitter Civil War. Dedicated and heroic members of the Zhenotdel donned veils in order to meet Muslim women and explain the laws and goals of the new Soviet republic. Special meeting places, sometimes "Red Yertas" or tents in nomadic areas or clubs in cities, were a key way for the Communist Party to begin to win the trust of these women. Such clubs followed Lenin's policy of using Soviet state power to carefully and systematically undermine native tribalism by demonstrating the superiority of Soviet institutions. The tremendous pro¬ductive capacity of the Soviet planned economy provided the services, education and jobs that finally decisively undercut the ancient order and liberated women from their stifling subjugation.
Today the condition of women in Soviet Central Asia is centuries removed from the oppression their sisters across the border in Afghanistan still face. We said "Hail Red Army in Afghanistan!" because the 1979 Soviet Army intervention against murderous Islamic counterrevolution (whose rallying cry is keeping women under the veil) posed the possibility of a revolutionary transformation of this hideously backward country. Under the protection of the Red Army, the women of Afghanistan have been taught to read and write, and a major¬ity of university students are now women and girls; many hold jobs outside the home; and there are 15,000 women in the Afghan army, defending their new freedoms.
Return to the Road of Lenin and Trotsky!
Many of the gains made by Soviet women under the Bolsheviks were subsequently reversed by the Stalinist political counterrevolution. In 1936, abortion was made illegal. (It was again legalized in 1955.) Divorce becar difficult to obtain, co-education was abolished, horr sexuality was again outlawed. As Trotsky said, "The actual liberation of women is unrealizable on a basis 'generalized want.' Experience soon proved this ai tere truth which Marx had formulated eighty years before." The cruel Civil War decimated the proletariat in the young workers state. Most fundamentally, failure to extend the Revolution internationally strengthened the Stalinist bureaucratic caste in the isola Soviet Union. Workers democracy was smashed." Leninist internationalist program was abandoned favor of the search for "peaceful coexistence" versus imperialism, while domestically the Stalinists sou social props and ideological justifications for bure cratic rule. Exploiting social backwardness to strenghten their grip over society, the Stalinists rehabilitated family as a useful institution of social conservatism control.
Trotsky denounced the Stalinist bureaucracy "Thermidor in the Family" (The Revolution Betray "These gentlemen have, it seems, completely fogooten that socialism was to remove the cause which impels woman to abortion, and not force her into the 'joys of motherhood' with the help of a foul police interference in what is to every woman the most mate sphere of life....
"Instead of openly saying, 'We have proven still poor and ignorant for trie creation of socialist tions among men, our children and grandchildren realize this aim,' the leaders are forcing people together against the shell of the broken family, and not only that, but to consider it, under threat of extreme penalties, the sacred nucleus of triumphant socialism. It is hard to measure with the eye the scope of the retreat."
Despite these counterrevolutionary measures, capitalist private property has not been restored in the Soviet Union. The tremendous productive capac the Soviet planned economy has opened opportunities for women—in education, jobs, social service—which capitalism can never provide. We defend the USSR today unconditionally against imperialism because the fundamental gains of the October lution remain; it is a society based on production for social needs, not capitalist profit. At the same time call for political revolution to re-establish workers democracy and to return the Soviet Union to the liberating goals and program of Lenin and Trotsky.
Today there is great interest in the Soviet Union, in part because of the visible difficulties of American imperialism, but also because of Gorbachev's promises of glasnost (openness). Yet this "enlightened bureaucrat" will never tell the truth about the revolutionary work of the Bolshevik Party. Between that tradition and today's bureaucracy lies the gulf of the bloody political counterrevolution carried out by Stalin.
To appease the nuclear nuts in the White House, Gorbachev appears willing to pull out of Afghanistan. The Kremlin bureaucracy's willingness to abandon Afghan women to illiteracy, the veil and chattel slavery starkly exposes the gulf separating them from the Bolsheviks, who understood that the question of women's liberation,was key, above all in such backward, feudal areas.
In imperialist countries like the United States, only the abolition of private property will make women's emancipation a historical reality. It will take a socialist revolution in the U.S. to win the basic rights and social institutions the Bolsheviks fought for in the early years of the USSR. Given the tremendous productive capacity of U.S. industry and a far higher level of culture than that which the Bolsheviks inherited from the tsar, we have no doubt that the American workers government will be able to quickly implement such far-reaching social programs. For women's liberation through socialist revolution!
Soviet Measures to Liberate Women
Decree of the People's Commissariat of Health and Social Welfare and the People's Commissariat of Justice in Soviet Russia
During recent decades the number of women interrupting pregnancy by abortion has risen both in the West and in our country.
The legislation of all countries combats this evil by severe punishment of the women undergoing abortions as well as of the doctors performing them. To date this method has succeeded only in making the operation illegal, performed in secrecy, and in making women the victims of ignorant quacks or unscrupu¬lous doctors who turn a profit from abortion. As a result, 50 percent of these women become seriously ill and 4 percent of these die from the consequences of the operation.
The Workers and Peasants Government regards this phenomenon as a terrible evil for the entire society. The Workers and Peasants Government sees the consolidation of the socialist order and agitation against abortion among the broad masses of the female working-class population as the way to successfully combat it. It combats this evil in practice with the most far-reaching protection of mothers and children, hoping that it will gradually disappear. However, as long as the remnants of the past and the difficult economic conditions of the present compel some women to undergo an abortion, the People's Commissariat of Health and Social Welfare and the People's Commissariat of Justice regard the use of penal measures as inappropriate and therefore, to preserve women's health and protect the race against ignorant or self-seeking profiteers, it is resolved:
I. Free abortion, interrupting pregnancy by artificial
means, shall be performed in state hospitals, where
women are assured maximum safety in the operation.
II. It is absolutely prohibited to perform this operation without a doctor.
III. Midwives or "wise women" who break this law
shall forfeit their license to practice and be handed over to the People's Court.
IV. Doctors performing this operation in their private offices for personal gain shall also be brought before the People's Court.
Women's Work in the Economy
Women as Participants in the Construction of Soviet Russia
Resolution of the Eighth Congress of Soviets
Considering that the primary task of the hour is raising the level of industry, transportation and agriculture; that women comprise more than half of the population of Soviet Russia—women workers and peasants; that implementing the proposed unified economic plan is only possible by involving all the female labor power: the Eighth
Congress of Soviets resolves that:
a) Women workers and peasants are to be
involved in all economic organizations which are
working out and realizing the unified economic
plan; likewise in factory administrations, in fac¬
tory committees and in the administration of the
trade-union organizations.
b) For the purpose of reducing the unproduc¬
tive work of women in the household and in child-
care, the Eighth Congress of Soviets requires that
the local Soviets encourage women workers to
support, with their initiative and activity, the
reforms of social institutions, the beginnings of
communist construction, such as organizing com¬
munal dwellings and workshops for washing and
mending laundry in city and village, organizing
squads of cleaning women, creating foster care
centers, communal laundries and dining halls.
The Eighth Congress of Soviets charges the newly constituted Central Executive Committee of the Soviets to immediately begin working out measures aimed at reducing the unproductive work of women in the household and family, thereby increasing the supply of free labor power to raise the people's standard of living and augment the productivity of the Workers Republic.
Social Institutions for the Relief of the Housewife Communal Kitchens in Moscow
The Russian Soviet bodies are committed to the opinion that the traditional housework performed by the mothers of families in individual households must pass over to socialized institutions. This is both in the interest of women, who squander their time and energy in arduous, grinding, unproductive tasks, and in the interest of society, which can make full use of women's talents and accomplishments in the economy and culture. In Moscow there are at present no fewer than 559 communal kitchens in which hot midday and evening meals are prepared daily for 606,100 adults. The children take their meals in the childcare and educa¬tional centers where they have found places or which they attend during the day.
Compare the blessings of "orderly conditions" in the states that are still capitalist with this result of "Bolshevik chaos"! Part and parcel of these "orderly conditions" is the fact that in all major cities, in all industrial centers, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands go without a warm midday meal every day and in the evening in an uncomfortable home they choke down a meal their harried wives have prepared hurriedly and with insufficient means. Increasingly, women in the proletariat and also in the petty bourgeoisie must con¬tribute to the family's income. The double burden of working for a living and running the household rests on her. Meals in common—insofar as they occur at all— unite an overtired mother, a husband who is often grouchy because he does not find at home what he seeks, and children whose eyes and clothing bespeal their lack of care and attention.
'In Russia the working woman can throw off the burden of household obligations. She knows not only she herself, but, more importantly, her husband and children are better cared for than she could manage a home even with great energy and devotion. The home can now be a home in the most noble sense for husband and wife, for parents and children, a place to be together, for thinking and striving together, for enjoyment. Women have the time and leisure to learn, to educate themselves, to participate in all areas of social life, both giving and receiving. Oh, these Bolshevik "wreckers" and "destroyers"! Is that no what the philistines of all the capitalist countrie are still prattling?
Note on the documents: The three pieces reprinted here are our own translations from the April 1921 issue of Die Kommunistische Fraueninfernationat (Communist Women's International), the official German-language journal of the Women's Secretariat of the Communist International. In W&R No. 9 (Summer 1975) we reprinted another version of the abortion legislation, which included at the end the signature "N. Semashko, People's Commissar of Health; Kursk) People's Commissar of Justice." That was taken fron the book Health Protection in the U.S.S.R. by N./A Semashko, published in London by Gollancz in 1934 The date given for the decree on abortion in Semashki is 18 November 1920. Regarding "Women's Work in the Economy": the Eighth Congress of Soviets was held in Moscow from 22 to 29 December 1920. We were unable to find a date for the third piece; the Comintern women's journal did not give a source."
