Lesbian, gay, bi and trans pride series, part 13
1930s USSR: Survival with setbacks
By Leslie Feinberg
Male same-sex love was re-criminalized in the
Soviet Union in 1933. In 1936, measures were introduced banning
abortion and making divorce more difficult to obtain. (Abortion
for medical reasons was restored in 1955, and free abortion on
demand was re-legalized in 1968.)
Upon seizing state power in October 1917, the Bolsheviks had
struck down the tsarist laws against homosexuality and abortion
and eased restrictions on divorce. Why, then, this political
reversal after more than a decade and a half?
For diehard anti-communists, no explanation of why setbacks
occurred in the Soviet Union will convince them that in its
more than seven decades of development there was still much
worth defending from the point of view of the working
class.
But for those who study past revolutions in order to
strengthen the modern movement to achieve socialism--a system
that will flourish in a planned world economy--a much more
thorough examination of this period is essential, and no glib
answers should be accepted as good coin.
The seizure of state power by the numerically small Russian
working class, allied with the vast peasantry, did not
establish socialism. A revolution is not a single act. It is a
process.
The state based on this workers' revolution liberated turf
on which to build a planned economy which, to be socialist, had
to build the economic base of the impoverished, war-torn
country, in order to breathe life into the demands of the
revolution: peace, bread and land.
Russia was still semi-feudal and semi-colonial--the weakest
link in the capitalist chain. Technologically
under-developed.
This was the material reality.
People "make their own history," Karl Marx wrote, "but they
do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under
circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances
directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past."
("The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte")
Cleaning the Augean stable
If all the Bolsheviks had to do was get rid of the dominant
ideas of the old exploiting class, ideas which had permeated
the population of laborers in the fields and the
factories--national chauvinism, anti-Semitism, misogyny,
anti-gay and anti-trans attitudes, superstition--the task of
cleaning this Augean stable would have been formidable.
But in order to change social ideas, it was necessary to
change the material conditions--to raise the productive level
in the workers' state. And world imperialism, howling like
ravenous wolves at its borders, did everything possible to
hamper that historic effort.
Lenin wrote concretely about this in 1919 in relation to
women's liberation. "Not a single democratic party in the
world, not even the most advanced bourgeois republic, had done
in decades so much as a hundredth part of what we did in our
very first year in power. We actually razed to the ground the
infamous laws placing women in a position of inequality,
restricting divorce and surrounding it with disgusting
formalities, denying recognition to children born out of
wedlock, enforcing a search for their fathers, etc., laws
numerous survivals of which, to the shame of the bourgeoisie
and of capitalism, are to be found in all civilized
countries."
However, he concluded, "Notwith standing all the liberating
laws that have been passed, woman continues to be a domestic
slave, because petty housework crushes, strangles, stultifies
and degrades her, chains her to the kitchen and to the nursery,
and wastes her labor on barbar ously unproductive, petty,
nerve-wracking, stultifying and crushing drudgery. The real
emancipation of women ... will begin only when a mass struggle
is started against this petty domestic economy, or rather when
it is transformed on a mass scale into large-scale socialist
economy." ("A Great Beginning," Collected Works, vol. 29, pp.
408-34)
Herculean tasks
The "dead hand of the past" handed the Russian Revolution
three enormous responsibilities. "The new, infant workers'
state, the Union of Soviet Socialist Repub lics," wrote Workers
World Party founder Sam Marcy, "had thrust upon it three
Herculean tasks utterly unprecedented in the entire history of
the class struggle.
"It had the duty and obligation to reorganize on a
revolutionary basis the left wing of the social democratic
movement, put it on a communist basis, and lay the foundation
for a new and revolutionary international. Lenin and the
Bolsheviks were thus obligated from the start not only to give
revolutionary leadership at home but, in a way, to become the
general staff of the world revolution which seemed visible on
the horizon, especially in Western Europe and later in the
East, in China.
"Its second task, no less urgent and intimately connected
with it, was for the new workers' state to defend itself
against the most barbaric assaults by the united front of the
imperialists, from Vladivostok to Murmansk.
"And thirdly, it had to begin to lay socialist economic
foundations and raise the living standards of the workers and
peasants who had passed through a most horrible period of
destruction, civil war and famine." ("The Signi fi cance of
Euro-communism," WW, July 11, 1977)
Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik seizure of power, was no
utopian. He had no illusions that the capitalist class in
Russia, or the enraged imperialists who surrounded the young
workers' state, would be won over by "moral suasion" to stop
attacking the revolution. In fact, he and other revolutionary
leaders did not think the workers' state could survive long
without the support of workers and oppressed peoples' around
the world rising up in a groundswell of revolution in order to
provide material support--globalizing socialism.
In Lenin's report to the Eighth Congress of the Bolshevik
Party on March 18, 1919, on behalf of the Central Committee, he
said that "it is inconceivable for the Soviet Republic to exist
alongside of the imperialist states for any length of time. One
or the other must triumph in the end." (Collected Works, vol.
29, p. 153)
A year earlier, on April 23, 1918, Lenin had explained to
the Moscow Soviet, "We are a revolutionary working-class
contingent that has advanced to the forefront, not because we
are better than other workers, not because the Russian
proletariat is superior to the working class of other
countries, but solely because we were one of the most backward
countries in the world. We shall achieve final victory only
when we succeed at last in conclusively smashing international
imperialism, which relies on the tremendous strength of its
equipment and discipline.
"But we shall achieve victory only together with all the
workers of other countries of the whole world. ... Our
backwardness has put us in the forefront, and we shall perish
unless we are capable of holding out until we receive powerful
support from workers who have risen in revolt in other
countries." (Ibid, vol. 27, p. 233)
Something had to give, Marcy stressed. While the result was
not the dismantling of the workers' state and its economy, as
the imperialists had hoped, some of the social gains of the
early revolution were set back. The most left-wing militants in
the Bolshevik Party, if they had not died on the front lines
defending the revolution, were being pushed back in an internal
struggle. And the population was exhausted by imperialist war
and intervention, famine and want.
Revolution bent, but did not break
Any study of how and why important political rights that had
been won for same-sex love and women were reversed in the
Soviet Union in the 1930s has to take into consideration the
effects that encirclement, economic embargo and isolation,
sabotage, civil war and other weapons of unrelenting attack by
world capitalism had on this vast but economically
underdeveloped country.
Stripping historical reality from these steps backward does
historic injustice to the tens of millions of workers and
peasants of many nationalities, sexes, genders and sexualities
who built the revolution with their sweat and defended it
against the onslaught of world imperialism with their
blood.
And it merely fans the flames of anti-communism, serving to
derail the forward motion of the planet's working class and
oppressed peoples towards genuine liberation.
An honest look at the measures taken against male
homosexuality and abortion in the 1930s Soviet Union must ask:
What effect did the low level of the productive apparatus and
the high level of scarcity and deprivation have on the
political goals of the Bolshevik Party? How did this frustrate
the early goals of achieving the liberation of women and
greater freedom of sexuality from state regulation?
With the danger of a new and even more destructive
imperialist war gathering like a storm against the workers'
state, creating an imperative need to quickly build a military
force capable of defending the Soviet population, how did the
industrialization and rapid collectivization of the peasantry
in the 1930s produce a sea change in the spheres of women's
societal role, and official attitudes towards gender expression
and sexuality?
And perhaps most importantly, did these political reversals
mean, as some said, that the Soviet Union ceased to be a
workers' state that deserved the support of laboring and
oppressed peoples around the world as it fought for its very
life against world imperialism?
Next: Political setbacks for gays and women, and the
'seismic gender shift'
Reprinted from the Aug. 26, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
Workers World, 55 W. 17 St., NY, NY 10011
Email: ww@workers.org
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