late-imperial Russia, Lunacharsky, Commissar of Enlightenment, and Krupskaia, Lenin's wife, promoted polytechnicism - the idea of an all-round education without vocational specialization - and the'unified labour school' where pupils took part in vocational training as a way of familiarizing them with the world of work. Entrance examinations, grading, homework, and punishment were all abolished. Relations between the government and teachers got off to a bad start when teachers went on strike, and throughout the civil war most teachers remained hostile to principles of progressive, child-centred education. Significant strides were made in extending education: by 1926-7 eight out of ten children aged 8 to 11 were in school, compared with 49% in 1915. As against that, expenditure per pupil remained well below the pre-war level and as late as 1926 teachers earned less than half what they had earned in 1913. In a context where levels of educational achievement were still very low, the Komsomol and trade unions pressed for greater specialization and more vocational education. This was resisted by the commissariat of education untihg26when it went some way to reinstate a more traditional curriculum. This was not sufficient to palliate critics, however, and in 1929 Lunacharsky was removed.
In 1918 a 'revolutionary housing repartition' was proclaimed under the slogan 'Peace to the Hovels, War to the Palaces'. Workers were moved from their 'cots' and 'corners' and placed in the apartments of the wealthy. So- called 'nobs'
17. Children's demonstration
ended and most property was returned to its former owners. In 1922 rents were reintroduced, but consumed a small proportion of the budget of working-class families (under 9% in 1928-9). From the mid-19205, the resumption of migration to the cities put intense pressure on the housing stock. In 1926 the official allocation of living space per adult was only 4.9 square metres for workers, 6.9 for employees, and 6.1 for others. Anyone having in excess of that was likely to be asked to 'self-corn press'
With NEP, the attempt to distribute goods and services through the state was abandoned. The easing of supplies that resulted was widely welcomed, but the fact that many goods were beyond the pockets of ordinary folk caused much resentment. From 1926 restrictions on 'speculation' were stepped up, but the state's inability to substitute for private trade led to the emergence of the queue as a characteristic feature of Soviet life. Goods were in eternally short supply -
Family and gender relations
The Bolsheviks came to power with a radical programme for the liberation of women and transformation of the family. Their reforming zeal was evidenced in the comprehensive Code on Marriage, the Family, and Guardianship, ratified in October 1918, which equalized women's legal status with men's, allowed both spouses to retain the right totheir
own property and earnings, granted children born outside wedlock the same rights as those born within, and made divorce available upon request. In Bolshevik theory the key to women's liberation lay in taking women out of the confines of the family and bringing them into the sphere of wage work. There they would gain economic independence and develop class consciousness. For this to happen, however, it was recognized that the state would need to take over the tasks of child care and household labour, described by Lenin as 'the most unproductive, the most savage, and the most arduous work a woman can do'. During the first years, women were summoned to set aside their responsibilities to husbands and children and to become fighters on behalf of oppressed humanity. Efrosiniia Marakulina, a peasant who became an instructor in Viatka province, was an archetypal 'new woman': 'She forgot her family, her children, the household. With enthusiasm she threw herself into the new business of enlightening her ? dark, downtrodden sisters.' Not surprisingly, those who became 'new
g women' were few. For most women the chaos of the civil war saw them
I
e struggling to survive, their lack of interest in the revolutionary drama
jg reinforcing the stereotypical image of the woman as
It was to combat such 'backwardness' that a Women's Bureau was established in 1919 by Inessa Armand and Alexandra Kollontai. They insisted that working women must be mobilized around projects of direct concern to them, such as literacy classes, creches, collective dining rooms, and consumer cooperatives. During the 1920s the Bureau, which was permanently under-funded, undertook a range of campaigns against wage and hiring discrimination, sexual harassment, layoffs of women, alcoholism, and wife-battering. The assertive feminism that it occasionally encouraged made many men in the party leadership edgy. On 1 March 1927, for example, a conference of working women in Irkutsk passed a resolution declaring that'it is necessary to fight for the liberation of women and to struggle against men.' In 1927 the Bureau launched an aggressive campaign in Central Asia against
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the veil, bride price, polygamy, and female segregation. Some 800 women were killed by outraged menfolk, protesting that Bolsheviks were 'turning women into harlots'. This was the excuse that some in the leadership had been looking for. The Bureau was accused of 'heavy-handed bungling', the prelude to its dissolution in 1930.
The Bolsheviks challenged the patriarchal concept that men had a Cod-given right to rule over women, what Lenin called'rooting out the 'old master right of the man'' but they generally showed far less interest in challenging male than female gender roles. The revolution reconfigured rather than unseated the dominant masculine norm, substituting for the patriarchal model of masculinity a fraternal model in which young men were defined through comradeship and a commitment to the struggle. Within the revolutionary script production took priority over reproduction, so left little space for women whose identities were largely defined by family and motherhood. In pictorial representations of revolution, moreover, women were largely absent. Totemic workers, peasants, and Red Army soldiers were generally men, covertly bolstering the assumption that revolution was men's business. In the course of the 1920s, patriarchal norms quickly gained ascendancy within the party-state, so that gender was one of the first areas in which a 'return of the repressed' became visible.
Many Bolsheviks believed that the family, as an institution based on private property, would be abolished under communism, with the state taking responsibility for the care of children and for domestic labour. In the event, underthe blows of war, flight, hunger, and disease, the family began to abolish itself as spouses separated, children were cast adrift, and casual sexual relationships flourished. As a result, the economic position of many women, left
