by James Millar
FEMINISM
Soviet communism declared gender equality, as celebrated in this 1961 postcard, reading “Glory to Soviet Women!” © RYKOFF COLLECTION/CORBIS
Disagreements between feminist reformers and radicals were present from the beginning. At first these conflicts were more over lifestyle than politics. Reformers observed existing social codes (dress, comportment, family obligations, respectability). Many, though not all, came from well-to-do gentry backgrounds and had no need to earn a living. Radicals, often of gentry origin too, were in conscious revolt against family and social propriety. They wore cropped hair and simple, unadorned clothing, smoked in public, and called themselves “nihilists” (nigilistki). Whether in financial need or not (many were), nihilists joined urban “communes,” or set up their own. For a few years there was some contact (including individual friendships) between nihilists and feminists, focusing on attempts to set up an employment bureau for women and cooperative workshops providing employment and essential skills for themselves and other women. This collaboration foundered during the mid-1860s; within a few years many nihilist women had moved into illegal populist groups whose aim was the liberation of the “Russian people,” the narod. In their own estimation, by the early 1870s the radicals had left the “woman question” behind.
FEMINIST CAMPAIGNING
The reformers were dedicated to working within the system. They raised petitions, lobbied ministers, and exploited personal connections to reach influential figures, many of them already sympathetic to feminist ideas. Of necessity, they focused on philanthropy and higher education. Philanthropy was the one form of public activity then open to women, an acknowledged extension of their “caring” role within the family. It aimed both to encourage self-sufficiency in the beneficiaries and to give their organizers practical experience of public administration. Feminist philanthropists ran their enterprises, as far as was possible, democratically and with minimal regulation. Most successful was a Society to Provide Cheap Lodgings (founded in 1861 and by 1880 a major charity) in St. Petersburg. Another society provided refuges for poor women. A major feminist preoccupation, particularly important in a rapidly urbanizing society, was to provide poorer women with alternatives to prostitution.
Campaigns for higher education were a new departure, but still within a familiar realm- woman as educator of her children-a role that became increasingly important in Russia’s drive to “modernize.” Feminists received support from individual professors and even university administrations. Persistent lobbying of government led to permission for public lectures for women (1869), then preparatory courses and finally university- level courses (1872 in Moscow), all existing on public goodwill, organization, and funding. Medical courses (for “learned midwives”) were opened to women in St Petersburg (1872), extended to full medical courses in 1876. In 1878 the first Higher Courses for Women opened in St. Petersburg, followed by Moscow, Kiev, and Kazan. Though outside the university system, with no rights to state service and rank as given to men, these courses were effectively women’s universities. Feminist campaigners also provided financial resources to students needing assistance, setting up a charity to raise money for the Higher Courses in 1878.
The campaign for higher education and specialist training was critically important for radical women too. Radicals’ increasing identification with
FEMINISM
“the people” inspired them to train for professions that could be of direct use, principally teaching and medicine. During the early 1870s dozens of radical women (along with nonpolitical women in search of professional education not then available in Russia) went abroad to study, especially to Zurich, where the university was willing to admit them. Some radicals completed their training; others were drawn into Russian ?migr? political circles, abandoned their studies, and soon returned to Russia as active revolutionaries.
Feminism-like all reform movements in Russia during the 1870s-suffered in the increasingly repressive political environment. All independent initiatives, legal or illegal, came under suspicion: these included a feminist publishing cooperative founded during the mid-1860s, fundraising activities, proposals to form women’s groups, and so forth. Alexander II’s assassination in 1881 brought further misfortune. Several of the terrorist leaders were women, former nigilistki, and in the wholesale assault on liberalism following the murder, feminists were tarred with the same brush. The reaction after 1881 proved almost fatal. Expansion of higher education was halted; some courses were closed. Feminists ceased campaigning, and all avenues for action were barred. Only during the mid-1890s could feminists begin to regroup, but under strict supervision, and always limited by law to education and philanthropy.
POLITICAL ACTION
Before 1900 Russian feminism had no overt political agenda. For some activists this was a matter of choice, for many others a frustrating restriction. In several, though not all, western countries women’s suffrage had been a focal point of feminist aspirations since the 1850s and 1860s. When rural zemstvos and municipal dumas were set up in Russia in the 1860s, propertied women received limited proxy rights to vote for the assemblies’ representatives, but legal political activity-by either gender-was not permitted. Indeed, no national legislature existed before 1906, when the tsar was forced by revolutionary upheaval to create the State Duma. It was during the build up of this opposition movement, from the early 1900s, that Russian feminism began to address political issues, not only women’s suffrage, but calls for civil rights and equality before the law for all citizens.
After Bloody Sunday (January 9, 1905), feminist activists began to organize, linking their cause with that of the liberal and moderate socialist Liberation Movement. Besides existing women’s societies, such as the Russian Women’s Mutual Philanthropic Society (Russkoye zhenskoye vzaimno- blagotvoritelnoye obshchestvo, established in 1895), new organizations sprang up. Most directly political was the All-Russian Union of Equal Rights for Women (Vserossysky soyuz ravnopraviya zhen-shchin), dedicated to a wide program of social and political reform, including universal suffrage without distinction of gender, religion, or nationality. It quickly affiliated itself with the Union of Unions (Soyuz soyuzov). Feminist support for the Liberation Movement was unmatched by the movement’s support for women’s political rights, and much of the union’s propaganda during 1905 was directed as much at the liberal opposition as at the government. Unlike the latter, however, many liberals were gradually persuaded by the feminist claim, and support increased significantly in the years of reaction that followed. The government refused to consider women’s suffrage at any point.
The women’s union-though itself overwhelmingly middle-class and professional-was greatly encouraged by women’s participation in workers’ strikes during the mid-1890s and, particularly, women’s involvement in working-class action in 1904 and 1905. After 1905, however, feminists were increasingly challenged by revolutionary socialists in a competition to “win” working-class women to their cause. Prominent Bolsheviks such as Kollontai had finally convinced their party leaders of working-class women’s revolutionary potential. During the last years of tsarist rule, when the labor movement overall was becoming increasingly active, Kollontai and her comrades benefited from the feminists’ failure to make any headway in the mass organization of women, a failure exacerbated after the outbreak of World War I by the feminists’ stalwart support for the war effort. It was the Bolsheviks, not the feminists, who capitalized on the war’s catastrophic impact on the lives of working-class women and men.
With the outbreak of the February Revolution of 1917, the feminist campaign resumed, and initial opposition from the Provisional Government was easily overcome. In the electoral law for the Constituent Assembly, women were fully enfranchised. Before it was swept away by the Bolsheviks, the Provisional Government initiated several projects to give women equal opportunities and pay in public services, and full rights to practice as lawyers. It also proposed to transform the higher
FERGHANA VALLEY
courses into women’s universities; in the event, the courses were fully incorporated into existing universities by the Bolsheviks in 1918.
During the 1920s, with “bourgeois feminism” silenced, women’s liberation was sponsored by the Bolsheviks, under a special Women’s Department of the Communist Party (Zhenotdel). In 1930 the Zhenotdel was abruptly dismantled and the “woman question” prematurely declared “solved.” See also: KOLLONTAI, ALEXANDRA MIKHAILOVNA; KRUP-SKAYA, NADEZHDA KONSTANTINOVNA; MARRIAGE AND FAMILY LIFE; ZHENOTDEL
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Atkinson, Dorothy; Dallin, Alexander; and Warshofsky, Lapidus, eds. (1977). Women in Russia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Clements, Barbara Evans. (1979). Bolshevik Feminist: The Life of Aleksandra Kollontai. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Clements, Barbara Evans; Engel, Barbara Alpern; and Worobec, Christine, D., eds. (1991). Russia’s Women: Accommodation, Resistance, Transformation. Berkeley: University of California Press. Edmondson, Linda. (1984). Feminism in Russia, 1900-1917. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Edmondson, Linda, ed. (1992). Women and Society in Russia and the Soviet Union. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Engel, Barbara Alpern. (1983). Mothers and Daughters: Women of the Intelligentsia in Nineteenth-Century Russia. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Farnsworth, Beatrice, and Viola, Lynne, eds. (1992). Russian Peasant Women. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Glickman, Rose L. (1984). Russian Factory Women: Workplace and Society, 1880-1914. Berkeley: University of California Press. Noonan, Norma Corigliano, and Nechemias, Carol, eds. (2001). Encyclopedia of Russian Women’s Movements. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Norton, Barbara T., and Gheith, Jehanne, M., eds. (2001). An Improper Profession: Women, Gender, and Journalism in Late Imperial Russia. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Stites, Richard. (1978). The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism, 1860-1930. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
LINDA EDMONDSON
FERGHANA VALLEY
A triangular basin with rich soil and abundant water resources from the Syr Darya River, modern canals, and the Kayrakkum Reservoir; the Ferghana Valley (Russian: Ferganskaia dolina; Uzbek: Farg-ona ravnina) is situated primarily in Uzbekistan and partly in Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, and is formed below the Tien Shan Mountains to the north and the Gissar Alay Mountains to the south. This has been the agricultural center of Central Asia for the last several thousand years. The basin is a major producer of cotton, fruits, and raw silk. It is one of the most densely populated regions of Central Asia, including the cities of Khujand, Kokand, Ferghana, Margilan, Namangan, Andijan, Osh, and Jalalabad.
Throughout its history, material and cultural wealth have made the valley a frequent target of conquest. Khujand, at the western edge of the valley, was once called “Alexandria the Far” as an outpost of Alexander the Great’s army. From the third century the valley emerged as a Persian-Sogdian nexus and major stop along the Silk Road under the suzerainty of the Sassanids. The Chinese Tang Dynasty briefly exerted influence in the valley during the seventh and eighth centuries, followed by Arab conquest and Islamic conversions during the eighth and ninth centuries and Persian Samanid dominion during the tenth century. The rise of the Karakhanids brought lasting Turkicization of the Ferghana Valley during the eleventh century. The Chaghatay Ulus of the Mongol Empire during the thirteenth century and the Turkic Timur (Tamerlane) and his grandson Ulugh Bek during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries introduced a period of burgeoning literature and Islamic erudition, followed by centuries of shifting local powers and instability under the various Turkic groups. Kokand khans ruled from the late eighteenth century until the Russian Empire annexed the valley as the Ferghana oblast to the Turkestan governor-generalship in 1876.
During the establishment of Soviet power in Central Asia (1920s and 1930s), the valley provided a fertile area for the Basmachi movement. In 1924, it was divided between the Uzbek SSR, the Tajik ASSR, and the Kirgiz ASSR. As a result, the valley inherited several cross border enclaves in a traditionally interwoven ethnic region. Despite a tradition of multiethnic cooperation, late-Soviet unrest and ethnic clashes erupted there in 1989 between
FEUDALISM
Uzbeks and Meshkhetian Turks, and in 1990 between Kyrgyz and Uzbeks in Osh. The famous Ferghana Canal was an early Soviet engineering project celebrated in prose, poetry, and film. See also: BASMACHIS; CENTRAL ASIA; UZBEKISTAN AND UZBEKS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Manz, Beatrice Forbes. (1987). “Central Asian Uprisings in the Nineteenth Century: Ferghana Under the Russians.” Russian Review 46 (3):267-281. Tabyshalieva, Anara. (1999). The Challenge of Regional Cooperation in Central Asia: Preventing Ethnic Conflict in the Ferghana Valley. Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace.
MICHAEL ROULAND
FEUDALISM
According to the nearly unanimous consensus of Western scholars, pre-Soviet Russian scholars, and most Soviet scholars until the mid- to late-1930s, feudalism never appeared in Russia. By the end of the 1930s, however, it became the entrenched dogma in the Soviet Union that Russia had experienced a feudal period. Post-Soviet Russian historians have been unable to rid themselves of this erroneous interpretation of their own history, in spite of Western arguments to the contrary that have been advanced since 1991.
The fundamental issue is whether the term “feudalism” has any meaning other than “agrarian regime,” that is, that most of the population lives in the countryside and makes its living from farming and that most of the gross domestic product is derived from agriculture. If that is all it means, then Russia was feudal until after World War II. Most definitions of feudalism, however, involve other criteria as well, which, as defined by George Vernadsky and others, typically encompass: (1) a fusion of public and private law; (2) a dismemberment of political authority and a parcellization of sovereignty; (3) an interdependence of political and economic administration; (4) the predominance of a natural, i.e., nonmarket, economy; (5) the presence of serfdom. Presumably all of these criteria, not just one or two, should be present for there to be feudalism in a locality.
The first historian to posit the existence of feudalism in Russia was Nikolai Pavlov-Silvansky (1869-1908), who based his theory primarily on the political fragmentation of Russia from the collapse of the Kievan Russian state in 1132 to the consolidation of Russia by Moscow by the early sixteenth century. The basic problem with that thesis is that there was no serfdom until the 1450s. Moreover, there were no fiefs. In 1912 Lenin defined feudalism as “land ownership and the privileges of lords over serfs.” Mikhail Pokrovsky (1868-1932) worked out a “Soviet Marxist” understanding of Russian feudalism and traced its origin and major cause (large landownership) to the thirteenth century. “Feudalism” was necessary to legitimize the October Revolution and Soviet power. According to Marx, human history went through the stages of (1) primordial/primitive communism; (2) slave-owning; (3) feudalism; (4) capitalism; (5) imperialism; (6) socialism; (7) communism. The fact that Russia in reality never experienced “stages” two through five made it difficult to claim that the October Revolution was historically inevitable and therefore legitimate. Inventing “stages” three through five was therefore politically necessary.
A major problem for the Soviets was that Russia never knew a slave-owning stage (as in Greece and Rome). This “problem” was worked out in the early 1930s by a Menshevik historian, M. M. Tsvibak (who was liquidated a few years later in the Great Purges), with the claim that Russia had bypassed the slave-owning period entirely, that feudalism arose about the same time as the Kievan Russian state during the ninth century, or even earlier. Boris Grekov, the “dean” of Soviet historians between 1930 and 1953 (he allegedly had no use for Stalin), earlier had alleged that Russia had passed through a slave-owning stage, but he took the Tsvibak position in the later 1930s, and that remained the official dogma to the end of the Soviet regime. As a result, nearly all of Russian and Ukrainian history was deemed feudal and succeeded
by “capitalism” with the freeing of the serfs from seignorial control in 1861. See also: MARXISM; PEASANTRY; SLAVERY
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Hellie, Richard. (1971). Enserfment and Military Change in Muscovy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Vernadsky, George. (1939). “Feudalism in Russia.” Speculum 14:302-323.
RICHARD HELLIE
FILARET DROZDOV, METROPOLITAN
FILARET DROZDOV, METROPOLITAN
(1782-1867), Metropolitan of Moscow, theologian, and churchman.
Throughout his long career, Filaret (Vasily Mikhailovich Drozdov) played a central role in important matters of church, state, and society: as a moving force behind the Russian translation of the Bible, as a teacher of the Orthodox faith through his famous catechism, sermons, and textbooks, and as a reformer of the church, particularly its monasteries. His widespread reputation as a man of profound faith and great integrity made him the government’s natural choice to compose the emancipation manifesto ending serfdom in 1861. When he died in 1867, the country went into mourning. As Konstantin Pobedonostsev, the future over-procurator of the Holy Synod, wrote on the day of the metropolitan’s funeral: “The present moment is very important for the people. The entire people consider the burial of the metro[politan] a national affair.”
Filaret’s early career focused on reform of religious education, which he shifted from the Latin scholastic curriculum of the eighteenth century to a Russian and Bible-centered one during the early nineteenth century. He wrote two Russian textbooks in 1816 inaugurating a new Orthodox Biblical theology: An Outline of Church-Biblical History (Nachertanie tserkovno-bibleiskoi istorii) and Notes on the Book of Genesis (Zapiski na knigu Bytiya). By this time he was also heavily engaged in a contemporary Russian translation of the Bible that would carry the Christian message to the Russian people more effectively than the Slavonic Bible published during the previous century. He personally translated the Gospel of John. In 1823 he wrote a new Orthodox catechism with all of its Biblical citations in Russian. His abilities and work quickly advanced his career. He became a member of the Holy Synod in 1819 and archbishop of Moscow in 1821 (metropolitan in 1826).
