This week’s episode is brought to you by hero of two worlds. The Marquis de Lafayette in the age of revolution, we are officially four weeks from pub date. Pub date is August 24th, 2021. And now it’s time to announce some good fun stuff. Like for example, book events. Now all book events are still online these days, so you don’t have to be anywhere in particular to see me.

You just have to log in and come see me. If you want to be able to see me in person at some point in the future. Let me just go ahead and slip in the obvious PSA and say, go get vaccinated. I did it. Everyone should do it. Please get vaccinated so we can have in-person events again. Thank you. Now, if you have attended online book events, you know, that it has tended to work better when two people are in conversation with each other, rather than having just one person deliver some talking head.

So I am very excited to reveal the following events with the following conversation partners. On Friday, August 20th, I will be with politics and prose with every historians. Favorite New York times columnist Jamelle Bouie Bouie is a longtime friend of the podcast, and we’re really looking forward to doing our first official event together.

So that again, August 20, me and Jamila. Then on Monday, August 23rd, I will be with Midtown scholar along with former Obama white house staffer. Ben Rhodes, Ben Rhodes is also a long-time fan and supporter from the history of Rome days and has his own book out called after the fall. So again, August 23rd, me and Ben rose.

Then on pub date itself, Tuesday, August 24. I am very excited to be at the strand with the enormously talented writer and historian, Alexis co who among other things is the most recent biographer of George Washington. And we are both very much looking forward to talking all things, Washington and Lafayette, and then last, but certainly not least Patrick Wyman.

And I will be getting together with Harvard bookstore on Tuesday, August 31st. If you enjoyed our performance. And we both certainly did well. We’ll be doing the same thing in reverse. So that again, Jamelle Bouie, August 20, Ben Rhodes, August 23rd, Alexis co August 24th and Patrick Wyman August 31st now onto the nitty gritty terms and conditions of all this first space is limited.

There is a cap on how many people can come to these things. So please do sign up quickly. Second, the events are going to be ticketed. These are ticketed. So, what does that mean? It means that when you register for the event, you will be purchasing a signed copy of the book that will then be mailed to your house.

So that’s the basic deal. Buy a ticket for the event. You get a signed copy of the book. Now, of course, under normal circumstances, you would just come to a live event at a bookstore and get your book signed. But we can’t do book signings right now. So again, please go get vaccinated so we can have live events.

Thank you. Now. I know what you’re saying. How are there going to be signed books? How are they going to get to you? Well, I signed like 2000 title pages over about a week, a couple months ago. Then I boxed up all those signed title pages and mailed them to the printer who then inserted them into a special run of the day.

So these are not simply signed book plates or anything that we just stick inside of a signed copy of the book. It’s a signed copy of the book. That page has been inserted and bound along with everything else. It was actually quite a bit of work, but I think it was all worth it. So space is limited for these events.

The number of signed copies is limited. So if you want to get one of these, how do you. Well, first of all, bad news for my international fans. Uh, and since I was just among you over in France, I am cognizant that this isn’t exactly fair, but these four bookstores aren’t shipping internet. So, if you sign up for this, you got to have a friend or someone in the United States to ship the book, too.

I do have a representative in the UK working on some publicity stuff, and hopefully we can get some events in Europe, at least. But for now you do need a us shipping address. Uh, sorry about that. But the call to action here is that I’ve put some links in the show notes that will tell you how to register for any of the events, which are.

August 20 politics and prose with Jamelle Bouie, August 23rd, Midtown scholar with Ben Rhodes, August 24th with the strand and Alexis co and then August 31st with Patrick Weiman at the Harvard bookstore. But in case you are just sitting there with pen in hand, the website for all of this is B, B I T dot L Y slash Lafayette.

Book. That again is B I T dot L Y slash Lafayette. Okay. So I’m super excited about all these events. I think they’re going to be very, very, very, very, very, very fun. Uh, you won’t want to miss it. You won’t wanna miss a chance to get a signed copy. So do please come out. I will see you there. And until then on with the show,

Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.62: International Women’s Day

Today we move beyond the dangerous but still solid ground Nicholas and Alexandra had been walking along for the past several months, the past several years, the past several decades. They had been warned repeatedly they walked towards an abyss, warned repeatedly they stood on a precipice, but those warnings had not been heeded. When the tsar boarded a train and headed back to army headquarters on February 22nd, 1917, he left solid ground behind forever. That train carried him right over the edge into the fall of revolution, and any further attempt to twist, turn, or maneuver now resulted in mere futile spinning in the face of gravity. He was on a straight line to the rocks below.

In Nicholas’s ever so teeny tiny defense, we ended last week by discussing that a prevailing belief had set in among nearly all sides in the ongoing political struggle — disaffected aristocrats, high ranking, military officers, bourgeois businessmen, Duma delegates, working class organizers and revolutionaries of all stripes, that Minister of the Interior Protopopov had successfully defused the political bomb that looked set to explode on February 14th, 1917. By arresting all the leaders of the Workers Group, the police believed they had severed the link between popular protesters in the streets and the leaders of the progressive block in the Duma. And with those progressive block leaders already incredibly hesitant and nervous about turning to the streets for help, the moment came and went, and nobody took decisive action. Among the rest of the working class political organizers not targeted in the sweep — among them, revolutionary Bolsheviks, Mensheviks, and SRs — the word went round to lay low, husband their resources, and prepare for May Day. That would be the next best time to strike.

But obviously we know that there was no May Revolution of 1917; it’s the February Revolution of 1970. But, we’ve already taken events to February 22nd, so, there’s not much time left to stage a revolution, especially as all the leaders seem to be pulling back, not driving forward. So what happened? Well, two things happened: mother nature happened, and the women of Russia happened.

They combined on February 23rd, 1917, the morning after the tsar left Petrograd, to launch the February Revolution of 1917.

Now to set up how and why the women of Russia, and in particular, the women of Petrograd, managed to precipitate the fall of the 300 year old Romanov dynasty and bring about the collapse of the tsarist regime, we need to back up a bit, and trace the development of the women’s rights movement in Russia. And in particular, the relationship between liberal democratic feminists coming out of the more bourgeois classes, and their sisters inside the working classes, who were sometimes allies, sometimes opponents, but who would come together on February 23rd to mark International Women’s Day together, and in so doing, change world history forever.

So to trace these threads, let’s go all the way back to nearly the beginning of our series, when we started talking about the origins of the counter-cultural revolutionary underground in the 1860s. This is back in the days of the Nihilists, right, those hippie beatniks, who among many things were hoping to break down all gender norms. They cohabitated with each other on an equal basis, even outside of marriage. So right from the start, the Russian revolutionary character was laced, at least in the abstract, with the idea that gender equality was among the things any revolution worth its name would achieve. This remained true all through the first great revolutionary epoch from the mid 1860s, up to the assassination of Tsar Alexander in 1881. And you’ll remember when we discussed what this first generation got up to — for example, Going to the People — there were at least as many women as men involved in all of this, especially as one of the main components of going to the people was educating the peasants. And as I talked about, when I introduced Krupskaya, she was probably first radicalized as a young girl by an idealistic revolutionary teacher with connections to People’s Will. That young teacher wasn’t herself more than 18 years old, and she wound up arrested and completely disappeared from history. Then, after the Going to the People failed, and Peoples’ Will turn to terrorism among their heroes were Vera Zasulich, and then when they finally got the tsar in 1881, a couple of women were in the inner circle of that plot, one of them Vera Figner, the other Anna Yakimova and if you’re looking for a dynamite book, read Memoirs of a Revolutionist by Vera Figner, or the defiant life of Vera Figner: Surviving the Russian Revolution by Lynn Ann Hartnett.

But despite all this, many of the women active in the ranks of the Socialist Revolutionary underground were acutely aware that despite the outwardly progressive politics of their male comrades in talking up equally rights, when it came to meetings, priorities, and leadership, the men all still tended to dominate, and they expected a certain degree of subservience from their female comrades. Katerine Breshkovskaya, the Babushka of Revolution, later recalled that at meetings back in the old days, she and her revolutionary sisters were of course allowed to be full members and attend meetings, and they were expected to participate in all party activities, but it was super rare for women to actually get up and speak their minds on an equal basis at those meetings, and that when she herself dared to do so, she could feel the uncomfortable shifting of her male comrades.

Now we know that this first wave of revolutionary activity was more or less crushed after the assassination of the tsar in 1881. But despite the hyper reactionary, hyper anti-revolutionary tenor of the 1880s and 1890s, there were actually still plenty of progressive social reforms that accompanied the regime’s attempt to modernize, and keep up with their neighbors to the west. Among these reforms was a great push to increase access to education. This was from basic primary education and literacy programs at the village level, all the way up to expanding advanced university programs in the major cities of the Russian empire. Women were not shut out of this expanded world of education, and an entire generation of young women now advanced through what we would today consider high school. Now the universities were still almost exclusively male, though by now we are starting to hit the first round of trailblazing women who pushed for admittance into the universities and then attain degrees. They were still, however, very much the exception rather than the rule. But even after hitting a ceiling imposed on them by their acutely misogynistic and patriarchal society, these women took the education they received from the state and used it as the foundation to continue on with their own self-education.

And that brings us into contact with a group we have not yet talked about in this series, and that is progressive liberal feminists in pre-revolutionary Russia. And most of what I’m about to discuss comes mainly from a great book by Rochelle Goldberg Ruthchild called Equality and Revolution, which discusses the role of Russian feminists and suffragists in the tumultuous milieu of early 20th century Russia. These women form the Russian chapter of the wider international women’s rights movement unfolding throughout the world in the late 19th and early 20th century. And they were aiming for the same basic goals, of equal rights, political and legal equality, the right to vote, run for office and act as free and autonomous individuals.

In Russia, the leaders of the feminist movement typically drew from the ranks of the middle and upper classes, who received a good education and lived in comfortable material circumstances, and who found themselves justifiably dissatisfied with their second class citizenship. These women could travel, acquire foreign books and periodicals, and they eagerly joined, supported and contributed to the broader international women’s rights movement.

Now, the thing that makes Russian feminism somewhat different from their western counterparts was the state of political freedom in Russia before the revolution of 1905, which is to say, there wasn’t any. So while, say, British and American and French feminists struggled inside a political system that already mostly allowed for broad-based universal male suffrage, the Russian women struggled inside a system that had no broad-based universal suffrage whatsoever. And this was of great tactical advantage to the Russian feminists, because their calls for the right to vote entered into harmony with their male counterparts who were also trying to get the right to vote. Which is to say, that in the west women were having to fight, to convince men who already had the right to vote, to extend it to women. Whereas in Russia, women were pitching themselves to men who also did not have the right to vote, and thus the whole movement for democracy and universal suffrage in Russia came to embrace the call that universal meant everyone without distinction of sex. So men and women were standing shoulder to shoulder demanding voting rights. And both sides found it tactically advantageous in their struggle against tsarist absolutism. Though, it should come as no surprise, that the women were among the first to be told, well, not yet, we must wait, let set your demands aside, when the revolution came.

And this is basically how the Revolution of 1905, went for them. As the revolutionary energy grew, and the union of liberation movement got going, women’s rights organization supported the broad coalition of all anti autocratic factions. This included a group called the Mutual Philanthropic Society, as well as new organizations like the Women’s Equal Rights Union. But as the revolution of 1905 exploded, women struggled to keep their goals above water, and plenty of men out there believed pursuing women’s equality would be counterproductive, and turn off undecided elements of society. Conservative liberals tended to see feminists as way too radical, making unrealistic demands for gender equality that would threaten the whole democratic movement. The women argued that it wasn’t very democratic if half of the population could not vote, but that didn’t get them very far.

While they endured being called too radical by those conservatives, they were also accused of being too conservative by the socialists. The socialists did not much like these feminists coming out of the bourgeois circles, who were focused too narrowly on winning legal equality and the right to vote. They believe that gender based organizing and focused on gendered issues would be a distraction from the real class conflict.

Vera Zasulich, by this point a Menshevik, called these women’s rights groups, quote, unnecessary, if not harmful, because in her opinion, everything worth achieving for women had to be achieved along with the socialist revolution, and that these liberal bourgeois feminists would ultimately hinder that larger project. Now, slightly more nuanced politics came from several other socialist women, the most famous and outspoken of them being Alexandra Kollontai, who was until World War I allied with the Mensheviks, and then after that became a very prominent Bolshevik. She believed it was vital to both head off the ultimate social and economic conservatism of the bourgeois feminists, but also, to organize working class women as women, and speak to the issues that affected them as women. That recognizing the primacy of the class struggle did not mean being blind to the special ways women were oppressed. And they believed that tactically, it made sense to reach out to them as fellow women, even if they didn’t quite embrace the class struggle as fellow workers.

When the October Manifesto of 1905 came around, it was a very bittersweet moment for women’s rights activists of all stripes, as it achieved so many of their liberation dreams, but made absolutely no mention of women, their rights, the right to vote, or to run for office. And they were now in fact dangerously close to the predicament of their sisters in the west, where the men folk gain the right to vote and suddenly did not care much about supporting the women folk. This definitely played out in the first and second Dumas. The feminists went in with high hopes as the Kadet Congress that hammered out their platform heading into the first Duma had voted narrowly to include a demand for gender equality. But unfortunately, Pavel Milyukov — who ran the first Duma from the tea room — was skeptical of women’s rights at that moment, and believed the party had much bigger fish to fry. Women’s rights was certainly not a hill he planned to defend. The group that wound up doing the most to aggressively bring up the issue of women’s rights in the Duma were the Trudoviks, who put forward motions to support women’s rights, even as they landed on ears deafened by allegedly more important concerns.

Now eventually, the feminist groups along with their Trudovik allies lobbied hard enough that they got the Duma to create a commission to study women’s equal rights, but then the first Duma was shuttered before the commission could even meet. Now the first major victory for feminism inside the Russian empire actually occurred over in Finland. Now, as I’ve noted a couple times, Finland enjoyed a special position inside the Russian empire. Now, Tsar Nicholas was Tsar Nicholas, but in controlling Finland, he did so as the Grand Duke of Finland. On July 7th, 1906, as Grand Duke of Finland, Nicholas signed off on a law giving women the right to vote and run for office, which was the first time both of those had been achieved in the same country. New Zealand has kind of a claim to fame for being among the first to grant women the right to vote, but they still could not stand for office, so this is a distinction that goes to the Finns. And the reason Finland got to earn this distinction is that the struggle for women’s rights got tied up in the national struggle for Finnish autonomy from Russian dominance, and for them, the Revolution of 1905 was also about national liberation, and so a broad coalition of nationalists and liberals and socialists all tended to see Finnish women as allies in that struggle.

Now, with this victory in Finland and with events in Russia seeming to constantly move in the direction of more democracy, it seemed like brighter things were ahead for the women of Russia. But instead, July 1906 turned out to be the high watermark. The second Duma then came along and was even less enthusiastic about pushing women’s issues, and then it too was dissolved. And then along came Stolypin’s coup, and the momentum for democracy just drained out of the Russian empire. Anyone who was committed to any kind of progressive social reform or change or revolution saw their fortunes plummet between 1907 and 1912.

But there were a few highlights sprinkled in there. In December, 1908, there was a Russian Women’s Congress in St. Peterburg, and by now, Pavel Milyukov said that he had come to see the error of his ways. He sent a telegram welcoming the Congress to St. Petersburg expressing his profound conviction in the need to establish women’s political and civic equality. And then he later spoke at a reception of attendees and apologized for underestimating the problem of equal political rights for women.

But this All Women’s Congress also triggered a walkout of some of the more working class women leaders as the Congress adopted a platform calling merely for universal suffrage, using very vague language, without making it explicit that everything must be written nor discriminated against on the basis of sex. So it wasn’t all solidarity inside the movement, but they were all still pointed mostly in the same direction.

Then a couple of years later, International Women’s Day was born. The prototype for this was staged by the Socialist Party of America in February 1909 in New York City. Then in August 1910, there was an international socialist women’s conference in Copenhagen, leading up to a Congress of the Second Internationale. Leading socialist delegates like Clara Zetkin proposed an annual women’s day to promote the special needs of women’s workers and the need for equal rights and the right to vote. This motion passed, and they set a date of March 19th, 1911 as the first International Women’s Day. And on that day, all over central and northern Europe, about a million people took part both men and women. And in the main, it was about equal legal rights and equal political rights and the right to vote and run for office and against general sex discrimination. International Women’s Day was first celebrated in Russia in 1913 on the last weekend in February. Then World War I came along, and changed everybody’s calculations everywhere.

Now at the very beginning of the war, most of the feminist publications in Russia were very supportive of the war, and they patriotically supported the tsar and Russia. They believed that their visible support for the war effort and constant professions of loyalty and support would earn them official gratitude, and the after the war was over, they would be rewarded with something like equal rights and the vote. They believed they had come very very close to achieving this back in 1905 and 1906, and they believed the time had come to try again. This time, not by trying to overthrow the tsar, but by trying to help him. But then, also of course, when it comes to the debate between the Defensivists and the Defeatists — that is between people who hoped Russia would win the war and people who hoped Russia would lose the war — women’s rights activists were almost uniformly Defensivists. No feminists could stomach the idea of losing the war to Germany and then having a German army subsequently invade and occupy the country. Women do have a special opposition to occupying foreign armies for obvious reasons, as rape and abuse has historically been one of the first things that all conquering armies throughout history have considered their spoils of war.

Now Russian women’s rights activists pretty much went on the same journey that every other group in Russia did, and by 1916, they had gone from supporting the tsar and supporting the war to opposing the tsar and opposing the war. Official Russia told them that the rapid fire decline in standards of living and the plight suffered by women all over the empire was just something they had to endure. They needed to sacrifice for Russia. But women were sacrificing a lot for Russia. A group started called the Women’s Economic Union, whose goal was to improve the economic and social situation of women everywhere, and when the war really started to go badly, they aligned their interests with the progressive bloc, and whether it was working class women or these bourgeois liberal feminists, they all came around to the notion that the tsar had to go.

But thanks to the war, they had some economic heft that they themselves could lift. The war brought way more women into the urban industrial workforce. In 1913, women accounted for about 25% of the working classes in Petrograd; by 1917, that was up to 33%. Across all of Russia though, they went from 26% to fully 43%. There was also an acceleration of women participating in the various professions, most especially the medical fields, like doctors. They were also now being admitted into universities on an almost equal basis, filling the empty slots left behind by men who had been carried off to war, or who had then been carried off to meet their maker.

But out in the streets, all of these working women saw their entire quality of life just plummet. They were the ones standing in the freezing bread lines to get basic food to feed their family. And so while there was something like gender solidarity floating around out there, there was still a lot of class conflict, and a great deal of the wrath coming out of the working class women was directed, not just at the tsar or his ministers or men generally, but also at rich women who are able to come into the store, flash around a load of valuable stuff or cash, and buy things at prices that now put everything out of the reach of the poor families. As the war went on and the supply chain broke down completely, there started to be riots, disorder, strikes, and these were staged by male and female workers alike. Among the many police reports coming out of January 1917 warning of imminent disturbances, one said, the mothers of families exhausted from the endless standing in line at the stores, tormented by the look of their half starving and sick children, have made them incredibly volatile. The police report continued that these women are very likely closer now to revolution than Milyukov and Rodzianko and company, and of course they are more dangerous because they represent that stored up inflammable material for which one spark will set off a fire.

So that brings us to February 23rd, 1917, when one spark set off a fire. February 23rd, 1917 was the date set aside for celebrating International Women’s day in Russia. Feminist groups, as well as working class women, decided they wanted to mark the day with special demonstrations, marches, and strikes. This, even as male organizers and leaders, both among the socialists and the liberals said, don’t waste your time, don’t make a big deal out of it. We can’t expend a bunch of energy on women’s rights issues right at this particular moment. And in fact, on this particular February 23rd, the women workers went on strike indirect defiance of orders from male leaders not to go on strike. Trotsky later wrote of this, "February 23rd was International Women’s Day and meetings and actions were foreseen despite orders to the contrary." Textile workers left their work in several factories and sent delegates to ask for their support in the strike.

Pretty soon, tens of thousands of women were demonstrating throughout Petrograd, with the chief of police being so out of touch he didn’t know what was happening or why. There was a gathering near the headquarters of the League of Women’s Equal Rights, another out at Nevsky Prospekt, there were demonstrations near the Duma as well as in all the working class districts. Women were suddenly everywhere. In the working class districts where the women were employed as metal workers and in textile factories, they went out on strikes, and joined various demonstrations that became more raucous and turbulent as the day progressed. The general demands of this International Women’s Day were threefold, one social, one military, and one political: bread, peace, and down with the tsar. Now, initially it was mostly just women marching around out there, but they decided they didn’t want to be alone. So they started going around to various factories, demanding that their husbands and brothers and comrades come out and join them. Oftentimes, they were chucking rocks and tiles and snowballs at factory walls and windows trying to disrupt and shame the men who were still working into coming out to join them. And it worked. They started shutting down factory after factory, one by one. Hundreds marched off the job here, several thousands over there soon 50,000 were out in the street, then a hundred thousand, then 200,000, then 250,000, all of them parading throughout Petrograd calling for a new government and the overthrow of the tsar.

But you will recall that at the beginning of this episode, I said that two big things combined on this particular February 23rd. That one of them was the women of Russia, and the other was Mother Nature. Because remember last week we talked all about how it had been just freezing cold this particular winter. Temperatures had been hovering well below freezing for months. Now, suddenly, on this particular February 23rd, temperature shocked back up to a positively balmy 46 degrees Fahrenheit. If you have ever lived in subfreezing temperatures for a prolonged period of time, and then magically overnight, it suddenly shoots up above freezing, you know that it’s like t-shirt and shorts weather. It’s not like spring out there, it feels like summer. And we’re talking about 46 degrees Fahrenheit here, this is like pretty chilly under most normal conditions, but compared to subfreezing temperatures, it feels fantastic. So when it’s suddenly 46 degrees out, people are opening up their doors and their windows. It feels like summer. They’ve all been cooped up inside, they’ve all been freezing, they’ve all been starving, and now everybody is pouring out into the streets. And they feel this crazy mix of anger, but also exhilaration, jubilation, and a kind of chaotic, hopeful energy just bursting forth from everybody.

The police forces in Petrograd were caught completely off guard and completely unprepared. And when the police and soldiers and cossacks were dispatched to try to head off these demonstrations, they found a majority of those in the frontlines were women. And here the subtle patriarchal biases worked to the advantage of the women. Soldiers and cossacks who might not otherwise have hesitated to crack skulls or open fire on unruly crowds hesitated to beat and murder women. And it was at this point of contact between the forces of order and the women leading the demonstrations that the line into revolution was breached. The soldiers, as we discussed last time were already on the verge of mutiny. And when they were ordered to fire on the women, they simply couldn’t do it. Especially as the women were calling out to them saying, we’re your wives and your mothers, don’t fight us, join us. And so they did. By the end of February 23rd, 1917, the situation in the capitol was completely out of hand. The opposition leaders in the Duma belatedly realized whether they liked it or not, the streets were now out in full force, and they could either be leveraged to the advantage of the Duma opposition, or the Duma opposition could just be swept away along with everything else. Socialists leaders in the working class districts, belatedly realized there was no waiting for Mayday. The women had forced the issue. The time to strike was actually right here and right now. They hadn’t planned for it, they hadn’t expected it, they weren’t the drivers of it, but the revolution was at hand.

Less than 24 hours after the tsar left Petrograd, the capitol had turned decisively again imh. And next week, the reckoning for Nicholas and Alexandra had finally come. Minister of the Interior Protopopov believed he had successfully stopped the union of elite level political opponents of the regime with working class street demonstrators, but he was clearly wrong. And next week the tsar will be told in no uncertain terms that the only option left to him was abdication.