Soviet genealogy

In the Russian-speaking world, feminism’s political history begins with socialism, not American universities in the 1960s. The Bolsheviks made the “woman question” part of remaking property, family, child-rearing, and private life. Women were to leave the household, enter production, and hand domestic functions to the state.

Alexandra Kollontai

In “Communism and the Family,” the individual family loses its economic function. The husband stops being the provider, domestic labor becomes public, and child care passes to the collective.

Nadezhda Krupskaya

Krupskaya subordinates women’s emancipation to socialism, collectivization, and public labor. The family must raise builders of communism.

The state in place of the husband

Soviet feminism fought paternal authority, church marriage, inheritance, private housekeeping, and a wife’s dependence on her husband. Its “liberation” replaced family dependence with dependence on employer and state.

The state supplied work, nursery care, benefits, and ideology. In return it took labor, taxes, loyalty, and influence over children. Soviet feminism did not abolish power. It moved power from the family to the state.

Reject the collective culprit

Class hatred and economic antisemitism use the same mechanism: they explain a complex society through a collective culprit. Socialism blames the property-owning class. Antisemitism replaces it with the myth of “Jewish bankers” and wealthy dynasties.

When the bourgeoisie is given an ethnic face, class hatred becomes antisemitism. Both left- and right-wing critics of capitalism have used this rhetoric. Ancestry proves no guilt. Stop treating origin as evidence of culpability.