“Many women will serve in the ranks of the army”

95 years ago, on October 10, 1927, the All-Union Congress of Working Women and Peasants opened in Moscow, called the “Congress of Free Women” by the Soviet press, at which the head of the Soviet state M. I. Kalinin and other high-ranking comrades spoke, and some of their revelations, from the new the interpretation of Lenin’s thesis about the cooks who run the state to the path of mass recruitment of women into the army, made a very strong impression.

“Infanticide is still flourishing in our country”

From a speech at the congress by a member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks N. I. Bukharin, October 10, 1927.

…Our party repeated more than once or twice the words of its brilliant late leader Vladimir Ilyich Lenin that it should conduct its work in such a way that every cook could manage the state and learn to exercise their rights.

Of course, when Lenin spoke of a cook, he meant a cook in the broad sense of the word.

Vladimir Ilyich wanted to say that the goal of Soviet power, the goal of the Communist Party, is such an upliftment of the broad workers and, in general, the broad working masses …

Despite our achievements, how many different kinds of enemies we still have – vodka, drunkenness, ignorance, darkness, sorcerers, healers, not to mention other troubles, how much we are still mired in swearing – a thing that flourishes with us and is one of the greatest evils of our way of life—how far we, even among the advanced workers and peasants, still observe the barbaric, savage, massacre attitude of a husband towards his wife, how far infanticide still flourishes among us, how far other things connected with the greatest our slave past.

And if we take the way we work, then we must honestly say that even here we are dragging on ourselves the oppression of the old slave past. For those who could be abroad, and for those who could compare how they work in our field, in the countryside, or in a factory, it will be evident that we are still behind by a huge amount of time, that we still have this slave pace of work.

You can see it everywhere, and you will stumble every day on all sorts of amazing cases.

Look how our roads are being repaired, how our houses are being painted, look how sometimes they forget to clean up decently so that there is no real pigsty in the room; see how often the same thing happens in the factory and in the factory. All this is a consequence, the remnants of our great poverty, the consequences and remnants of our slave past. And destroy it, raise this colossus, accustom people to cleanliness, accustom people to cleanliness in dealing with each other, wean them from vodka, wean them from swearing, accustom them to a different pace of work so that they really work with full consciousness that they are working for themselves, and not against the master, in order to wean the male half of our Workers ‘and Peasants’ Union from massacre and from the swine attitude towards women and their wives — before that, a lot of time will pass and a huge amount of effort will be needed …

“We often have reorganizations”

From a speech at the Congress of the Chairman of the Central Executive Committee of the USSR M. I. Kalinin, October 10, 1927.

… The number of beggars is gradually decreasing. But it will probably be a number of years before all people are provided for, before the state is able to provide for each person. Now the state is not able to fully provide for all those in need. If now we do not take on the provision of the state in full a number of disabled groups, then it is quite natural that we cannot take on the provision of a number of the poor …

At the moment, such phenomena often pass before my eyes. Women come to me who have two children in their arms, and the husband ran away, and she was left literally broke, without anything. Suppose the husband worked in a factory or somewhere else, or the husband is a farmer. As long as she is a worker’s wife, she has some rights. As soon as he left, she and the guys find themselves in a difficult situation.

There is literally nothing to help them.

This shows that when people get married, they think little about the fact that they will have children, that these children should be taken care of at least a little, because our state, with all its desire, cannot provide for them. At present, we often have reorganizations: reduction – at one plant, increase – at another plant …

True, we have social insurance, but you yourself know that social insurance is limited to a certain amount of time. Finally, not everyone is insured. Therefore, I say that women should be especially interested in savings. Therefore, women should be ahead of those who should produce savings.

The comrades can raise the question: “Well, here are savings, savings, but won’t these savings lead to the creation of capitalists?” It is quite legitimate, so to speak, to raise such a question in a state which is building socialism, which is building a socialist society. I think, comrades, that, firstly, any savings of a working person, taken separately, is very small. Secondly, every working person, saving 10 or 100 rubles, looks at this money not as capital, which must be put into circulation with the aim of exploiting others, but as an amount set aside just in case …

“Our basic law provides”

From a speech at the congress of the People’s Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs of the USSR K. E. Voroshilov, October 10, 1927.

… The Red Army is the first and only army in which a woman works on an equal basis with a man. Our higher military educational institutions – the Military Academy. M. V. Frunze – 8 women graduated. There are 72 women in command and political positions in the Red Army. Among the military pilots there is one woman who graduated from flight school. During the civil war, fighting along with men, 29 women were awarded the Order of the Red Banner …

In case of war, our basic law on military service provides for the mandatory recruitment of women into the ranks of active troops for special services, if considered necessary.

From this follows the simple conclusion that already now, in peacetime conditions, women must prepare themselves to do the best job that the state will entrust them with in wartime …

But, comrades, if the number of women who are members of the various circles of Osoaviakhim (Society for the Promotion of Defense, Aviation and Chemical Construction.— “Story”), compared with the total number of women involved in trade unions, the party and public work, we will see that Osoaviakhim organized only a very small part of the women’s activists in its ranks. But we must not forget that behind a small layer of activists lie deep millions of working women and peasant women who are not covered by social work …

Many women will serve in the ranks of the army while in the ranks. Thus, in a difficult time of military suffering, a lot will depend on a woman …

“We have 104,600 schools”

From a speech at the congress of the People’s Commissar of Education of the RSFSR A. V. Lunacharsky, October 14, 1927.

… Now about the school. All in all, we have 104,600 schools throughout the Union and 7,000,230 children study in them. If we compare this with tsarist times, it turns out that we have schools for 4 percent. more. This is a rather respectable figure, if you consider what hardships and calamities we have endured as a result of the imperialist and civil war…

Our school is not what it used to be. Vladimir Ilyich, when he gave us instructions on how to build schools, told us: you must, of course, take all the knowledge that the human race has acquired up to now, a whole series of sciences, from literacy to arithmetic; all kinds of sciences: mathematical, natural, social; they are of great value, we must teach them in schools. But at the same time, Lenin pointed out that many of these sciences were crippled in the old school, that such pseudosciences as the law of God were taught there, and history was taught in an animal-patriotic spirit: “Here we are, Russians, and all the rest are images all sorts of basurmans who do not have a human.

All this we completely threw out of school …

Publication by Evgeny Zhirnov