January 30, 2019

The American housewives who sought freedom in Soviet Russia


The American housewives who sought freedom in Soviet Russia

In the summer of 1922, Ruth Epperson Kennell, a children’s librarian, left New York City for the far reaches of Siberia. She travelled with her husband Frank and 132 other “pioneers.” In Siberia, they joined the Kuzbas colony, a utopian commune in the coal-mining town of Kemerovo, founded by “Big Bill” Haywood, a leading Wobbly (Industrial Worker of the World) who had jumped bail in the United States and escaped to Russia. Haywood and hundreds of other foreigners were eagerly establishing industrial and agricultural communes to aid the “new Russia.” Kennell claimed that the Kuzbas pioneers – re-enacting American settlement of the West and industrial development on a new frontier – were building, not a new Atlantis, but a “new Pennsylvania.”

In signing a two-year contract with the Society for Technical Aid to Soviet Russia, and leaving the comforts of middle-class life in the US, Kennell made a decision that was surprisingly popular. An article in the radical Liberator by the proletarian bard Mike Gold, headlined “Wanted: Pioneers for Siberia,” provided the spark that set the Kennells’ life in a new direction. It also gestured toward the attractions of a broader exodus that was not just about escaping the US: these pioneers wanted a part in the building of something new. This was especially the case for US women at a moment in which they’d gained the vote but otherwise nothing had really changed for them. Appealing to “the Young Intellectuals who have not fled to the boulevard cafés of Paris, there to sip cocktails in a sort of noble protest against American Puritanism,” Gold’s article convinced the Kennells to pack up their worldly goods and leave their 18-month-old son in California with his paternal grandmother.

Although more men than women volunteered their services to Russia in its early years – and many of the women who did come were simply accompanying husbands – Kennell was among those who went to Russia not as dependent wives but as workers. Indeed, what made the Kuzbas enterprise appealing to her was the chance to escape what Lenin had described as the “crushing drudgery” of housework, by living communally.

Kennell also, it turns out, craved freedom from bourgeois morality, and found herself increasingly drawn to an engineer from New York who she met in the colony office. When her husband departed in a dispute between Wobblies and Communists, Kennell felt relieved rather than sorry. As she noted in the popular satirical magazine American Mercury: “In the spring of 1925, more than one matrimonial partnership melted, usually on the wife’s initiative. The colony women found in Siberia the freedom their souls craved.”

Kennell was among the hundreds of American women who looked to revolutionary Russia as they tried to imagine a new way of being in the world. Prior to the Bolshevik Revolution, suffragists, settlement house workers, prison reformers, muckrakers and other “New Women” concerned about social justice, joined the struggle for “Russian freedom.” Many saw the effort to liberate “darkest Russia” as universal in its significance. Long viewed as a kind of “dark double” to the US (with a similarly “unsettled” frontier, and a tradition of serfdom terminated at almost the same moment that American slavery was abolished), the Czarist regime seemed to epitomise an age-old dynamic of a wealthy few brutally oppressing the masses. Lillian Wald and other settlement workers wrote admiringly of the “tender” revolutionary women in Russia whose hatred of injustice drove them to take up arms against their government. After the successful revolution, New Women in the US regarded with approval Soviet attempts to socialise housework through public laundries, dining halls and nurseries. They celebrated the new ideal of “comradely love.” And they praised laws granting women the vote, legalising abortion, simplifying divorce and mandating equal pay.

By the late 1920s, every year saw hundreds of “American girls” – relief workers, journalists, performers, educators, artists and adventurers – “barging into the Red capital” to witness and take part in the “new life.” The celebrated dancer Isadora Duncan arrived in Moscow in 1921 to start a dance school, eager to see if there was “one country in the world that does not worship commercialism more than the mental and physical education of its children.” The photographer Margaret Bourke-White made the first of several trips to the Soviet Union in 1930, determined to document Russia’s industrial progress, declaring: “Things are happening in Russia, and happening with staggering speed … the effort of 150,000,000 people is so gigantic, so unprecedented in all history.” And 22 African-American women and men, including notable Harlem Renaissance figures such as Dorothy West and Langston Hughes, travelled to Moscow in 1932 to act in a film showing “the first authentic picture of [American] Negro life.” The film was never made, but most members of the group – several staying on permanently – found much to admire in the Soviet Union.

Why has fascination with revolutionary Russia, particularly among women, been forgotten? Part of the answer lies in the fact that the ‘Soviet dream’ became a nightmare for many, including the unlucky Americans who tried to live out their lives there, optimistically (and sometimes accidentally) giving up their US citizenship and then finding themselves trapped: some wound up in the gulag or died, and nearly all who stayed lost the idealism that initially drew them there. For the many who stayed for several years or months – that is, long enough to feel like they were more than just tourists, but short enough to feel like their own fate was not tied up with the Soviet Union’s – it was in many cases possible, at least for a time, to rationalise violence, repression and paranoia as temporary and necessary steps on the road to building true socialism.

By the late 1930s, it had become hard to argue this; with the coming of the Cold War it became almost impossible. Today, a ‘new cold war’ is the inevitable lens for assessing the Russian ‘chapter’ in US feminism. For a feminist movement that has always been under siege, the story of “American Girls in Red Russia” does not represent a usable past in a political sense. That Kennell remained loyal to the Soviet Union until her death in 1977 is not a reason to admire her. But this chapter is indeed usable in the sense that it allows us to understand something about human desire and fallibility, about the persistence of inequities between men and women, and of the belief that a better world is possible.

The Russian chapter in US feminism reminds us that women’s struggles to balance motherhood, domestic duties and meaningful work; their desire for fulfilling and egalitarian romantic relationships; and their hopes for building a more just society, have a long and richly textured history. Today, as Right-wing politicians and businessmen are lured by Russia’s single-minded pursuit of profit and its flagrant displays of power, it seems an opportune moment to remember that country’s quite different attractions in an earlier era.Aeon counter – do not remove

 

This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.

Like this post? Get a weekly email digest + member-only deals

Some of Our Books

Moscow and Muscovites

Moscow and Muscovites

Vladimir Gilyarovsky's classic portrait of the Russian capital is one of Russians’ most beloved books. Yet it has never before been translated into English. Until now! It is a spectactular verbal pastiche: conversation, from gutter gibberish to the drawing room; oratory, from illiterates to aristocrats; prose, from boilerplate to Tolstoy; poetry, from earthy humor to Pushkin. 
Woe From Wit (bilingual)

Woe From Wit (bilingual)

One of the most famous works of Russian literature, the four-act comedy in verse Woe from Wit skewers staid, nineteenth century Russian society, and it positively teems with “winged phrases” that are essential colloquialisms for students of Russian and Russian culture.
93 Untranslatable Russian Words

93 Untranslatable Russian Words

Every language has concepts, ideas, words and idioms that are nearly impossible to translate into another language. This book looks at nearly 100 such Russian words and offers paths to their understanding and translation by way of examples from literature and everyday life. Difficult to translate words and concepts are introduced with dictionary definitions, then elucidated with citations from literature, speech and prose, helping the student of Russian comprehend the word/concept in context.
Murder at the Dacha

Murder at the Dacha

Senior Lieutenant Pavel Matyushkin has a problem. Several, actually. Not the least of them is the fact that a powerful Soviet boss has been murdered, and Matyushkin's surly commander has given him an unreasonably short time frame to close the case.
Davai! The Russians and Their Vodka

Davai! The Russians and Their Vodka

In this comprehensive, quixotic and addictive book, Edwin Trommelen explores all facets of the Russian obsession with vodka. Peering chiefly through the lenses of history and literature, Trommelen offers up an appropriately complex, rich and bittersweet portrait, based on great respect for Russian culture.
Life Stories: Original Fiction By Russian Authors

Life Stories: Original Fiction By Russian Authors

The Life Stories collection is a nice introduction to contemporary Russian fiction: many of the 19 authors featured here have won major Russian literary prizes and/or become bestsellers. These are life-affirming stories of love, family, hope, rebirth, mystery and imagination, masterfully translated by some of the best Russian-English translators working today. The selections reassert the power of Russian literature to affect readers of all cultures in profound and lasting ways. Best of all, 100% of the profits from the sale of this book are going to benefit Russian hospice—not-for-profit care for fellow human beings who are nearing the end of their own life stories.
Faith & Humor: Notes from Muscovy

Faith & Humor: Notes from Muscovy

A book that dares to explore the humanity of priests and pilgrims, saints and sinners, Faith & Humor has been both a runaway bestseller in Russia and the focus of heated controversy – as often happens when a thoughtful writer takes on sacred cows. The stories, aphorisms, anecdotes, dialogues and adventures in this volume comprise an encyclopedia of modern Russian Orthodoxy, and thereby of Russian life.
At the Circus

At the Circus

This wonderful novella by Alexander Kuprin tells the story of the wrestler Arbuzov and his battle against a renowned American wrestler. Rich in detail and characterization, At the Circus brims with excitement and life. You can smell the sawdust in the big top, see the vivid and colorful characters, sense the tension build as Arbuzov readies to face off against the American.
Driving Down Russia's Spine

Driving Down Russia's Spine

The story of the epic Spine of Russia trip, intertwining fascinating subject profiles with digressions into historical and cultural themes relevant to understanding modern Russia. 
Fish: A History of One Migration

Fish: A History of One Migration

This mesmerizing novel from one of Russia’s most important modern authors traces the life journey of a selfless Russian everywoman. In the wake of the Soviet breakup, inexorable forces drag Vera across the breadth of the Russian empire. Facing a relentless onslaught of human and social trials, she swims against the current of life, countering adversity and pain with compassion and hope, in many ways personifying Mother Russia’s torment and resilience amid the Soviet disintegration.
Jews in Service to the Tsar

Jews in Service to the Tsar

Benjamin Disraeli advised, “Read no history: nothing but biography, for that is life without theory.” With Jews in Service to the Tsar, Lev Berdnikov offers us 28 biographies spanning five centuries of Russian Jewish history, and each portrait opens a new window onto the history of Eastern Europe’s Jews, illuminating dark corners and challenging widely-held conceptions about the role of Jews in Russian history.

About Us

Russian Life is a publication of a 30-year-young, award-winning publishing house that creates a bimonthly magazine, books, maps, and other products for Russophiles the world over.

Latest Posts

Our Contacts

Russian Life
PO Box 567
Montpelier VT 05601-0567

802-223-4955