In the 10th and final episode of this season, I talk about the origins of feminism in the russian empire before 1917.
I decided to do this because I noticed that whenever we talk about how it all started, we usually hear about the USA and Europe — about Olympe de Gouges, author of the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, about the suffragettes, and so on. And in this retrospective, the post-soviet region is never mentioned. We don’t know what was happening here on this topic. We’ve only heard that in the USSR, women’s emancipation followed a different path — one imposed from above by the Bolsheviks. But what came before that? Was there really nothing?
Spoiler: of course there was. It’s just that “comrade” Lenin appropriated the achievements of pre-revolutionary feminists and erased their contributions from history. As the saying goes: “It has never happened before — and here we go again”.
I wrote a short academic paper on this topic during my master’s studies at Vilnius University, so I’m happy to share this information with you.
In the 1850s, the russian intelligentsia became aware of Western debates on women’s equality. And in 1859, the first organization in the russian empire that could be called feminist appeared. It was called the “Society for Providing Inexpensive Housing and Other Assistance to Needy Residents of Saint Petersburg”, and it was founded by three women: Maria Trubnikova, Anna Filosofova, and Nadezhda Stasova. These women later became known as the “triumvirate.” At this point, every Belarusian heart might feel a little tug — recalling the triumvirate of 2020.
Even during the reign of the liberal Tsar Alexander II, the demand for women’s equality was considered a sign of radicalism. Activists managed to gain permission for women to pursue higher education only because the authorities believed it was absolutely necessary to prevent them from studying abroad — fearing they might bring back ideas harmful to the state, the so-called “corrupting influence of the West”.
In the 1860s, women made up 5% of all revolutionaries, and just a decade later, that number had risen to 20%! In 84 political trials during the 1870s, 95 women were sentenced, and more than 30% of members in the Combat Organization of the Socialist Revolutionary Party were women.
However, when the 1905 revolution created conditions for political activism and many parties and organizations began to form, only the socialists remained unconditionally committed to the demand for equal civil and political rights for women alongside men.
What justified this stance? The same reasoning typically found in any “male-dominated” state. The same dynamic we witnessed in Belarus during the 2020 protests — present not only in the rhetoric of the regime that held on to power, but also among opposition forces. There are always “more important” issues than women’s rights. This attitude extends to the discrimination faced by any vulnerable group. For example, during mass protest marches, feminist or LGBTQ+ activists who tried to carry banners and flags representing their ongoing struggles were met with harsh criticism. The core message was: first we all have to defeat the common enemy, and only then can we deal with these “less important” issues. This reinforces the same behavioral patterns in the political arena — women participate equally in the fight, but their demands are sidelined in favor of supposedly universal concerns.
Pre-revolutionary feminists had only a very brief window to fully articulate their ideas, and practically no political space at all. Nevertheless, they:
- secured the right to higher education for women under Alexander II;
- and it was they who achieved the introduction of women’s suffrage in April 1917 — earlier than in France, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
And once again: universal suffrage was not a Bolshevik achievement, contrary to the soviet propaganda narrative. On April 15, 1917, the Provisional Government adopted a decree “On the Election of Members of Municipal Dumas and Local City Administrations”, which granted voting rights to all citizens aged 20 and over, regardless of nationality or religion. In April, two women were elected as Duma members in the Vologda region. On June 20, 1917, the Provisional Government adopted the regulations for elections to the Constituent Assembly, which explicitly stated “universal suffrage regardless of gender”.
Pre-revolutionary feminism in the russian empire had its own unique characteristics, distinct from the Western model. It was an integral part of the broader liberation movement for all social groups. In its advocacy for women’s rights, it was a form of “liberation without an oppressor” — it didn’t emphasize the feminist agenda, fearing accusations of bourgeois ideology, which eventually led to its marginalization and defamation.
The feminist movement in the russian empire cannot be described as a grassroots movement in the strictest sense, since the activists were members of the intelligentsia — educated, and therefore not representative of the majority. However, it was still similar to a grassroots movement, where people recognize violations of their rights through personal experience and begin fighting to claim them. Educated women at that time might have been better off financially than illiterate peasant women, but in essence, they were all deprived of rights. A quote from Tatiana Lekhatkova’s work on the women’s movement in the russian empire captures this well: “After the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, it turned out that a simple peasant man had more opportunities than some countess — women didn’t even have passports”.
The reason pre-revolutionary feminists have been forgotten is due to a deliberate erasure of their names and accomplishments by the Bolsheviks, who then claimed those achievements as their own.
I hope this podcast episode contributes in a small way to restoring historical justice and bringing back the names and accomplishments of the women who came before us.
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