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Soviet and Post-Soviet Scholarship of Women’s Participation in Russia’s Socio-Political Life from 1900 to 1917

Synthesizing ten decades of scholarship by Russian historians and sociologists, this article traces the major developments in the history of women and the women’s movement in Russia shortly before and during the Russian Revolution. Studies between 1917 and 2017 of the ‘women’s issue’ around the turn of the twentieth century demonstrate that in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia the struggle to recognize the rights of women did not form part of the basic struggle for human rights as it did in the West. What themes were interesting and important in the ‘rural kingdom’ of Russia, since feminism was usually an ideology of urbanized countries? What topics from the history of women’s movements were prioritized if discourse surrounding feminism remained negative? The article discusses the links between the topics studied and the events contemporaneous with the historians’ lifetimes. One can see also the development of a traditionalist trend over the course of 70 years of Soviet rule unrelated to feminist ideas, where its proponents continued traditional studies of social consciousness, social movements, social history and family anthropology. This discourse and approach directs readers towards accepting the importance and heuristic value of the study of not the feminist movement, but the social role of women in history and social movements with women’s participation. The evidence collected by its proponents is sometimes intended to lay the groundwork for the ‘uniqueness’ of the Russian path and thus the ‘foreignness’ of feminist values and special ‘women’s rights’ to Russian culture. But, simultaneously, there has been a steady and largely unseen growth of feminism. There is a lack of specialists in Russia who are prepared to teach courses in women and gender history in general and to inform people of the impact of women on the Russian Revolution, but there are some. This article summarizes their achievements and will conclude by surveying the unanswered questions that are facing the new generation of feminist scholars in Russia.