Pravda (Lead Article), A Remarkable Conference. May 10, 1936

Original Source: Pravda, 10 May 1936, p. 1.

Today the magnificent hall of the great palace of the Kremlin is filled with more than three thousand activist-wives of the leaders of Socialist industry. This hall has seen much during the past year. The Stakhanovites of industry and transport, the tractor drivers and combine-men, the leading collective farmers, the best cattle-breeders have here held conferences with Comrade Stalin, with the leaders of the party and the Soviet government. Everything that is progressive, full of initiative and creativity in the country has been brought here, into the Kremlin. The best sons and daughters of our fatherland have stepped on to its honored platform and their powerful voices have been broadcast hence to the whole country.

Who are the people who have gathered there to-day for their first conference, a conference unimaginable in any other country?

They are the activist-wives (obshchestvennitsy) of the managers, engineers and technicians, women who are not themselves employed in the enterprises and establishments. Formerly, many of them lived for the limited interests of the family, within the narrow confines of household care. In the majority they are people brought by the Soviet government, educated, cultured people. They were no longer willing to be satisfied with the position of mere sympathizers with the great socialist constructive movement and decided to become active participants in it. A great cultural force lay latent and had not been utilized in an organized way. Now it has found a purpose worthy of it. The delegates to the conference are the best representatives of the large proportion of women in our country who do not want to be mere housewives if they can be wives of the country. They have found new interests in life, and our party and government are helping them, educating and organizing them, drawing them into the active construction of our land.

There have arrived in Moscow the wives of engineers and technicians from the Donbass and the Urals, from the Far East and Transcaucasia, from all parts and regions, from the towns of metal and coal, petroleum and gold. Before their eyes factories and towns have been created and have grown with fairy-tale speed, canals have been dug and mines sunk, hydro-electric dams have been erected and oil wells drilled. The drama of construction, the Eroica of socialist everyday life, the romanticism of the Bolshevist transformation of the country could not leave them unmoved. Among this section of Soviet womanhood there are also those who side by side with their husbands went through the fire of the Civil War. In those days, like the activists of Krivoi Rog, the founders of the movement of wives of commanders-they lived on news bulletins, with the moods of the Red Army, in the passion of the struggle. The more active ones joined the political and administration departments of the Army, the nursing services, sharing with their husbands the joys of victory and the sorrows of defeat. And these women say: "Now above all must we be in the ranks, now that we have grown up politically and the aims desired have become so near and clear, now that our wise Stalin has collected all that is best in the working people in order to lead the land of socialism speedily and joyfully towards final victory."

The movement of the wives of engineers and technicians sprang up spontaneously. During one of his visits to the Urals the People's Commissar of Heavy Industry, Comrade Sergo Ordzhonikidze, inspected the flowers planted with care in the Red Urals thermo-electrical power station by the manager's wife. The wives of the leaders of the construction of Krivoi Rog heard about it and found an outlet for their energy. They have chosen as the field of their activities that aspect to which the Party is at present paying great attention, the side of civilization in everyday life: they decided to introduce into life Comrade Stalin's slogan about the care of men.

And now, look at the work done by the wives of the commanders in hundreds of enterprises. They have opened first-class restaurants, poultry farms, fashion shops, they have organized cultural centers, hostels, nurseries, pioneer camps, they are organizing medical services for workers' families, delivery of foodstuffs to the houses, canteens. They are liquidating illiteracy and running libraries. Their work represents that great movement of the toilers towards culture in everyday life about which Stakhanovite Fadeeva has written in the pages of Pravda.

The desire for creative and joyful work on the part of the leading wives of the commanders of heavy industry was taken up by Comrade Ordzhonikidze. Supported by Party and government, this movement has found followers in light industry and in the food industry. It is fighting its way into the villages, into the Machine and Tractor Stations. In the northern Caucasus the wives of the managers of the Machine and Tractor Stations are undertaking the organization of the cultural life of the workers on the stations; they are planting house-gardens and allotments, setting up mobile libraries. In Leningrad the first women's organization in light industry has been created by the wife of the manager of the Skorokhod shoe factory. In short, the enterprise of the activists of heavy industry has inspired hundreds of thousands of women.

It cannot be said that the movement of the wives of engineers and technicians did not meet with obstacles. Like everything new, it at first met, and even now sometimes still meets, the opposition of dull-witted officials and trade-union bureaucrats. But this movement, created by the initiative of the masses of women, is strong and breaks the obstacles that bar its path.

Even now some people view the work of the wives of the commanders with sarcasm, call them philanthropists and compare them to the pre-revolutionary "charity ladies". This is the shallow nonsense of the stupid bourgeois. The "charity ladies" of the philanthropic societies threw the crumbs from their tables to the poor, and their benevolence took the form of alms.

Women's charitable organizations "for the care of beggars, orphans, the sick and the pregnant," the "women's society of teetotalers," or the society for the "care of young girls" we a pitiful fruit of bourgeois hypocrisy hiding behind a humanitarian facade. The revolution of the proletariat has liquidated poverty and our whole Soviet system has become the truly humane friend of humanity. The new movement of the wives of engineers and technicians helps the Party and the government in leading the country to a life of plenty and raises the members of this movement to the level of active builders of socialist society.

Ploughed up by the revolution, the soil of our land again and again bears new and remarkable fruit. The Soviet land has become a vast and magnificent garden where the talents of the people blossom and the great Bolshevist gardener nurses them as though they were his favorite tree. The wives of the engineers and technicians of the Baku petroleum plants wrote to him- to Comrade Stalin-in Pravda recently:

We are happy at the mere thought that the drop of our work flows into the great, invincible toil of our mighty country. We are happy to live and toil in the great Stalin epoch, we who are enlightened by the wisdom of your genius, warmed by your love and care. Thank you for everything, for the joy of life, for the resounding laughter of our children, for the new aspirations you have given us.

Greetings to the activists, to the wives of the commanders, the delegates to this remarkable conference.

Source: Rudolf Schlesinger, ed. Changing attitudes in Soviet Russia; the Family in the USSR (London: Routledge & K. Paul, 1949).