Exploring Sovjet Women’s Magazines as Creators of the New Woman

Abstract

Soviet history of the first three decades of communist rule (until Stalin’s death) is not an unknown area in which the women received considerably less attention than one could have thought—in fact, grandiose transformations of gender relations were taking place during the time. The existing works largely interpret the period as having seen revolutionary, women-oriented initiatives of the 1920s which were followed by the “great retreat” during the 1930s up to the time when Stalin came to power and progressive policies were suppressed by social conservatism. This view has recently been contested by one suggesting that there was no radical change of policy, though in both cases the discourse to a great part has been revolving around the issue of “what Bolshevics did not do for women”. However, much is still left to explore during the period this book deals with. Lynne Attwood (who has already published “The New Soviet Man and Woman: Sex-Role Socialization in the USSR” and “Red Women on the Silver Screen: Soviet Women and Cinema from the Beginning to the End of the Communist Era") puts the purpose of her new study thus: “to explore the role played by the women’s magazines Rabotnytsa (Woman-worker) and Krestyanka (Woman-peasant) in attempting to create the new Soviet woman by providing readers with appropriate models of female identity”.