Vita Zelče

The First Contract Between the Stalin’s Regime and Latvian Women: 1945

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This article reviews one aspect of the history of Latvian women during the period of Stalinism – the “social contract” which was established by the occupation regime on the one hand and women on the other. This marked the beginning of a major social process. The relations that were established were a key prerequisite for the strategies and practices that were a part of post-war survival in Latvia. The paper also offers a review of the complicated twists and turns of Latvia’s post-war history, and of the legal and actual status of women during the Stalinist period in the Soviet Union.

By the autumn of 1944, World War II was drawing to an end in Latvia. Fighting did continue until the very last minute, true – until the official conclusion of the war in May 1945. For Latvia, the war had involved a Nazi and a Soviet occupation. Men were drafted into armies, many people suffered repressions. There was war, there were trenches. People were destroyed for political and ethnic reasons. There were accidental deaths, battles, marches by armies and flows of refugees. Latvia was a severely damaged and empty land.

Upon the conclusion of the war, the Latvian population was one-third smaller than it had been before the fighting began. Some calculations suggest that at the very end of the war, there were 1.4 million people in Latvia. In 1946, when some refugees and soldiers had returned, the number rose to around 1.6 million. Nevertheless, the Nazi and Soviet repressions had caused a population decline of one-third. [1] The events that had taken place since 1940 caused major changes in the people who lived and survived in Latvia. Traces of  these events which were left in the minds, the souls and the destinies of people at that time cannot be studied as precisely as can the number of destroyed factories, power plants, bridges, or buildings, the kilometres of destroyed railroad tracks and highways. People learned how to live under extreme conditions. They suffered traumas and pain. They found that they could feel joy just because of the ability to survive. Even though war as such ended in Latvia in 1944 and 1945, Latvians quickly found that a very complicated period of history was about to begin – the restoration of the Soviet occupation regime that lasted for the next 50 years.

As the Red Army of the Soviet Union pushed its way deeper and deeper into Latvia – a process that began in the summer of 1944 – the massive project of “Sovietization” in Latvia began. Both forced and contract-based resources were used to establish the Soviet time and space in Latvia. The totalitarian system of the Soviet Union presented itself as a Socialist system, and it had achieved its apogee by the end of the war. Latvia, along with other new Soviet republics, quickly had to standardise itself in accordance with the Soviet model that existed already. The people of Latvia had already experienced a brief Soviet occupation in 1940 and 1941, and the survival skills and wisdom that they had accumulated now had to be put to use in quickly learning about the Soviet way of live, the model of behaviour and the permitted forms of expressing oneself. [2] During the first post-war years, there was armed opposition to the regime, and there were still faint hopes that the Soviet occupation would not last for too long, that the Western powers would not permit the incorporation of the Baltic States into the USSR. The hopes soon faded, however, and by the late 1940s it was clear that nothing would change in the immediate future, that the Soviet occupation and the existence of Soviet Latvia had to be seen be seen as long-term projects.

Political accounts were settled for several years after the war, and there were class-based purges in society, ostensibly “in the interests of the people”. In terms of the everyday lives of those who had lived through and survived the war, however, politics were far less important than the yearning for welfare, for primary conveniences (home, heat, food), and for finding or regaining one’s family. Human warmth was of value, as were  intimacy, attention, love, a secure and stable private world, and acceptable living conditions. The social consciousness was imbued with a hatred of war and politics, with suspicions against ideological games and any calls to sacrifice oneself on the altar of an idea or of the state. Illusions were replaced by cynicism. [3]   It was necessary to create a certain level of normality in people’s everyday lives.

When it comes to the establishment of normalcy in post-war Latvia, gender history is of key importance, but it has not been much studied. Over the last several years, there has been fairly intensive studies of the Soviet period of Latvia’s history, and the focus has been primarily on the crimes of the Soviet occupation. [4] Many important aspects of history, gender history included, have remained outside of the realm of consideration.

This article is part of a broader and more varied study on women during the period of Stalinism. The aim is to reveal the way in which the Soviet authorities concluded a contract with Latvia’s women, thus marking the beginning of survival strategies. The focus in the paper is on a single event – the first Women’s Congress of the Latvian SSR, which took place on 30-31 March 1945.

Women during the Soviet period of Stalinism

Any study of the history on women during the post-war period, the incorporation of Latvia into the USSR, and the Sovietization of the agenda of life, must necessarily take into account the policies which the regime pursued vis-à-vis women. One must consider the legal and actual status of women in the Soviet Union. The most important aspects in promoting an understanding of the history of Latvian women during this period are (1) the contract between the regime and women, (2) the policy of creating the “new Soviet woman”, (3) the role of sexuality.

Researchers who have written about the history of women in the Soviet Union have always emphasised the existence of a special contract between the regime and the women. In the Soviet model of a gender system, this contract was of much greater importance than was the principle of equality between men and women – officially declared, but existing merely as a formality. Yelena Zdravomyslova and Anna Temkina have argued that the relationship between the regime and the women in the Soviet Union can be described as the contract of a working mother. The regime considered women to be a special social group, one that was of particular concern, and one with a status that could be regulated with normative documents, ideological campaigns, mechanisms of social control, and the mass media. The paternalistic approach of the regime was manifested in social guarantees and various kinds of relief that were offered to working women who were, at the same time, giving birth to and then raising their children. These subsidies caused women, as a social group, to become dependent on the regime, and thus many women became quite loyal to the prevailing order. Zdravomyslova and Temkina write that during the period of Stalinism, the regime made use of repression and strict controlling mechanisms in tandem with a set of social guarantees, and that this served to put the contract firmly into place. [5]

It is also true that the period of Stalinism was a time during which two contradictory social processes were taking place. Industrialisation and collectivisation of agriculture demanded more workers, and so countless women were involved in industrial and agricultural production.  On the other hand, as totalitarianism got a firmer hold in the Soviet Union in the 1930s, its norms were also introduced in private life. Policies were aimed at the creation of stable and patriarchal families and the relevant conservative values. Abortion was banned in the Soviet Union in 1936. Divorce became so complicated as to be virtually impossible. A system of social subsidies to the mothers of large families was introduced. Irresponsible fathers and husbands were denounced, and the authority of parents as an institution was strengthened. Homosexuality was banned and criminalized in 1934. A set of laws that was adopted in 1944 essentially delegated all responsibility for the consequences of a sex life outside of the family to the woman.  She had no right to have an abortion, and she had no right to demand that a specific man admit parentage and offer material assistance. Traditional gender stereotypes were an everyday part of life. Women, for instance, were held to be fully responsible for the domestic sphere. A concrete system was established to honour those mothers who had many children – the “Mother’s Glory” order, the “Mother’s Medal”, and the honorary title of “Mother Hero”. Single mothers received social subsidies from the state. The Stalinist Soviet Union was one in which many people held positive views about the shifting attitudes of the regime vis-à-vis the country’s families. Strengthening of the family was received as a return to normal life, it was granted the status of normalcy. [6]

Stabilisation of the institution of the family was also facilitated by insecure and unpredictable living conditions and human lives. No one could guarantee one’s own survival during the reign of Stalin. The historian Sheila Fitzpatrick has argued that given this situation, families and family members drew closer together in pursuit of survival. [7] Deficits, which became more and more common, were certainly a part of the mix. During the period of Stalinism, ordinary people found shortages in all areas of life – housing, food, household objects, etc. This facilitated the traditional distribution of duties between men and women in the family. Women had to sew or knit clothing, prepare food, organise and manage the household, and find goods under conditions of severe deficits, making use of personal contacts for this purpose. Work for men insofar as the home was concerned involved those things that required physical strength, skills at repairing various objects, and knowledge of technologies and mechanisms. Zdravomyslova and Temkina argue that if women had always performed the roles of workers and mothers, then now they had to play yet a third role – professional servants to their families. [8]

Soviet gender policies also focused on the creation of the “new Soviet woman”. Lynne Attwood has argued that the concept of the “new woman” is not a constant category; it is one, which is rebuilt and redefined as the situation in the relevant country changes. The initial aim was to create a contrast to women in tsarist Russia and to women in capitalist countries. A study of Soviet women’s magazines told Attwood that during the Stalinist period, the concept of the “new woman” contained many contradictions:

“She was confident but modest, ambitious yet self-sacrificial, heroic yet vulnerable, strong yet weak.  She worked like a man, but with no thought of personal profit. She was active and innovative while in the factory or ploughing the fields, but bowed to her husband’s authority as soon as she was home.” [9]

It is also true that during the period of Stalinism, the regime intensified its ideological approach to women as a social group. The Communist Party considered the women’s press to be an instrument by which women could be “reforged” in ideological terms, writes Tatyana Dashkova. [10] As the war ended, there was a strengthening of the traditional norms and obligations of women, of their duty toward husband, family and the Soviet state. This was part of the construct of the “new woman”. [11]

One element in the ideologies and policies of the Stalinist regime was that sexuality was ignored or kept quiet. Igor Kon has described these policies, which first emerged in the 1930s, as a “sexual Thermidor”. [12] Sexophobia helped to strengthen the fanatical cult of state and leader, which existed in Stalin’s time. It could be used in so-called “practical politics”, as well – if someone had to be repressed, then all that was necessary was a claim of sexual perversity, e.g., the possession and distribution of pornography. Kon points out that sexophobia was not just the policy of the state; it was also to a certain degree, a policy of “the people”. This occurred not least because of fundamental changes in the country’s political elite – changes which occurred in the context of industrialisation, collectivisation and Soviet repressions. Men who had been farmers suddenly found themselves at the top of the elite in the 1930s, replacing intellectuals and people of urban origin at the top. As Kon has put it:

“for unsophisticated former peasants, ‘anti-sexual’ arguments were far more convincing than they had been for the previous ruling elites. They could hardly renounce sex itself, nor had they any intention of doing so, but it was easy for them to expunge it from the culture – and they did so with relish and sincerity.” [13]

Anna Rotkirch, writing about the culture of sexuality in the Soviet Union, calls the generation of the period of Stalinism the “silenced generation”. She notes that there was absolutely no public discourse about issues that had to do with sex. [14] Irina Zherebkina has argued that in the social construct of the new Soviet woman, all “biological” and gender-marking properties were replaced with ideological ones, and the model of reproductive biology was replaced with the model of “social reproduction”. Any sexual or bodily properties of women were deemed to be “undesirable” or “negative” in the public discourse. [15]

In everyday lives during the Stalinist period, women increasingly found themselves to be subordinated and “secondary” social entities in all areas of life. Officially declared gender equality was nothing more than a simulation.

Post-war contracts between the regime and the public

The Soviet regime held an ambivalent attitude vis-à-vis Latvia and Latvians. Latvia was a republic of the USSR, and its public status was dictated by the fact that the occupation of 1940 was declared by the Soviet Union to have been a “voluntary accession” to the USSR. Soviet propaganda insisted that it was the Latvian SSR which was occupied by the Nazis and then liberated by the Soviet Union. On the other hand, many functionaries in party and government, in security institutions and in military structures, felt that Latvia was a hostile occupied territory, one in which local residents could and must be treated appropriately. This was manifested first and foremost in the appearance and behaviour of Soviet troops. Many instances in which men from the Red Army robbed people, raped women, and killed civilians have been recorded. [16]

The post-war situation and the Soviet occupation dictated terms when Latvia’s social structure was formed and reformed, and this applied both to processes and principles. People in Latvia had to be brought into the social structural schemes that had been established in the Soviet Union. [17] The public status of Latvia as a Soviet Socialist Republic and the status of Latvia’s residents as citizens of the USSR – these factors essentially obliged the regime to determine and to shape both wanted and unwanted contractual relations with local residents.

Writing about the relationship between regime and society in the post-war Soviet Union, Vera S. Dunham has argued that the relations became more complex, because after the victory in World War II, a latent conflict emerged between the highest-ranking elite of the Soviet Union on the one hand, and the people of the Soviet Union on the other. The role of Stalin as a heroic victor dominated the public discourse, but everyone knew that defeat was prevented because of superhuman efforts and national heroism on the part of the people. [18] With the aim of preserving and maintaining the existing system of politics, social factors and privileges, Stalin and his team began to draft an unspoken concordat with the middle classes, strengthening their social status and system of values, and awarding them certain privileges. The regime also sought to recruit workers and farmers to become a part of these new middle classes. Dunham has called this policy of internal alliances in the post-war Soviet Union the “Big Deal”. [19]

The model of the Big Deal can be seen in the relationships among residents of post-war Latvia – one can even sense a double version of the deal. If people were loyal, if they did not oppose the regime, if they refused to give aid to the opposition rebellion, if they satisfied requirements and held a paid job, then in return they were given a chance to live and survive. Absolute security guarantees were not issued, of course, they were temporary in nature, but people could receive the minimum that was necessary to survive. [20] The aforementioned status as a Soviet republic forced the occupation regime to create a new political, social and cultural elite in Latvia, an elite that would be made up of the regime’s allies. These partners were offered a secure chance to survive. They received social privileges and comparative wealth (larger and better flats, access to scarce food products and other goods, etc.). The regime awarded all kinds of orders, medals, prizes and honorary titles to its supporters. The elite were praised in the mass media, as well. This meant that the sub-strata of society suddenly found that there were fairly extensive career opportunities in place. The elite and middle class that had existed in Latvia in the 1920s and 1930s were largely gone, destroyed at the hands of the Soviets and the Nazis, killed during the war, or émigrés who found themselves in the West at the war’s end.

In late 1944 and throughout 1945, the Big Deal was presented publicly by the regime through a series of mass public meetings. Contracts were concluded with social groups and individuals from the middle classes. In early 1945, for instance, there were mass meetings for farmers, doctors and arts workers. Later there were meetings for employees of the courts and of prosecutorial institutions, of the intelligentsia, of labour unions, of theatre employees, and of athletes. Each event was a major public production number, and it helped to initiate the people of Latvia into the rituals of the Soviet system. Public life in the Stalinist period was extremely ritualised, and Stalinist rituals dated back to the 1930s. Rituals were a part of life, they were played out through collective performances, and they brought together design, movement and verbal discourse. The meeting was the cornerstone to the official Soviet ritual. [21]

Mass meetings in post-war Latvia were held in the grandest and most prestigious facilities that were available in the capital city of Rīga. Representatives of distinct social groups were brought together for an event which seldom differed from other, similar events in terms of the scenario. The most visible official representatives of the Soviet regime in Latvia read out their speeches, then a letter was sent to Stalin, then representatives of the group that had been assembled made their speeches, and then a challenge was issued to everyone who was a part of the social group. The Big Deal relations were a component in the survival practices of Latvia’s residents at a time when the Stalinist regime had created fairly limited opportunities for human existence. [22]

Latvia’s women: Statistics

There were more women than men in Latvia after the end of World War II. Demographers have no access to precise data about the gender imbalance that occurred in the latter half of the 1940s, because the first official post-war census was conducted in the Soviet Union only in 1959. Data from this pan-Soviet census allow us to draw certain conclusions about the situation that prevailed. In 1959, according to the census, there were 919,008 men (43.90%) and 1,174,450 women (56.10%) in the Latvian population. The proportion of women was slightly higher in urban areas than in the countryside. Among urban residents, women represented 56.66% of the population, while in rural areas, they represented 55.39% of the population. [23] The largest proportion of women was found in those age groups in which men had been subject to mobilisation. In the age group 35 to 39, for instance, there were 385 men and 615 women per 1,000 residents – these were people who were 20 to 24 years old in 1945. In the age group from 40 to 44 years (25-29 in 1945), there were 405 men and 595 women per 1,000 residents. [24]

In 1944 and 1945, when the war came to an end in Latvia, women represented the majority of civilians in the country. Of particular importance is the fact that they also represented a majority of those who were able to work. Men were in the Soviet or the Nazi army, they were in filtration camps, some took part in armed opposition movements, while others were in an illegal situation while they waited for events to develop.

Women in Latvia were not very much involved in politics; the household was their primary area of consideration. Prior to the war, only 10% of women had held salaried positions in Latvia. [25] Among the Soviet authorities and the functionaries of the Communist Party, too, there were few women. In 1946, 25.4% of rank-and-file members of the Latvian Communist Party were female. Among the leaders of Communist Party organisations in Latvia, only 23.4% were women. Most of them organised party functions in parishes or at small companies. [26]

When it came to cleaning up the damage that had been caused by the war, and to the modernisation of Latvia’s economic and social structure, however, women found themselves much more extensively involved in work, as well as in political and social activities.

The Latvian Women’s Congress

On March 30 and 31, 1945, when the war was continuing in the western parts of Latvia, the first Congress of Women of the Latvian SSR was assembled in Rīga. This was one of the grandest public performances of the era, and its aim was to demonstrate that women, as a major social group, and the new regime supported one another and could work together. The congress was extensively covered by newspapers and the radio, and the speeches that were made and the documents that were approved were later published in a separate book. [27]

The scenario for the women’s congress was similar to that of other events of the same type. First there was the Soviet simulation of democracy – smaller meetings of women were organised at the level of administrative districts and companies, and these elected or nominated delegates to the national congress. In this, they performed the Soviet ritual to a narrower degree. Mandatory elements were always the same: Stalin had to be elected as an honorary member of the event’s presidium, and a letter had to be sent to Stalin. [28] On 29 March, the delegates arrived in the capital city, where they were received with great pomp. On the next day, the 1,100 delegates gathered at the National Opera, which was the grandest building in Riga at that time.

All of the elements of the Soviet ritual were in place at the congress. This could be seen in the decorations of the hall and in the scenario of the event. Stalin was, as always, elected to the presidium, the Soviet hymn was played, and a collective letter to Stalin was approved and sent off. Such letters always praised the Leader and the Soviet system giving them thanks and repeating standard slogans such as “Long live the heroic Red Army!”, “Long live the mighty Soviet Union!”, “Long live the indestructible friendship of nations!” and “Long live comrade Stalin, the genial war leader, the organiser of victories for the Soviet peoples, our beloved teacher and our nation’s great friend!”. [29] The letter also included statements of obeisance to Stalin, as well as promises to work together with them. The delegates swore an oath: “We, the women of Soviet Latvia, will devote all of our strength and our creative energy to heal, in a short period of time, the scars of the Fascist occupation and to transform Latvia into a flourishing Socialist republic.” [30]

The speeches that were delivered at the women’s congress can be divided up into two groups – those made by representatives of the regime and addressed to the women, and those made by women and addressed both to the regime and to other women.

The regime’s message to women

In post-war Latvia, three men represented the pinnacle of Soviet authority insofar as the public were concerned. These were the first secretary of the Latvian Communist Party, Jānis Kalnbērziņš, the chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Council, Augusts Kirhenšteins, [31] and the chairman of the Soviet Latvian Council of Commissars, Vilis Lācis. [32] These three men were supposed to symbolise the legitimacy of the Soviet regime both in Latvia and outside of it. None of the three men, however, had an independent political role to play, none of the three institutions could act freely. The post-war Soviet Union was a highly centralised country, and the governing regimes in the various republics were largely ignored. Important decisions were taken by Stalin and Stalin alone. His consultants were very few in number. The highest ranking officials in Soviet Latvia, as noted, basically were there for the purpose of public consumption. Their job was to translate the instructions of the pan-Soviet regime so that ordinary people could understand them. In this case, the issue had to do with the Big Deal and its conditions.

Vilis Lācis delivered the opening address at the women’s congress. [33] He stressed the official doctrine of the Soviet regime – that the USSR was the only country in the world in which women had the same rights as men, and where women had access to all kinds of opportunities. [34] The regimes demands to women, were formulated in the speeches delivered by Jānis Kalnbērziņš, first secretary of the Latvian Communist Party’s Central Committee, and by his number two, Arvīds Pelše. An axiom of Soviet mythology was first to be declared – the Soviet state and the Soviet system were the best in the world, they represented the highest achievements of humanity. The introduction of this “absolute truth” was a part of legitimating the Soviet system and the Soviet occupation. It also served to break down the legitimacy of the previous system. Teun van Dijk points out that strategies to legitimate or delegitimate are similarly discursive and involve positive self-presentation and negative presentation of the other. [35] The duty for Soviet ideologues was not only to present an absolutely positive image of their own system, but also to throw mud at other systems. When knowledge and facts did not correspond to the official ideological framework, the ideologues had to transform them into the “correct” knowledge, or else to exclude them from the dominant discourse altogether. Discourse performs a specific role in the spread, implementation and, particularly, reproduction of ideologies. Ideologies may be formulated clearly only through language, discourse, communications, or other semiotic practices. [36] Thus the past was insistently turned into the “symbol of the bad times” – it was assigned the new task of enhancing the achievements of the Soviet regime. The more bitter the discourse about the past, the mightier seemed the Soviet system, the brighter became its promises about the future. The speeches clearly reflected a construction of comparison between the past, which involved capitalism and the Nazi occupation, and the present and future, when Socialism was in place: