The ten-year history of the Zhenotdel — the women’s department of the central committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) — is the history of a struggle to put women’s emancipation at the heart of the Soviet project. Created in December 1918 by Bolshevik women like Alexandra Kollontai and Inessa Armand, it provided an unprecedented platform for working-class and peasant women to participate in social and political life, taking the revolution directly into their own hands. Yet this experience remains little-known even among those who consider themselves well-versed in Soviet history.

The Russian Revolution’s claim to advance women’s rights is often considered a matter of proclamations of principle which didn’t deeply change women’s real conditions. Doubtless, the legal codes introduced in the first two years of the revolution promised unprecedented changes to women’s role in society, as in the Code on Marriage, the Family and Guardianship introduced in 1919. Ending religious sanctions on marriage and confirming the availability of divorce on demand, this code pronounced men and women equal under the law and guaranteed equal pay for equal work. It moreover legalized abortion and abolished illegitimacy, set the minimum marriage age at eighteen for males and sixteen for females, and required the consent of both parties to marry.

It is widely assumed that the limitations of an isolated revolution meant that these legal rights remained on paper — that is, there was no serious project to translate them into real women’s emancipation. Yet such a perception is inaccurate. The Zhenotdel was a very serious project — not least for the hundreds of thousands of women who benefited from it. It initiated the participation of women in social and political life right across the Soviet Union. In 1920 it went further and launched the Communist Women’s International — a project which lasted until 1930, when both it and the Zhenotdel were closed down under Stalin’s regime.