Celebrating Women. Gender, Festival Culture, and Bolshevik Ideology, 1910-1939. .

Celebrating Women. Gender, Festival Culture, and Bolshevik Ideology, 1910-1939. By Choi Chatterjee (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002. x plus 222 pp. $34.95).

In this slim volume (the text comprises 161 pages), Choi Chatterjee presents the history of International Women's Day as an element of Bolshevik revolutionary strategy, state-building, and international mobilization through the 1930s. Her study joins more substantial works on Bolshevik policies toward women (by Wendy Goldman, Elizabeth Wood, Barbara Evans Clements and others) and on Bolshevik festivals (by Karen Petrone, Richard Stites, James van Geldern, Katerina Clark and others). Chatterjee structures her study chronologically, with individual chapters on 1917, 1920-1928, the First Five Year Plan, and the l930s. She opens with a discussion of the major Marxist texts on women and of the place of festivals in Bolshevik strategy and rule. Chatterjee had extensive access to several archives in Russia, ranging from Communist Party organs to the personal papers of Aleksandra Kollonrai. Her published sources include newspapers, films, photographs, posters, memoirs, contemporary Western journalists' accounts, International Women's Day brochures, and literature. She also discovered several "propaganda plays" written for the holiday, to which she devotes an entire chapter. Finally, like all women present in Russia on March 8, she witnessed the ho liday with its notorious contradictions between public celebrations and the private gender relations so distant from public rituals.

Despite those contradictions which tempt Western visitors to dismiss the holiday's significance, Chatterjee proves that International Women's Day ultimately contributed to the articulation of public images of Soviet womanhood that altered the discourse about gender in the U.S.S.R. She also demonstrates that the holiday provided a weapon to be used in various ways by such Communist women leaders as Kollontai, Central Asian women striving toward secular womanhood in the revolutionary era, and Stalin and his partners in imposing the dual expectations of Soviet motherhood and Soviet labor. She identifies two central themes that persisted across leaders' shifting goals--liberation and transformation--and points to hyperbole as the consistent ritual style. In the early years of the revolutionary state, International Women's Day events provided arenas for melodramatic appearances by Soviet women breaking free from their abusive relationships, Central Asian women removing their Muslim veils and casting them into bonf ires, or the enactment of soap-opera quality plays in which Soviet consciousness emboldened women to seek official protection from wife-battering. In many of these events, the featured woman completed formulaic liberation from patriarchy as the prerequisite for transformation into Soviet womanhood and consciousness.

Chatterjee identifies a tension within the Communist Party leadership about how best to make use of International Women's Day. She presents Aleksandra Kollontai in this context as the defender of popular initiative and workers' needs, a role consistent with her leadership in the Workers' Opposition. Kollontai and other leaders of The Women's Department (Zhenotdel) of the Party pressed hard in the revolutionary years to use March 8 as an occasion to solicit women's input on their condition and needs. The male leadership, however (and consistently), viewed March 8 as an occasion to transmit the Party's visions and goals. For the latter, March 8 was an opportunity for propaganda and mobilization. Their ultimate domination meant that the plays from the 1920s and activities from the First Five Year Plan and the 1930s sent the message to Soviet women that they must mobilize themselves to create the institutions at the local level to meet their peculiar female needs (child care facilities, communal dining halls, lau ndries, and such). Liberation and transformation meant assuming responsibility for taking care of themselves, not relying on the Party or state to meet their needs. Meanwhile, however, the Party made ample use of March 8 to broadcast images in all available media of the oppression of women in the West to contrast with the security Soviet women enjoyed through their paternalist state.

Chatterjee coins some excellent phrases in describing International Women's Day rituals, especially from the 1930s. She notes that women were called upon to celebrate "joyous fecundity" (153), while displaying "mystical attachment to norm fulfillment" (143), and a "quasifeudal sense of gratitude to the state" (161). These gems in her prose indicate her penetration of the culture she is analyzing.

However, they are gems in an otherwise thin study, marred by sloppy production which unfortunately precludes recommending this book for course adoption, which would be the primary justification for the publication of such a short book. Although most Western studies related to her topic appear in Chatterjee's bibliography, she rarely mentions them or acknowledges their contributions or proximity to her analysis of the larger themes of women and festivals in Bolshevik culture. This volume is one of several examples I have recently read where the press has apparently not invested in copy-editing and left proof-reading to the author. This may be necessary in our cash-strapped era for academic publishing, but it does the individual scholar, the reader, and the field as a whole a disservice to publish books in which the following types of grammatical errors and editorial lapses are frequent: subject-verb agreement; failures of translation; failure to translate Russian terms and titles; failure to spell out the full names of acronyms; word usage, spelling, and typographical errors. Such problems appear on more than 10% of the 161 pages of text, undermining the ultimate impression of Chatterjee's considerable research, evident understanding of the topic and the culture, and her own writing potential.