pedanther

My next short book for February was Kristen Ghodsee’s Red Valkyries: Feminist Lessons from Five Revolutionary Women, which I had received as a party favor at a wedding along with several other books. I had read Ghodsee’s Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism for a book club several years ago and had found it fun and readable.

The book consists of five biographical essays, then a concluding section distilling the lessons that modern leftists can learn from their lives. The first biography is a sketch of the life of record-breaking Soviet sniper Lyudmila Pavlichenko, who racked up 309 confirmed kills in World War II before an injury took her off the front lines. Her career skewed young; she was barely in her mid-twenties when she had to retire from sniper work, at which point she had also already been married twice and had a son. From then she was something of a professional celebrity, touring Allied countries to gin up enthusiasm for the noble art of killing Nazis and fielding stupid, sexist questions from American journalists.

From there the book moves a couple decades back in time to give us biographies of three women who had done so much work to shape the society in which Lyudmila Pavlichenko could arise. These three women were all contemporaries and were very close with one another: Alexandra Kollontai, Nadezhda Krupskaya, and Inessa Armand. Alexandra Kollontai I’d heard about a bit before, although I haven’t actually read any of her writings. She was very forward-thinking about things like “free love” and polyamory and having strong relationships in your life outside of the traditional nuclear family. Nadezhda Krupskaya I’d heard about in passing mainly as Lenin’s wife, which, it turns out, is doing her a major disservice–she was also a deeply committed revolutionary herself with a specialization in radical pedagogy, who did a ton of work establishing public school and libraries and increasing the literacy rate. She and Lenin also got started in basically a revolutionary fake dating scenario, where they agreed to be each other’s “fiancés” in order to maintain lines of communication when one or the other was imprisoned, and eventually got married for real. Inessa Armand didn’t write quite as much original material as Kollontai or Krupskaya but did a lot of translation and editorial work, as well as absolutely monster amounts of movement gruntwork–organizing conferences, smuggling communications, networking, running a newspaper for socialist women, anything and everything you could think of. She was in and out of jail several times, while also raising five children–four by her husband and one by her husband’s younger brother, which apparently her husband didn’t mind. Armand was also interesting because she came from a noble family and got started doing charitable liberal feminism, but was radicalized through the paranoia of the tsarist regime that wouldn’t let the nice wealthy liberal feminists do their charity work in peace because they were afraid it was secretly a cover for anti-authoritarian activities. Well done, tsarist regime. No obvious own goals there.

The last of the five Valkyries that we meet is Elena Lagadinova, a Bulgarian woman who got her political start as a partisan during World War II, when she was barely a teenager. After the Nazi-allied government forces burned her house down–with her only pair of shoes in it–she hid out in the mountains armed with a pistol and became a local legend for being the youngest partisan in the resistance forces. Afterwards, she went to school and got a PhD in plant genetics, where she did a bunch of groundbreaking research into agriculturally useful things. She was willing to stand up to the government about the ways in which its suspicion of the last generation of scientific experts was causing problems, which, fortunately, got her noticed as a principled communists willing to stand up for what she believed would further the good of society, rather than as an enemy of the state, and she got promoted into government work. She then spent the last several decades of her life doing internationalist feminist organizing, liaising with women’s activists from across the world and across ideologies. She was rather abruptly sidelined when the Bulgarian government collapsed in the ‘90s, but is still a beloved figure in many women’s activist circles today. Somehow, I had never heard of her.

The bit at the end about lessons we can draw from these five women is a bit less exciting; it’s very much in the vein of “here are the bite-sized actionable conclusions because every politics book needs to end in bite-sized actionable conclusions” but like, for people who are doing leftism, there’s probably never really a bad time for a reminder to take some steps to avoid burnout. This book was also written during the pandemic, which was certainly a stressful time to be doing anything whatsoever. Maybe not quite as stressful as hiding in the mountains hunting Nazis with a pistol after the government burned your house down, but still pretty bad.

Overall, a fun, short read! It’s good to know more about these people! I’d recommend it alongside Red Rosa for anyone who wants to learn more about important socialists feminists that have tended to get left out of more mainstream Western feminist history.