Soviet cultural history can enrich our understanding of the major transformations of gender roles in industrialized societies during the 20th century. This piece, based on a master's thesis research (Malysheva, 2024), explores how post-Stalinist women perceived their own lives by examining their discussions of literature, which reflected their lived experiences.
Soviet modernity created a unique type of subjectivity (Chatterjee & Petrone, 2013; Hellbeck, 2001, 2006; Kotkin, 1995; Pinsky, 2014, 2019; Yurchak, 2005), and this article contributes to ongoing scholarly discussions by examining post-Stalinist female subjectivity specifically.
Through analysis of reader responses to Natalya Baranskaya’s 1969 novella A Week Like Any Other, this study illuminates how Soviet society functioned at the intersection of public ideology and private experience. The examined archival letters reveal the complex inner lives of Soviet women who navigated conflicting demands of work, motherhood, and social expectations.
Natalya Baranskaya's novella A Week Like Any Other was first published in the famous journal Novyi mir in 1969, reflecting rising societal anxiety about gender roles. The journal's editorial board showed considerable courage in publishing this work, as it highlighted the persistence of patriarchy in Soviet society and challenged the socialist emancipation project that prioritized economic equality alone.
This literary work appeared when women's employment, having grown since the 1930s, had become nearly universal in the Soviet Union. Soviet women were expected to combine full-time work with motherhood, creating significant tension in the private sphere.
The novella effectively illustrates the concept of the ‘second shift’ (Hochschild, 1989), also known as the 'double burden'. It highlights the additional unpaid domestic labour and childcare responsibilities often shouldered by women who work outside the home. Despite describing the specific realities of Soviet everyday life, the work gained international recognition, being translated into twelve languages during the 1970s and 1980s.
The struggles of Soviet working women resonated with their Western counterparts, revealing similar processes occurring on both sides of the Iron Curtain. This connection reflects the global phenomenon of women's mass entry into the workforce throughout the twentieth century, which fundamentally transformed their self-perception. This article aims to examine what was distinctive about the Soviet women's subjectivity within this broader transformation.
The novella A Week Like Any Other has a documentary quality. It is widely recognized as a historically accurate depiction of urban life in the post-Stalinist Soviet Union, particularly regarding women's position in that society. It portrays the life of a married mother of two who combines a full-time career at a research institute with a never-ending list of domestic obligations.
The protagonist is perpetually rushing, chronically suffering from a shortage of time and inadequate sleep. Despite all her efforts, she fails to fulfill her multiple roles as worker, mother, and housewife. This scenario, typical of many modern societies, is compounded by specific Soviet features such as consumer goods shortages, the unavailability of quality contraception, and mandatory political education meetings. However, when the protagonist's husband suggests that she might give up her work, she responds that doing so would mean her extinction.
Like many other works published in the journal Novyi mir during the 1950s and 1960s, Baranskaya's novella sparked widespread discussion. Readers actively submitted their reviews to the Novyi mir editorial board. These letters have since become part of the Novyi mir journal collection housed in the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (hereafter RGALI). My analysis draws upon these archival sources. All the letters examined here were written in 1970, shortly after the novella's publication. The letter writers represent a relatively homogeneous demographic: predominantly educated women who were working mothers and urban dwellers, mostly from the Soviet Union's largest cities. Many of the letters are lengthy and detailed, characterized by their remarkable frankness and emotional intensity.
The value of these texts lies in their documentation of perspectives difficult to locate elsewhere—namely, Soviet women's gender beliefs and their relationship to the ‘double burden.’ The letters offer not only insight into the specific ways Soviet readers engaged with literature (Malysheva, 2024) but also provide analytical access to late Soviet female subjectivity.
In their reviews of the literary work, female readers gave very high praise to the novella, emphasizing its authenticity. One reviewer wrote: “This short novella … is an exact copy of our life” (RGALI, 1970). Nearly every letter affirmed that Natalya Baranskaya had succeeded in accurately depicting the life of a Soviet woman. However, the female readers went beyond simple commentary on the novella, transforming their reviews into stories about their own lives. By sharing intimate details of their personal experiences, they created writings that resembled egodocuments.
Like the novella, female readers' letters also reflected the enormous tension surrounding gender roles, but they painted a picture far more grim than the one outlined by Baranskaya. The readers described being torn between work and family amid a constant lack of time (RGALI, 1970). They wrote about feelings of inadequacy and a persistent sense of guilt. Several reported working without a single day off or holiday for years. A university instructor confessed that she regularly left her sick child home alone starting at age four, because she did not want to miss work as she valued her reputation (RGALI, 1970). Many complained about constant illnesses — both their own and their children's, who did not receive proper care in nurseries and kindergartens.
The most prominent narrative in the letters was that of the nervous exhaustion experienced by working mothers. The boldest characterization of the situation came from a female reader in the Moscow region: “All of us women are victims of a state machine at full throttle and speeding up, and in its noise, you can hear the crunch of our bones” (RGALI, 1970).
Although many female readers expressed deep dissatisfaction with their ‘double burden,’ none considered the option of not working. The letters rarely discuss what primarily motivated women to enter the workforce: whether it was financial necessity, legal requirements, social expectations, or other factors. It seems evident from the texts that all women (regardless of marital status or whether they had children, including mothers of infants) were expected to work. When analyzing the data, I attempted to understand what lies behind this expectation evident in the letters: to deconstruct this universally understood ‘normalcy’ of role combination even as the letter authors construct their narratives to emphasize the abnormality of their burdens.
The myth that Soviet women were forced to work remains widespread. This was partially true during the industrialization period of the 1930s and World War II. However, during the late Soviet period, this was no longer the case. Despite extremely high female employment rates, there were documented instances of women (even those without children!) who did not work and faced no state punishment. In general, coercion as a method of governance declined significantly in the post-Stalin period.
Another widespread assumption is that economic necessity was the primary driver behind Soviet women's entry into the labour market. The argument suggests that salary structures left many married women no choice: they had to work to support their families. However, none of the studied letters contains any hint of the author’s desire to be a housewife. Similarly, none of the letters reveals longing for the male breadwinner model. The readers’ responses I analysed as well as Soviet sociological surveys (Lapidus, 1983), demonstrate that work was a cornerstone of late Soviet female subjectivity. At least educated women could not imagine themselves without work. Many female readers emphasized the importance of work beyond its material benefits, while others mentioned that their husbands had actually asked them to quit their jobs (RGALI, 1970).
Soviet women’s entry into the workforce did not happen gradually but occurred in three distinct waves. The first took place during Stalin's 1930s industrialization campaign. The second occurred during World War II, a pattern observed in many countries involved in the conflict. However, economic history research shows that after the war, “Soviet urban households tried to return to pre-war levels of participation in the labour force, keeping, whenever possible, a non-employed woman at home” (Markevich, 2005). The third major drive to recruit housewives into the state sector began in the late 1950s and continued through the 1960s. Unlike wartime recruitment, this wave was largely voluntary and coincided with improved living standards. Therefore, we cannot claim that Soviet women in the post-Stalin period worked exclusively out of economic necessity.
In fact, most women entered the workforce not during the most difficult periods, but rather during times of economic growth. While some female readers of the novella did mention their husbands’ low salaries as a factor in their decision to combine motherhood with work, this was not their main concern: it seemed more like a justification for their choice to work. As one female reader put it: “Besides the financial side, I simply could not imagine at all how one could live without work; it meant a great deal to me.” (RGALI, 1970).
This observation raises a compelling question: what motivated women, including those with infants, to seek employment outside the home (while still shouldering the majority of housework and childcare), especially when they were not in dire financial need? Historiography typically offers several explanations for the rise of women's employment in the post-Stalin period.
What motivated women, including those with infants, to seek employment outside the home, especially when they were not in dire financial need?
By the 1960s, the state had created incentives for non-employed women to find jobs. Staying at home became economically irrational. Among those incentives were an increase in the size of the pension and an increase in the minimum wage (Markevich, 2005). Unlike Western societies, the Soviet state provided an extensive childcare infrastructure that enabled mothers to work. This included workplace nurseries, state-funded daycare centers, and after-school programs (Buckley, 1981). Thus, female employment went hand in hand with the development of the welfare state.
The rise in consumerism during the late 1950s and 1960s also contributed to women's entry into the workforce. The level of consumption that had been considered acceptable in previous years could no longer satisfy urban residents. Therefore, even families that did not experience acute need could strive to have an additional source of income to ensure an acceptable standard of living. According to Kiblitskaya (2000), women of the post-Stalinist era saw work as important because they were driven by a “sense of responsibility for the comfort of the family.”
The ideological foundation is also mentioned as one of the important reasons for women's decision to work outside the home (Lapidus, 1978; Goldman, 1993). Marxist-Leninist principles assumed that all adults should participate in productive labor, and indeed, the meaning of labor had great significance in Soviet society. However, this did not apply to domestic labor (Engel, 2021). This distinguished the Soviet Union from other socialist countries: in Poland, for example, housework was normalized and could be considered a worthy occupation (Jarska, 2022). This ideological emphasis on work outside the home was strengthened during the Khrushchev era. The new program of the Communist Party, adopted in 1961, stressed that labour is a public duty, a genuinely creative process and a source of joy, declaring that “every able-bodied person will participate in social labour”.
The analysis of responses to the novella reveals that for female readers, the ideological factor played a decisive role in their decision to work. Employment became an intrinsic part of their subjectivity. One reader, describing the challenges of combining motherhood with work, emphasized that only the extreme situation of having three small children forced her to stay home for six months. She expressed pride in not having had long breaks from work (RGALI, 1970). Other letters frequently featured phrases like “worked all my life” and cited exact numbers of years of work experience. Women took pride in having worked their entire lives, viewing this as their civic duty and their right to have a voice and opinion. Paid employment became fundamental to women's sense of self and social fulfillment, with their narratives consistently emphasizing not just the desire to work, but to excel alongside their colleagues.
However, the analyzed texts reveal that in addition to economic and ideological factors, there was yet another element as significant to Soviet women’s decisions to work outside the household, which has not been previously discussed in academic literature.
I argue that in addition to economic incentives and communist ideology—which rejected the bourgeois model of family—the women’s responses I studied reveal another significant motivation centered on the concept of the collective, which carries several meanings in this context.
First, the collective as a specific Soviet ideological construct. The collective functioned as a fundamental social unit where individual identity was meant to merge with group identity: not merely through cooperation, but through collective consciousness and shared responsibility. In this regard, women with higher education felt a responsibility to the collective to ensure that their knowledge and skills were applied as effectively as possible. The resources invested in their education belonged not only to them personally or to their families, but to the collective as a whole.
Second, the collective in a more straightforward sense as a working team. Many responses from female readers demonstrate the value of the working team for their sense of subjectivity. At the workplace, they discussed literature, debated pressing issues, and shared personal news. Many readers described forming close relationships with their colleagues. Notably, in their letters, women paid significantly more attention to relationships with colleagues than to relationships with male partners, who remained peripheral in their narratives (Malysheva, 2024).
Recognition by the work team emerged as an essential component of women's lives, and the absence of such recognition could prove devastating, as described in one particularly revealing letter. In this correspondence, a female reader identified the most tragic aspect of her difficult life not as her own illness or her child's illness, but as the fact that her colleagues refused to believe that her child could genuinely fall sick so frequently (RGALI, 1970). Across the letters, the work collective appears sometimes as a source of support and other times as a disciplining institution, but for all female readers, it remained fundamentally important to their experience.
Recognition by the work team emerged as an essential component of women's lives.
Finally, the collective as a community. In this sense, women were motivated to work for psychological reasons, particularly the fear of social isolation. Being employed and being recognized as a member of a working team were crucial for female readers. In this way, they not only sought to conform to ideological messages but also to avoid atomization at a moment when people found themselves cut off from extended family and traditional rural communities.
For female readers, the work team (collective) functioned as something like a second family — sometimes even more important than the nuclear family itself. The nuclear family could neither be a source of fulfillment nor a substitute for the collective. This explains why periods away from work, including maternity leave, often proved psychologically challenging. At this point, the working self sharply conflicted with the maternal role, which was also considered obligatory in Soviet society.
In contrast to the type of Stalinist subjectivity conceptualized by Jochen Hellbeck (2001, 2006), late Soviet female readers of Novyi mir demonstrate a shift from the equation between self and society. They were more individualistic than the Stalinist generation and might have deconstructed some power discourses, while belonging to the collective remained crucial for their subjectivity.
This research shed light on how Soviet female subjectivity reflects universal aspects of modern women’s experiences while maintaining its distinctive characteristics within the socialist context. Work occupies a central place in the women's responses to Baranskaya's novella, revealing that employment outside the home held great significance for educated urban Soviet women, extending far beyond economic necessity. It was crucial for their sense of self and social belonging, as demonstrated by their inability to imagine life without professional engagement despite the overwhelming ‘double burden.’ The collective served as a vital social structure, sometimes rivaling family in importance.