The printworker who rose to the Central Committee: a proletarian woman revolutionary
At the 1918 First Congress of Working Women and Peasant Women, when Lenin entered the Hall of Columns, Nikolaeva rose and began to sing the Internationale — 1,147 delegates rose with her.
A Bolshevik revolutionary from the printworkers. As editor of Rabotnitsa (1917) she rallied working women to the party; during the Civil War she led the Petrograd women's section. She rose to the Central Committee and Orgburo, one of the highest-ranking women in the Soviet apparatus.
Career Timeline
- 1909Joins RSDLP(b); active in the printers' union
- 1908–15Repeated arrests and exile; continues revolutionary propaganda
- 1917Editor of Rabotnitsa; participates in October Revolution
- 1918–19Heads Petrograd Zhenotdel and agitprop; chairs First Congress of Working Women
- 1924–26Member of Orgburo, candidate member of Secretariat, head of Zhenotdel
- 1930–33Head of Agitation and Mass Campaigns Dept, CC
- 1936–44Secretary of the All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions
- 1942Mission to Britain; aids wounded under Luftwaffe attack on return convoy
Related historical events
- 1917.10–1918.01The October RevolutionOctober Revolution participant
- 1941–1945The Great Patriotic WarAUCTU secretary; trained nurses, evacuated children, trade-union mission to BritainAs AUCTU secretary she oversaw the training of nurses and medical auxiliaries, the evacuation of children to the rear, and trade-union patronage over Red Army units, while serving as a non-staff lecturer for the Red Army's Main Political Directorate. In 1942 she was sent to Britain with a trade-union delegation; on the return convoy to Murmansk under Luftwaffe attack, she distinguished herself dressing the wounded.
The Zhenotdel and the Bolshevik Women's Movement
Nikolaeva was a central figure in building the institutional foundations of the Bolshevik women's movement. From her days as a St. Petersburg printworker she agitated among working women, and she wrote for the Bolshevik women's journal Rabotnitsa (The Woman Worker), founded in 1913. Released from exile after the February Revolution, she returned to Petrograd and became the journal's editor. During the July 1917 crackdown, when every other Bolshevik newspaper was shut down, Rabotnitsa alone continued to appear. And it was in its pages that Lenin's 'Three Crises' was published.
In November 1918, Nikolaeva chaired the First All-Russian Congress of Working Women and Peasant Women in Moscow. At first only about 40 delegates arrived, as Civil War transport had broken down, but telegrams poured in and the final attendance reached 1,147. The congress adopted a programme for organising women around the socialisation of domestic labour, maternity protection, the abolition of prostitution, and women's literacy. And it led directly to the creation of the Zhenotdel, the party's central women's department.
During the Civil War, Nikolaeva served as head of the Petrograd party committee's women's section and its agitation-propaganda department. When Yudenich's White army advanced on Petrograd in the autumn of 1919, she served on the revolutionary tribunal of the 2nd City District. From 1919 to 1924 she returned as editor of Rabotnitsa, turning the journal into the central organising medium for working women and peasant women alike.
In 1924, succeeding Alexandra Kollontai and Sofia Smidovich, Nikolaeva was appointed head of the Zhenotdel (the Central Committee's Department for Work Among Women), the summit of the Soviet women's movement. That same year she was elected a full member of the Central Committee, a member of the Orgburo, and a candidate member of the Secretariat, becoming only the second woman in Soviet history to enter the Secretariat. As head of the Zhenotdel she drove the literacy and de-veiling campaigns among Muslim women in Central Asia, expanded the nationwide system of women delegate assemblies (delegatki), and built out the public-health infrastructure that followed the 1920 legalisation of abortion. When she left operational work in 1926 to study at the Marxism-Leninism courses, the Zhenotdel continued to rely on the network of local women organisers she had built until its dissolution in 1930.