Bolshevik who succeeded Kollontai at the head of the Zhenotdel and set the family and single mothers against “free love”
In 1922 she ousted Kollontai as head of the Central Committee’s women’s department (Zhenotdel) and openly rejected her ideas of free love and the abolition of the family.
A Bolshevik revolutionary born Sofia Chernosvitova into a lawyer’s family in Tula. At eighteen she married Platon, elder brother of Anatoly Lunacharsky, and abroad with him she met Plekhanov and Zasulich’s Emancipation of Labour group and became a Social Democrat. She joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1898, worked in Tula as a link to Iskra, helped organise the city’s first political workers’ demonstration in 1903 and led the Tula committee. In 1911 she married Pyotr Smidovich. She headed the women’s department of the Moscow party committee in 1919–1922 and of the Central Committee in 1922–1924, setting equal partnership in marriage and the protection of single mothers against Kollontai’s ideas of free love. She later sat on the Central Control Commission and died in Moscow in 1934.
Also known as: Sofya Smidovich · Sophia Smidovich · Sofia Lunacharskaya · Sofia Chernosvitova
Activities and affiliations
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1898–
Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP)
Social movements and organizing -
1914–1934
Soviet Communist Party and BolsheviksMain
Social movements and organizing
Related historical events
The Zhenotdel and the quarrel over “free love”
The daughter of the Tula lawyer Nikolai Chernosvitov, she grew up on her mother’s estate at Shchuchye in Venev district, where her liberal father built a school so that she could teach peasant children. At eighteen she married the physician Platon Lunacharsky; abroad with him in 1894–1898 she met Plekhanov and Zasulich of the Emancipation of Labour group and became a convinced Social Democrat, and through them she came to know Anna Ulyanova-Elizarova and formed a friendship with the Ulyanov family. She joined the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1898; arrested in 1901 and banished to Tula, she worked in the city library and served as a link to Iskra. She helped prepare and lead Tula’s first political workers’ demonstration on 14 September 1903 and was arrested again; released in 1904, she moved with her husband to Kiev, and after his death she returned to Tula and led the party’s Tula committee. In 1911 she married Pyotr Smidovich, and from 1914 she worked in the Moscow regional bureau of the Bolshevik Central Committee and took part in the February and October revolutions. She headed the women’s department of the Moscow party committee in 1919–1922, and in 1922 she ousted Kollontai and led the Central Committee’s department of women workers and peasant women until 1924. After the revolution she stood among the more conservative Bolshevik women, openly rejecting Kollontai’s free love and the abolition of the family; the family, she held, should be a healthy relationship of equal partners, and she devoted herself to the plight of single mothers. Kollontai called their relationship “too painful to talk about” in her memoirs. Smidovich remained an outspoken critic of “loose sexual tendencies”. In 1925–1930 she worked in the apparatus of the Central Control Commission and on the Central Committee’s party board, and the 13th to 15th party congresses elected her to the Central Control Commission. During collectivisation in 1929 she asked the party to let the Zhenotdel take a larger part in winning peasant women over to the collective farms. In 1931–1932 she was deputy chairman of the Soviet Central Executive Committee’s committee for improving women’s labour and living conditions and worked in the Society of Old Bolsheviks, and in 1933 she received the Order of Lenin for her work in the communist education of women workers and peasant women. She died in Moscow on 26 November 1934.