Russia's February Revolution and the problematic origins of International Women's Day

Truth and memory

International Women's Day on March 8, 1917

Today is "International Women's Day" and over the internet socialists, communists, and well meaning persons are celebrating a holiday that was first celebrated on February 28, by the Socialist Party of America, but today's date, March 8th, is owed to a tragic history.

On March 8, 1917 (February 23 in the Julian calendar), tens of thousands of Russian women took to the streets of Petrogad (St Petersburg) in protest demanding "Bread and Peace" for the lack of food due to World War One, and within a week Czar Nicholas II had abdicated his throne in what became known as the February Revolution. This would lead eight months later to the October Revolution and the rise of the Bolsheviks and 74 years of totalitarian communist rule that led to tens of millions dead. The February Revolution that took place on March 8th in our Gregorian calendar is the origin of the reason that International Women's Day is celebrated today, and that is problematic. However, it is here to stay, the United Nations formally recognized it in 1975.

This legacy is reflected in the images spread over social media seeking to "empower" women within a revolutionary paradigm carrying heavy weapons, along with rhetoric of bringing down "capitalism, imperialism, fascism and colonialism" while ignoring how the Soviet Union allied with Nazi Germany, divided Central Europe into colonial possessions with Nazi Germany in August 1939, and created a communist empire that lasted until 1991.

More disturbing is that this revisionist history has taken over the Academy in the United States, and spread out into our educational institutions indoctrinating America's youth. For example, Anthropologist Kristen Ghodsee in her book, Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism, makes the claim that women had it better under Communism. This is not true. Professor Ghodsee makes the following argument:

"In East Germany, Scandinavia, the Soviet Union, and Eastern Europe, political leaders supported the idea of women’s emancipation through their full incorporation into the labor force. These ideas soon spread to China, Cuba, and a wide variety of newly independent countries across the globe."

With the exception of Scandinavia, which we will return to later, the others are dystopian nightmares and the record on women leaves a lot to be desired. For the sake of brevity lets look at three countries that  Kristen Ghodsee mentions positively in her book.

 Romanian orphanages packed with children not receiving attention. Credit: The New York Times

Communist Romania
She makes some interesting claims that deserve closer scrutiny, especially citing statistics that women in Romania believed life was better under Nicolae Ceauşescu's communist regime.

"47 percent of women thought that state socialism was better for their country, only 42 percent of men said the same. Similarly, whereas 36 percent of men claimed that life was worse before 1989, only 31 percent of women said life under the dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu was worse than the present."

Consider for a moment being born and placed in a cage as a newborn washed via a hose with cold water and never experiencing human touch. Fed like an animal and contracting HIV, hepatitis, and other diseases through dirty needles used to inject the child with vitamins. All of this done to sell children, as one would any other commodity, on the international black-market. Heartless capitalists? No, heartless Marxist-Leninists in the Ceausescu communist regime of Romania.

Nicolae Ceauşescu in a propaganda photo during his dictatorship

The Ceausescu regime decided in the mid 1960s that it needed to increase its population and in 2013 Scientific American explained how this crime was systematically planned out and its aftermath in the article Tragedy Leads to Study of Severe Child Neglect. Shannon Quinn authored the essay "17 Moments In History that Inspired the Handmaid’s Tale" in History Collection and provides a summary of Ceauşescu's Decree 770 policy for women.

One of the specific events that Margaret Atwood found during her research process was “Decree 770” in Romania. This was a law that passed in 1967 that made abortions and all forms of contraception illegal. This had nothing to do with religious beliefs. It was an action that the government believed was necessary for the future of their country. The government already taxed married couples a 6% income tax if they did not have children between the ages of 25 and 50, but they realized that this was not enough to stop people from using contraception.

During the 1950’s, Romanian women were entering the workforce and having fewer children. By the 1960’s, abortion became a common practice, because there were very few birth control options available to women to prevent pregnancy. This began a sharp dip in the country’s birth rate. The Communist Party wanted the population to increase from 23 million to 30 million in a single year, so they enacted Decree 770. After the change of law in 1967, and women no longer had access to birth control, the number of babies born that year skyrocketed to roughly double what they had been the year before. Thousands of new preschools and nursery schools had to be built. Orphanages were overflowing with children whose parents could not afford them.  Aside from making abortions illegal and taking contraception off of store shelves, women’s bodies were literally policed. Decree 770 forced women to visit the gynecologist once a month to check for pregnancy, and police officers stood in the halls to make sure women complied. If a woman was pregnant, the doctors followed her progress very closely. Wealthy women were able to buy birth control pills and condoms on the black market, but poor women did not have that option. There were some cases where women caught the pregnancy before the doctors did, and some women died while attempting to give themselves an at-home abortion. The policy continued until the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1980’s.

Hundreds of thousands of children were subjected to this in Romania, and millions of women were forced to have children. This real world history inspired Margaret Atwood's Handmaid's Tale,  but we are supposed to believe that Romanian women miss this?

Foreign tourists with young Cuban women at the beach

Communist Cuba
Professor Ghodsee in her book, Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism, also makes the critique that women in post-Communist Eastern Europe are "once again commodities to be bought and sold—their price determined by the fickle fluctuations of supply and demand."  She makes no mention of widespread prostitution in Cuba, and the claim by Fidel Castro in May 2001, that Cuban prostitutes were the most educated.

"One day when I was down in Brazil, an Argentinian asked me 'Is it true that some girls who are university graduates sometimes practice prostitution?"' Castro said in a rare public reference to a highly sensitive subject for Cuba's government. "I replied instantly, without thinking, 'That proves prostitutes in Cuba have a university level,' " he added, laughing at the anecdote given during a lengthy  speech to close a Cuban workers' congress in Havana. [...] Castro gave no figures this time, whereas he had laced his 1998 speech with statistics like the fact that more than 6,700 prostitutes and around 190 pimps were rounded up in Havana in the first 11 months of that year. He also made no reference to Cuba's latest tactics in the fight on prostitution, which since 1998 has included the closure of bars and discotheques, night raids, the sending of thousands of women to rehabilitation schools, and new penalties for sex-related crimes like child abuse or pimping.

An online 2016 Travel guide repeats regime propaganda that prostitutes in Cuba are not driven by economic necessity, citing a speech of the late dictator claiming that "Cubans did not need to earn extra money by getting involved with tourists. The state took care of everything, so the women that were getting involved with foreign men did so for their pleasure." This is a lie, and there is much dire need in Cuba due to economic necessity that arises from a centralized communist economy. The reality is that prostitution never went away in Cuba, but went underground.

The difference between communist regimes and capitalist regimes is that you can complain in the latter and not be beaten, imprisoned, or killed because of your political views.

During Mao's Cultural Revolution thousands of young women were raped in camps

Communist China
China expert Frank Dikotter explained how in "1968, millions were sent to the countryside after they finished school, some of whom were girls as young as 14. Thousands of young girls were left at the mercy of villagers and raped.” Xinran  in her 2002 The Good Women of China described how young girls suffered the worse of the sexual horrors in the Cultural Revolution: "The perpetrators were their teachers, their friends, even their fathers and brothers, who lost control of their animal instincts." Mao died in 1976 and the decade long blood letting came to an end.

On September 26, 1980 The New York Times ran a UPI story reporting that "Chinese Reds Limited To a Child Per Family"  and euphemistically wrote  "China intensified its population-control drive today by ordering the 38 million Communist Party members to have only one child per family" and how the policy would use "painstaking patience and persuasion." Decade later Time Magazine reported in 2015 that "patience and persuasion" included "forced abortions and sterilization, and a gender imbalance resulting from female infanticide." 
 
Tom Hilditch in the South China Morning Post (Hong Kong), reproduced in World Press Review, in September of 1995 described it as a "A Holocaust of Little Girls" and reported on the plight of a Chinese baby girl in an orphanage:

Mei-ming has lain this way for 10 days now: tied up in urine-soaked blankets, scabs of dried mucus growing across her eyes, her face shrinking to a skull, malnutrition slowly shriveling her two-year old body. The orphanage staff call her room the "dying room", and they have abandoned here for the very same reasons her parents abandoned her shortly after she was born. She is a girl. When Mei-ming dies four days later, it will be of sheer neglect. Afterward, the orphanage will deny she ever existed. She will be just another invisible victim of the collision between China's one-child policy and its traditional preference for male heirs. She is one of perhaps 15 million female babies who have disappeared from China's demographics since the one-child-per-family policy was introduced in 1979.

 Like, Senator Sanders, Professor Ghodsee mixes in Nordic countries with totalitarian regimes to make what she is advocating more palatable. Scandinavian countries are capitalist welfare states that respect private property rights, promote business, and respect both human rights and the rule of law. They are the antithesis of China, Cuba, the Soviet Union, and Communist Eastern Europe. Fareed Zakaria on CNN detailed the reality of Scandinavian countries in the video below.