SAMOILOVA, KONDORDIYA NIKOLAYEVNA

(1876–1920), Bolshevik; leader of Communist Party Women's Department.

Konkordiya Samoilova was one of the founders of the Soviet Communist Party's programs for emancipating women. Born into a priestly family in Irkutsk, she studied in the Bestuzhevsky Courses for Women in St. Petersburg in the 1890s. In 1901 Samoilova became a full-time member of the Social-Democratic Labor Party.

Samoilova spent sixteen years in the revolutionary underground, mostly in St. Petersburg. An editor of Pravda (Truth) in 1913, she created a column on the female proletariat and, in 1914, with Inessa Armand, Nadezhda Krupskaia, and Lyudmila Stal, founded Rabotnitsa (Female Worker), a newspaper devoted to working-class women. In 1913 she also organized the first celebration in Russia of International Woman's Day.

In 1917 Samoilova revived Rabotnitsa, which had been closed by the tsarist government. In 1918 she worked closely with Inessa Armand and Alexandra Kollontai to establish a women's department (the Zhenotdel ) within the Communist Party. While Armand and Kollontai developed the program for women's emancipation, Samoilova concentrated on building the department from the ground up. Always an enthusiastic supporter of Vladimir Lenin and a reliable, hard-working, efficient Bolshevik, Samoilova was trusted by the party leadership, despite the fact that she was as ardent an advocate for work among women as the more flamboyant Kollontai. She was also an able propagandist who crafted vivid, accessible speeches and pamphlets. Samoilova died of cholera on a propaganda trip down the Volga in 1920.

See also: feminism; kollontai, alexandra mikhail ovna; zhenotdel

bibliography

Clements, Barbara Evans. (1997). Bolshevik Women. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Wood, Elizabeth A. (1997). The Baba and the Comrade: Gender and Politics in Revolutionary Russia. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Barbara Evans Clements