ABSTRACT
The collectivization of Soviet agriculture gave rise to a massive wave of peasant protest and violence in the countryside during the late 1920s and early 1930s. Peasant unrest began on the eve of wholesale collectivization in 1928 during the implementation of ‘extraordinary measures’ in state grain procurements. Peasant women were able to get away with a great deal more than their male counterparts in resisting collectivization and the other policies of the times. Stakhanovites were noticeably scarce among the working women who testified to the wisdom of the draft decree banning abortions. The militant class outlook that had been a vital part of the proletariat’s revolutionary tradition and identity was distinctly out of favor with the authorities, in both the domestic and, from 1934, the international contexts. The cultural mythology of the latter half of the 1930s was decidedly domestic in orientation and integrative in function.
