Opinion: How Russia Pioneered Women’s Rights
Most histories credit the West—but Russia was actually ahead in granting women political, educational, and workplace equality.
Published on Mar 18, 2026
Standard interpretations of literature on women’s rights place great emphasis on the suffragettes organized across the globe as the harbingers of what women’s rights have become today. In particular, the 19th Amendment—which prohibits the United States and its states from denying citizens the right to vote on the basis of sex—is often cited as a milestone, for it was America that set a precedent for such legislation to have widespread cultural purchase. And while Norway was the first nation to formalize universal suffrage in 1913, we are often implicitly aware that many precedents are set by what we know as the major powers for any initiative to gain teeth.
The other side of this narrative is only recently acknowledged as Cold War tensions have dissipated into public consciousness. In this counterpoint, the first major country on Earth to adopt universal suffrage unconditionally was not Washington. Instead, it was Moscow.
But how did this occur in the first place?
For many decades, women’s rights have been a cornerstone of many parties and organizations under the socialist, communist, anarchist, and red label. To give a refresher on what these terms mean, a recap of their roots is needed. And this will not be a mere rehash, but a retelling.
For instance, when socialism as an ideology and as politics is articulated by its supporters and opponents, they often go straight to definitions, be they public ownership, nationalization, and a thousand other categories. They tend to take for granted that what became known as socialism is rooted in the dilemma known for years as the social question, posed by Europe’s intelligentsia in the 1800s. The thought experiment, which became a force, is simple in its logic: with the Ancien Régime all but gone, and coupled with the realization that it cannot be brought back, especially after the fall of Napoleon in 1815, what will therefore be the bonds that shall harness society together, in the absence of tradition and firm religious customs?
A soldier in Napoleon’s column recounted in his memoir this insight during the Russian campaign of 1812: “Everyone was disguised in furs, rags, and pieces of cloth; they wore round hats and peasant caps on their heads, and many had priest’s robes from the churches. It was like a world turned upside down.”
The terms anarchism and communism came afterwards. The social thinker Pierre-Joseph Proudhon would be the first to refer to himself openly as an anarchist, which in this case is animated by the traditional resistance of the peasantry against the machinations of a centralizing state. For Proudhon, the social question, which unleashes the power and brutality of industry, must be harnessed into a cooperative or an association of producers. The producers he refers to in this regard are those who toil in the factories and till the soil.
If this echoes the observations of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, your instinct would be correct. But they differed on one point. While Proudhon conceptualized this association from the mantra that “All Men Are Brothers,” which is the motto of the League of the Just, they instead noted that this is but a fantasy. Contradictions in the city and the countryside, which became the bourgeoisie and the proletariat—terms they borrowed from the economist Sismondi—are so profound that their harmony without an upheaval is akin to monks debating how many angels can fit on the head of a pin. Thus, from this conclusion, instead of “all men are brothers,” the workers of the world must unite. But before this can be realized, the workers themselves must wrest supremacy in their respective countries while maintaining coordination with other like-minded groups overseas.
While the term communism has become associated today with grisly images, and while it is literally on the title page of Marx’s and Engels’ pamphlet, it would only become a political tendency of an explicit kind in 1918, when Vladimir Lenin’s Bolsheviks changed the name of Russia’s premier socialist organization, the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, of which they were then in possession, to the All-Russia Communist Party. Lenin and company did this to separate themselves from the social democrats, the first mass-based socialists, for their perceived failure to stop World War I in their nations and the increasing disunity in their camp. Long story short, those who followed Moscow adopted the label immediately, while those who did not retained the social-democratic label.
What is the connection of this recap to women’s rights?
Simple. For many decades, women and much of the general public have been more accepted in these groups as leaders and as rank and file. The arithmetic is blunt. Prior to 1919, the franchise was not even granted to all men. Therefore, universal suffrage for both sexes is not only popular; it is a decisive tool. The social question in this regard came hand in hand with the woman and the national questions. All tried to deal with and foist an alternative to what they deemed bourgeois arrogance, exclusion, and mismanagement.
For decades, socialist organizations have been the first to commemorate the day of women. Again, the wager is as clear as day. Drawing from classical republican interpretations of what a citizen should be, it follows that all must serve their country with equal rights and obligations. From a sentimentalist’s point of view, this is justice. Yet from a strategist’s perspective, this means that resources and manpower can be mobilized on an unprecedented scale.
The First World War became that testbed. As men were called up to fight in the trenches, women found employment on the home front largely as factory workers, farmers, technicians, and clerks. When the men came home—radicalized and alienated, exposed to many ideological currents of the period—women experienced a similar process. By 1917, when the frontlines were collapsing, it was women in Petrograd who initiated the movement that led to the Tsar’s overthrow. In recognition of this, the Russian Provisional Government, which was dominated by moderate social democrats and progressives, took the first steps to bring women into civic life, but it was soon deposed by the Bolsheviks, which intensified this reckoning.
Alexandra Kollontai, an important leader of the Bolsheviks, became one of the first women officials to hold cabinet rank in a modern, sovereign state. She shares this distinction with her counterpart, Constance Mackiewicz of Ireland’s Sinn Féin, who was fighting her country’s war of independence against the British Empire. Ireland likewise granted the franchise in the middle of the conflict.
For many governments, this produced a dilemma. Would they extend the franchise to all men and women, which many of their suffragettes had sought for decades but had gained only piecemeal reforms, or should they let them become agents of the Comintern, or the Third International? The latter became the evident off-ramp, most importantly when the All-Russian Communist Party changed its name to the All-Union Communist Party in 1925, reflecting the ascendance of the Soviet Union as a power not connected to the international banking fortunes and political class.
Almost immediately, the Soviets set their task to integrate women not just in theory but in practice. Classical education, which had once been the preserve of the aristocrats, became mass public education. Workplaces on farms and in factories did not discriminate on the basis of sex. Women gained unprecedented access to universities, and even today, post-Soviet Russia is still among the countries where a significant proportion of women are in STEM—around 39 percent, according to recent statistics. While traditional notions of womanhood are still promoted, such as being in charge of the family as their primary role, this was not contradictory to the advancement of women within Soviet society.
The first woman in space was Valentina Tereshkova. The most notorious combat unit of the USSR in World War II was the 588th Night Bomber Regiment, more popularly known as the Night Witches, which served with distinction and was known for its effective precision strikes against German and other Axis forces across the Eastern Front. This is in addition to the fact that it was the Red Army that destroyed more than 80 percent of the Nazi war machine from 1941 to 1945 and later pummeled Japan’s elite Kwantung Army during their assault in Manchuria by August. To this day, Russia boasts one of the largest numbers of women in its armed services, reflecting the legacy of the hammer and sickle upon the present double-headed eagle.
Whatever limitations the Soviet Union had, it takes a con artist to deny that it made a contribution to women’s liberation and freedom. These became the defaults for much of the Eastern bloc and for those that aligned with it. At the height of its influence in 1978, more than half of the world was covered in Red. As for what happened afterward, that is another topic, for another time.