nadyakrupskaya:Happy birthday to Nadezhda Krupskaya, born on February 26th, 1869! The pictures are a

nadyakrupskaya:Happy birthday to Nadezhda Krupskaya, born on February 26th, 1869! The pictures are as follows: Nadya as a little girl in 1876; sometime in the 1890s; giving a speech to Red Army soldiers in 1919; with Lenin and their niece and nephew in 1922; and with her close friend the German communist and feminist Clara Zetkin in 1929. Nadya actually came from an aristocratic family, but her parents were both orphaned at a young age and her immediate family had no land and very little money. Nadya went to a prestigious girl’s high school in St. Petersburg on scholarship. She dreamed of going to university, and wanted to study history, but women weren’t allowed in higher education in Russia at the time. She tutored children and taught at a night school for factory workers. At the same time, she was becoming active in the Russian communist movement. In 1894, she met Lenin at a Shrove Tuesday pancake supper. Although at this first meeting they got into an argument about politics, they quickly became close. After they both were arrested, he proposed marriage in prison via a letter and they married in 1898 on the way to exile in Siberia. Nadya was a crucial part of the Bolshevik movement before the revolution, helping to organize the party as well as running agents in and out of the Russian Empire from exile. She was particularly known for being good with codes. Nadya also edited most of her husband’s published work and helped manage the Bolshevik newspaper Iskra (The Spark). She also published her own writings, primarily about women’s rights and educational theory. After the revolution, Nadya was the deputy commissar of education, and focused particularly on adult literacy. The early Soviet government was extremely committed to education, and in part because of Nadya’s policies the literacy rate rose from about 25% before the Revolution to 75% in 1939, the year Nadya died. In 1922, Lenin had the first of a series of strokes. He would ultimately die in January 1924. During his illness, Nadya was his primary caregiver. Nadya had her own health issues throughout her life–she had hyperthyroidism, which led her to develop serious heart problems and also effected her reproductive health, which is probably why she and Lenin were unable to have children, despite the fact that they both wanted to. Her husband had taken care of her when she was sick before, especially after she had a then-risky thyroid operation in 1913. Although Nadya focused primarily on her dying husband and his health during this period, she also strongly opposed Stalin’s growing consolidation of power.This led to an incident in December of 1922 when Stalin called her on the telephone and shouted at her, calling her a “stupid bitch” and using other abusive and misogynistic language. This conversation further widened the rift between Lenin and Stalin. Lenin wrote a document known to history as his testament in which he condemned Stalin and endorsed Trotsky as his successor. He told Nadya to publicize it to the party leadership after his death, which she did. Nadya supported Trotsky and other claimants to leadership against Stalin, but as it became clear that most of the party supported Stalin despite the testament, she eventually capitulated in favor of party unity. Later, though, she would continue to criticize some of Stalin’s policies, in particular those related to forced collectivization. She also was adamantly and publicly against the embalming and public display of her husband’s body, which deeply disturbed her for the rest of her life. Although she was officially respected as Lenin’s widow, Stalin banned her from writing in Pravda and increasingly isolated her from the party. During the purges, most of her old comrades and many of her closest friends were executed. Although Nadya’s life ends amidst a time of horrible struggles for the Soviet Union and personal tragedies for her, I want to acknowledge the positives here and the reasons why I find her inspiring. I love Nadya for being a capable, outspoken woman who was compassionate and argued articulately for what she believed in. I also find her particularly relatable because she was a former teacher with a lifelong passion for reading, writing, and learning. She used her talents and experience to be crucially involved in the foundation of the Soviet education system. When historians discuss her, they often don’t acknowledge that she did all of this while chronically ill, which is a part of her life that is profoundly relevant to my experience as a disabled woman. -- source link

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