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Nannies in the Homes of the Soviet Elite

27.03.2013, 23:06

Transcending Borders of Class, Ethnicity, and Culture


Alissa Klots
Rutgers, State University of New Jersey

Scholars have long noted the role of domestic service as a social institution that facilitates cultural exchange between lower and upper classes (1). In industrializing societies servants are usually recruited from the recent migrants from the country side or the urban laborers. They work in the middle and upper-class families where they are daily exposed to the culture of their masters. Domestics assume the new styles of dress, ways of speech and standards of cleanliness. At the same time they bring their own cultural baggage and share it with members of the household, especially children. Wet-nurses, governesses and nannies give youngsters a taste of village and urban folklore, introduce them to religious tenets and provide them with knowledge about the adult world.
According to the All-Union Census of 1939, there were over half a million women officially employed as domestic workers (2). Many more were working unofficially. The job turnover was high: some women returned to their villages to get married or to take care of the family plot while others found employment opportunities outside domestic service. It is safe to say that in the first three decades of Bolshevik industrialization, several million women experienced employment in private households as nannies, cooks and maids of all works. If we multiply this rather approximate figure by the number of urban dwellers who employed domestics and members of their families, it becomes clear that domestic service was an important social platform for interaction between female migrants from the countryside and privileged urban families.
Specialists in Soviet history have paid little attention to domestic service as a mechanism of cultural interaction between newcomers from the countryside and urban elites. While scholars like Catriona Kelly and Orlando Figes have noted the particular role of a peasant nanny in introducing children of soviet elite to Orthodox Christianity (3), appropriation of employers? culture by domestics remains unexplored (4). A Petersburg scholar Marina Vitukhnovskaya has indeed argued that domestic service jeopardized chances for integration into the urban society and professional mobility for female migrants because it confined them to their employers? homes and limited their circle of contacts to ?their own kind? (5). In this paper, I intend to show that domestic service could be a step to successful integration for female newcomers to the city. I seek to reconstruct the delicate ways in which soviet domestic workers and their employers transcended borders of class through daily interactions within the household and transformed each other?s everyday practices as well as each other?s worldview. I will give special attention to cultural exchange between ethnically Russian and Ukrainian nannies and their Jewish employers in Stalinist society. Attention to this this aspect of domestic service was prompted by the sources themselves: a large online collection dedicated to Jewish experience in the twentieth century Russia (6) includes numerous memoirs of members of privileged and not-so-privileged Soviet Jewish families that employed domestics in 1930s-1950s. Although, as Yuri Slezkine has shown, Jewish-born soviet elite of the 1920s-1930s tried to shed off their Jewishness and embraced their new soviet identity, the still knew that to a certain extent they were Jews ? the awareness that intensified during the war with the Nazis and in the post-war ?struggle against cosmopolitanism? (7). In the paper I attempt to show how Jewishness played in the interactions between Jewish families and non-Jewish nannies.
The paper will mostly focus on those domestics who worked as nannies for several reasons. Firstly, it looks like the overwhelming majority of urban families who hired servants did so in order to have someone to look after their children. Thus baby-sitting was the defining experience for most soviet domestics and the words ?nan?ka? (nanny) and domrabotnitsa (domestic worker) were often used interchangeably. Secondly, nannies are more prominent in autobiographical sources and their influence on children is more palpable. Even though there is evidence that families with low income as well as families in the countryside employed nannies, I will talk about privileged urban families ? those of engineers, doctors, administrators, party functionaries, and academic elites. This category of employers hired the majority of domestics. They are also more useful as objects of research for this particular project because they were bearers of values arguably more different from those of domestic workers than those of the employers from the countryside and ?proletarian? families. The chronological framework of the paper is rather tentative and covers the three decades between 1930 and 1960.
Autobiographic materials, such as memoirs, autobiographical fiction and oral interviews constitute the bulk of the source base. I have to admit that it is biased to the employer?s perspective and voices of domestics are heard either through the writings of their employers? or through oral interviews conducted and to a great extent shaped by the scholar through the questions he or she poses. The retrospective essence of memoirs and interviews, which often makes the use of these sources problematic, in this case works for the project?s advantage. It allows us to see what aspects of interactions between nannies and children, domestics and employers had a lasting, even life-changing effect. Autobiographical accounts of one?s childhood are attempts to understand what and who made the person who he is now. The fact that an individual includes the figure of his or her nanny in his memoirs means that the nanny is important, that she played a certain role in the author?s life. At the same time, autobiographical materials produced by soviet intelligentsia are often driven by nostalgia, shaped by the myth of happy childhood from the works of Russian classics of the genre (8). A question of the interviewer to talk about one?s nanny or a domestic worker often came as a surprise to respondents, and it triggered stories that had not been retrieved from the depths of memory for a long time. In such cases the respondent tried to ?make sense? of these distant memories in the course of the interview. However, the myth of the happy Soviet childhood (or youth in the case of former nannies) informs oral narratives not less than the written ones.
The majority of soviet domestic workers were not professional caretakers but migrant peasant women. Employers often ended up with nannies whose understanding of childminding was based on their experience as older sisters or cousins in large peasant households with occasional slapping and beatings being the norm (9). Another issue that often came up was cooking. Coming from collective farms, domestic workers had little knowledge of urban cuisine, did not know how to light a kerosene stove and were unfamiliar with many products available in the cities. So, in order to have a nanny who could actually perform her duties employers had to spend time teaching her.
Cooking lessons often come up in the interviews of both nannies and children. For example, Asya Engaus clearly remembers how her mother, a doctor, taught her young nanny Faia to cook. In the interview she uses these lessons to prove that her teenage nanny was treated like a member of a ?normal family? (10). Culinary preferences of the employers could quickly become cooking habits for the domestic for the rest of her life. Thus, Zoya Dolgopolova, who experienced post-war hunger in a small village in the Urals and ?did not dream? of what their employers had for dinner, to the present day uses a book of recipes she learned at her new home in the city of Molotov (11).
Both Faia and Zoya were very young. Older nannies, especially in the homes of young and inexperienced parents, took matters in their own hands and made their own rules in the kitchen. Many years on, Boris Bershtein who grew up in a rather privileged family in Minsk, remembers his nanny?s Lenten soup which seemed to be ?the most delicious thing on earth? (12) while Irina Ablizina, daughter of successful geologists, cannot forget the revolting garlic cutlets and chunks of salo ? a traditional Ukrainian dish (13). Moreover, domestics taught their employers certain cooking skills, sometimes of questionable value as in the case of Yakov Farber, who witnessed his young wife washing macaroni ?from the inside and outside? following the advice of their domestic worker (14).
Cooking was not the only skill domestics acquired from their employers. In order to adapt to the new urban life, it was important for the young nannies to learn new standards of behavior, particularly how to dress and speak. Their employers were not only the role models but often eager teachers. Irina Ablizina recalls how her grandmother, a ?true pedagogue? constantly corrected the way her nanny spoke (15). The soviet law on domestic service required employers to provide their workers with working clothes in addition to monetary compensation, however, many employers preferred to ?save? their worker?s money and then buy an item of clothing, such as a coat or a pair of boots, for them (16).
This patronizing attitude towards domestic workers sometimes led to involvement in their lives that far exceeded the questions of cooking, dress or speech. It was not unusual for the employers to arrange for the young nanny?s education. Sometimes they used their own professional connections like in the case of Zoya Dolgopolova, whose employer, a physician, enrolled her in courses for nurses (17). Olga Popova, a deputy machine-shop manager, didn?t take the question of her domestic worker?s education so lightly. She and her husband decided that the teenage nanny had to receive a high school diploma first. Then the girl became a geography student at the university. The future profession was solely the choice of the employers who believed that the girl wouldn?t be able to pass entrance exams to any other departments. As Olga Popova put it, she ?didn?t see any special talents? in her domestic. She recalls how she spent nights solving math problems for the young nanny, while her husband was drawing charts to help the girl get through course work (18). In both cases, the young nannies do not seem to have much say in choosing their career path.
Such attitude towards one?s domestic servant is, of course, a sign of good nature of the employers. However, it should also be viewed through the prism of the concept of ?culturedness?. This discourse in Stalin?s Russia served as an ?everyday ?soft? instrument of discipline for new urban dwellers, shaping and normalizing their everyday life according to the model of culturedness? as well as the ?means of integrating of the ?low classes? into the system of quasi-elite values? (19). While in the industry the level of ?culturedness? of workers was being raised by trade union activists and members of the obshestvennitsy movement, it was for the private employers to introduce their domestics to the norms and values of the soviet society. The notion that it was employers? duty to educate their domestics was part of the official discourse on domestic service (20).
This messianic vision of bringing culture to the ?backward masses? had long been a part of the intelligentsia?s understanding of their role as guiding and educating the ?people?. In late imperial Russia both ?conservatively? and ?progressively?-minded representatives of the educated classes called for an active intervention into the lives of servants. The former emphasized the role of the master in maintaining servants? morality and religiosity (21), while the latter tried to educate their domestics about questions of class struggle and revolution (22).
Of course, these paternalistic relationships between employers and domestics were mostly present in cases when the nanny was a teenager or a young woman. According to the All-Union Population Census of 1939, more than 40% of domestics workers were under the age of 20, and 20% were between the age of 20 and 29 (23). For these young migrants the quasi-familial relationship with their employers substituted for the kinship networks they left behind because in many cases they simply did not know anybody in the city and had no one to turn to for moral support or advice. This is especially obvious in cases when young domestics felt the need to introduce their potential husbands to the family of their employer (even after they have left domestic service) (24) while the mistresses helped them to prepare dowry (25). The maternal aspect of the mistress?s relationship to her servants was not a unique feature of the soviet society. Similar practices were wide-spread in western capitalist countries were employers felt obliged to educate domestics, ?to prepare them for life, and to provide them with a Christian environment in which to live? and a servant ?could be treated as a wayward or uneducated kin who could become cultured and refined through her contact with her new family? (26). What makes the soviet case special is the way the household practice of educating servants was an extension of public campaign for ?culturedness?.
Domestic workers in soviet households did not only absorb the new urban culture. Their impact on members of their employers? families, especially the children, cannot be underestimated. Katriona Kelly has shown that pre-revolutionary discussions of nanny?s influence on children were informed by nostalgic notion of a ?real Russian peasant nanny? as well as anxieties over putting a child in the hands of an ?untrained nanny? (27). After the revolution, my own research has shown, some activists were also worried by the ?backwardness? and professional inaptness of a privately employed nanny who had ?upbringing of future soviet citizens in her hands? (28). However, propositions to provide domestic workers with training that will allow them to contribute to children?s proper communist upbringing were never put into practice.
Indeed, nannies could make a lasting impact on children?s lives. As one of the respondents put it, they ?met people who were very different and would have never seen them if not for those nannies. They were people from a completely different milieu, generally speaking, from a different life? (28). Peasant nannies provided children in privileged urban families with a rare opportunity to learn something about life in the countryside. Through stories, songs, and colloquial expressions peasant culture permeated the household. In rare cases children even grew up bilingual, like Valeri Damye, who claims in his autobiography that his mother tongue was ?ukrain?ska mova? of his nanny rather than Russian spoken by his parents (30). Of course, it is difficult to say how much of this influence is retrospectively imagined but the ability of some memoirists to cite songs and stories told by their nannies suggest that young children did appropriate some elements of peasant culture. An illustration of this appropriation is an episode from the life of Tatyana Kostareva, a daughter of an high-ranking accountant, who scandalized her parents? friends by wishing one of them happy birthday with the following poem she learned from her nanny: ?Be healthy as a cow, be happy as a pig?. This is a version of a traditional peasant greeting ?be healthy as a cow, be fertile as a pig? that Vladimir Dal? included in his collection of peasant proverbs in 1862 (31).
For those nannies, who had not lost their connections with the village, it was not unusual to take children along on visits to the countryside (32). For children from urban families this practice was a way to get some ?fresh air? as well as get a firsthand experience of peasant life. Sometimes such trips to the village were not a planned vacation but an escape from an orphanage for children whose parents were arrested on counter-revolutionary charges (33). In her famous oral autobiography Podstrochnik Lilianna Lungina tells a story of her son?s nanny who brought her first mistress and her two children to her village after the head of the family was arrested as a spy and for several years supported them by working in the kolkhoz (34).
The stories that nannies told children were not always the ones that soviet authorities would want them to hear. Granddaughter of a famous soviet scholar Dmitry Likhachev, Zinaida Kurbatova, in her memoirs recalls the anti-Soviet chastushki she learned from the nanny who had been with her family since the 1930s (35). Most likely little Zinaida could not understand the political message of the song but since it stayed in her memory at some point in her life she had to wonder why people in her nanny?s village wanted to ?feed the communists to the fish?. Yevgeniy Rein is more direct about the role he believes his nanny played in his political ?education?, stating in an interview that when he was ten years old she told him everything he needed to know about Stalin: ?that his was a villain who devastated the peasantry, a murderer and a paranoiac? and since that time he had not learned anything new on the matter (36). It is certainly hard to believe that a nanny?s anti-Soviet words were as important for a child in a privileged soviet family as they are presented in the memoirs of individuals who strongly associate themselves with the late soviet dissident movement. At the same time, it is impossible to completely write off the role of a nanny in shaping a person?s worldview as nostalgically imagined. In fact, Rein does not claim that he accepted what the nanny had told him when she (supposedly) did. He just retrospectively admits that she had it right all along.
Older nannies were the first to introduce children to an important component of peasant worldview ? Orthodox Christianity. The way these women transmitted their beliefs on the children could be quite different. While some tried to teach the kids certain biblical values, chastising them for greed or envy (37), others went so far as to invite a priest to sprinkle the children?s room with holy water (38) or to even secretly baptize the child (39). Church services could have a lasting impact on a child. A provincial writer Bella Zif, who considers herself to be a part of the Jewish community, loves going to Orthodox Churches ? a habit fostered by her religious Russian nanny (40). In her autobiographical novel she included a fictitious scene of her Orthodox baptism, an episode that never happened but something she is clearly longing for (41).
It is interesting to note that in all cases mentioned above religious nannies were living in soviet Jewish families. In The Jewish Century Yuri Slezkine cites a memoir of, Inna Gaister, a daughter of a prominent Bolshevik theorist. She writes that her nanny?s ?good-natured and simple-hearted peasant God? had a much stronger appeal to her than her grandmother?s ?mean? Jewish God (42). Even though it is unlikely that either the grandmother or the nanny had enough moral power to convert Inna to their faiths the quotation captures the multiplicity of cultural layers present in the house of Soviet Jewish elites: the internationalist Bolshevik commitments of the parents, the traditional Jewish world of the grandmother and the Russian peasant world of the nanny. In the memoirs, these domestics became ?faithful reflections of the old revolutionaries?s peasant nannies? (43) that connected their authors to pre-revolutionary Russian intelligentsia. One of the extreme examples is the case of Yevgeniy Rein. In the interview he unambiguously states that he believes himself to be not a Jew but a Russian because he was brought up by a Russian woman ? his nanny Tanya (44).
Working for a Jewish family could be a life changing experience for a domestic as well. In didactic literature for soviet domestic workers anti-Semitism was presented as a sign of backwardness, a disgrace for soviet working class along with illiteracy and religiosity (45). Instances of covert anti-Semitism are sometimes described in memoirs. When the family of Maksim Gitman was being evacuated from Kiev in 1941 his nanny, whom he believed to be his mother?s close friend, happily declared that she was glad to see the ?damn Jews? leave so she could finally occupy their apartment (46). However, many teenage domestics who had had no previous contact with Jews working for a Jewish family in the city was a chance to form their own idea of these people. When Zoya Dolgopolova read in her employers? passports that they were Jews she felt extremely confused and frightened. But the close relationship she developed with their family, her admiration for their industriousness and ?culturedness? helped her develop a positive attitude towards Jewish people. (47) Moreover, when in the early 1990s her former employers immigrated to Israel she made it a point to visit them there before she dies. Many years have passed since she stopped working for the L?vovskii family but she still sometimes refers to them as ?my Jews?.
The soviet society of the 1930s-1950s was going through serious transformation. One of the most visible aspects of these changes was the unprecedented migration of peasants into cities. Crammed into overpopulated apartments and barracks these newcomers constantly rubbed shoulders with the ?old? urban dwellers. However, families of the new soviet elites were to a great extent shielded from these migrants in their special housing facilities (doma spetsialistov, doma pisatelei, etc), special cafeterias, and special stores. Peasant women hired as domestic workers brought elements of village culture right into the homes of the soviet elite. As this paper has shown, some of them made a profound impact on the families of their employers and especially the children they took care of.
At the same time domestic workers, the majority of whom were teenagers or young women, were also greatly influenced by their masters who acted as role models, mothers and teachers for their domestics. In spite of the patronizing nature of the servant-master relationships domestics were not passive objects of the educational efforts of their employers. They actively appropriated the urban culture and used it for their own empowerment in this new, often hostile environment.

1. J.J. Hecht, The Domestic Servants Class in XVIII century London (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1956), p.200; Theresa M. McBride, The Domestic Revolution: The Modernization of Household Service in England and France, 1820-1920 (New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, Inc., 1976), p.119; David Katzman, Seven Days a Week: Women and Domestic Service in Industrializing America (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1978), p.156; Evelyn Glenn, Issei, Nisei, Warbride: Three Generations of Japanese American Women in Domestic Service (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1986), p.126; Raffaella Sarti, Dangerous Liaisons: Servants as 'Children' Taught by Their Masters and as 'Teachers' of Their Masters' Children (Italy and France, Sixteenth to Twenty-First Centuries), Paedagogica historica, Vol.43, No.4, 2007, pp. 565-587.
2. Vsesoyuznaya perepis? naseleniya 1939 g. Osnovnye itogi (Moskva: Nauka, 1992), p.111
3. Catriona Kelly, Children?s World: Growing up in Russia, 1890-1991 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007), pp.337, 367; Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin?s Russia (New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt and Company, 2008), p.47- 48. Orlando Figes argues that in many households nannies served as ?a moral counterweight to the household?s ruling Soviet attitudes?.
4. In the most recent book on Russian nannies Steven Grants also focuses on the influence of nannies on children. Steven A Grant, Russian Nanny, Real and Imagined: History, Culture, Mythology (Washington, DC: New Academia Publishing, 2012)
5. Marina Vitukhnovskaia, ?Staryie? i ?novyie? gorozhane: migrant v Leningrade 1930kh godov in Normy i tsennosti povsednevnoi zhizni: Stanovlenie sotsialisticheskogo obraza zhizni v Rossii, 1920-30 gody, ed. by T. Vikhavainen (Sankt-Peterburg: Neva, 2000), pp.133-134.
6. Zametki po yevreiskoi istorii //http://berkovich-zametki.com/
7. Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 275
8. Andrew Baruch Wachtel, The Battle for Childhood: Creation of a Russian Myth (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1990), p.152
9. GARF. F.5452.Op.12.D.154.L.23. Protocol Otcheta sobrania domashnikh rabotnits Mestkoma No.2, April 8, 1928, Minsk
10. Interview with A.D. Engaus, dd. January 24, 2009.
11. Interview with Z.F. Dolgopolova, dd. June 13, 2012.
12. Boris Bernshtein. Bor?kini rasskazy // http://bborka.com/borka_stories/1story.htm /> 13. Interview with I.D. Ablizina, dd. January 11, 2010.
14. Yakov Farber. Lubov? do toi samoi berezki. Zametki po everiskoi istorii. No.1 (136), Jan 2011.
15. Interview with I.D. Ablizina, dd. January 11, 2010.
16. Interview with Z.F. Dolgopolova, dd. June 13, 2012.
17. Ibidem.
18. Interview with O.S. Popova, dd. June 27, 2010.
19. V.V. Volkov. Kontsepsiia kul?turnosti, 1935-1938, Sotsiologicheskii zhurnal. 1996, ?1/2. pp. 201-220.
20. Z.A. Bogomazova. Kul?turnaia rabota sredi domashnikh rabotnits (Moskva: Knigoizdatel?stvo VTsSPS, 1928), p.25
21. S.P.Shumov. Khoz?aieva I prisluga: Po zhitiiu sv. much. Agafoklii (Moskva: Otd. rapsprostr. dukhovno-nravstevennoi knigi pri Mosk. ob-ve l?ubitelei dukhovnogo prosvescheniia, 1904), pp.3-8.
22. Stranichka iz zhizni i deiatel?nosti chlena partii RKP (b) Ivana Fyodorovicha Zudina v period vremeni s 1905 po 1907 gg vkluchitel?no. GARF. F. R6861. Op.1. D.66. L.39
23. Vsesoyuznaya perepis? naseleniya 1939 g, p.135
24. Interview with Z.F. Dolgopolova, dd. June 13, 2012; interview with A.G. Chernykh, dd. September 21, 2009.
25. Interview with T.A. Kostareva, dd. September 21, 2009.
26. David Katzman, Seven Days a Week, p.156
27. Catriona Kelly, Children?s World, p.367
28. Z.A. Bogomazova. Kul?turnaia rabota sredi domashnikh rabotnits, p.64
29. Interview with I.D. Ablizina, dd. January 11, 2010.
30. V.V. Damye. Karandashi. Samizdat // http://zhurnal.lib.ru/d/damxe_w_w/karandashi.shtml /> 31. V. Dal?. Poslovitsi russkogo naroda. Tom 2 (Leningrad, Moskva, 1987), p.322
32. Interview with A.V. Godiner, dd. December 2, 2009.
33. M Azov. Razgovor dl?a skameiki. Iz povesti ?Itsik Shraiber v strane bol?shevikov?. Zametki po everioi istorii, No.44, 2004 // http://berkovich-zametki.com/Nomer44/Azov1.htm /> 34. O. Dorman. Povstrochnik. Zhizn? Lilianny Lunginoi, rasskazannaia eiu v fil?me Olega Dormana (Moskva: Astrel?, 2010), p. 351
35. Z.D. Kurbatova. Vospominania o sem?e Likhacheva. Zhili-byli? Nashe nasledie. No.79-80, 2006. http://www.nasledie-rus.ru/podshivka/7908.php. /> 36. Y. Rein. Istoria ne znaiet spravedlivosti. Novoie vremya, No.43, 2004, p.43
37. Interview with A.V. Godiner, dd. December 2, 2009.
38. M.V. Fok, Vospominania, p. 136 // http://www.ihst.ru/projects/sohist/papers/viet/1993/2/132-138.pdf /> 39. N.A. Bonk, Vz?ala s soboi vyshyvanie. Natalia Aleksandrovna Bonko rodnykh mestakh, l?ud?akh I inostrannykh iazykakh. http://www.rulife.ru/mode/article/1159/. /> 40. Interview with B.L. Zif, dd. January 24, 2010.
41. B.L. Zif. Provintsiia: Povest?. Iz vospominani (Perm: Zvesda, 2004), pp.10-12
42. Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century, pp.231-232.
43. Ibidem.
44. Y. Rein. Istoria ne znaiet spravedlivosti, p.43.
45. Z.A. Bogomazova. Kul?turnaia rabota sredi domashnikh rabotnits, p.64-65
46. M. Gitman. Moi?ia voina. Kiev-Tashkent // http://berkovich-zametki.com/2010/Zametki/Nomer6/Gitman1.php /> 47. Interview with Z.F. Dolgopolova, dd. June 13, 2012