State Allowances for Soldiers' Families and the Radicalization of Russian Women, Petrograd 1914-17

In 1912 the Russian government issued a law guaranteeing monthly state subsistence allowances to the families of men called up for active military service in the event of war. The law was implemented within days after Russia went to war in the summer of 1914, on a scale not anticipated in 1912; more than eighteen million men served in the Russian army during the course of the war, five million of whom were drafted in its first five months. The administration of assistance to millions of eligible soldiers’ wives, mothers, and children was entrusted to local governments, not the state bureaucracy, and depended on the labor of thousands of civilian volunteers, particularly women.  This paper argues that the system of state allowances for soldiers’ families represented an unprecedented entitlement to government assistance, one unrelated to the extent or nature of their need. Administered by and for women, the system bolstered arguments for equal rights and raised women’s political and economic expectations. By imposing enormous financial burdens on the Russian state and encouraging women’s empowerment, the implementation of the 1912 law exerted a little-known but major influence on the Russian war effort and revolutionary unrest on Russia’s home front in 1917.