Writing Women into the Russian Revolution

Dr Katy Turton

As a historian of women's participation in the Russian Revolution, Dr Katy Turton has employed a variety of strategies to write women into a narrative which continues to centre on male leaders, male workers and male soldiers. Dr Turton took a broadly compensatory and feminist approach in her first book – rescuing Lenin’s sisters from comparative obscurity and dealing with them as historical agents in their own right. In her second, she was more keen to explore the daily interactions and cooperation between men and women in the revolutionary movement through the lens of family life. More recently Dr Turton has turned to fiction to explore the daily lives of revolutionaries more deeply, considering in particular an under- if not unrepresented group: homosexuals. 

In this talk Dr Turton discusses the challenges and opportunities presented by all three approaches when trying to write a history of the Russian Revolution which includes and integrates women. 

Dr Katy Turton lectures at the Centre for History, University of the Highlands and Islands. She completed her PhD at the University of Glasgow and has worked at the University of York and Queen’s University, Belfast. Specialising in European, Russian and Soviet history, with a particular focus on women’s experiences, she is the author of Forgotten Lives: The Role of Lenin’s Sisters in the Russian Revolution, 1864-1937 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007) and Family Networks and the Russian Revolutionary Movement, 1870–1940 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). In 2021 she released her first novel Blackbird's Song, set against the Russian Revolution of 1905. 

This talk took place online on Thursday, 17 March 2022. You can view a recording of it below: