Olga Malashkina – Occupied but Empowered? How the Soviets tried to Redefine Women in Austrian Politics

We know that this year Austria celebrates the 80th anniversary of the creation of the Second Republic, the end of the Anschluss, and 70 years since the Staatsvertrag (state treaty) was signed, restoring its sovereignty. As we all expect exhibitions, conferences, and shows to commemorate these events, it feels like everything has already been discovered. Hundreds of books have been written, and thousands of articles have been published. Yet, my intuition told me there was something Austrians still don’t know about themselves or about the Soviet presence. I wondered, what could that be? Not politics, culture, or economics. I thought about gender studies, and my investigation yielded a significant discovery.

You might ask why I focused on the Soviet side. The Soviets were different from the other Allies. They had a different economic system, a command economy. Their political ideology was socialism. And most importantly, their documents remained inaccessible for the longest time. Thankfully, I know Russian, which allowed me to read them. A historian’s task is to work in archives with primary sources. The results of my extensive work show how the Soviets redefined women’s roles in Austrian politics, which is what I will share with you today.

Chapter 2: The Fall of Austria and the Allied Intervention

Let’s discuss the political landscape after the Second World War and the circumstances of the Second Republic’s creation. The first Austrian parliamentary elections and their results. How did the communists change their tactics after the elections, and how did they create new movements? The influence of the economic environment in Austria after the Second World War and the 1970s when the SPO took advantage and made its move.

I mentioned that Austria regained its sovereignty in 1955, but it was lost in 1938 with the Anschluss. Here is a map from a 1938 Austrian school atlas, showing Austria as part of Germany. Where is Austria? It’s here with its capital, Vienna. On the other side would be Innsbruck. Such a country no longer existed. It even lost its name, becoming a province called Ostmark. Austria lost its democratic laws. Everything seemed to be lost forever.

After the start of the Second World War, especially in 1941, the Allies—the U.S., Great Britain, and the Soviet Union—wanted to liberate this territory and declare the Anschluss null and void. In the spring of 1945, the Soviet Army launched an offensive, occupying Vienna and all of Lower Austria. It was in the Lower Austrian city of Gloggnitz that Soviet troops met Karl Renner. I brought a brochure for you from the museum in Gloggnitz, a town with an amazing museum. You can find these leaflets at the entrance and visit the former house of Karl Renner, where Soviet troops captured him in April 1945. After his capture, he was moved to various Soviet administrations and later to Vienna. It was he who was appointed by Stalin as the provisional chancellor. Since then, Austria began to return to its sovereignty.

Chapter 3: The First Elections

By autumn 1945, the Allies entered Vienna. The Soviet Union allowed them to enter and set the date for the parliamentary elections: November 25. These were the first democratic elections since 1930.

Here is a timeline of the processes Austrians faced. We know that in an election, we choose from various parties, but during the Anschluss, all parties were abolished. There was only one. Karl Renner’s task was to restore these parties. But how was it possible to restore parties that didn’t yet exist? The process was fascinating.

By mid-April, leaders of the Communist Party of Austria (KPO) arrived from Moscow, where they had lived on Tverskaya Street throughout the Anschluss. The Soviet-controlled newspapers Österreichische Volksstimme and Österreichische Zeitung were published by them. It’s important to remember these because when you see documentaries, the newspapers shown reveal a lot. By mid-April, the Social Democratic Party of Austria (SPO) was also founded. Their newspaper was Arbeiter-Zeitung. The final party to be restored was the conservative Austrian People’s Party (Volkspartei). Unlike the SPO and KPO, they completely changed their ideology. Before 1934, they supported Austro-fascism. They wanted to distance themselves from their previous activities, so they adopted a new name and ideology. Their newspaper was Wiener Kurier.

So, three parties emerged. A fourth, a right-wing party, did not exist because right-wing movements were strictly prohibited in May 1945. All Nazi parties were banned. So, by April 1945, Austria only had these three. Karl Renner, with these three parties, proclaimed the creation of the Second Republic on April 27th.

Chapter 4: A Surprise Result

Austria held its first democratic parliamentary elections in 15 years. No one knew what the result would be; there were no public polls. The voter turnout was very high, over 90%. The last person you saw in the video was Leopold Figl. He is mentioned here because his party, the Volkspartei, won the elections with approximately 50% of the vote. The Social Democratic Party came in second, and the Communists received just over 5%.

The USSR was shocked by this result. We now know from archival documents that they were expecting 20%, but got just over 5%. A vivid account of the Soviet reaction comes from the program director of Radio Vienna. The morning after the election, the Soviet censor Goldenberg showed up at the radio station and asked about the results. The director said, “We already know the Volkspartei got 35 seats, the Social Democrats got 25, and the KPO got only three.” Goldenberg then called his office at the Hotel Imperial, the Soviet administration headquarters, saying, “Communists, three, not 30. Only three.”

But the biggest surprise was who voted. The majority of voters were women. There are several reasons for this. Hundreds of thousands of men died during the war. Many remained prisoners of war in the Soviet Union and couldn’t vote. A special law from May 8, 1945, excluded former Nazi socialists from the voter rolls. These were the reasons so few men were represented in the ballots. It was women who determined the future of Austria in these first, decisive democratic elections.

Chapter 5: Women in Power

What were the consequences for the KPO and the USSR? Since everything the KPO offered was synchronized with Soviet policy, they changed their tactics. They realized women were now a key political force. The KPO needed to ask women to join the party. While the SPO already had a women’s movement, it was crucial for the KPO to create one.

Between 1946 and 1948, on the initiative of the Communist Party, the League of Democratic Women (Bund Demokratischer Frauen Österreichs) was founded. The leaders were, not surprisingly, the wives of KPO leaders—a characteristic feature of the party. To prove this, I prepared a fascinating declassified CIA document. Using your mobile phones, you can scan the QR code to access the two-page document on the CIA website. You can also use their search tool to explore other declassified documents.

The document shows the structure of this democratic movement. The subject is “Officials of the League of Democratic Women,” and it lists the leaders, most of whom were KPO leaders’ wives. The document, distributed on February 1, 1950, reveals that the League of Democratic Women asked Austria’s justice ministers and parliament members to reform the outdated marriage and family law of 1811. This law, still in effect in 1945, included Paragraph 144, which stated that a man was the head of the family. He could prohibit his wife from working or choosing a place to live. A mother couldn’t even sign her baby’s passport. The women claimed equal pay, equal opportunities for education, and equal careers.

The Soviet Union was interested in forming these pro-communist organizations as agents of influence. Direct influence was prohibited by an agreement signed by the Allies in July 1946, which granted Austria some self-governing rights. I have a Soviet document to prove that the Soviets were indeed supervising these movements. I took a photo of it at a Russian archive in Moscow. The document, dated 1953, states that the League of Democratic Women had 30,000 members, with 21,000 in the Soviet zone. It also notes that the organization remained weak and didn’t receive enough assistance from the KPO, but they were still looking forward to new parliamentary elections.

Chapter 6: The Soviet Economic Influence

There was a struggle for the female electorate. Women could either join the League of Democratic Women or work at Soviet-controlled enterprises and later become KPO members. According to the Potsdam Conference, the USSR was given former German assets in Austria. In Vienna, Lower Austria, Burgenland, and part of Upper Austria, the Soviet administration took control of more than 400 such enterprises.

Through magazines like Welt illustrierte, the Soviet Union promoted the idea of the working lady who could easily get a job at these enterprises and become a KPO member. I interviewed Eleonora Dubuis, who told me her older sister worked at such a factory in the early 1950s. Her sister was repeatedly asked to join the KPO. This was how the KPO aimed to gain more female voters for upcoming elections. This system of Soviet-controlled factories was known by the acronym USIA (Soviet-controlled factories in Austria).

While propaganda in Austrian magazines promoted equal rights and pay for women, Soviet documents reveal a different reality. People with Soviet citizenship occupied the top positions at these factories, while Austrians held lower positions, such as accountants and clerks.

When women went to work, they needed childcare. Another magazine promoted kindergartens, showing that the USSR applied its proven method from the 1920s: opening kindergartens to free up women’s time for production. These Soviet-controlled magazines were a form of cultural propaganda. You can see examples of this at the new exhibition at the Wien Museum, for which I did some research.

Chapter 7: The Lasting Impact

There was one major drawback to the KPO and Soviet policy: they relied on a long-term Soviet presence, which never happened. The occupation lasted only ten years. After the troops withdrew in 1955, the KPO lost its support, and its rating fell to 1%. By 1959, they had no representation in parliament and could no longer influence politics.

However, the left-wing SPO had a better long-term strategy and implemented these gender reforms in the 1970s. Bruno Kreisky, a prominent SPO leader who served as foreign minister and chancellor, was the person who spearheaded these family reforms. A family law reform was launched right after the 1970 elections, developed by justice ministry officials and supported by the League of Democratic Women.

Following the QR code on the screen will give you access to the entire federal act on the reorganization of the personal legal consequences of marriage, which abolished the 1811 law. This new law, which took effect in 1975, introduced the concept of “partnership” into Austrian family language for the first time. It abolished the husband’s position as the head of the household, established equal rights for women in the family, and mandated that couples must contribute equally to family maintenance. Furthermore, the couple now jointly determined their place of residence and their last name.

We see that women today are more likely to vote for middle-left parties. The KPO and the Soviet administration certainly contributed to these achievements by forming women’s movements and raising awareness. However, the KPO couldn’t reap the rewards because they counted on a long-term Soviet presence that didn’t materialize. The SPO took advantage and made progress in the 1970s. The questions raised by the communists in the 1940s and early 1950s could no longer be ignored. Thanks to the SPO’s majority in parliament and government after the 1970 elections, these projects became a reality.

The facts I’ve shared are only a small part of my research. The topic of the occupation is much broader, combining culture, social policy, and gender policy. To learn more, I invite you to participate in the various activities of the Denkfabrik and Dialogbüro. We are preparing more lectures and events. I also encourage you to visit the museums whose leaflets are available at the entrance: the Wien Museum, the Karl Renner Museum, and the Haus der Geschichte Österreich. The Bezirksmuseums in the 8th, 15th, and Hietzing districts have also prepared fascinating exhibitions with American and Soviet documents.

I know you might have some questions. Thank you for listening. I would be pleased to answer anything you wish to ask.