About

Wendy Z. Goldman is a faculty member in the Department of History at Carnegie Mellon University. She is recognized as an acclaimed environmental historian and a scholar of history with a focus on issues related to diversity, inclusion, and equity in education. Her contributions include redesigning courses to incorporate diverse perspectives, explore strategies that enable student participation, remove barriers, and consider a variety of learning needs and preferences. As part of her work, she addresses gender bias in the scientific community by researching and discussing issues of gender barriers and equal representation in science, including incorporating an equal proportion of female and male scientific authors in her course materials. Her efforts are part of a broader initiative to bring greater focus to issues of diversity, inclusion, and equity within and outside of the classroom at Carnegie Mellon University.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Computer Science
• Law
• Sociology
• Neoclassical economics
• Archaeology
• Economic system
• Biology
• Algorithm
• Political economy
• Engineering
• Medicine
• Economics
• Economic history
• History
• Obstetrics
• Ancient history
• Market economy

Selected publications

• Stalin’s postwar terror targeted Soviet Jews – in the name of ‘anti-cosmopolitanism’

  2025-12-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Soviet Home Front and the Great Patriotic War, 1941–1945

  2025-01-09

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter examines the situation in the Soviet rear during the Great Patriotic War, where the Soviet rear-area mobilisation of economic and human resources constituted a consistent success story in terms of the ultimate aim of winning the war, even if the human cost was considerable. This chapter examines themes such as evacuation, labour mobilisation, rationing and propaganda to help the reader understand the significance of the rear for Soviet victory, as well as the high human costs of success.

  PublisherDOI

• The Soviet War Effort

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2025-11-13

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• The Most Essential Workers

  The Russian Review · 2024-09-24

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Klots, Alissa. Domestic Service in the Soviet Union: Women’s Emancipation and the Gendered Hierarchy of Labor. New Studies in European History. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2024. x + 307 pp. $130.00. ISBN 978-1-0094-6719-3. Women’s responsibility for household labor—cleaning, cooking, caring for children—has proved stubbornly resistant to changes in economic system, class structure, and ideology. Women’s entrance into the waged labor force only sharpened the contradiction between “productive” and “reproductive labor.” Put simply, a woman working for wages outside the home cannot care for children and do the tasks required within it. All the quarreling between men and women over a more equal division of household tasks still has not resolved this basic problem. Like the ever-adaptable cockroach predicted to outlast nuclear war, women’s responsibility for household labor will also likely survive the big blast. When the dazed human survivors crawl out of the rubble, women will undoubtedly have to clean up the mess. In this wonderful and illuminating book, Alissa Klots engages the question of domestic service under Soviet socialism, a system that initially promised a new way of organizing reproductive labor by transferring it to the public sphere. Daycare centers, dining halls, and laundries staffed by paid workers would free women to enter the waged labor force and public sphere. The new Soviet state, however, soon fell back on the age-old solution of replacing the household labor of women working outside the home with the lower paid work of female servants working within it. It did establish a name change, transforming “servants,” an occupation associated with the gross class inequities of the tsarist regime, into the more seemly “domestic workers.” And it did provide greater labor protection for domestic workers than they received anywhere else in the world. Yet as Klots repeatedly reminds us, the state’s efforts to socialize household labor and elevate domestic workers were undermined by the priority it assigned to industrial production. Moreover, reproductive labor remained firmly gendered as “female” regardless of whether it was done by an unremunerated wife and mother in her own home, a waged worker in a daycare center or dining hall, or a domestic worker serving a family. “Zhenskое delo” was “women’s business.” Klots meticulously surveys the changes in domestic service from the bold plans of the Revolution through the Civil War, the New Economic Policy, industrialization of the 1930s, World War II, and the postwar years. She does this big, significant topic full justice, examining not only the organization of domestic labor but also socialist ideals and achievements, the composition of the labor force, urbanization, migration, proletarianization, and the vertiginous twists and turns of Soviet history. She is keenly attuned to the economic and material conditions that structured some women’s needs for domestic help, the willingness of other women to do it, and the state’s efforts to regulate it. The book covers union efforts to organize and protect domestic workers, the challenges of negotiating employment within the intimate space of the home, and the impact of larger trends, including rapid social mobility, women’s mass entrance into the labor force outside the home, migration, and the Terror. Klots draws on an impressive source base, ranging from labor statistics and union debates to reminiscences, literature, cartoons, and film. The book, deftly intertwining social, cultural, and policy history, is deeply researched, culturally informed, and analytically acute. Klots begins with Lenin’s famous dictum that, under socialism, every kitchen maid would learn to run the state. Over the coming decades, the kitchen maid, or domestic servant, would become a familiar and enduring symbol of the revolution’s promise to elevate and educate even the lowliest, echoing the stirring words of the Internationale, “We are naught, we shall be all.” Prior to the Russian Revolution, Marxists debated whether servants should even be considered workers. Klara Zetkin, a staunch advocate for working women, unequivocally maintained that servants were indeed part of the proletariat and members of its most subjugated female layer. Lenin and Karl Kautsky, however, disagreed, doubting the ability of servants to become active agents of revolution. In 1905, women servants promptly proved the clever male theorists wrong, forming servants’ unions and taking an active part in the revolution. As Klots explains, their participation “belied the notion that they lacked class consciousness” (p. 29). Yet the debates over the nature of domestic service continued. Many revolutionaries argued that the occupation was inherently demeaning. Servants deserved the opportunity to take “productive” jobs, and socialists should clean their own houses, cook their own food, and mind their own children. The unspoken assumption, of course, was that male socialists would be exempt from much of this demeaning work. The 1918 Labor Code stated that all citizens should perform “socially useful labor,” and once the Civil War began, housewives and servants not caring for very young children were mobilized for “labor duty.” Consonant with these labor policies, the fledgling state created a patchwork of canteens and nurseries. In the midst of the struggle for a new world, no one worried too much about the cleanliness of their living quarters. In the 1920s, the state drastically cut support for socialized services, shifting scarce capital toward rebuilding the war-ruined industrial infrastructure. Domestic service rebounded. Domestic workers joined the Professional Union of Workers of People’s Food Services (Narpit), which lobbied to classify them as manual workers rather than white-collar employees. As workers, they were entitled to a contract registered by their employer, time to study, paid vacations, and regulation of hours. In the 1930s, women entered the waged labor force in record numbers, filling jobs in production previously held only by men. Although many workers and party members continued to conflate domestic service with enforced servility and inequality, the growth in daycare centers, canteens, and laundries did not keep pace with demand. Given the difficulty of procuring consumer goods, the lack of labor-saving home appliances, and the absence of gas heat and hot water, the state recognized that the labor of domestic workers was essential. As a result, Klots argues, it approved “the employment of female migrants as household workers,” a solution that cost the state nothing because, unlike socialized services, domestic workers were paid by their employers (p. 56). In 1939, domestic workers constituted a significant group—roughly five hundred thousand women—within the working class. The occupation was filled almost entirely by women peasant migrants who lived in the urban homes of their employers and performed a wide range of duties that usually fell to wives and mothers. The union quickly discovered that domestic workers were difficult to organize and protect. Scattered and isolated in private homes, their work was hard to oversee and regulate, and turnover within the occupation was high. Many domestic workers and employers failed to register with the union, ignoring a written contract in favor of private, unwritten arrangements. Exploitation and intimacy were closely intertwined. Domestic workers served long hours, lacked overtime pay, and had little knowledge of the wage scale the union tried to impose. At the same time, many domestic workers took their employers’ children back to their own native villages over the long summer months, acting as surrogate rural relatives. The class divide between domestic workers and employers was often small, with both groups less than one generation from the village. Much depended on the personal relationship forged by both parties. Yet many domestics did join the union and found new purpose in its activities, attending meetings, taking on new responsibilities, and organizing other women. As Klots notes, “these activities became the foundation of their new proletarian identity” (p. 93). The state, however, continued to view domestic service as a lowly occupation, valued less for its substance than its ability to free others for more valuable jobs. Even the union had a mixed attitude toward the occupation, encouraging its members to leave domestic service for jobs in industry. “The old paradox intensified,” Klots aptly explains. “The more women were drawn into the workforce, the more acute the need for household services became” (p. 163). The trends of the 1930s thus included a growing urban demand for domestic workers, a steady supply of rural women eager to enter the occupation, and rapid turnover as domestic workers took better-paid jobs in industry. New state policies, such as the passport system, which limited migration from the countryside, and the ration system, which created a hierarchy of consumption, shaped domestic workers’ lives. Domestic service became a key channel for migration and inclusion on the ration rolls. And while the occupation was characterized by great turnover, Klots points out that the overall numbers employed remained fairly constant (pp. 177–78). By the end of the 1930s, the state “recognized the home as a site of socialist reproduction,” encouraging domestic workers to professionalize and their employers to model equal, comradely relations (p. 198). Yet the new socialist home, whether it was managed by a domestic worker or a wife, still remained a woman’s responsibility. Domestic service was characterized by “negotiation, cooperation, and even affective connection” (p. 211). While many female migrants left domestic service for other jobs, others stayed for a lifetime, becoming an integral part of the families that employed them. Klots movingly describes how some domestic workers stepped in to raise the children in their care when their parents were arrested during the Terror. Polia Shcherbakova took on responsibility for her two charges when their mother and father went to prison. Shcherbakova died of starvation during the siege of Leningrad, but her self-sacrificing efforts ensured that the children survived, and after Stalin died, their mother returned from the camps to find them. The war created a precipitous decline in the number of domestic workers. While some women remained domestic workers and escaped Nazi rule by evacuating with their employers, thousands more left service for better-paid and -provisioned work in defense enterprises. After the war, the numbers quickly regained their prewar levels. The large numbers of single working mothers created by the cataclysmic loss of men generated a pressing need for household help. Once again, thousands of rural women, eager to leave the countryside, filled urban demand. The 1950s saw the last great outmigration from village to city. By the end of the 1960s, both supply of and demand for domestic workers dwindled. Domestic workers became a rarity. Collective farmers received greater rights and benefits, and migration from the countryside slowed. As wages rose, private employers could no longer compete with the public sector for the labor of women who left the countryside. At the same time, household chores became easier with the widescale installation of gas heat, hot running water, and new appliances. Socialized services, including an expansion of daycare, laundries, and canteens, along with very generous maternity provisions, transformed Soviet family life and eased the burden on women. Grandmothers often stepped in to fill the gap created at home by working parents. A mixture of socialized services, family care, and rising living standards characterized the 1960s, 1970s, and part of the 1980s. Yet a new cataclysm soon shook the foundations of society. Under Gorbachev and Yeltsin, the state sector of the economy collapsed and “daycare centers became the first casualties of the transition” (p. 280). Officials began promoting a new ideology that urged women to leave the workforce and return to their duties in the home. The great Soviet experiment, with its admirable protections for domestic workers and fluctuating efforts to socialize reproductive labor, came to an end. Klots’s sweeping story openly challenges many of the prevailing arguments about Soviet domestic workers. In contrast to the view that the state largely ignored the “kitchen maids,” she argues that “the Bolsheviks were serious in their attempt to transform into proletarian workers even servants who were marginal to industrial production” (p. 10). Lenin’s vision of empowering kitchen maids was not simply a metaphor, as some historians claim, but rather a serious concern for the Soviet state from its inception. Nor was domestic service a marginalized occupation, irrelevant to the larger history of socialist development. On the contrary, it served as a major conduit of social mobility, enabling female peasant migrants to enter cities, and their female employers to work outside the home. She disagrees with historians who present Soviet labor laws and unions as ineffectual, arguing that the union helped domestic workers to sue for redress and develop new identities. Domestic workers could file grievances with the union’s Rates and Disputes Commission, which usually took their side. The unions, despite their loss of power under Stalin, played a critical role in protecting and defending domestic workers “at a time when collective bargaining was completely inaccessible to their peers in other countries” (and remains inaccessible to this day) (p. 10). The Soviet state was the first to introduce broad protections for domestic servants, recognizing them as workers and affording them rights to registered contracts, education and study time, vacations, time off, health insurance, and unemployment benefits. Over time, some of these protections were removed, but Soviet domestic workers still maintained a considerable advantage over their peers abroad. The protections extended to them contrast sharply with those provided in the United States, where domestic workers are not unionized, ineligible for social security, workers’ compensation, and pensions, and vulnerable to abuse. In the Soviet Union, domestic service was not relegated to the margins, but, rather, “eventually embraced as part of the socialist economy” (p. 4). Over time, help with reproductive labor came to be a “privilege,” like a state car or summer home, provided to high-ranking cultural figures and state officials (p. 182). Unlike Trotsky and some contemporary historians, Klots does not see domestic service as a “betrayal of Soviet values,” but, rather, as part of the hierarchy of labor necessary for building a socialist society. The Bolsheviks privileged industrial over domestic, white-collar, and agricultural work; skilled over unskilled; and production over service. Klots contends that this tension between the unavoidable need for domestic labor and the low value assigned to it shaped the debates from the revolution through the 1960s. Soviet leaders, unlike their Cuban counterparts, who mandated an equal division of housework between spouses in the 1974 Family Code, always viewed reproductive labor as women’s work, whether it was socialized or performed in a private home. Klots notes that “the Soviet state created opportunities for domestic workers unheard of in other states, while simultaneously thwarting their agency” (p. 13). This long history, in her view, offers us an important lesson. Women chose to do domestic work for good reasons—a place to live, economic need, limited options—and they valued the service they provided to the families that needed them. Scaling Lenin’s vision way back, she argues that domestic workers did not need to run the state. They simply wanted their work to be respected, well remunerated, and valued as essential labor. Of course, given how far domestic workers still are from realizing these modest hopes, they may have to rule the state in order to make them a reality. This lesson, which connects justice to power, was one Lenin understood well.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Stalinism, the Terror, and Social History

  Cornell University Press eBooks · 2024-06-15

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  This chapter begins by providing a personal overview of the author's trajectory as a historian of Stalinist society and politics. Beginning in the early 1990s, the author's immersion in the archives demonstrated that Stalinism could best be understood as a dialectical process involving social pressure, state response, and new realities, which posed their own problems in turn. The author is also interested in social antagonisms. For the author, the interplay of broad social forces and state policies “produced a propulsive dialectic that determined the beginning, escalation, and end of the Terror.” Similarly, the author's more recent work has stressed not only state policies like wartime evacuation, rationing, deportation, and labor mobilization, but their dynamic relationship to people's material needs, the flourishing black markets, and widespread disobedience of draconian labor laws.

  PublisherDOI

• Chapter 4 Stalinism, the Terror, and Social History

  Cornell University Press eBooks · 2024-06-13

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Women, Abortion, and the State, 1917-36

  University of California Press eBooks · 2023 · 3 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Computer Science
  • Obstetrics
  PublisherDOI

• Introduction: Primitive Accumulation and Socialism

  International Review of Social History · 2022 · 7 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Political Science

  Abstract In this dossier, Marx's concept of primitive accumulation is applied to socialist development in the Soviet Union, China, and Romania, three countries in which socialist revolution occurred before the full development of capitalism. The introduction profiles the ideas of Evgenii Preobrazhensky, the Soviet theorist and left oppositionist, who first applied Marx's concept to the problems of socialist development, and was executed under Stalin in 1937. Preobrazhensky advanced the idea of “primitive socialist accumulation”, a process that would fund industrialization by extracting surplus through planned, non-coercive transfers from market-based and state sectors. Preobrazhensky's ideas sparked debates within communist parties over collectivization and the tempo of development. The introduction and articles in the dossier point the way towards future comparative research, suggesting that the processes of primitive capitalist and socialist accumulation shared painful similarities.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Blood on the Red Banner: Primitive Accumulation in the World's First Socialist State

  International Review of Social History · 2022-03-16 · 2 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract This article provides a reinterpretation of Stalinism through the lens of Marx's concept of primitive accumulation. It connects a series of defining events that are usually viewed separately – the debates and oppositional movements of the 1920s, industrialization, collectivization, and the “Great Terror” – to the state's need to accumulate capital for development. Using the idea of “primitive socialist accumulation”, first introduced by the Soviet theorist and left oppositionist Evgeny Preobrazhensky, it examines the challenges of building socialism in an underdeveloped, overwhelmingly peasant country. It argues that the emergence of the left and right oppositions in the 1920s and the grain crisis in 1927–1928 resulted from the state's struggle to create a stable balance between rural and urban exchange. The hastily implemented move to collectivize resulted in a cascade of unintended consequences, including a disastrous famine, decrease in food supplies, and a precipitous fall in real wages that impelled record numbers of women into the labor force. Against a background of social instability and discontent, the Kirov murder proved a fearful trigger, igniting fears among Party leaders that ultimately resulted in mass political and social repression. The article is part of a dossier, comprising an introduction and three articles, which offers a new approach to our understanding of socialism in the Soviet Union, China, and Romania.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Rolling East and Resettlement

  Oxford University Press eBooks · 2021-04-22

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  The transfer and resettlement of millions of people, including children, invalids, and elderly, posed a vast challenge to public health officials, factory managers, and local soviets. People crammed into freight and cattle cars, and their journeys were often derailed by bombing, illness, and death. Child measles and typhus took a deadly toll. Evacuees from Leningrad during the siege were often in no condition to travel. Families left their dead at unknown stations along the way. The exhausted people who reached their destinations were billeted with other families, in barracks, and in earthen dugouts. Newcomers and natives clashed. Construction crews built their own shelters before laying new electricity, water, and railway lines, and erecting structures for the evacuated factories. Factories too were ordered to merge and share space. Along with new hazards, new, more efficient methods of production emerged. The war proved a powerful crucible, forcing every branch of administration to confront challenges of epic proportions.

  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Donald Filtzer

  Russian Academy of Sciences

  25 shared

• Gijs Kessler

  11 shared

• Simon Pirani

  Durham University

  6 shared

• Simon Pirani

  4 shared

• Joe William Trotter

  Carnegie Mellon University

  2 shared

• Lynne Viola

  2 shared

• Barbara A. Holland

  Northern Kentucky University

  1 shared

• Heather J. Coleman

  1 shared

Labs

• Wendy Z. Goldman LabPI

Awards & honors

• Berkshire Conference Book Award
• Honorable Mention, Reginald Zelnik Book Prize in History
• Society for Military History prize