The Group Rape of Mariia N.: Gender, Violence, and the Crisis of Legitimacy in Early Soviet Russia

This article examines the responses of early Soviet legal and juridical professionals to the 1926 group rape of seventeen-year-old Mariia N. as a starting point to discuss assumptions regarding women’s sexuality, peasant consciousness, and revolutionary transformation. By 1926, anxiety over the slow pace of revolutionary change created what might be called a crisis of legitimacy among early Soviet legal professionals. This article examines how these juridical professionals perceived the limits and failures of efforts to transform Russian society along socialist lines, and highlights their explanations for those failures that rested on the persistent “backwardness” of the countryside and on traditional discourses of female sexuality. While they argued that the slow pace of transformation hindered rural development, and expected greater state intervention in the countryside to facilitate such change, they failed to challenge traditional patriarchal assumptions regarding women. The article argues that the legal system played a central role in the Soviet social transformation, and that through redefining the law, early Soviet professionals helped to construct a legal foundation for the state that ultimately facilitated the state’s move away from its early emancipatory and communal impulses and toward the embrace of paternalism and individualism.