Gender Discontents and Feminist Whispers

The Khrushchev and Brezhnev regimes tinkered with Stalinist gender values. The basic paradigm remained the same–women and men were to be hard‑working, honest, patriotic, public‑spirited citizens, and women were also to be nurturing wives and mothers, men considerate, civilized husbands. In the post‑war world, the government paid more attention to motherhood, as we have seen, and to fatherhood too. The New Soviet Men of the 1930s had been praised for providing for their families. In the 1950s and 1960s, they were also urged to pay attention to their children. “A good father,” Deborah Field has written, “helped his children with homework, took them on interesting excursions, and taught them hobbies.” Popular magazines such as Sovetskii sport (Soviet Sport) urged men to instruct their sons in the masculine virtues of diligence, self‑control, sobriety, patriotism, and athleticism. The women’s magazines Rabotnitsa and Krest’ianka urged them to help with housework.³³

These officially approved definitions of masculinity were adapted by men of different social ranks and ethnicities, as hegemonic values always are. Working‑class and peasant men put more stock in physical strength and manual competence than did white‑collar workers. They also cherished those rowdy pleasures–competitive cursing, heavy drinking with male friends, brawling in bars and at soccer matches, seducing women– that the regime had long tried to stamp out, and they continued, as their peasant ancestors had, to admire clever men from the lower classes who figured out how to beat the system. Peoples of the Caucasus and Central Asia insisted more than did the Europeans on dutifulness to parents and family loyalty from both genders. They also believed that defense of one’s family and of one’s personal honor were essential male responsibilities.³⁴

Soviet women made their own adaptations of the post‑war variant of the New Soviet Woman. Like Baranskaia’s fictional “Olga,” younger women of the Brezhnev years were proud of being more emancipated and better off than earlier generations had been. Many of them, like Olga, considered their work outside the home very important to their sense of self‑worth and they valued family life as well, but many complained, as we have seen, about the domestic division of labor. Some came to see themselves as “brave victims,” to use the terminology of Polish sociologists Mira Marody and Ann Giza‑Poleszczuk. They were laboring endlessly to meet the demands of their families and of a system that did not keep its promises. The “brave victim” was yet another variant of the ancient theme of women as suffering servants. It valorized the self‑sacrifice, endurance, patience, kindness, and resourcefulness of wives and mothers. It also deprecated men, for the Soviet “Knights of the Sofa” were loafers compared to their endlessly laboring wives.³⁵

The complaints about husbands arose from real grievances over the double shift and also from what some observers have described as a “crisis of masculinity” in the late decades of the Soviet period. By the 1970s it was harder for poor people to climb the social ladder because the stagnating economy was generating fewer new jobs and because the elites were keeping the best educations and jobs for themselves and their children. It now all too often took connections as well as hard work to get into good schools or to move up the waiting lists for telephones and apartments. As gaps between the privileged and the poor widened, the promises made by the government became harder to trust. At the same time, women were less economically dependent on their husbands than in the past, because they had their own incomes and could rely more on public services. The decreased social mobility of the Brezhnev years and the perception that women were more independent made some men feel diminished.³⁶

In the midst of these discontents, independent feminist thought resurfaced from within a much repressed but persistent dissident movement. The dissidents were a loosely organized collection of writers, scientists, and other intellectuals who began in the 1960s to criticize the regime’s dictatorial habits, to document the evils of Stalinism, and to urge democratization and improved relations with the West. Within their ranks were Jewish dissidents who pressed for the right to emigrate to Israel to escape anti‑Semitism. The dissidents could not publish their work legally, so they circulated newsletters, manifestos, poems, and novels in typescript copies. Women’s participation in the dissident movement was very similar to that of their predecessors in the nineteenth‑century intelligentsia and also to that of women in the rising opposition movements in Eastern Europe, particularly Poland. They made copies of the dissidents’ writings; they hosted meetings at their apartments; they helped friends undergoing persecution. “Our movement had no leaders,” wrote Liudmila Alexeeva, a Moscow teacher. “They weren’t needed. Each of us decided what he wanted to do and acted only on his own behalf.”³⁷ Elena Bonner, a physician whose communist father had died in the purges, was perhaps the most prominent female dissident. She became a spokesperson for her husband Andrei Sakharov, a nuclear physicist and human‑rights advocate who was a leading dissident.

Important among the writings that the dissidents circulated in typescript were the works of three women. Anna Akhmatova’s poetry collection Requiem (1940) recorded the anguish of women who waited for news of their arrested loved ones. Evgenia Ginzburg’s memoirs told the story of the camps. Nadezhda Mandelshtam, the widow of poet Osip Mandelshtam, who died in the Gulag in 1938, testified in Hope against Hope and Hope Abandoned (published abroad in 1970 and 1974) to the anguish and struggles of wives who had lost their husbands to the Terror. Akhmatova, Ginzburg, and Mandelshtam did not participate directly in the dissident movement, but their work played an important part in the building criticism of the Soviet system. The quality of their writing also placed the three among the major authors of twentieth‑century Russian literature.

Until the late 1970s, the dissident movement paid little attention to the situation of women in the Soviet Union, because most dissidents, female as well as male, considered the woman question a less pressing issue than the absence of democracy. In 1979, a small group of Leningrad women began to argue that there was a connection between the autocratic government and women’s difficulties. Tatiana Goricheva (a philosopher) and Tatiana Mamonova and Julia Voznesenskaia (both writers of poetry and prose) published an underground magazine, Almanac: Woman and Russia, which contained articles by professional women and blue‑collar workers documenting in touching detail the hardships of Soviet women’s lives. Contributors blamed those hardships on the sexism pervading Soviet society, a sexism, they argued, that was promoted by the very regime that claimed to have liberated women from sexism. “Equality between Soviet men and women is observed primarily on paper,” declared Ekaterina Alexandrova, a professional from Leningrad, “and… the assertion that women have the same opportunities as men for any type of work is pure nonsense.” Once again, as in the 1850s, feminists were arguing that the system itself was patriarchal, and they were implying that women could only be emancipated by thoroughgoing political change. They implied as well that women’s emancipation should be a priority for those seeking to change the Soviet system.³⁸

The publication of Almanac marked the re‑emergence of feminism within the critical intelligentsia. Very soon after the magazine began to circulate in typescript, the police came calling on its editors. They were expelled from the Soviet Union in 1980.