WOMEN DISCUSS THE WOMAN QUESTION

Women also spoke out about the hardships of their lives in interviews and letters to the press. At first most repeated publicly the complaints that they had been making privately, that men were lazy and party leaders did not keep their promises. “In general in this country we have so many problems,” said Olya, a seventeen‑year‑old vocational student interviewed in 1989. “Men don’t want to face them, and they can’t resolve them, and the women take everything on themselves.” Many bemoaned the dismal economy. E. Frolova, A. Govorukhina, and N. Borisova, three women from the provincial city of Morshansk, wrote to the magazine Ogonok in 1987, “People who have been to Paris are ecstatic over the women there. They look so young and elegant. In our opinion, the point is not the women themselves. How are you supposed to be young‑looking when you’re prematurely gray and there’s no hair dye available to give your hair the right color?”⁴⁴

As public criticism of the Soviet regime intensified, a handful of professional women began to publish the feminist critique of Soviet‑style emancipation that had been circulating quietly for years. The much‑vaunted programs had not freed them, they declared; they had exploited and controlled them. Larisa Kuznetsova, a philologist, wrote in 1989, “Women have been manipulated through most of our history. Put on tractors or on steam engines, or dropped out of planes with parachutes…. Spiritual food and values have always been offered from without. From ready‑made recipes… We won’t have any women’s movement until women have the chance to stop this race, to concentrate on themselves, to understand and hear their own voices.”⁴⁵

Kuznetsova and others argued that it was time for men to share power with women in the Kremlin and in the family, a change that would only happen if a new woman’s movement arose. Journalist Nina Belaeva sketched out this feminist plan for social regeneration in 1989, in terms that would have pleased both Kollontai and the Russian feminists Kollontai had so often criticized: “Though there are still no signs of a mass movement, the first women’s associations have appeared. They will foster leaders, public figures, and politicians with a female face. Then women shall have a place in the social hierarchy worthy of our intellect, experience, education, and creativity. Women will occupy this place not by ‘battling their way’ into it, but by naturally imparting their womanhood to society. Maybe then society will also understand that whenever women flourish, the nation stands to gain.”⁴⁶

Belaeva’s feminism, unlike Kollontai’s, was not Marxist; it did not attribute women’s subordination to economic forces, but rather to the persistence of patriarchal values. Belaeva and many other women who spoke up in the 1980s also subscribed to what the Federation of Women Writers labeled “the woman principle.” That is, they believed that women were naturally more sympathetic, generous, and loving than men. Belaeva saw this as a reason for women to be involved in the public world, where they would bring their natural virtues to bear on social problems. These traditional ideas about women–present in feminism since its inception–were being stressed in the 1980s by cultural feminists in the West as well, but Soviet feminists were not much influenced by Westerners, with whom they had little contact. Rather, they were staying true to the core principles of Soviet‑style women’s emancipation–women should be free and equal citizens and they were, by nature, more moral than men–but joining them to calls for more democracy, which would enable women to work to reform patriarchy.