ACTIVISM ON THE WOMAN QUESTION

The rapid emergence of this feminist discussion suggests that feminist ideas had won widespread acceptance among elite women before glasnost began. So did the development of organizations dedicated to reforms for women. The largest was the Soviet Women’s Committee (SWC), which held a national meeting of representatives of the zhensovety in 1987. Valentina Tereshkova, the head of the SWC, who had spent decades singing the praises of Soviet women’s emancipation at international conferences, delivered an attack on sexism in Soviet society that repeated many of the officially approved themes. Delegates listened and then, in an effort to revitalize the SWC, replaced the cosmonaut with Zoia Pukhova, a regional party official. Pukhova soon drafted a proposal to extend paid maternity leave to two years and advocated the abolition of fees charged for daycare and abortions. In 1989 the SWC was awarded a block of seats in the Congress of People’s Deputies, and for the next two years Pukhova and her successor Alevtina Fedulova worked to promote attention to women’s problems.⁴⁷

There were many female activists, most of them professionals, who scorned the SWC as a tool of the regime. They created a variety of independent organizations in the larger cities, some of these small associations of friends who shared ideas and support, others larger groups dedicated to propagating feminist ideas and developing feminist scholarship. In 1989, Anastasia Posadskaia, Natalia Rimashevskaia, Natalia Zakharova, and Valentina Konstantinova, all academics in Moscow, formed the League for the Emancipation from Sexual Stereotypes. The following year, they won government approval for the establishment of the Moscow Center for Gender Studies in the Institute of Socioeconomic Population Problems. That year also saw the launching of other feminist groups, among them the Independent Women’s Democratic Initiative (its Russian acronym is NeZhDI, which means “Don’t wait”) and the Free Association of Feminist Organizations (SAFO). In 1991, NeZhDi, SAFO, and others held a conference at Dubna, near Moscow, that brought together two hundred delegates from forty‑eight women’s organizations. The authorities stationed police at the meetings, as the tsarist police had done at the 1908 Women’s Congress, but they could not dampen the enthusiasm of the delegates or prevent lively discussions and networking.

OTHER ACTIVISM

Women’s activism in the late 1980s extended beyond the ranks of the feminists to become almost as wide‑ranging as the activism of the late nineteenth century. Once again women mounted a religious revival. An easing of government regulation permitted the number of convents to grow from a dozen in the mid‑1980s to more than one hundred in the early 1990s. Most remained small, for Orthodox authorities were as reluctant as their nineteenth‑century predecessors to admit large numbers of women to religious orders. They did welcome the laywomen who held Bible‑study classes and helped maintain church property. The restore‑the‑church movement was also strong in the Baltics, Ukraine, and Georgia, where religious faith (Lutheranism and Catholicism in the Baltics, Ukrainian Orthodoxy and the Uniate Church in the Ukraine, and Georgian Orthodoxy in Georgia) was bolstered by a nationalist belief that the churches were repositories of ethnic identity. In Siberia as well, religious practices that had been performed in secret began to come out into the open. For decades Yakut women had hung salamas, decorated ropes that solicited the good will of the spirits, in their cow sheds, only to take them down when outsiders came around. Now newly braided salamas went up in late winter, when the cows were due to calve, and stayed there for the rest of the year.⁴⁸

Less religious women also felt the pull of ethnic and national loyalties. Evdokia Gayer, a member of the Nanai tribe of northern Siberia, was one of the organizers of the Association of Small Peoples of the North, which advocated the improvement of living conditions for native peoples and the ending of environmentally destructive development on their ancestral lands. Two of the largest of the independence movements, Rukh in Ukraine and Sajudis in Lithuania, recruited female members. In Baku, the Association in Defense of Azerbaijan Women’s Rights worked as a women’s auxiliary of the Popular Front of Azerbaijan. In Tatarstan, three women’s organizations, Apa, Ak Aky, and Ak Kalfak, demonstrated for national independence. Like the revolutionaries and nationalists of the nineteenth century, these women denigrated feminism as self‑interested and declared themselves dedicated to the emancipation of all their people. Many repeated the widespread belief that women had a special role to play in preserving native cultures and thus that they should leave the paid‑labor force to concentrate on their families.

Activists also worked in many other volunteer organizations, some of them exclusively female. The smaller groups were usually confined to a single city, where they pursued all sorts of projects, from philanthropy and historic preservation to handcrafts. There were also larger organizations, such as the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers, that lobbied in Moscow for increased veterans’ benefits and better treatment of soldiers. Similar groups in Ukraine and Georgia demonstrated against young men’s being sent to military service outside their home republics. Within the professions, academics and writers formed all‑female organizations to promote contacts with Western Europe and North America, as well as to press claims for funding. Memorial, an organization that publicized the atrocities of the Stalin era and encouraged Gulag survivors to write down their stories, had many female members. All this volunteerism added up to the highest levels of independent organizing by women since the Revolution.

Conclusions

The last decades of Soviet history were far easier than the earlier ones had been. The terror diminished to police surveillance and occasional brutality. Differences between classes and ethnicities eased. Conveniences were few, but the basics were within the reach of many. The government, attentive to domestic needs and international opinion, improved women’s marital and reproductive options and encouraged analysis of the difficulties in their lives. Then, as the economy slowed and the leadership proved unable to rise to the challenge, women’s grumbling about the double shift became one of the major themes in a subdued but pervasive chorus of complaint about the shortcomings of the Soviet system.

When real reform began, most women soldiered on with their everyday lives, as they had done through good and bad times in the past. A few revived the independent social activism of the pre‑revolutionary era. The Soviet Women’s Committee asserted itself, while feminists, nationalists, religious women, soldiers’ mothers, and women concerned about the plight of their neighbors organized their own independent groups. Meanwhile the economy faltered, the borderlands broke away, and then, on a December day in 1991, the leaders of the Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian Republics dissolved the Soviet Union. The empire that most had thought unshakeable had collapsed, taking with it the hard‑won stability of the post‑war era.

GAINS AND LOSSES

^1991–2010

In the 1990s, the peoples of the fifteen nations that emerged from the collapse of the Soviet Union–Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan–set about remaking their political and economic systems. The largest and most populous of these successor states was Russia, presided over for eight years by President Boris Yeltsin. A courageous, boisterous, undisciplined man, Yeltsin seemed to embody the chaos of the 1990s. In 1999 he handed power to his hand‑picked successor, a former intelligence agent named Vladimir Putin. Putin rebuilt the power of the center, repressed critics, and pursued an assertive foreign policy. In 2008, at the end of the two terms permitted to the president by the new Russian constitution, he became prime minister and was succeeded as president by an ally, Dmitri Medvedev.

Some of the governments of the other republics were more democratic than Russia’s, some less. In Belarus and Central Asia, Soviet‑era leaders and renamed communist parties remained in power into the early twenty‑first century. Ukraine and the states of the Baltic and Caucasus developed more democratic regimes. All these governments instituted similar economic reforms: they shut down inefficient factories, privatized some state‑owned enterprises, encouraged the creation of privately owned farms and businesses, and cut funding for social services and benefits programs.

These developments had similar consequences for women across the former Soviet Union (FSU). Many, particularly the elderly, felt that much had been lost with the passing of a system that was a source of security and pride for those who had worked so hard to build it. These feelings of loss were fed by severe economic problems. Unemployment rose, especially for women, as did the cost of living; social services declined. Gender values and practices were not much affected, and so the double shift became still more laborious.

The post‑Soviet period did bring more freedom of information and expression, particularly in the European republics and the Caucasus. Relaxation of censorship made it possible to read a much greater variety of books and periodicals, more people could travel abroad, and many had access to the internet. Property rights were extended with the legalization of private business and farming. The easing of controls that occurred in some republics enabled women to set up thousands of voluntary organizations. Greater religious freedom permitted still more Christian women to join convents, Muslim ones to teach the faith in girls’ schools, and Siberian shamans to practice their healing arts openly. These new liberties resulted in still more social activism among women and the most unfettered consideration of gender arrangements since the revolutionary era.