Women’s Work in the Post‑Soviet World

For the great majority of women, the post‑Soviet period began with great hardship. When antiquated factories were closed and government ministries downsized, some managers responded as they had in the NEP years, that is, they laid women off and refused to hire new ones because they judged women more expensive employees than men. Government figures suggest that roughly the same percentages of women and men lost their jobs in Russia; in Ukraine, in the Caucasus, and among some native people in Siberia, more women than men became unemployed. Most people remained officially employed, but received no wages for months or were paid only with goods from the enterprise or produce from the collective farms. They stayed on the job because there were so few others available and because they hoped thereby to remain vested in government pension programs.¹

Making the situation worse was the fact that the cost of living rose, wiping out savings and reducing the value of already meager incomes. This occurred because governments had pegged local currencies to international standards, because expensive imports flooded in and domestic manufacturing dropped, and because the resulting economic depression cut government revenues, causing funding for social services to fall and the price of those services to the public to rise. The poverty was worst in the places that had always been poorest–the countryside, small towns, Central Asia, native settlements in Siberia–and among the most vulnerable–children, the disabled, the elderly, and single mothers. Single older women, who made up the great majority of those living on pensions, were particularly hard hit. Hundreds of them begged outside subway stations and churches in the mid‑1990s.

More fortunate people worked harder and relied on family and friends. In the cities, women put in overtime at their regular jobs or took additional part‑time jobs. “Everyone around, degree or no degree, seemed to be looking for work that could bring quick cash: this could be a translating job, as well as babysitting for an affluent family or going into retail business,” remembered Elena Gapova, a history graduate student in Minsk in the early 1990s. “No one knew where opportunities were and who would win, in the end. People tried what they could.” Teachers became cleaning women after hours; professors tutored high‑school students; doctors took on private patients. Friends and family loaned one another money and traded goods. It had long been common for urban people to grow some of their own food in community gardens near the cities or at rural cottages (dachas); now they grew more. Grandmothers pitched in, putting up the food grown at the dachas and taking care of children when daycare centers closed or became too expensive.²

In the countryside, the peasants doubled or even tripled the output of their kitchen gardens so as to have more to sell at local markets. Women did much of this additional work, because the private plots had long been their responsibility, but men in Russia, Kazakhstan, and Siberia helped out more than in the past. Among the Sakha (formerly the Yakuts), men left unemployed by the closing of collective farms looked after the children while their wives planted and weeded and the old women tended the cows. By 2003, the private plots, the source of much of Soviet produce since Stalin’s time, were growing 93 percent of Russia’s potatoes and 80 percent of other vegetables.³

Millions of people coped with the hard times by leaving home. One million ethnic Russians living in Central Asia and Siberia moved to European Russia in 1994 alone. Some returned to their hometowns or to places where relatives lived. Those who lacked such connections settled in the smaller cities, where residency permits were easier to obtain. Even though building a new life was not easy, families moved in hopes that their children would have more opportunities in predominantly Russian areas than they had as minorities in the other successor states.⁴

Many others went on the road to find permanent or temporary jobs. A million Armenians journeyed to work in the Slavic republics in the 1990s. For some citizens of the FSU, this migration took on epic proportions. In the early 2000s, Mikhail Sondak, a mechanic, and his wife Ekaterina, a retired feldsher, drove every six weeks or so from Pinsk, Belarus, to the White Sea port of Murmansk, 1500 miles to the northeast. In that frigid city, Mikhail could earn higher wages than at home. Periodically, the couple would drive back to Pinsk to check on their teenaged daughter, Irina. Tens of thousands of other people from the FSU found work in Western and Central Europe and in North America. Between 1995 and 2000, 400,000 women left Ukraine for the West. They were part of the largest migration out of Eastern Europe since World War II.⁵

Some of the women who stayed home found work in the new economy. Female entrepreneurs set up beauty salons, cosmetics distributorships, groceries, and laundries. Others became small traders, selling food, consumer goods, and handcrafts in hometown markets. In the Caucasus and Central Asia, such women created burgeoning family businesses. By the mid‑1990s, many had become importers, traveling abroad to buy clothes, packaged foods, and other portable consumer goods for resale at home. Ekaterina and Mikhail Sondak made the reverse choice: in the early 2000s they opened a clothing store in Murmansk. Hiring an accountant and a salesperson to conduct daily business, the couple continued to make the three‑thousand‑mile round‑trip to Pinsk to buy inventory produced in new Belarusian factories.⁶

Female entrepreneurs were most likely to succeed in small businesses with low start‑up costs and female clienteles, such as beauty parlors and clothing stores. Even these ventures were risky, and women struggled against gender beliefs as well. Many people considered it disreputable to be a merchant, an opinion that had been around since long before the Revolution and was strengthened in the post‑Soviet period by the rampant corruption. The common wisdom held that women should not sully themselves by getting involved in such things. Nor were women welcome in the higher levels of the new economy, which was run, as the Soviet economy had been, by networks of men. Gender and age discrimination were common, even in fields such as banking that had employed many female managers during the Soviet period. To provide support for one another, businesswomen set up clubs in large and small cities.⁷

Some women resorted to making a living in the sex trade. Law enforcement had kept prostitution and pornography underground throughout the Soviet period. After 1991, that enforcement languished and they came out in the open, particularly in the European republics of the FSU. Pornography was sold at neighborhood newsstands. Well‑dressed call girls frequented hotel lobbies in the big cities. Hundreds of websites aimed at foreign men featured gorgeous young women available for on‑line chat or marriage. When interviewed, many of these women gave economic necessity as their motive for being sex workers or for seeking foreign husbands. Liuda, a teenager in the small city of Efremov, Russia, confided to documentary filmmaker Josef Pasternak in 2002 that she had become a stripper in order to save enough money to go to acting school in Moscow.⁸

The press publicized the criminal side of the sex trade, particularly incidents of women being recruited for jobs abroad, only to discover when they got to Germany or the United States, that they were virtual slaves to pimps who forced them into prostitution. Such stories horrified many people, who came to see the legal and the illegal trafficking in sex to be a product of post‑Soviet decadence, created by a corrupt new elite and the influx of Western influences. This decadence, like other malign developments of the 1990s, seemed to be disproportionately affecting women.⁹

Discussing Gender

As so often during periods of rapid change in Russian history, there was a widespread perception in the post‑Soviet years that gender required discussion. When that discussion began in the early 1990s, it centered on the perception that women’s burdens, considerable in Soviet times, had increased. They were being laid off in record numbers, the social services they relied on to ease the double shift had been slashed, and they were openly discriminated against in the new economy. The family seemed imperiled as well. The birthrate fell, along with male life expectancy, and by the late 1990s the populations of all the successor states save those in Central Asia were declining. Alarming statistics documented widespread domestic violence in families stressed by the hard times. Bride capture was reportedly on the rise in Kazakhstan. Because so many people believed that survival of the family depended primarily on women, the question of how they were to live in the new societies took on critical importance. The result was a broadening and deepening of the discussion begun under Gorbachev into the liveliest public consideration of gender matters since NEP.¹⁰

Most participants agreed that the Soviet system had exploited women. Historian Liudmila Popkova summed up a widespread attitude when she wrote, “The Soviet state institutionalized a distinctive order in which the roles of men and women were defined according to the needs of the communist state.” Galina Starovoitova, an ethnographer, declared sardonically that women had “enjoyed the privilege of heavy manual labor, work in foundries and metallurgical plants, and could sit in the make‑believe parliament of a dictatorial regime; it was not real equality.” Opinion on how to rectify that situation quickly divided into two schools of thought, the “feminist” and the “maternalist.”¹¹

The feminists developed the arguments they had begun making under Gorbachev. They declared that women should be men’s equals in the new society and that they should not suffer disproportionately from the economic collapse. To remedy the situation, feminists made the argument made so long ago by Zhenotdel leaders: political parties should encourage women to move into leadership positions. Governments should enforce equal access to new economic, political, and cultural opportunities and increase funding for health care, daycare, and maternity leave. Furthermore, society’s awareness of the pervasiveness of sexism had to be increased. Men should do more housework; benefits programs should be conceptualized as assisting families rather than enabling women to work the double shift. “We advocate harmony in the development of society, healthy families, partnership between men and women in making decisions regarding the government, society, the economy, and daily life. But unfortunately, patriarchal traditions are still strong in our society, asserting the priority of male strength, intelligence, and power,” wrote Liudmila Iacheistova, a member of the zhensovet of Vologda, northeast of Moscow. If those traditions could be overcome, feminists argued, women could enjoy equality of rights and opportunities. They could make their own choices, wrote philosopher Olga Lipovskaia, “to create, to earn money, to sit at home with the children, or go on a business trip.”¹²

Feminists believed that the transformation had to begin with individuals shaking off the shackles of Soviet‑era thinking. This was a common belief in the 1990s, as people across the FSU struggled to orient themselves to the new world. Anastasia Posadskaia, a founding member of feminist organizations during perestroika, declared, “I believe that women should understand that no one ever has liberated us and no one ever will liberate us, unless we do it ourselves. We must free ourselves from our silence, stereotypes and political manipulation. Only a revolution of morals and ideology can transform women from the objects of a policy formulated by others into the driving force of social change.”¹³ That revolution must begin, Posadskaia and other feminists believed, with women joining together with like‑minded others, as feminists in the West had done during the early stages of second‑wave feminism.

The maternalists agreed with the feminists that women had been exploited by the Soviet system. They proposed very different remedies for this exploitation, however. Rather than become even more engaged in the public world, women should leave the paid‑labor force, maternalists argued. Childrearing was women’s primary social duty and most rewarding undertaking, but too many had been unable to be good mothers in the past because the state had made them work outside the home. If they became homemakers, they could nourish their own well‑being and restore the family, which had been battered by Soviet policies. The state, the maternalists declared, had taught children that it was the authority on morality, and had thereby usurped the role of parents and undermined their authority. By paying benefits to mothers, it had weakened the standing of men within their families. “What emerged was a situation in which women relied increasingly on the state as the omnipresent, reliable father and husband,” wrote historian Sergei Khukhterin, “while men were effectively marginalized, their domestic power curtailed, along with their ultimate responsibility to and for their families.”¹⁴ The consequences were high divorce rates, domestic violence, alcoholism and drug abuse, the alienation of young people, and the early death of dispirited men. To get society on the right track, maternalists wanted women to have more children, create happy homes, and support the authority of their husbands.

Nationalists added that if women stayed home, they could better preserve native cultures and nurture the next generation. This venerable argument was very popular in all the successor states, where people and governments were attempting to define their national identities. As part of this effort, nationalists across the FSU coupled their praise of real mothers with veneration of folklore heroines. The most spectacular example of this unearthing of earth mothers was the gigantic winged statue of Oranta‑Berehynia erected in Kyiv’s (Kiev’s) Independence Square in 2001. Critics charged that this purported goddess of the ancient Slavs was an especially gaudy and expensive example of myths manufactured by maternalist nationalists.¹⁵

The leaders of the predominantly Muslim republics of the Caucasus and Central Asia were seeking to build national identity and cohesion too. To that end, they endorsed Islam as the faith of their people. They did not, however, adopt the conservative Islamic prescriptions about women popular in neighboring Iran and Afghanistan. Indeed, they held Islamism at arm’s length and sometimes arrested its proponents. Governments and social commentators in Azerbaijan and Central Asia also endorsed women’s legal and civil equality and their right to education and employment. The authoritarian politics of the Soviet era lived on in these countries, and so did the principles of women’s emancipation.¹⁶

Soviet ideas, and older feminist ones, were at the heart of the discussions of gender in the post‑Soviet world. The maternalists’ core notion– that a woman’s most gratifying experience and greatest social service was motherhood–had been a constant theme of the Brezhnev years. It was widely accepted by women as well as men. Although the feminists asserted the importance of gender equality and women’s participation in the world beyond the family, many of them agreed with the maternalists that women were innately more nurturing and moral than men. Some used this claim of women’s superiority, a legacy of the cult of domesticity, to justify civic engagement, as women had from the earliest days of feminism. What was new after 1991 was the principle, stressed by both sides, that women should be free to make their own choices, rather than being marshaled to tasks set for them by the state. Feminists and maternalists added the promise that women would make choices that promoted social welfare, and in this pledge too they were echoing the reassurances issued by feminists since the nineteenth century.¹⁷

Discussions of masculinity also continued the themes of the Brezhnev years; they focused on male weakness and decline. Social commentators and ordinary folk alike feared that men, who had been demoralized by the Soviet system, were now collapsing under the strain of the crisis, leaving their wives to keep families going. “The women take absolutely everything on themselves,” a peasant woman told historian Susan Bridger. “The men are all alcoholics, they won’t do anything.” Tatiana Khainovskaia, a Belarusian university student, complained in 2007 that the biggest problems in women’s lives were “lack of real men and lack of money.”¹⁸

These laments were reinforced by dismal statistics. Between 1992 and 2000, male life expectancy fell from 62 years to 59 in Russia; female life expectancy in 2000 was 72 years. The most horrifying examples of displaced men were the veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Chechnya, many of whom had returned to civilian life suffering from post‑traumatic stress disorder, but had received little treatment or social support. Less stricken men worried about how to define themselves. A nineteen‑year‑old Siberian interviewed by Sergei Oushakine in the late 1990s expressed a common feeling when he declared, “Masculinity has lost its former essence, and no new definitions have popped up on the surface yet. I cannot even tell what the contemporary meaning of such a notion as masculinity consists of.” Similar laments were heard in the Caucasus.¹⁹

There were tales of men who were thriving. Websites and magazines glowed with images of stylish, handsome “New Ukrainians” and “New Georgians” who had become rich in private business. These men were successful, press coverage suggested, because they had the energy, courage, and will to reinvent themselves. In the summer of 2007, Vladimir Putin laid claim to being such a man by circulating photographs of himself fishing, bare‑chested, in a Siberian river and captaining a sailboat, with his beautiful family alongside. In December 2010 Putin, now prime minister, added cosmopolitan coolness to his resume. He took the stage at a gala fund‑raiser in St. Petersburg to sing, badly and sheepishly, the rock‑and‑roll classic “Blueberry Hill.”²⁰

Putin’s elevation to a paragon of post‑Soviet masculinity did not mean that his government had the power to lay down hegemonic masculine ideals, as its predecessors had. In the age of the internet and a flourishing commercial press at home, it could not control the dissemination of masculine ideals, and indeed, it did not try to do so. It also faced a public that did not admire the “New Men.” Ordinary people viewed most of them as nouveauriche thieves in league with corrupt politicians.