Politics in the Successor States

The new rulers were mostly men from the Soviet elite. “While women were waiting on line for food,” feminist Maria Arbatova observed tartly, “men carved up the country into pieces.” The successor governments did not continue the Soviet practice of setting quotas for female representation in their legislatures and bureaucracies, with the result that the numbers of women in those institutions fell. In 1993, 14 percent of the delegates to the Russian Duma, the national legislature, were women; by 2003 that proportion had dipped below 10 percent. There were more women in regional legislatures and city councils; 26 percent of the members of the Tver municipal Duma in 2005 were female. The public seemed to consider this continuance of male dominance in politics unexceptional. Women did not have the temperament to serve in elected office, many believed. They meant this as a compliment; politics, like business, corrupted everyone who participated in it. Women should devote their talents to the higher callings of education, health care, and childrearing.²¹

PUBLIC POLICY

In the 1990s, the governments of the successor states passed constitutions and other laws that affirmed women’s rights to civil, educational, employment, legal, and political equality with men. They continued Soviet benefits programs, but, on the advice of such foreign lenders as the World Bank, they shifted much of the responsibility for funding public services to local governments. Because those administrations were even more strapped for revenues than the national ones, the results were disastrous. Thousands of daycare centers closed; others raised their fees. Maternity and child‑support benefits went unpaid. The sick had to bear more of the cost of treatment, even while conditions in the hospitals deteriorated. The implementation of all these changes was made still worse by poor planning and local foot‑dragging, the same difficulties that had plagued many Soviet projects.

Abortion rights in the Western successor states were also imperiled. Nationalist conservatives and the Orthodox and Catholic Churches advocated restricting abortion, citing declining populations as a rationale. The Russian and Ukrainian governments made some unpublicized, minor changes in the regulations in 2003–2004, but widespread public support for the availability of the procedure dissuaded them from going further. Perhaps they were influenced as well by the fact that women were having fewer abortions. Between 1991 and 2001, there was a 50 percent drop in the abortion rate in Russia and Ukraine because public‑health workers and volunteer organizations, supported by international agencies and foundations, expanded family‑planning counseling and increased supplies of affordable contraceptives.

Women in Central Asia and the Caucasus had less access to contraceptives and underwent fewer abortions. They continued to prefer having large families. In 2007, the Uzbek government, worried about overpopulation, ordered physicians to promote surgical sterilizations; the birthrate dropped in consequence, even as complaints about women being forced to have the procedures increased.²²

WOMEN IN POLITICS

The most important women in the governments of the FSU were those who kept social services functioning. In cities and towns, many of the civil servants who staffed the schools, hospitals, and social‑service agencies were women; some of these people worked hard to preserve programs benefiting women and to create new ones, staffed by volunteers, that could help people deal with the economic crisis. In Uzbekistan, this collaboration resulted in a network of women’s committees extending from the national to the neighborhood level. Neighborhood committee members served as volunteer social workers, passing out poor relief, advising women on family matters, and teaching Islam. Many people across the FSU, especially poor women, believed that women did such jobs better than men, because they were more sympathetic to the plight of the disadvantaged. The general disgust with politicians did not extend, therefore, to those civil servants who helped women get through the hard times.²³

The political parties that sprang up after 1991 were predominantly male organizations, with a couple of fleeting exceptions. The largest and most successful of these was the Women of Russia party (WOR), formed in 1993 by the Union of Women of Russia, an alliance of three women’s groups: the Soviet Women’s Committee, the Association of Women Entrepreneurs of Russia, and the Women of the Naval Fleet. WOR ran on a platform that criticized other parties for not paying attention to women’s plight, praised female legislators as more effective than male ones, and advocated increased spending on services beneficial to women. The campaign succeeded; WOR won twenty‑one seats. The party’s delegates to the Duma concentrated on funding social services, such as family planning, and on writing laws that affirmed gender equality.²⁴

WOR’s successes were short‑lived. In elections in 1995, their delegation shrank to three representatives. Political inexperience, which plagued all the new parties, contributed to this decline, as did WOR’s own particular weaknesses. Its leaders quarreled with one another and with other female activists. Feminist groups denounced WOR for its association with the Soviet Women’s Committee and charged that its delegates were mere tokens who did as men told them. The fact that WOR became more assertively feminist during its two years in the Duma did not allay the suspicions. There was still greater diversity of political opinion among the masses of female voters, huge majorities of whom did not vote for WOR.²⁵

Women participated in other parties much as they had done in the Soviet communist party–that is, they remained in the lower ranks, where they did clerical and organizational work. In the Caucasus and Central Asia, women ran female auxiliaries derived from the Soviet Women’s Committees. Male party leaders reported that they valued their female comrades as dependable, reliable functionaries who were more compliant and less ambitious than male politicians.²⁶ Perhaps the ambitious ones learned to content themselves with whatever they could achieve.

A handful of women did rise to positions of regional and national leadership across the FSU. There were probably several thousand such women in the period under consideration here, of whom two, Kazimiera Prunskiene of Lithuania and Yulia Tymoshenko of Ukraine, reached the highest offices in their nations.

KAZIMIERA PRUNSKIENE (b. 1943), AND YULIA TYMOSHENKO (b. 1960)

Prunskiene and Tymoshenko were Ph.D. economists who, like Tatiana Zaslavskaia, entered politics during the Gorbachev years, but who, unlike Zaslavskaia, stayed in the game after 1991. Prunskiene was the sort of politician that Zaslavskaia scorned as “sly, dodgy.” Her admirers praised her pragmatism and flexibility. A specialist in agricultural development, Prunskiene was one of the founders of the independence movement Sajudis. In 1990 she became prime minister, then resigned a year later because of policy differences with parliamentary leaders. She set up a consulting firm and returned to academics, publishing studies of economic development in post‑socialist Eastern Europe.

Soon Prunskiene’s ambitions drew her back into the political fray. First she tried to build a base among women. Following the example of WOR, she founded the Women’s Party of Lithuania in 1995 and criticized the continuing economic and political inequality of women as well as conservative Catholic influences. When the Women’s Party failed to win popular support, Prunskiene renamed it the New Democracy Party and arranged a merger with the larger Farmers’ Party. Now she became an advocate for the peasants, supporting the development of private enterprise in rural areas, declaring her allegiance to “conservative values (family, local communities, Christian morality),” and speaking fondly of her own childhood in the countryside. She served as a delegate to the national legislature, the Seimas, from 1996 onward, and managed to build up her own popularity, if not that of her party. In 2004 the Farmers and New Democracy Party won 6.6 percent of the popular vote in parliamentary elections, while Prunskiene, running for president that same year, lost by only 3 percent of the vote. Thereafter she became minister of agriculture. Her adaptation to democratic politics had succeeded.²⁷

Yulia Tymoshenko exercised her political skills in Ukraine’s more turbulent political world. She had worked in the Komsomol during graduate school. When perestroika came, she built a successful chain of video‑rental stores. In the 1990s, she moved to the more lucrative field of managing privatized energy companies and made a fortune. Politics then began to interest her again, and she decided to run for election to Ukraine’s national legislature, the Verkhovna Rada. Eloquent and beautiful, Tymoshenko received huge majorities from her constituents.

In the late 1990s, she began to criticize the corruption of the new elite, of which she herself was such a successful member. Appointed deputy prime minister for the fuel and energy sector by Prime Minister Victor Yushchenko in 1999, Tymoshenko set about closing tax loopholes that were benefiting many of her former colleagues. They retaliated by having President Leonid Kuchma fire her in January 2001, and then arrest her on corruption charges. Tymoshenko emerged from a month in jail more critical of the government than ever. She organized her own political party, the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc, and began holding public protests. She was targeted for assassination in 2003, but survived a suspicious auto crash.

^{A photograph of Kazimiera Prunskiene in the 2000s.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Kazimiera_Prunskiene.2008–05‑23.jpg. Accessed June 27, 2011.}