KAZIMIERA PRUNSKIENE

In 1990, after Lithuania had declared its independence, Prunskiene came to Washington, D.C. The visit put the U.S. political establishment, then supporting Mikhail Gorbachev, in a difficult position. According to Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, Prunskiene rose to the occasion.

“At a dinner tonight, with journalists at the house of Christopher Matthews, a columnist for The San Francisco Examiner, Mrs. Prunskiene was asked why Lithuania had not waited a year to declare its independence.

She smiled and said, ‘We felt we had to do it quickly, like a karate chop, if it was to work.’

Mrs. Prunskiene, a 47‑year‑old economist and former Communist Party official, had a small entourage, no security guards and she rode in a dark‑blue sedan paid for by a private person in the Lithuanian‑American community. As a translator, she used the head of a Lithuanian‑American organization based in Washington.

Even so, she showed a natural aptitude for American politics. When the Prime Minister settled in her room at the Embassy Row hotel here on Wednesday night, her friends and advisers gathered around to counsel her on how to handle the American politicians she would be meeting.

They told her that each politician would think he was more important than the last.

‘And my job,’ she said, smiling knowingly, ‘is to confirm that.’”

SOURCE: MAUREEN DOWD, “EVOLUTION IN EUROPE: LITHUANIA PREMIER SEES BUSH, BUT THERE’S NO RED CARPET,” NEW YORK TIMES, MAY 4, 1990, HTTP://WWW.NYTIMES.COM. FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES, MAY 4 1990 THE NEW YORK TIMES. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. USED BY PERMISSION AND PROTECTED BY THE COPYRIGHT LAWS OF THE UNITED STATES. THE PRINTING, COPYING, REDISTRIBUTION, OR RETRANSMISSION OF THIS CONTENT WITHOUT EXPRESS WRITTEN PERMISSION IS PROHIBITED.

^{Yulia Tymoshenko speaking to the press on December 2, 2010.http://www.tymoshenko.ua/. Accessed December 2, 2010.}

YULIA TYMOSHENKO

In July 2010, on her husband’s birthday, Tymoshenko wrote this about him on her blog:

“There are people (very few, unfortunately) who you can always rely on in the most difficult moments. You know that they’ll never betray you, they’ll never turn away, they’ll never judge. Such is my Oleksandr. And not because he’s my husband, but because he’s a real man–120%.

We were once in the same detention facility in Lukianivka. It was clear that they threw my husband behind bars only because he was my husband. Back then this was a ‘crime.’ One night he and I were both being taken for questioning and we saw each other for just a moment, for just one breath. But for me this was enough. This gave me such a boost of energy, faith and courage that I felt I could endure and survive everything. It seems the prison administrators also sensed this because the next day Sasha was transferred to a prison in the Zhytomyr oblast. He handed me a note directly into the cell on which he wrote: ‘Don’t give up.’…

Why am I writing all this? Just because. I’m grateful to my husband for simply being. I’m grateful that I have someone I can rely on. I’m grateful that in all these years he has never said a word about the fact that I haven’t dedicated myself entirely to my family….

I hope that you always have lots of people you can rely on. “

SOURCE: YULIA TYMOSHENKO, HTTP://BLOG.TYMOSHENKO.UA/EN/ARTICLE/ACNONAA4. THE TRANSLATION HAS BEEN SLIGHTLY EDITED HERE BY BARBARA CLEMENTS

Tymoshenko came to international attention during Ukraine’s Orange Revolution of December 2004, when hundreds of thousands of demonstrators gathered in downtown Kyiv to protest Kuchma’s clumsy attempts to falsify the results of a presidential election in favor of his candidate, Victor Yanukovich. Her long blond hair now braided and curled around her head in a hairdo once favored by Ukraine’s peasant women, Tymoshenko became the voice of the protestors, speaking often before them and to the international press. Kuchma soon backed down and a coalition of reform parties chose Tymoshenko as prime minister in January 2005.

When the coalition fell apart nine months later, Yushchenko fired Tymoshenko. She returned to building her reputation and her party. She vowed to end corruption, reform the economy, and assert Ukraine’s independence from Russia. She also promised to make life better for peasant women. Tymoshenko continued to cultivate foreign elites, publishing articles in such prestigious journals as Foreign Affairs and traveling often to Western Europe. By the fall of 2007 she was heading two political parties, the Yulia Tymoshenko Bloc and the All Union Fatherland Party. In elections that summer, her Bloc received one‑third of the vote. In December, she once again became prime minister. In February 2010, she lost a bid for the presidency to a resurgent Yanukovich, and thereafter resigned from the premiership and became the leader of the coalition of opposition parties in the parliament. The vicious jockeying for power that had bedeviled Ukraine’s politics for more than a decade continued thereafter.²⁸

Tymoshenko and Prunskiene were intelligent, ambitious, determined, adroit, and assertive. In their political skills, they resembled Catherine the Great. Like Catherine, they were elite women who reached for power to which the patriarchal rules of the game did not entitle them. Like Catherine, they built alliances with powerful men and tailored their advocacy to the public mood. They also created reassuringly feminine images, as Catherine had done. Prunskiene dressed the part of a matronly professional and embraced family values. Tymoshenko wore designer clothes that showed off her figure, publicized her church‑going, and kept her bright hair in that peasant braid. The clothes and the smiles cloaked the reality that these women, like Catherine, were hard‑nosed political infighters. Prunskiene and Tymoshenko may have been even more skilled at the dark arts of politics than Catherine, for Catherine was sustained at least in part by her courtiers’ deference to her royal rank. The other two made their way in the free‑for‑all of post‑Soviet politics.

WOMEN IN THE MEDIA

There were many women among the journalists who worked to build an independent press in the successor states. It was a risky business, for the autocratic regimes in Belarus and Central Asia arrested their critics, while in Ukraine President Kuchma arranged automobile accidents or poisonings for his. In Russia, Yeltsin was fairly tolerant of the electronic and print media; Putin was not. He closed offending television networks, arrested critics on trumped‑up charges, and approved assassinations. Estimates of the number of journalists murdered in Russia between 1991 and 2010 range from several dozen to more than three hundred. Despite the intimidation and the increasingly strict regulation of the media, a few outspoken women remained. Of these, two of the best known were Maria Arbatova and Anna Politkovskaia.

MARIA ARBATOVA (b. 1957) AND ANNA POLITKOVSKAIA (1958–2006)

Maria Arbatova was a sardonic, self‑promoting playwright, poet, novelist, talk‑show host, radio broadcaster, actor, and blogger who became famous in the 1990s as “Russia’s first feminist.” She was not the first, but she, unlike the academic feminists, had a national audience. Arbatova was a Muscovite who began publishing stories on women’s lives in the 1980s and embraced feminism during the Gorbachev years. In the 1990s she organized women’s groups, became an adviser to Yeltsin, and wrote still more on feminist themes. She became famous as host of the television show I Myself. Her co‑host, also a woman, sang the praises of motherhood as woman’s highest calling; Arbatova championed feminism. In an effort to break down feminism’s negative connotations for her audience, Arbatova dressed well, talked lovingly about her twin sons, bemoaned the double shift, and asserted women’s rights to independence and equality. The show became a hit, particularly with working‑class women, and Arbatova became a star.²⁹

After I Myself went off the air, Arbatova remained Russia’s foremost celebrity feminist. Broadening her criticism in the Putin years to include human‑rights issues, she larded her public pronouncements with humor. Her novel, How I Tried to Get into the Duma Honestly (2007), mocked political corruption. In 2007 she drew international attention when she proposed that since Russian men were drinking and smoking themselves to death, the government should import Indian men for Russian women to marry. She had married one herself. Arbatova hosted a radio program, The Right to Be Yourself, and maintained a lively website and a Facebook page.³⁰

Anna Politkovskaia was a muckraking journalist of exceptional courage and determination. She came to prominence by publishing reports on atrocities committed by the Russian army during the war with separatists in the province of Chechnya. Soon she turned her attention to passionate exposés of corrupt politicians, judges, and businessmen. Politkovskaia was unsparing in her condemnation of Putin. “I dislike him for a matter‑of‑factness worse than felony,” she wrote in 2004, “for his cynicism, for his racism, for his lies…, for the massacre of the innocents that went on throughout his first term as president.”³¹ When Chechen terrorists seized a school in the city of Beslan in 2004, Politkovskaia flew south to help mediate the confrontation. En route, she became seriously ill, probably because she had been poisoned. Undeterred, she continued to write her scathing articles. On October 7, 2006, Putin’s birthday, gunmen lying in wait in the elevator of her apartment building in Moscow assassinated her.

The fact that she was publishing her criticism abroad and thereby publicizing the regime’s brutality to the world, even as it was trying to present itself as humane and democratic, may have sealed her fate. Officially, the government denied any involvement in her death, then launched an investigation that proceeded according to well‑established precedents. Police found the gunmen, but not those who had hired them. In 2009, the three men tried for her murder were acquitted, the acquittal was overturned on appeal, and a new trial was ordered. The same year, five people who had worked with Politkovskaia to expose human‑rights abuses in Chechnya were killed.³²

FEMALE TERRORISTS

The atrocities in Chechnya also called forth a terrorist campaign against the Russians in which a handful of women participated.

The most lethal attacks were the occupation of the Dubrovka Theater in Moscow in the fall of 2002 and of a school in the southern city of Beslan in 2004. In both cases the terrorists included a few heavily armed women. In both cases hundreds of people died when police tried to free the hostages. The women called themselves shakhidki, a Russification of the Arabic word for martyr. Dressed in black headscarves or veiled from head to foot, shakhidki also conducted most of the group’s suicide bombings. In August 2004, two of them blew up two passenger jets in flight, killing ninety people. A few weeks later a single shakhidka destroyed herself and nine others in a Moscow subway station. In March 2010, two women, one of them identified as Dzhanet Abdurakhmanova, the seventeen‑year‑old widow of a Chechen militant leader, killed forty people and wounded more than ninety in a suicide attack on the Moscow subway.³³

Veiled women assaulting defenseless civilians seemed to confirm the long‑standing Russian belief that the male Chechen terrorists were savages and female terrorists their benighted dupes. Most Russians had not read Politkovskaia’s articles. They did not know that their army had committed war crimes against the Chechens, including the rape of children, which went unpunished. The shakhidki, inspired by the militant Islamism preached among Chechen guerillas and by the suicide bombers of the Palestinian Intifada, sought through terrorism to avenge their dead and draw attention to the crimes perpetrated against their people. Vengeance seemed the stronger of their motives, for the mass killing of civilians did nothing to inform Russians about the depredations of their own government.³⁴

The New Activism

Some women responded to the freedoms and stresses of post‑Soviet times by joining a wide variety of volunteer groups, the so‑called “civic organizations.” In the early 2000s, 2 to 2.5 million people, the majority of them women, belonged to these groups in Russia alone. They joined for a variety of reasons. Some were attempting to help themselves by helping others. This was the case with the women who established an organization, Our House, to give aid to large families in Kyiv. Others, such as the midwives who did home‑birthing in St. Petersburg, were applying their professional skills to volunteer work. Still others were continuing the projects begun during the Soviet period by the zhensovety. Many members of civic organizations believed that their work fostered the development of democratic politics; feminists also saw them as a way to organize women to achieve their emancipation. Activists and the public believed that civic organizations were suited to women because they were philanthropic and because they were independent of the government. Julie Hemment has written, “The market and formal politics were regarded as dirty, but also as masculine domains…. The non‑governmental… sphere was seen to be decent, moral, and in this way peculiarly feminine.”³⁵