ACHIEVEMENTS AND DIFFICULTIES

There were parallels between post‑Soviet activism and that of the pre‑revolutionary era. The post‑Soviet activists, many of them professionals, were a tiny minority of women, as their predecessors had been. They struggled to sustain the morale, staffing, and funding of their organizations and they coped with government intransigence and sometimes with oppression. As in the past, women with connections to the political leadership had the greatest success. Unlike the pre‑revolutionary generations, some of the activists of the post‑Soviet world enjoyed support from international sources and access to modern communications that facilitated organizing. Their endeavors were made easier by nearly universal literacy and widespread acceptance, thanks to progress in the Soviet era, of the notion that women should be involved in public life.

Self‑identified feminists were a tiny minority among the women in civic organizations. Maternalist ideas, especially the notion that activists were applying their nurturing skills to helping mothers and children, were far more common, especially in the early 1990s. As time passed, awareness of the systemic nature of gender inequities grew among the activists, because they found themselves struggling against them and because contacts with feminists from abroad proliferated. Particularly important for the women of the Baltics, the Caucasus, and Central Asia was the United Nations Women’s Conference of 1995. The governments of the successor states, eager to be accepted into the international community, sent female delegates to the meeting in Beijing, and there they met thousands of female activists from around the world.⁴³

The contact with foreigners, particularly international aid agencies and foundations, was a mixed blessing. Their grants buoyed the fortunes of many civic organizations. For example, the Ford Foundation and the Canadian Fund for Gender Equality supported the Tver Center for Women’s History and Gender Studies. The U.S. Agency for International Development gave grants to battered women’s shelters, and the League of Women Voters sponsored travel by female politicians from Russia and Ukraine to the United States. Foundations from Europe and the United States underwrote research projects and scholarly publications. But the relationship between the foreigners and the activists could be problematic. Many of the outsiders took a patronizing attitude toward the people of the FSU, and their assumption of the superiority of their own perspectives affected which projects received funding. Battered women’s shelters were a favorite in the late 1990s, while organizations that espoused maternalism were not. The funding priorities of the international agencies also shifted over time, and grants were usually short‑term, leaving civic organizations to redirect their activities or find other sources of support when the money ran out. This situation also plagued women’s groups elsewhere in Eastern Europe.⁴⁴

Another frustration arose from frictions between the civic organizations and national, regional, and local governments. In smaller cities, particularly in the European republics, many workers in civic organizations maintained good relations with the authorities. The activists gained access thereby to office space in publicly owned buildings and funding for their projects from officials glad to have the volunteers’ help in providing services. In Ivanovo, Russia, for example, the leaders of the local chapter of the Union of Women of Russia, the successor to the Soviet Women’s Committee, collaborated with the bureaucracy in the late 1990s in establishing programs to help poor families. Civic organizations in the major cities were more suspicious of involvement with government, and government officials often viewed the larger and more feminist groups as troublemakers. The most autocratic regimes, such as that of President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, permitted only politically compliant philanthropic organizations to operate. The Russian government under Yeltsin was more tolerant, under Putin less so. It issued regulations in 2004 and 2005 tightening oversight, particularly over the public‑advocacy civic organizations and foreign funders. Perhaps following the Russian example, Lukashenko then began harassing with regulations even such resolutely apolitical groups as the American‑based Children of Chernobyl, which brought Belarusian children to the United States in the summer for vacations and medical care. By the mid‑2000s, governments in the autocratic successor states were still letting volunteers help out with problems caused by the drastic cuts in social services, especially if those volunteers would fund their projects themselves, but they were keeping a close eye on them. Here was yet another carryover of Soviet practices, and of tsarist ones as well.⁴⁵

The women of the civic organizations trained millions of women in social activism, helped millions more cope with hardship, and disseminated reformist ideas. But their immediate impact on the great majority of women in the FSU was limited. A 2002 poll of women in Russia found that 70 percent of respondents did not know whether civic organizations were active in their regions. Still worse, more than half of those who were aware of them doubted that they themselves might benefit from their operations, and, when asked whether women were better than men at defending women’s interests, only 62 percent answered in the affirmative. Better‑educated women were more likely to have heard about and participated in civic organizations, a finding that reflected the organizations’ base among such women.⁴⁶

This weakness plagued all civic organizations. Across the FSU, people were far less likely to participate in volunteer groups than were citizens of the Western democracies.⁴⁷ This was a legacy of Soviet times, when volunteerism had been required and controlled by the regime and people had avoided it when possible. There was little motivation to change that habit after 1991, with survival demanding so much and volunteerism giving back so little. Once again, as in the past, female social activists worked assiduously to improve their own situation, preserve their organizations, cultivate government support, and reach out to poorer women. The poor concentrated on getting by and relied on family, friends, and help from local governments.