Satisfactions and Concerns

In the second decade after the end of the Soviet Union, women across the FSU voiced many of the same satisfactions and concerns about their personal lives and their societies. The hardships and disappointments of the period had provoked widespread feelings that the new world was less secure and less fair than the old. Remembering Soviet times, Ekaterina Sondak, the feldsher from Pinsk who became a businesswoman, commented, “There were many good things. In spite of everything, life was very calm and people were sure that tomorrow would be like today. In 1991, all people were in the same material position. They had the same possibilities; everybody had the same clothes, the same food. There was no range of production in shops. Everyone was equal, with equal salaries and wages.” Elena Khainovskaia, a Belarusian physician, agreed: “There were many really good things [in the Soviet period]. Free education, free health care; for different work credits, you could get a car or a flat or something else. There were some bad things, but as the time passes I forget them.”⁴⁸

The old world had not been as egalitarian as Sondak and Khainovskaia remembered; the elite then too enjoyed a far higher standard of living than did less fortunate folk. Much had been lost, though. The Soviet guarantees–employment for high‑school and university graduates, job security once hired, cheap public services, and low prices for the goods that were available–were either gone or greatly weakened. Now money and connections mattered more than ever, income disparities grew, and professionals, who had enjoyed high status as members of the intelligentsia in the Soviet system, struggled to get by on wages that did not keep up with rising prices. Tatiana Khainovskaia, Elena’s daughter, summed up the situation eloquently in 2010: “So the people who have some of the most important jobs (doctors save people’s lives and teachers sometimes save students’ souls) earn the same amount of money (if not less) than someone working in a clothing store.”⁴⁹

For the great majority of women, life was harder. Eighty‑five percent of respondents to a 2002 poll of women in Russia said childrearing had become more difficult since 1991. Substantial percentages of these women also reported that they now had more trouble finding employment (79 percent), getting a good education (64.8 percent), having a rewarding private life (53 percent), and doing their housework (47 percent).⁵⁰

No strangers to hardship, many of these women said that they were learning to cope with the new challenges. Sixty‑three percent of the respondents described their personal situations as “satisfactory,” and 25 percent said that theirs were “good.” The majority rated as adequate the availability of consumer goods and food, and said the same of their housing. Naturally enough, poorer women reported greater discontents, while those who held good jobs and lived in big cities were the most satisfied. Strong majorities of rural and urban women in Russia reported in other polls that they considered their husbands loving, hard‑working, supportive, and attentive to the children. Perhaps this was because, even as public opinion bemoaned the crisis in masculinity, most men were successfully adjusting to the new reality.⁵¹

Women speaking to pollsters and the press took a much more critical view of the world beyond their families, and they worried about that world’s impact on their children. In the Soviet system, education had been a pathway to good jobs, economic security, and social mobility. After 1991 the cost of education, particularly higher education, rose, so poorer women feared that their children would be unable to better themselves by studying hard. As always, the peasants were the most disadvantaged and the most pessimistic. In rural areas of Central Asia and the Caucasus by the mid‑1990s, some parents had to keep their daughters out of school because they could only afford to pay tuition for their sons.⁵²

Women across the FSU also worried about the difficulties of teaching children morality in a society that seemed to have lost its moral compass. Most felt that they themselves could resist the temptations of the new times. Ninety‑one percent of the women questioned in the 2002 Russian poll affirmed that they could “live an honest life” even in a society that they regarded as more corrupt than the one they had lost. The children were another matter. When asked in 2007 to name the greatest changes since 1991, Liudmila Buloichik, an English teacher in Minsk, pointed to rising rudeness and materialism among young people, brought on by exposure to Western consumer culture and by a lack of discipline at home and in the schools. A group calling itself “Vologda Mothers for the Morality of Children” expressed the same concerns in a 2004 letter to President Putin: “The reasons for our anxiety and pain are not only local conflicts and wars, the lingering economic and political crises, poverty and unemployment. No less terrible fears arise from the loss of faith and hope, from apathy and depression, from the immorality overwhelming our society, from the ever more rampant deficiencies of alcoholism and drug addiction, sexual dissipation and prostitution, permissiveness and lawlessness.”⁵³

Few women agreed with the maternalist argument that they should leave the paid‑labor force. Work, for most of them, was an economic necessity, and the majority told pollsters that their jobs gave them a sense of personal fulfillment and a community of colleagues and friends. Furthermore, their jobs were less boring than housework and provided a break from the pressures of family life. Many women, particularly in the European republics, still resented the double shift, and their criticism of it echoed those Soviet women had made for decades. “Nowadays, though women and men are considered to be equal, women remain hearth‑keepers,” lamented Irina, a university student and daughter of the businesswoman Ekaterina Sondak, in 2007. “So her duty is not only to earn money, but to be a good mother, to cook, to keep the house, clean, etc. Not a lot of men help women with these duties because they believe it’s not masculine work.” Opinion polls in the 1990s reported that two‑thirds of wives and husbands thought that the refusal of men to do housework was a major cause of strife between spouses. This statistic seems particularly unfortunate in view of the fact that, as a consequence of the cutbacks in social services, women’s chores, particularly childcare, had become more time‑consuming. “Leisure for the majority of our contemporaries,” wrote the authors of the 2002 Russian poll, “for the most part is reduced to breaks between paid work and housework, during which they pay some attention to the children and watch t.v.” Many women complained, as they had done during the Brezhnev years, that the double shift prevented them from upgrading their credentials in order to qualify for better jobs.⁵⁴

Many women perceived as well that continuing gender inequities were affecting their economic opportunities. When asked in 2007 whether women and men were equals in Belarus, Tatiana Khainovskaia, the university student, replied, “Theoretically yes, but practically, men in Belarus seem to have more rights than women.” Respondents to the 2002 Russian poll reported that men were more able than women to pursue political careers and become entrepreneurs. They earned higher wages and had greater job mobility. When explaining these inequities, women often attributed them not to gender discrimination, but to natural differences between the sexes. “We know from the Holy Bible that all the people are equal,” declared Liudmila Yushko, a student at the Belarusian State University in Minsk in 2007. “But, of course, there are a lot of differences in their psychologies. First of all, we have different values. So, for a woman the most important thing is her family, her children. For a man, it is his career.” The 2002 poll of women in Russia found that poorer women were more sensitive to gender discrimination than more privileged ones, probably because they experienced it more frequently.⁵⁵

Polls also found that many women were optimistic about their personal prospects. In the 2002 poll, 75 percent of respondents said that they believed that they would be able to “find real love,” “create a happy family,” “raise good children,” and “have good friends and interesting work.” In 2007, the Belarusians Ekaterina Sondak, the businesswoman, and Elena Khainovskaia, the physician, shared this optimism. Despite the hardships and disruptions they had lived through, despite the political repression and poverty of Belarus, they had managed well. The Sondaks’ clothing store in Murmansk was a going concern, their son Andrei was an accountant, and their daughter Irina was a student at the best university in Minsk. The Khainovskiis had done well too. Elena’s husband Sergei worked in a bank, where he earned a decent salary, and she kept up her medical practice. Her daughter Tatiana and son Andrei were successful students. Both mothers hoped for still more for their daughters. Asked “Do you think Irina will have a better life than you did because of the changes since 1991?” Sondak replied, “I’m sure of that. She is getting a perfect education. And now if she wants to have success in her life, she will have more opportunities than I did in our times.” Khainovskaia was less certain. “I think so,” she said, “because our society develops and changes and I think that it will give Tania an opportunity to have a better life.”⁵⁶

In 2007, the daughters, Irina and Tatiana, aspired to have good jobs and happy families, as their mothers had, but to enjoy more comforts and freedoms than the older generation had known. Tatiana, always enthusiastic and optimistic, declared, “I want to have three children and enough money to provide perfect lives for them, my brother, my parents, and my grandparents, and to work in the tourism business.” Irina, a steelier personality, had a less rosy vision: “When I was younger I wanted to become a businesswoman. But now I realize that this is very hard. And being a female is one of the hardships. That’s why I want to have a more or less well‑paid job with the possibility of promotion. I want to get married, have children, and do everything possible to make their lives easier. I hope that in the future my children will be able not only to dream about a perfect job but to have it.” Her limited hopes were widely shared by women across the FSU.⁵⁷

^{Tatiana Khainovskaia in 2010.}

^{Author’s collection.}