TATIANA KHAINOVSKAIA

In 2008–2009, Tatiana studied tourism at Central Washington University. A year later, asked about her hopes for the future, she wrote:

“I don’t want to leave my country. I was born here. I want to see it develop and flourish. I don’t want to have to explain to people from different countries what Belarus is and where it is situated. I want people to know my country. I don’t want tourists who are planning their European tour to miss my country. I want them to come here and to see what we have to show and to feel what we have to give them. We are young. We are only 20 years old. It takes time for any country to develop, to grow, to bloom. Rome wasn’t built in one day either.

I want to work in the tourism business, because to my mind it’s the easiest way of peaceful and beneficial communication between people from all over the world. Ideally, tourism is about creating, not about destroying, but in reality it’s not always true. So it’s our job, young peoples’ job, to create. I want to create an image of my country so that people will want to know about it. I want them not to be afraid of the mythical dangers that await them on the streets of our cities (many still believe that there are bears walking along the streets in Minsk).

I’m proud of my country and I want other people to understand why I’m proud of it. And when I say ‘country,’ I don’t mean the government or the economy… I mean the people and nature and everything around us that we see every day.”

SOURCE: TATIANA KHAINOVSKAIA, LETTER, NOVEMBER 23, 2010.

Conclusions

The first twenty years of the post‑Soviet period were a mélange of gains and losses. By lowering the standard of living, increasing unemployment, and intensifying gender patterns that disadvantaged women, these decades made women’s lives more difficult. By weakening the remaining autocratic governments and giving birth to more democratic ones, they expanded civil liberties and contacts with the outside world. Activists grabbed the new opportunities, as they had done before in Russian history. A handful became leaders. Some confronted the authorities. Women in all the successor states launched independent organizations that addressed social problems. Feminism once again flourished within the intelligentsia.

While the activists organized, ordinary folk devoted themselves to adjusting to the new realities. By the early 2000s, women in some of the European republics were telling pollsters that although life was still hard, they had hope for the future. Elena Khainovskaia and Ekaterina Sondak were typical. No one had asked them if they wanted the Soviet Union to end. The country’s leaders had simply ended it, and expected them to deal with the wreckage. They had done that well.

Their daughters, Tatiana and Irina, were among the lucky children of the new world, for they had loving, hard‑working parents who nurtured their talents. They were middle‑class people, not rich by the standards of their country, but able to afford stylish clothes and automobiles. The girls surfed the web, watched pirated foreign movies on the social networking site V kontakte, and devoured the Harry Potter novels. They text‑messaged. They were critical of the autocratic behavior of the Lukashenko regime. These liberties and possibilities, taken for granted by them, had been unimaginable when their mothers were their age. Their mothers, although wistful about what had been lost, rarely talked to their daughters about the way things had been before.

By the end of the first decade of the twenty‑first century, the nations that had been born from the dismantling of the Soviet Union were settling into revised political and economic arrangements and new social consensuses that preserved many Soviet values. With that stability came increasingly authoritarian governments that sought to rein in independent groups and independent voices. Foreign funding receded, regulations on civic organizations increased, and the difficulties of maintaining voluntary organizations overwhelmed many activists. Perhaps their movement would be seen, from the distance of several decades, as an efflorescence born of the instability of the immediate post‑Soviet period.

Or perhaps the situation was very different now, because the world was very different–more mobile, more connected–so that emancipatory ideas flowed as freely across borders as the embroidered jeans and girly magazines. Irina and Tatiana were far freer to express themselves and explore the world than their mothers had been. They also had very different points of reference and expectations. In 2010, Tatiana and her classmates at the Belarusian State University publicly criticized one of their teachers for being “totalitarian,” because she discouraged classroom discussion. These students did not long for the old ways, which they associated with “totalitarianism.” They thought teachers should listen to them, not simply talk at them. Perhaps small rebellions such as theirs portended greater changes when they and the other millions of young women across the FSU became adults. Perhaps some of them would join the ranks of all those women in Russian history who demanded better than the status quo, and made history in the process.

CONCLUSIONS

Several unifying themes have emerged from this study of the history of women in Russia from the tenth century to the twenty‑first. One of the most important is the proposition that that history is closely linked to that of women in other European nations. For most of the women in Russia’s past, the gender values and norms, the social hierarchy, the division of labor, the religions, and the myriad of customs that structured daily life were very similar to those that prevailed elsewhere on the continent. Those similarities were reinforced by the ebb and flow of contacts and therefore of influences across the continent. Consequently, during the Kievan and Appanage periods, elite, merchant, artisan, and peasant women lived lives very like those of their contemporaries in Tuscany or Burgundy. When industrialization and urbanization came, they had many of the same consequences for women in Russia as elsewhere. Russia’s imperial ventures were also markedly like those of other European colonial powers in their effects on conquering and conquered women. In Russia, as elsewhere, periods of instability weakened gender norms and enabled women to move outside patriarchal controls. The return of social stability saw the reassertion of the rules. Revolution had the power to hasten rule revision; usually gender values changed slowly.

The particularities of the history of women in Russia arose from the geography and environment of the region, from the customs of the peoples, and from the way in which changes in gender norms and practices, ongoing across the continent, played out in the Russian context. The demanding physical environment made agriculture more uncertain in its outcomes than it was in more salubrious areas of Europe, thereby contributing to the impoverishment of the peasantry. The remoteness kept the Rus and the Muscovites out of touch with transformative political, economic, and intellectual developments ongoing to the west. Content in their isolation, Muscovite rulers created a centralized monarchy, legalized serfdom, and eventually realized to their chagrin that other Europeans had surpassed them in technology and prosperity. Peter the Great and his successors tried to close the gap and opened Russia up to an influx of influences and processes of development that they could not control.

The results for women have been the subject of this history. From Kiev to Muscovy, their lives closely resembled those of other European women. Peasant women grew the food, merchant women sold the goods, and noble women managed their households and played politics. Because they were not serfs in the earlier centuries, peasants were less under the control of the elite than were women elsewhere. When serfdom did come, it proved to be as oppressive as its earlier Western variants. The government that legalized it also played a more powerful role in women’s history than did other European governments. Peter and his successors put gender change on the agenda and promoted the importation of gender ideas from Western and Central Europe. They also fostered the development of an intelligentsia that took discussions of the woman question further than the regime wanted. Noblewomen responded by improving their education and amassing property. A few joined the intelligentsia and became feminists and revolutionaries.

By the end of the nineteenth century these women had launched a period of female activism that, in its scope and consequences, was one of the most progressive and consequential in the European world. Initially most of the activists were noblewomen, because Russia’s middle class was far smaller and more politically and culturally conservative than the middle class in Western Europe and because its poor women were fully occupied with making ends meet. As the tsarist era drew to a close, increasing numbers of working‑class women were becoming politically conscious, joining unions, and protesting against the abuses of the government.

After the Revolution, the pace of change in women’s lives accelerated, because the uprising legitimated the questioning of ancient truths and because it brought to power a party committed on paper to emancipating women. Female Bolsheviks then persuaded male party leaders to make good on those promises, and communist and non‑communist activists from the pre‑revolutionary generation turned those promises into concrete programs and policies that affected women of all the ethnic groups of the nation. The Stalinist regime reined in independent female activism, while continuing many of the programs, enlisting women in the paid‑labor force, and taking a directive role in the lives of the women under its rule. An eager few from the younger generation pushed the regime further than it had imagined going, and so became pioneering workers in economic construction and the military. After World War II, the Soviet government required Eastern Bloc client states to adopt its principles of gender equity and its policies. Now Russia was exporting rather than importing gender ideas.

The deep cultural connections between Russia and the rest of Europe continued to shape gender values and norms throughout the Soviet period and thereafter. The government lauded notions about women’s roles in family life that were virtually identical to those being preached in Chicago and Brussels, even as they marshaled women into the factories. Patriarchy persisted in setting limits on women’s participation in the public world, limits that, it should be noted, were more capacious than those that prevailed to the west. After the Soviet Union was dissolved, the flow of gender influences from the West increased, bringing in the ideas of second‑wave feminism and the sexualized, commercialized notions of femininity propagated by popular culture.

Persisting as well through the Soviet and post‑Soviet periods was the poverty that had plagued the lives of most women throughout Russian history. It was compounded by the brutal mismanagement of the Stalin regime, the catastrophe of World War II, and the economic instability that followed the end of the Soviet Union. That poverty inhibited the development of education for women and girls and the provision of social services and it increased the burden of their domestic work.

The image of the horribly oppressed Russian woman is an old one. It appears in the tales told by foreign merchants of their travels in Muscovy. They had only been allowed to see elite women doing embroidery, so they concluded that embroidery was all those poor, walled‑in creatures did. To dramatize the evils of tsarist rule, nineteenth‑century Russian intellectuals portrayed the peasant woman as a pathetic victim, toiling, ignorant, bedraggled, and downtrodden. This notion persisted among foreigners throughout the Cold War. In the 1980s, television advertisements for an American hamburger chain featured a Soviet fashion show. “Day wear,” an unseen announcer intoned, as a stocky middle‑aged woman in a faded print dress strutted proudly down a shabby runway. “Night wear,” he declared in the next scene, as she appeared in the same dress, now flourishing an enormous flashlight.

The laments about the dolorous lot of women in Russian history are justified. The words “cope” and “struggle” recur in this book. But they do not tell the whole story. There has also been much in these pages about women’s engagement with their world and about the contribution of all of them to the history of their peoples. The mundane character of the lives of most women must not lead us to undervalue them, as historians in the past so often did. Their work was crucial to the survival of their families, their communities, and their country. Their adjustments to change shaped that history, as did the extraordinary few women who rose to leadership. This finding was to be expected; this is what women have done in all cultures, throughout history.