THE DEVELPOMENT OF FEMINISM IN THE PERESTROIKA ERA USSR-- Munich, August 21, 1991 (RI/Sarah Ashwin) Summary: Feminism was virtually absent from the USSR in the pre-perestroika period, but the liberalization of the last few years has promoted the first stirrings of a Soviet women's movement. The development of a feminist movement in the USSR has been also been prompted by the fact that women are bearing the brunt of many of the severe social problems of the present period. Several independent women's organisations have been formed and in March 1991, the first independent women's forum was held. Women from many different areas, representing a wide range of movements, took part. In the Gorbachev era, the living standards of Soviet women, which were always poor, have declined further. Economic hardship, combined with the greater freedom of expression and association permitted under Gorbachev, has prompted the emergence of an independent women's movement. Recently, a whole plethora of independent women's organisations have been formed, and in March 1991 an Independent Women's Forum was held in Dubna, a town near Moscow. Women from across the Soviet Union gathered to discuss a wide range of issues affecting their lives in the USSR today. The meeting marked the first time that Soviet women had the opportunity to discuss their problems in a Union-wide forum, independent of Party tutelage. THE SUPPRESSION OF FEMINIST THOUGHT The establishment of Soviet power all but extinguished the small but sure flame of Russian feminism which had burned prior to 1917.1 After 1917, independent activism in all spheres was gradually curtailed as the Communist Party established its monopoly of power. The ban on independent activity meant that it was almost impossible for a feminist movement to emerge in the USSR. This is the case since one of the major tenets of the western feminist movement has been that independent women-only forums play a vital role in conciousness-raising. (That is, discussion with other women alerts participants in such groups to the fact that women's problems are neither individual nor inevitable, but general, socially-caused and systemic; they are therefore amenable to political solutions. This insight is the theoretical basis of the feminist movement.) It was not until 1979 that Russian feminism was reborn, with the formation of a grouping around the samizdat journal Zhenshchina i Rossiya (Woman and Russia), but it was quickly suppressed by the KGB.2 In the pre-perestroika era, Soviet women faced serious serious handicaps to any efforts to form a feminist movement. The first was the Soviet regime's commitment to the principle of "Party saturation," according to which every social and political organization was supposed to contain a certain quota of Communist Party members in its ranks. This ensured that independent initiative was excluded from the realm of legitimate activity, which was monopolized by official organizations established and maintained by the state. The most important women's organisations were the all-Union Soviet Women's Committee and, at the local level, the women's councils (zhensovety). As the British scholar Genia Browning has shown, however, the zhensovety which, due to their small, local nature, could possibly have acted as conciousness raising forums were in fact too dominated by the Communist Party to do so. (Browning argues that such forums have been the crucial contribution to the development of feminism made by women's groups in the West.)3 The second obstacle was comprehensive censorship. Any ideas that competed with the Communist Party's tightly prescribed version of reality were excluded from public discourse. Women were discouraged from pursuing serious feminist scholarship and were denied access to seminal feminist texts produced in the West. It therefore proved extremely difficult, if not impossible, for Soviet women to define and criticize the sexual division of labour and power in ways that challenged the Party line on the issue. Furthermore, the Soviet authorities seem to have had considerable success in getting across their claim to have achieved the liberation of women, since the belief that Soviet women are the equals of their male counterparts is said to be "the favorite myth of the Soviet people."4 The interviews of Moscow women from a variety of different backgrounds conducted in 1978 by the Swedish journalists Carola Hansson and Karin Liden show the degree to which women in the pre-perestroika USSR had unconsiously incorporated into their view of the world the Party's prescriptions of women's proper role in society. In their interviews, Hansson and Liden illicited numerous responses which betrayed an acceptance of the "superwoman myth" propagated by the Party according to which the Soviet woman should be a perfect worker, mother, citizen, Party worker and so on.5 These women recognised that they led a hard life, but felt that their difficulties were a result of personal failure. In addition, many of the difficulties faced by Soviet women are slightly different from those of their Western counterparts and Soviet ideology has thus been able to portray Western feminism as an alien, "bourgeois" phenomonen. (The effectiveness of the regime in this area can again be seen in the comments made by the Moscow women interviewed by Hansson and Liden. One of them, for example, said that since Western feminism was only concerned with abortion, the vote, and "rights" the USSR did not need a feminist movement.6) For example, with the exception of high politics, from which Soviet women are almost entirely excluded, the traditional boundaries between "male" and "female" occupations are less observed in the USSR than in most Western countries. This is particularly true of manual labor. Soviet women have been encouraged, both by economic necessity and Party policy to enter the labor market, but they are still expected to fulfill all the traditional domestic duties of childcare, cooking and cleaning. This "dual role", forced upon them by the fact that Soviet men traditionally do not see household duties as a shared responsibility, is the most burdensome aspect of their lives. Similarly, the fact that abortion has been readily available since the Khrushchev period has allowed the Soviet authorities completely to neglect the development of an indigenous contraceptive industry and family planning system. Soviet women have long enjoyed rights that were until recently fiercely campaigned for in parts of the West, and that still do not exist everywhere. These include access to abortion on demand; the provision of workplace and local childcare facilities; easy access to divorce; and the right to prosecute for marital rape. Such "rights," however, have brought Soviet women little more than purely formal equality (ravnopravie) with men and have certainly not instituted real sexual equality (ravenstvo). In fact, the introduction of legal rights without a corresponding attempt to change deep-rooted patriarchal attitudes has in many ways only exacerbated the problems faced by Soviet women. It is therefore understandable that Soviet women might see the campaigns of Western feminists for abortion on demand or for access to "masculine" professions as irrelevent in their own situation. Under Gorbachev's policy of glasnost', many groups of Soviet society, women included, have had increased opportunities for independent initiative and discussion. Women have therefore been freed from many of the ideological and organisational constraints which previously inhibited the emergence of feminism in the USSR. At the same time the daily difficulties of women's lives have been increased by the severe problems resulting from an ill-conceived program of economic reform. Furthermore, their representation in top political positions has not improved. They therefore have even more reason to protest than in the past and have more opportunity to do so. Despite its promises,7 the Gorbachev leadership has done little to remedy women's low representation in top political and managerial positions. Despite the elevation of Galina Semenova to membership of the CPSU Politburo, the representation of women in some areas of political life is even lower under Gorbachev than it used to be. For example, the strict quota system in operation under Gorbachev's predecessors meant that women formed 33 percent of the deputies elected to the USSR Supreme Soviet in 1984. But Gorbachev's replacement of the quota system by partially free parliamentary elections led to the result that women made up only 17 percent of those elected to the USSR Congress of People's Deputies in 1989.8 Women's problems still remain outside the mainstream of Soviet politics and according to independent women's organisations none of the USSR's new political parties has a specific women's program. In fact, the only party with such a program is the CPSU.9 Gorbachev's economic policies are also having a disproportionately adverse effect on the quality of Soviet women's lives compared with men's. For example, price rises and goods shortages are making the rearing children even harder for Soviet mothers than it was in the past. The supply of contraceptives, which was always woefully inadequate, has not improved, and Soviet women are as a result having abortions even more regularly than they were in the past. The current figure is 137 abortions for every 100 live births.10 This is a dramatic increase from the 1988 figure of 106 abortions per 100 live births.11 There are also good arguments for supposing that women workers are more likely than male to be made unemployed as a result of marketisation. A major reason for this is the fact that enterprises, rather than the state, are responsible for the funding of the the greater legal protection that Soviet women enjoy in the workplace. This leads enterprises to regard female workers as a greater financial liability than male workers. Since the introduction of market relations will force Soviet enterprises to cut costs wherever they can, female workers are likely to be the first to be laid off.12 This prediction may already be being fulfilled. The Soviet Women's Committee recently issued an appeal to enterprise directors and work collectives to end the "unlawful and unjust" dismissal of women workers which, the appeal asserted, had already assumed a mass character.13 Women and the market has become a favorite theme of the Soviet press lately, and it is generally accepted that women will suffer most as a result of economic change.14 THE NEW FEMINIST MOVEMENT IN THE USSR The feminist movement that did emerge around the samizdat journal Zhenshchina i Rossiya differed in many respects from mainstream Western feminism. It had, for example, a greater tendency, which is still strong today, to see certain characteristics, such as an attachment to pacifism, as innately female.15 But while some of the tendencies of emergent feminism in the USSR may exhibit the marks of suppression and isolation from the world movement, it still procedes from the same starting point as Western feminism, i.e., that sexual inequality is socially caused and can be socially combatted. In the absense of any access to alternative views as to the causes of women's problems, and any forums in which Soviet women could explore these collectively, there was very little chance for Soviet women to develop a feminist perspective of any variety. But the freedom to organise and the threat to their already meagre living standards under perestroika have prompted women to form new organisations to discuss, represent or protect their interests. In the course of the last two years, during which the economic situation of the USSR has sharply declined, several new women's organisations have been formed. The organisations have various goals, from the particular to the most general aspiration to improve women's position. This resembles, on a much smaller scale, the situation in a state such as Great Britain, where there is no overarching feminist organisation, but rather a whole range of organisations and informal groups. In Britain these have specific fields of competence and include campaign groups such as the National Abortion Campaign; women's publishing houses, libraries, theatre groups and artists' associations and national networks of Rape Crisis Centres, women's centres and informal women's groups. Amid the diversity, it is possible to see two major new directions in the feminist movement in the USSR. The first is groups who want greater paricipation of women in politics. The rationale for this is that women's needs are better represented by female politicians, and that women have a special contribution to make to politics. The informal group, the Russian Union of Women, is one example of an organisation which seeks to encourage more women to enter politics. Larisa Kuznetsova, the co-chair of this organisation argues that women should think about a political program, "which we might prudently counterpose to the masculine program of endless changes", and argues that if women do not "preserve the barely breathing body of Russia", noone will. In this particular variant, it is assumed that women represent what Kuznetsova calls the "feminine conservative principle"16. The existence of such a principle would no doubt be disputed by many feminists in the USSR and the West. What is important, however, is the fact that Kuznetsova believes that women should have greater influence and to achieve this they must work together. In this sense her organisation is clearly feminist. The second major goal of the organisations which have been formed is the protection of women from the rigours of the market when it is introduced. Self help is one imoportant way in which women are seeking to achieve this. For example, in December 1990, the Moscow City Soviet registered the "Woman and Reality" organization. This group set up five small enterprises, two of which have already repaid their creditors and are making a profit. They have also set up free instruction courses for women, including one for women with physical handicaps.17 These concerns have also been reflected in official organisations. For example, the head of the Russian Communist Party's Problems of the Women's Movement department has called for special training sessions to be run by the Russian Communist Party to prepare women for political activity and executive work.18 Similarly, as previously mentioned, the Soviet Women's Committee has been highlighting the plight of women under the transition to the market, and has called for an end to unfair dismissals. Given the present unpopularity of the Party, and general distrust of official organisations, however, it seems unlikely that the old official organisations will form the basis of the new feminist movement in the USSR. In 1991 a further step was made in the development of a Soviet Feminist movement, when an Independent Women's Forum was held, which gathered together many of the new feminist groupings. The forum was initiated by the Center for Gender Studies of the Institute of Socio-Economic Population Studies of the USSR Academy of Sciences, in association with organisations such as the Leningrad-based United Women's Party (Edinaya zhenskaya partiya)19; the Moscow-based League for Liberation from Stereotypes (Liga osvobozhdeniya ot stereotipov) ; the group "Woman and Democracy" (Zhenshchina i democratiya); and informal clubs such as Safo and Lotos.20 The gathering was attended by 172 women representing 48 organizations and coming from 25 cities, including Vilnius and Tbilisi.21 The women present were also from a wide variety of professions, and included entrepreneurs, artists and dramatists. The Forum met under the slogan "Democracy minus women is not democracy"22 and discussed topics as diverse as the likely impact on women of the introduction of market relations; the role of women in the Soviet Union's new democratic organizations; the problem of rape; the situation of female victims of the Chernobyl' nuclear accident; the role of the family in the USSR today; and the possibility of creating a new women's organization. Individual groups were also able to share their problems and experiences of campaigning with other women. Nina Voevodina from the Chernobl' area, for example, explained that she and her group, which calls itself "Provincials", were pressing the local authorities to provide extra facilities such as holidays for child-victims of Chernobyl' and shorter working hours for local women, suffering as they do from extreme fatigue brought on by exposure to nuclear radiation.23 Given the diversity of groups represented, the forum was more conducive to discussion than the taking of collective decisions. Nevertheless, several decisions were reached. Most importantly, the forum's organizers resisted pressure to set up a new organization, despite many heated debates on the issue.24 Anastasia Posadskaya, director of the Center for Gender Studies which initiated the conference explained that this decision was taken because "We don't want to exercise control through the creation of a new organization; we don't want to accrue power."25 From this statement, it can be inferred that the decision was a result of the general distrust of officially constituted bodies in the contemporary USSR. There is a great fear of the bureaucratic stagnation and ideological rigidity, which has always in the past afflicted official Soviet political and social organisations. Instead, it was decided to set up a women's information network which would facilitate contacts between different women's organizations. The conference also established a social committee to monitor the implementation of the United Nations' Nairobi Declaration. (This declaration, adopted in July 1985, aims both to provide a legal basis for action worldwide against sexual discrimination against women and to promote the entry of women into positions of influence in society.) In addition, the forum created a fund to support women in business and to encourage the creation of alternative workplaces for women.26 On a more ideological level, forum participants agreed to promote the idea of a new type of family based on partnership between men and women.27 CONCLUSION A feminist movement is emerging in the USSR as a result of the fact that women have greater access to feminist ideas, and are able to gather together in women only forums, at a time when their interests are being threatened. They have both a strong incentive and their first real opportunity to attempt to combat the institutionalised and deep rooted inequality which means that the negative effects of reform are hitting them hardest. Many organisations have been formed which attempt in different ways to combat sexual inequality in all its guises. The Dubna forum helped to give the new movement some coherence, and sense of common endeavour. It did not, however, receive a positive evaluation in the official Soviet press. Pravda, for example, wrote of the forum that it expressed nothing by dissatisfaction and put forward no constructive ideas. The author of Pravda's article, Ella Shcherbanenko, concluded that the moment for the creation of a strong women's movement in the USSR had not yet arrived.28 A report on the conference in the normally liberal newspaper, Sovetskaya kul'tura, regretted the absence of men from the conference on the grounds that "women's problems are not just the problems of women."29 Both these commentaries failed to appreciate the most important achievement of the conference. What was significant about the Dubna forum was that it gave women the chance to explore their situation and define their own agendas in an environment conducive to the free exchange of opinions and ideas. This, at least, was the assessment of one of the forum's organizers, Olga Lipovskaya, who saw the fact that women from different areas had met "at last" and discussed "basic feminist issues such as rape and other forms of violence against women" as one of the most important features of the conference.30 "Consciousness-raising" is a first, crucial step in the formation of a feminist movement. This the forum achieved, according to Olga Bessolova, deputy director of an aeronautics institute near Moscow, who was quoted as saying that, "We could really form our thoughts at the forum. It is the first time that a meeting achieved that."31 Considering the size of the Soviet Union, the figure of 172 forum participants may not seem particularly impressive. More significant, perhaps, is the fact that the gathering took place at all. In countries such as Great Britain or the United States, the majority of women do not join women's groups and would usually not think of attending a women's conference. Feminism has nonetheless had an enormous influence in these countries, and what may be termed a feminist consciousness is by no means confined to activists. In addition, British and American women have access to women-only forums and feminist writing if they want it. Dubna was a step towards the creation of such a climate in the USSR. The fact that the organisers of Dubna refused to set up some kind of central women's organisation will not necessarily prove a weakness. What is most important is that Soviet women should have access to a variety of organisations which represent different facets of a feminist movement. Also important is the recognition at Dubna that women have specific problems which require separate attention from those in power. The feminists in the USSR still have to convince politicians at all levels of this. They also have to combat deeply entrenched patriarchal attitudes which affect Soviet men and women alike. But at least they have identified the nature of the task that lies ahead. FOOTNOTES 1. For an acount of the pre-revolutionary feminist movement, see, R. Stites, The Women's Liberation Movement in Russia. Feminism, Nihilism and Bolshevism 1860-1930, Princeton University Press, Princeton, 1978. 2. for futher details see, Alix Holt, "The First Soviet Feminists", in, Barbara Holland, Soviet Sisterhood, Fourth Estate, London, 1985. 3. Genia Browning, Women and Politics in the USSR: Consciousness-Raising and Soviet Women's Groups, Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1987. 4. Ella Shcherbanenko, "Feminizm v otechestvennykh tonakh," Pravda, May 8, 1991. 5. Carola Hansson and Karin Liden, Moscow Women. Thirteen Interviews, Pantheon, New York, 1987, p.51 and p.121 6. ibid., p.28 7. Speech of Mikhail Gorbachev, "On Reorganisation and the Party's Personnel Policy" delivered to plenary session of the CPSU Central Committee, January 27, 1987, TASS in English, January 27, 1987. 8. Dawn Mann, Robert Monyak, and Elizabeth Teague, The Supreme Soviet: A Biographical Directory, RFE/RL, Munich, and CSIS, Washington, D.C., 1989, p. 29. 9. This was noted with regret by Larisa Kuznetsova, of the Russian Union of Women , in a roundtable discussion published in Sovetskaya Rossiya, Febuary 22, 1991. Kuznetsova did not encourage women to unite around the program of the CPSU. 10. AP, June 28, 1991. 11. Meditsinskaya Gazeta, November 19, 1988. Even this is a very high figure; the lastest available figures for the USA are 33 abortions per 100 live births (1986), quoted in the Health For All Database, Published by the Unit For Epidemology, Statistics and Research, WHO, European Region, September 1990. 12. Judith Shapiro, "Reflections on the Differential Impact of Marketisation on Women's Employment: Soviet Past and Future," paper presented at the annual conference of Birmingham University's Centre for Russian and East European Studies, July 1991. 13. Rabochaya tribuna, July 6, 1991. 14. See, for example, the interview with the chair of the Soviet Women's Committee, Alevtina Fedulova, in Izvestia, August 6, 1991. 15. See, for example, "Eti dobrye patriarkhal'nye ustoi", Zhenshchina i Rossiya, Leningrad, 1979 (AS #3920). 16. Sovetskaya Rossiya, February 22, 1991. 17. ibid. 18. Selskaya zhizn', January 25, 1991. 19. Komsomol'skaya pravda, June 4, 1991 reported that 3,000 people (of whom one was a man) attended the first conference of this party in Leningrad. The party is led by Vera Kuril'chenko, described as a 39-year-old housewife . 20. Sovetskaya kul'tura, December 1, 1990. 21. TASS, April 1, 1991; The Guardian, April 4,1991. 22. N. Rusakova, "Ona v otsutstvie lyubvi i deneg," Sovetskaya kul'tura, May 25, 1991. 23. The Guardian, April 4, 1991. 24. Ella Shcherbanenko, op. cit. 25. The Observer, May 12, 1991. 26. Ella Shcherbanenko, op. cit. 27. TASS, April 1, 1991. 28. Ella Shcherbanenko, op. cit. 29. N. Rusakova, op. cit. 30. The Guardian, April 4, 1991. 31. The Observer, May 12 1991.