Loyal Wives, Virtuous Mothers

In general, the Russian women think more than the men, because they act less....[T]hey are better informed, less servile, and possess more energy of sentiment than the other sex. Heroism itself often appears to them natural, and becomes easy. [1839]

Empire of the Czar, the Marquis de Custine, Doubleday, 1989.

On March 8, International Women’s Day, millions of Russian men make breakfast, buy flowers, and drink champagne toasts to their mothers, wives, girlfriends, sisters, daughters and female work colleagues. This official Russian holiday, a former socialist one kept on by popular request, is an occasion for men to show collective appreciation for their womenfolk.

Unfortunately, March 8 is only one day a year, and though most women appreciate the attention, it has never done much for them to counteract the hardships of the remaining 364.

“I’m not a feminist,” says 58-year-old journalist Irina Inoveli. “I think women should be weak, but it’s just silly for a man to give a woman flowers or wash the dishes once a year.”

In the Soviet period, International Women’s Day celebrated the ‘heroic female worker.’ These days, most Russian women would gladly trade their heroic status for less work. They explicitly reject the ‘feminism’ of the socialist women who celebrated Russia’s first International Women’s Day on March 8, 1913.

Russia’s original feminists like Alexandra Kollontai, a minister in Lenin’s first Soviet government, probably thought socialism would emancipate Russia’s women, allowing them to compete for jobs on an equal basis with men without being hindered by domestic work. In fact, ‘emancipation’ freed them only to add workplace responsibilities to their full load at home. At the close of the Soviet era in 1991, some 84% of women were part of the labor force. Needless to say, labor in the home was not counted in that statistic.

Women have been the big losers in the disintegration of the Soviet system. According to the Moscow Center for Gender Studies, as recently as 1991 Russian women earned on average 75% as much as men. In 1995 the figure was only 40%. In some regions of Russia, women make up more than 85% of the unemployed. Countrywide, unemployment is three times higher among women than men. Ninety percent of recent female institute graduates cannot find work.

Twenty-eight-year-old Larisa Popova, an ethnic Russian refugee from war-torn Georgia, knows just how difficult it is to find work these days. After she fled Georgia in 1992, Popova, though highly educated, spent months looking unsuccessfully for work in Ukraine. When an aunt phoned from Moscow to ask if she would take ‘anything,’ Popova jumped at the chance. After a stint as a nanny to an American child, Popova now works cleaning the apartments of foreigners who live in Moscow.

Although she never expected to do manual labor, Popova now earns enough money to live in modest comfort. Other women are not so lucky. For example, Popova makes about twice as much as Dr. Alexandra Kriminetskaya, one of Russia’s leading hematologists. This disparity occurs largely because medicine, education, and other traditionally low-paying ‘women’s’ professions are not easily adaptable to Russia’s new market conditions.

The picture is even grimmer for people on pensions. In 1995, the average pension was approximately $38 per month, well below the official ‘poverty line’ of $70 per month. Because Russian women on average live nearly a decade longer than men, women make up the vast majority of Russia’s pensioners.

Although they almost never call themselves ‘feminists,’ women who have succeeded in business or professional endeavors in the post-Soviet world are some of its most vocal critics.

“Women have to be at least ten times smarter [than their male counterparts] to be successful here,” says Irina Yevseyeva, director of the Institute for Strategic Analysis and Development of Entrepreneurship, an economic policy institute known for its links to Russia’s leading democratic forces. Yevseyeva contends that business in Russia gets done in ways that make it difficult for women to participate. “It’s hard to work in this culture. I can’t drink vodka or go to the bathhouse with the guys and, frankly, I don’t want to,” she says.

However, many would disagree with this view of women as socially disadvantaged. Tatyana Moiseyeva, a 30-something doctor at Russia’s National Center for Hematology, expresses a view held widely among Russia’s professional women.

“I know what ‘glass ceiling’ means,” she says, “but I don’t see any glass ceiling in medicine. Everything depends on a woman’s priorities, what means more to her, her domestic duties or her profession.”

Home and Hearth

A wife must consult her husband on all questions of conduct: how to save her soul, how to please God and her husband, and how to manage the household properly.

The Domostroi, ca. 1550, quoted in A Source Book for Russian History from Early Times to 1917, vol. 1, George Vernadsky, senior editor, Yale University Press, 1972.

There’s an old Russian joke that still makes the rounds. A foreigner returns to his own country after visiting Russia and starts telling a friend what he saw.

“And the most amazing thing is, Russians practice polygamy,” says the traveler.

“I never heard that,” says his friend, “How do you know?”

“Well, when I visited a Russian apartment, I was amazed at how luxurious it was. So I asked the man, ‘Surely you can’t live like this on one salary?’ ‘No,’ said the Russian, ‘My wife works.’ Then I noticed how clean the apartment was. I said to him, ‘But you must have a housekeeper?’ ‘No,’ said the Russian, ‘My wife cleans the house.’ ‘And all these nice things? Surely you have a driver to comb the shops for them?’ ‘My wife does that,’ said the Russian. ‘And this delicious food? You must have a cook.’ ‘My wife does that,’ said the Russian. ‘And such well-behaved children! Surely you have a nanny for them?’ ‘My wife does that,’ said the Russian.

“Then I figured it out,” concludes the traveler, “That man had at least five wives!”

From the lowliest serf dwelling to the richest boyar household, Russian women have always managed the house. Although their duties varied with their social status, historically women’s activities almost never strayed beyond the confines of home and hearth. Until the Regent Sofia (half-sister of Peter the Great) emancipated them at the close of the 17th century, wealthy Russian women lived secluded in the terem, closed off from the outside world.

Ironically, around this time Russian women also helped launch and keep alive the Old Believers movement, which sought to preserve the religious civilization of medieval Russia from modern practices.

In the 18th century, Peter the Great worked hard to bring women into Russian civil society, explicitly requiring their presence at various court functions as part of his drive to ‘westernize’ Russia. Later in the century, Catherine the Great tried to adapt European principles of the Enlightenment to Russia’s realities. Women’s formal education became a reality when the Smolny Institute for Noble Girls began educating young women for their future duties as wives and mothers of men serving the Russian state.

Young children were cared for exclusively by women. In the 1820s, Russian poet Alexander Pushkin celebrated his peasant nanny in his verse. But it is Pushkin’s heroine Tatyana Larina who remains for many the paragon of Russian womanhood. Devoted to Eugene Onegin, she promises in a love letter to be a ‘loyal wife and virtuous mother’. Onegin scorns her, and she transfers her devotions to a man she does not love.

The mid-19th century ushered in a revolution in women’s lives. Higher education finally became available in the 1860s. Perhaps not surprisingly, well-educated women immediately joined and helped direct the People’s Will and other socially progressive and revolutionary movements during the second half of the century.

With increasing Russian industrialization, the lives of less privileged women also changed dramatically. Department of Commerce records for 1887 show that 24.4% of all industrial workers were women. In 1881 St. Petersburg, women made up 42.6% of workers in the capital’s textile mills.

The changes in women’s lives were captured in literature by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Nikolai Nekrasov. While Dostoyevsky idealized the redemptive power of even the most sinful woman, Nekrasov’s poetry spans the range from unflinching portrayals of big-city prostitutes to sentimental idealization of strong peasant women. ‘Lady writers’ like Madame Mikulich (Lidiya Veselitskaya) and Lidiya Charskaya (Churilova) turned out popular fiction that found a vast Russian audience around the turn of the century. Wealthy patrons such as the Princess Tenisheva and Yelizaveta Mamontova sponsored and took part in radical new movements in the arts.

The period immediately preceding and following the 1917 Russian revolution was in many ways the high point of the women’s movement in Russia. According to journalist Irina Yurna, writing in From Basic Needs to Basic Rights (Margaret Schuler, ed., Women, Law, and Development International, 1995), the revolutionaries who granted equal rights to Soviet women at the same time co-opted the women’s movement for their own, exclusively Communist purposes. Women became de-sexed toilers, ‘a unit of living labor’ (Alexandra Kollontai’s phrase). The industrialization drive of the early 1930s saw a particularly large increase in the employment of women, with far-reaching social consequences.

Despite their on-paper equality with male co-workers, Soviet women never achieved actual parity. According to a 1993 report by the World Bank, Soviet women were on the whole better educated than their male counterparts; in 1989, 47% of women and only 34% of men had completed higher and secondary specialized or technical education. Nevertheless, women occupied positions of lower skill than men and were consequently paid less. At the same time, the responsibility for raising children fell primarily on women. A complex system of leaves, concessions, and allowances permitted women to work full time and raise children part time.

With the advance of the market economy many Russian women, particularly in large cities, have been relieved from one of the most unpleasant and time-consuming duties in recent years — searching for food and consumer products and spending long hours in enormous lines.

“I no longer have to rely on my aunt for buying sausages under the counter,” says Lidiya Maslakova, 56, whose aunt, now a pensioner, used to work at a Moscow meat factory. “I can recall those times when I had to wake at 5 am to be the first in line at the department store to get my share of goods in short supply, whether it was a pair of Bulgarian-made jeans for my son or Polish make-up for my daughter.”

Under-the-counter shopping is now history, and connections are no longer a factor for consumers. Now money is the key, and this causes problems of its own. For a state pensioner, or a mother of three married to a miner who hasn’t been paid for three months, the search for bargains is just as taxing.

Of course money makes for choices, and not just in the shops. Women who can afford not to work often prefer to stay home. The young businessmen driving Russia’s economic rebirth often see a stay-at-home wife as a status symbol. At the same time an increasing number are choosing the work option, with considerable success.

“My career is more interesting than housework,” says economist Irina Yevseyeva. “Besides, if I had more time, I’d like to spend it with my daughter, not doing housework.” In her late thirties, Yevseyeva is part of a generation just old enough to remember a time when relatively few Russian jobs permitted employee independence or creativity. Even so, Yevseyeva admits that she is constantly juggling her demanding career with her daughter’s needs. “Even when I was lying in the maternity ward, people called me from work with questions,” she laughs.

Yevseyeva’s life is made much easier thanks to her mother, who lives with her and cares for her daughter, now nearly three years old. The baby’s father, an independent businessman, lives next door. While Yevseyeva and her mother raise the baby, the father is responsible for his daughter’s financial well-being. “He’s not interested in having a woman at home,” says Yevseyeva. Still, when Yevseyeva’s daughter was born, the father tried to dissuade Yevseyeva from going back to work, saying that he would provide for the family.

Yevseyeva turned him down. “I forgot how to make soup long ago,” she explains. “I used to sew and cook, but I don’t have any desire to do that now.”

Working Girls,

Working Women

[A]n officer has for sale a 16 year old girl, formerly belonging to a poor house, who knows how to knit, sew, iron, starch, and dress a lady; she has a nice figure and pretty face.

— 1797 newspaper advertisement quoted in Imperial Russia: A Sourcebook, 1700-1917, Basil Dmytryshyn, editor, Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1967.

Twenty-three year old girl [devushka], admirable in every way, great measurements, well-built, efficient, communicative...seeks serious work as a secretary-abstractor (I have experience)....I will be an ornament to your office. No intimate relationships [bez intima]. Natasha.

— Iz ruk v ruki newspaper advertisement, February 1996.

The phrase bez kompleksov (‘without complexes’) is so common in Russian employment ads that it is simply abbreviated: b/k. Everyone knows what it means, too. More and more young women, out of choice or economic necessity, are sleeping with the boss.

“The only thing Russian women have of value in the market is sex,” explains Martina Vandenberg, the American coordinator of the Women’s Consortium CIS-USA, which supports women’s non-governmental organizations in Russia and Ukraine. Coincidentally, Vandenberg helped found Moscow’s Sexual Assault Recovery Center, which in its first year of operation logged nearly 3,000 calls to its telephone hotline, 200 of them regarding rape or attempted rape.

Meanwhile, a recent survey conducted by Moscow’s Center for Gender Studies in several Russian cities found that one in four women had been victims of sexual harassment at work within the past five years.

“We are currently experiencing a massive change in stereotypes,” says Natalya Soboleva, director of Pharmacon, a company that produces math and science educational software. “Look at the messages young women get from TV: ‘Be a model, a secretary, find a rich husband!’ Women take this in with enthusiasm because it’s new, but it will lead to serious discrimination in the future. We don’t have enough positive examples for young women.”

Soboleva herself could serve as one of these positive images. A physics professor, Soboleva is also one of a small but growing number of successful Russian women entrepreneurs. According to Russia’s Public Opinion Fund, 32% of female entrepreneurs are engineers, 14% are bankers, and 9% are farmers. Almost all of the remaining 45% own small or medium enterprises.

Writing in The Moscow Times, journalist Natalya Timoshkina pointed out that the Russian word for ‘entrepreneur’ appeared in 19th century Russian dictionaries in both masculine and feminine forms. Although Timoshkina believes that women began entering the post-Soviet business world late, after the easy spoils were divided up and credit became an ‘inaccessible luxury,’ she observed that there are literally dozens of professional associations geared to Russian women involved in business.

Irina Yevseyeva, whose economic policy think-tank is just beginning to take on commercial clients, believes that women’s contributions to the workplace have been consistently undervalued.

“Women workers are more conscientious, more consistent, and more flexible in achieving goals,” she says flatly.

A visitor wandering off the street into Yevseyeva’s Institute for Strategic Analysis and Development of Entrepreneurship might be surprised: the only visible male is a secretary. “I didn’t specifically try to make a ‘feminist’ statement,” says Yevseyeva, pointing out that a prominent male scholar heads the Institute’s council of directors and that men do work on Institute projects. “But ours is a ‘women’s’ organization. Men are always looking to establish hierarchies that exclude people. Women, on the other hand, include others in their collective. I think it’s very important that the workplace be psychologically comfortable and that the workers want to help one another.”

Software designer Natalya Soboleva concurs, saying she would like to employ more women. Of her current staff of twenty, only the bookkeeper and secretary are female. Over the last five years, Soboleva has not received a single application from an interested woman.

“Of course, this kind of work is probably a long way from the ideal of a young woman in Russia,” she says wistfully. “But if you know any qualified female physicists interested in programming, tell them to come and apply!”

Growing a Movement

Grain does not grow, because the feminine sex is ruling.

— Peasant saying of the eighteenth century, quoted in The Icon and the Axe, James H. Billington, Vintage Books, New York, 1970.

[I]n this country the sentiment of honour is without power except in the heart of the women: they have made it a matter of religion to be faithful to their word, to despise falsehood, to observe delicacy in money affairs, and independence in politics....[1839]

— Empire of the Czar, the Marquis de Custine, Doubleday, 1989.

It is estimated that there are over two thousand women’s organizations currently active in Russia. These organizations fall into several broad categories: entrepreneurial and professional associations, single-issue groups (ranging from the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers to rape crisis centers), and official ‘women’s councils’ and other structures left over from the Soviet period. The boundaries among these groups are generally fluid, with women academics playing important roles in each.

“Women are the dissidents of the 1990s. I really believe that,” says Martina Vandenberg, who has been working with women’s groups in Russia for the past three years. Vandenberg claims that Russian women are steadily losing the social and economic rights — such as unlimited child care — they enjoyed under the Soviet system. Unfortunately, according to Vandenberg, lost social and economic rights are not being replaced by better political or economic realities.

“We are still fighting for the basic rights women in America take for granted,” agrees Natalya Soboleva. For example, the State Duma is currently considering a draft law on domestic violence (“It’s really a law about child abuse,” says Vandenberg) that some legislators have managed to brand as ‘a feminist law.’

In state organs in particular, the political organization of women is still poor. The cause suffered a setback when the moderate non-feminist Women of Russia party failed to win the necessary 5% of the popular vote last December to retain its representation in the Duma.

Although the 46 current female Duma members are trying to form a women’s caucus across party and faction lines, their only real chance to develop a legislative agenda is through alliances with traditional, male-dominated factions.

Things are not much better in the executive branch. Of the 89 people named by President Boris Yeltsin as his personal representatives to Russia’s provinces through August 1995, only one was a woman.

Many Russian women are extremely pessimistic about the political chances not only for their own generation, but for their daughters’ generation. Irina Yevseyeva puts it bluntly, “Russians always claim that we’re a European country, not an Asian one. But even Turkey has a female prime minister!”

Maria Kirbasova, chairwoman of the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers, sighs when asked about the ability of women to exercise even a modest moral influence over Russia’s political realities.

“People don’t listen to us because we are women,” she says of her organization’s public advocacy activities. “They only listen to us because we are mothers.”

She [Olga] was the first from Russia to enter the kingdom of God, and the sons of Russia thus praise her as their leader....

— From the Tale of Bygone Years, quoted in Medieval Russia’s Epics, Chronicles, and Tales, Serge Zenkovsky, editor, E.P. Dutton & Co., Inc., 1963

In the ten centuries since St. Olga accepted Christianity — after a spectacularly bloody career defending her own honor and her son’s claim to rule Kievan Rus’ — Russian women are still idolized as protectors of hearth and home. Through the centuries, the profound Russian reverence for motherhood expressed itself in wonderworking icons (religious images painted on wood) such as the Donskaya Virgin, an icon of the Virgin Mary and Christ credited with protecting Russia from Tartar invasions in 1380 and again in 1591.

Perhaps by coincidence, Russian women tend to describe their jobs and workplaces in ‘maternal’ or ‘family’ terms. Dr. Alexandra Kriminetskaya, who heads the Hematology and Intensive Care Department at Russia’s National Center for Hematology, speaks warmly of the ‘family atmosphere’ among patients and doctors in her department. Dr. Kriminetskaya says her colleagues are more like relatives than co-workers; friends of one person quickly become part of a large common group. Many of the children of the Center’s doctors grew up playing and studying together. “We can’t exist any other way,” she says.

In a similar vein, software developer Natalya Soboleva tries to ensure that her twenty employees, most of them young men, spend family holidays together. “Why should we lose our human warmth in the business atmosphere?” she asks.

Economist Irina Yevseyeva stresses the ‘mutual interests and mutual sympathies’ that keep her mostly-female staff working as a team. “I give people assignments and they do them. They’re competent and I don’t worry about them. I don’t even need to check up on them.” When she works weekends leading economic development seminars for Russia’s policymakers, she often brings her mother and her young daughter along.

Maria Kirbasova understands just how far Russia’s women have come and how difficult the road is ahead. “Why do you think we chose the name ‘Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers’?” she asks knowingly. “Fathers protect the fatherland. Mothers protect life.”