March 01, 2018

The Women of Russian Diplomacy

From Alexandra Kollontai to the Kollontai of the Putin era

The renowned Russian revolutionary Alexandra Mikhailovna Kollontai was born into a noble family. As her first act of rebellion, she married a poor military officer rather than her parents’ choice, an imperial adjutant. But then, in 1898, Kollontai left her husband and son to attend university in Zurich, Switzerland. After the Bolsheviks came to power, she became a member of the Soviet government and started her diplomatic career.

The legendary Marxist-feminist icon began her first ambassadorship in 1924 and represented her country until the end of the Second World War, serving as Soviet ambassador to Mexico, Norway, and Sweden. Throughout her career, in addition to advocating for the Soviet Union in the international community, Kollontai was a forceful proponent of the idea of gender equality.

As Kollontai’s grandson recalled in his memoirs:

I remember how, in Sweden, even during the war, everyone who worked at the embassy and other Soviet institutions would gather on [International Woman’s Day] for a solemn celebration. Women were congratulated and salutatory telegrams were read. My grandmother always made a speech about the international significance of the holiday and about the position of women in the USSR and other countries.

Kollontai dreamed that world revolution would create a utopia where women would be free from prejudice and the subjugating institution of marriage.

Everything individualistic shall be defeated by the collectivism of spirit and will. The “cold spiritual solitude” from which people living in bourgeois cultures seek salvation in love and marriage will disappear: diverse fibers will grow, binding people together with an emotional and spiritual cohesion. People’s feelings will change, and the inequality of the sexes, along with whatever dependence woman had on man, will vanish without a trace, receding into the memory of past eras.

Over the 20 years that Kollontai served as ambassador, the country she represented did indeed undergo radical changes, but emancipation wound up playing a nasty trick on Soviet women. Along with other progressive ideas, feminism was commandeered by the Soviet state.

The country needed muscle, and women were encouraged to take on physically demanding professions – everything from steelworker to fighter pilot. However, Stalin’s turn toward social conservatism meant that women were also expected to bear their traditional burdens of home and hearth. During the day, Soviet women labored alongside men as equals, but in the evening they had to take care of their husbands and children. Furthermore, women were not welcomed into the political arena, and when it came to diplomacy, as boldly and confidently as Kollontai may have extolled equality, seeming to open the door to future generations of female diplomats, it would be a long time before anyone else was able to walk through that door.

Only in the Thaw years of the 1960s did Zoya Mironova, the Soviet Union’s second female ambassador, assume her post. But while the firebrand Kollontai left her husband, marched against the old order, and hid from the tsarist secret police, Mironova belonged to a very different era and followed a very different path to prominence, working her way slowly and methodically up the party ladder. A chemist by training, this daughter of a local police chief worked for 15 years at a rare metals research institute, eventually trading her job as a scientist for one as bureau secretary at a Community Party institute. Advancing through the party ranks, from secretary, to deputy chair, to executive of various district and executive committees, she eventually earned herself a post as permanent representative to a UN committee, attaining the rank of ambassador in 1966.

Every International Woman’s Day, the magazines The Peasant Woman («Крестьянка»), The Worker Woman («Работница»), and Soviet Woman («Советская женщина») would come out with articles about Kollontai, and in 1969 a popular film, Ambassador of the Soviet Union («Посол Советского Союза»), depicted a Kollontai-inspired female ambassador to Sweden during the Second World War rumored to “smoke a pipe and drink vodka straight out of a samovar.”

Despite all the ballyhoo surrounding Kollontai, no other women represented the Soviet Union abroad until perestroika, when Zoya Novozhilova was named ambassador to Switzerland in 1987. Novozhilova went from being the third female Soviet ambassador to being the first for the Russian Federation. Like Kollontai, she was the first member of her sex to represent a new incarnation of her country in a new era. Because of a surge of interest in Russia in this time of transition, Novozhilova enjoyed enormous popularity among Europe’s diplomatic corps, which nicknamed her “Red Zoya” and, of course, “the new Kollontai.” In fact, “Red Zoya” was not really anything new: having begun her career as a secretary of the Komsomol’s central committee, Novozhilova was the same sort of party ladder-climber as her forerunner Mironova.

Indeed, this was a woman’s only path to a diplomatic career back then: Moscow’s Institute of International Affairs, best known by its acronym, MGIMO, did not even accept women when it opened in 1944. By the 1960s this restriction was lifted, but in practice the institution remained a male domain. For a long time, on top of being a minority, women had to endure all sorts of indignities. There were rules about how they could dress, and their skirts, for example, had to be modest in length. Worst of all, even those who graduated with honors still were not assigned to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Instead, they were sent to work in research institutes and libraries.

A revolution of sorts took place in the 1990s. Maria Zakharova, director of the Foreign Ministry’s Information and Press Department, and a graduate of MGIMO’s school of journalism, recalled:

In 1993, all the country’s customary norms, canons, and stereotypes collapsed. It was then that people started thinking that higher education wasn’t necessary, that what mattered was material wealth.

A wild, totally unregulated market emerged, where you could become an overnight millionaire and the state no longer put any limits or controls on you. Young men were being told that now was the time to go into business to get rich quick – the faster you joined the rush, the better. Why waste time on an education? Government was looked on as some sort of vestige of the past, so boys weren’t going to MGIMO and the Institute started to be more eager to accept girls.

Our department had 15 Mashas, 13 Katyas, and 10 boys – that was the joke. Other years it was 50/50 maximum. And there were teachers – both men and women, which is important – who would come up to us and say, “There goes government money down the drain.” Or, I remember, there would be more than 20 people in a section with only two of them being men, and the teacher would say, “Oh, well, at least we’ve got two to work with.” This was very upsetting, but moments like this were also motivating.

Zakharova said that back then there were not many men to compete with for entry to the ministry, since government salaries paid so little. She herself had to supplement her income by translating.

In the years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, several women have represented the Russian Federation as ambassadors. Among them, in the 1990s, were Roza Otunbayeva (as an ambassador to UNESCO; she went on to become Kyrgyzstan’s minister of foreign affairs, ambassador to the US and UK, and the country’s third president) and the influential Russian politician, former mayor of St. Petersburg, and current speaker of the Federation Council, Valentina Matviyenko, who served as Russian Ambassador to Malta (1991-1995) and to Greece (1997-1998).

Women in politics had to put up with all kinds of disrespect because of their sex. For example, when, after returning to Russia, Matviyenko began working under Vice Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov, she was immediately given the nickname “Primakov’s legs” (in addition to its sexist overtones, this expression was a demeaning play on words based on “Bush’s legs,” a common way of referring to chicken legs imported from the United States in the 1990s that were considered to be low quality). Because of her penchant for brightly colored outfits, Matviyenko was also dubbed “Valya Red Underwear” (Валя – красные трусы), and there was lively speculation about whether or not her career success had to do with close relations with influential men. Another nickname was “Valka Glass,” which she supposedly earned back in her Komsomol days because whenever her male counterparts marked the end of a Komsomol congress or meeting with vodka, she could keep up with them, something considered unseemly. Back in patriarchal Kyrgyzstan, Otunbayeva fared no better. People used all sorts of demeaning nicknames for her, including “apcheh” (“the milkmaid”).

Maria Zakharova admitted that the attitudes reflected in such nicknames persist.

I find it insulting when people imply that gender factors helped me achieve some of my professional milestones, that I, for example, used my “feminine charms,” or that my advancement was just a matter of being in the right place at the right time – that’s not how it was, and I won’t put up with that. Even when I was a schoolgirl I knew this topic would come up and that if I was going to be beyond reproach, I would always have to get good results: in school I got a medal for top grades, I graduated from the institute with honors, I defended my dissertation – all of that serves as a sort of shield against insinuations about a “gender factor.”

As the current century got underway, female MGIMO graduates achieving foreign affairs success included “the Kollontai of the Putin era,” Eleonora Mitrofanova, who, in addition to her diplomatic posts, served as the country’s first female deputy minister, and Olga Ivanova, ambassador to Mauritius from 2004 to 2011. (Incidentally, presidential candidate Ksenia Sobchak is also a MGIMO graduate.) But Mitrofanova and Ivanova are largely exceptions to the rule, and attitudes toward women at MGIMO have not changed much. As human rights activist Yelizaveta Vereshchagina, who graduated from the institute’s School of International Affairs in 2015, put it:

At the very first assembly, the dean told us: “Our school is – let’s face it – for men. I am of course happy to see girls, but we do, of course, understand…” He was hinting that most of the women had come not to prepare for a diplomatic career, but to marry a promising young man. This meme pursued us from year to year. When we graduated, when the women we knew applied to work at the ministry, they were told, whether in jest or seriously: “Why are you coming to us? You didn’t manage to find anyone when you were a student?” Incidentally, you can’t say that this stereotype is totally baseless – there are all sorts of situations.

Marriage, which Kollontai thought should be abandoned, is a major problem for female diplomats. In Vereshchagina’s words:

A man can go along with his wife who’s working in an embassy the same way a wife can go along with her husband, but not everyone is prepared to give up their own career, especially as there are restrictions on what diplomatic family members can do. For example, they can’t engage in business, and often their entire career is limited to teaching language to the children of embassy staff or perhaps some sort of administrative work. Not every husband will agree to that, and this is one of the big problems forcing a lot of female diplomats to choose between family and career.

Zakharova has a different perspective:

Now I see a huge number of cases where this is not a problem, where men go along with their wives and work in IT or journalism. Now everyone is in motion, and our communication capabilities have changed: while in the past calling overseas was a major event, today you can call as much as you want, and practically for free. But still, it isn’t easy, of course; my husband and I have lived apart for several years, and I know what it’s like having to fly to see one another.

There has been a subtle change in the discourse about women in politics in Russia: the idea that the “feminine nature” is needed to soften political temperaments – especially in diplomacy – has gained currency. Supposedly women are more inclined to resolve conflicts peacefully. Then again, it could not be said that Zakharova has a particularly placid personality, in fact she’s become well-known for making rather caustic comments. On the other hand, her combination of femininity and assertiveness have worked well for her image:

I don’t want to resist my nature; I’m a woman, my parents and Lord God made me that way, and I don’t understand why I’m somehow supposed to change this nature… I think it’s idiotic when a dress code erases the distinction between a woman and a man.

Clearly, the traditional views held by the head of the Information and Press Department in particular and the Russian political elite in general are far removed from Kollontai’s leftist ideas. So it is hardly surprising that Kollontai (the “Valkyrie of the revolution”) is not very popular in diplomatic circles. In fact, women’s rights advocates seem to be the only ones taking an interest in her. In conjunction with the revolution’s centennial, an avant-garde production was staged in Moscow devoted to Kollontai’s fight for gender equality. The show ended with a present-day protest march, complete with signs, drawing a continuous line between generations.

For Zakharova, Kollontai holds little interest. She names Valentina Tereshkova as a role model (after serving as a cosmonaut, Tereshkova, the first woman to fly in space, entered the field of public diplomacy, among other endeavors).

And recent MGIMO graduate Vereshchagina offered this:

I was always interested in Georgy Chicherin, the first Soviet Commissar of Foreign Affairs, an aristocrat who sincerely believed in socialism and worked hard to get other countries to recognize the Soviet state. Interestingly, Kollontai was working at the commissariat during approximately the same years, but I know almost nothing about her as a diplomat, just the most superficial and commonly known facts. Now that strikes me as strange: it never occurred to me to read her diplomatic diaries. Furthermore, I don’t even think I knew – at least I didn’t remember – that they existed. At MGIMO, no particular attention was paid to her. People’s private opinions were generally, “Well, we understand, of course, that she was a prostitute.”

There might be a connection between this attitude toward a world famous historical figure and the fact that today there is not a single female ambassador representing the Russian Federation. But Zakharova is confident that this situation will soon change.

Changes are right around the corner. I can’t give you the specifics, but there is something in process. And it’s important to understand that it’s not a matter of a special search for the right candidate or any special quotas for women – it’s just a natural process.

According to Zakharova, today between 30 and 40 percent of Russian diplomats are women, and soon those who studied at MGIMO in the 1990s will have risen through the ranks and be eligible for ambassadorships.