7
The communist leaders who succeeded Stalin ran the Soviet system without the Terror. They maintained the dictatorship, but reined in the police and sought to build public support by raising the standard of living. They also pursued an ambitious agenda of controlling client states in Eastern Europe and competing with the United States for influence around the world. In the 1970s, the Soviet economy faltered under the strain of this expensive foreign policy and of inefficiencies caused by centralization and bureaucratization. A new leadership, committed to wholesale reform, came to power in 1985. By 1991, these men had stumbled into dismantling the Soviet Union itself.
Life improved for millions of Soviet women after 1953. The programs and gender ideas established in the 1930s continued, with better funding for social services and education. Although gender norms that had weakened during the war strengthened and political leadership remained a male preserve, many women rose to middle management in government and the economy, and still more worked in the professions. Wages increased, and across the Soviet Union there were more consumer goods and greatly improved housing, communications, and transportation. The regime had long sung the praises of women who kept cozy homes. Finally that ideal came within reach of millions of Soviet people.
From the late 1950s onward, professional women—academics, journalists, physicians—maintained a government-sponsored critique of the remaining hardships in women’s lives. Central to their complaints was the persistence of the double shift. Decades after the government had pledged to lighten the burdens of housework and childcare, social services remained inadequate. Publicly these critics had to forswear talking about the gender assumptions that affected policy-making and thereby contributed to inequities in employment and promotion. Privately, some of them did just that. So when, in the late 1980s, reform began, there were women ready to launch a feminist critique of the Soviet system and to begin a new phase of independent activism.
Reforms came quickly after Stalin died. In 1953 and 1954, the new leaders reduced the power of the police and began releasing prisoners from the Gulag. They also eased press censorship and promised to provide more consumer goods and lighten the load on the peasants. By 1955, Nikita Khrushchev had maneuvered his way into the top position, first secretary of the Communist Party. He set out to mobilize the population to work diligently and enthusiastically to fulfill the government’s plans for economic growth.
Although Khrushchev never made the woman question a high priority, his administration did institute important changes. In 1955 it legalized abortion, on the grounds that backstreet procedures were harming women’s health. In the late 1950s it lowered the fees charged for divorce and increased paid maternity leave from 77 to 112 days. The government also instituted stricter enforcement of protective labor laws, which benefited some women while excluding others from better-paid jobs.
Accompanying these improvements was the most unfettered consideration of the woman question since the 1920s. Rabotnitsa and Krest’ianka, the national women’s magazines, had bemoaned the burdens of the double shift throughout the Stalinist period. Now, with Khrushchev’s encouragement, magazines such as Literaturnaia gazeta (Literary Gazette) and Trud (Labor) joined the women’s press in calling for expanded social services. They also wrote about the dismal working conditions some women endured and lamented the fact that women on average earned less than men. Some writers declared that husbands should stop bossing their wives around and do more housework and childcare.1
The first secretary himself joined in, charging that sexism pervaded the Soviet system. Women suffered from the double shift, Khrushchev charged, because the Soviet Union had been too poor in the past to provide adequate services and labor-saving household appliances, and also because men discriminated against women. The result of the prejudice, he asserted, was that very few women occupied leadership positions. This was an extraordinary charge for a member of Stalin’s leadership to make; on the handful of earlier occasions when the men of the Politburo had talked about the woman question, they had congratulated themselves on all they had done for Soviet women. Khrushchev may have been sensitized to sexist behavior by his wife Nina, a Bolshevik who had served in the Zhenotdel during the civil war. Perhaps he also discussed discrimination with Elena Furtseva, an official in the Moscow party organization who was one of his political allies. Furtseva served on the party Presidium (i.e., the Politburo), the first woman ever to do so. She was also minister of culture in the early 1960s.
To set a better example, Khrushchev ordered more women appointed to government committees and regional soviets. He approved the creation of a training program for female cosmonauts and personally selected Valentina Tereshkova, a textile worker, to be the first woman to orbit the Earth. Khrushchev also authorized the establishment of “women’s soviets” (zhensovety) to involve women in improving their communities.
Enthusiastic promoters of the zhensovety hailed them as reincarnations of the zhenotdel. There were similarities. The zhenotdel and the zhensovety consisted of networks of committees led by female communists. Both enrolled tens of thousands of women in community-service projects. Both advised women on getting the social services they needed. They suffered from similar weaknesses, too. The zhensovety’s relationship to the party was even more vaguely defined than the zhenotdel’s had been. It was not clear whether they were party organizations or a revival of the obshchestvennitsy movement, with a membership no longer confined to the wives of elite men. Furthermore, no zhensovety were established in Moscow or Leningrad, on the grounds that women’s consciousness was already sufficiently high there. Rather, they were concentrated in rural areas, smaller cities, and non-European republics, far from the centers of power, where their members had to address their complaints and suggestions to local leaders with limited authority and resources.2
NINA KHRUSHCHEVA (1900–84) AND VALENTINA TERESHKOVA (b. 1937)
The two Soviet women best known in the West during Khrushchev’s rule were the leader’s wife and the woman he sent into space. American journalists built their coverage of them on Cold War stereotypes. They made fun of Khrushcheva’s matronly figure and unfashionable clothing and trivialized Tereshkova’s flight as a propaganda stunt. Soviet women, reporters suggested, were either frumpy peasants or party puppets. Had they done their homework, these people might have understood that Khrushcheva and Tereshkova exemplified Soviet gender ideals that valorized both homemaking and breaking down gender barriers. This was a complexity then unknown in the dominant gender regimes of the United States and Western Europe.
Khrushcheva was the daughter of Ukrainian peasants. She graduated from secondary school in 1919, joined the Communist Party in 1920, and for a short time headed the zhenotdel in western Ukraine. She met Khrushchev in 1922, they married, and when his career blossomed, she retired from party work to rear their three children. Khrushcheva remained true to communism’s egalitarian principles after her husband became a party boss. Her son Sergei remembered, “She tried to bring us up so that we didn’t go around thinking we were the children of powerful people and could do whatever we wanted.” Khrushcheva also hired tutors to teach her children English and music, filled their home with books, and took the family to the opera and ballet. In short she was an exemplary Soviet first lady, a well-educated, culturally sophisticated, strong-willed communist who devoted herself to her family.3
Tereshkova was also a lower-class woman who rose to prominence. Like Pasha Angelina, she became a highly publicized pioneer in a field dominated by men. She was a textile worker in the Iaroslavl area, a member of the Komsomol, and an amateur parachute jumper at a local flying club when, on April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first person to fly beyond Earth’s atmosphere. Tereshkova and many other young women, who had grown up idealizing the female pilots of the past, were fascinated by these new heroes of aviation. “Everything fell into place… when I read that Gagarin was a student of an aerospace club, just like I was,” Tereshkova remembered. “And then I decided. I’ll be a cosmonaut.”4 Her parachuting experience was an important qualification, because cosmonauts ejected from their spacecraft on re-entry and parachuted to earth.
When letters from women requesting admission to cosmonaut training began flooding in, the administrators of the spaceflight program decided to admit a few in order to score points against the United States in the space race. A small group, Tereshkova among them, trained with the men, under the tutelage of and with the support of experienced cosmonauts. “In general they accepted me into their ‘cosmic family,’” Tereshkova remembered, “without even a shadow of coldness or special accommodation to the ‘weaker sex.’”5 Khrushchev then chose Tereshkova from among the four women who had performed best during training, because she had charmed him and because she was from the working class.
A photograph of Valentina Tereshkova widely circulated after her flight.
Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress.
VALENTINA TERESHKOVA
In a 1964 memoir, Tereshkova remembered the first minutes of her flight:
“The titanic force of the boiling gases [the exhaust of the rocket carrying her up] tears away the Earth’s gravitation. I feel like the weight [of g-forces] reached its limit, but it still grows. How much time has passed since the start? A minute? An hour? A day? I cannot collect my thoughts; I know I have to, but I cannot.
‘Chaika, Chaika [her call name, meaning “seagull”], everything is excellent, the machine is working great.’
I shake with surprise. The voice of Yury Gagarin sounds so near, as if he’s sitting next to me, as an instructor in the right seat of the plane. I don’t answer at once; maybe because of the cheering words of my friend, maybe because the flight to orbit is over, and the pressure has disappeared, as it melted under the warm wave spreading in my body. Breathing becomes easy.
I open my eyes and look out of the illuminator. (The illuminator is the porthole.) In a loud voice, I comment about what I see. ‘I am Chaika. I see the horizon. There is a blue stripe. This is the Earth. How beautiful it is! Everything is going well.’
Hello universe!”
SOURCE: VALENTINA TERESHKOVA, “THE ‘FIRST LADY OF SPACE’ REMEMBERS: EXCERPTS FROM VALENTINA TERESHKOVA’S MEMOIRS STARS ARE CALLING, MOSCOW 1964,” QUEST: THE HISTORY OF SPACEFLIGHT QUARTERLY 10, NO. 2 (2003): 19. THE TRANSLATION HAS BEEN SLIGHTLY EDITED HERE BY BARBARA CLEMENTS. REPRINTED BY PERMISSION.
On June 16, 1963, Vostok 6 took her up. By the time she bounced back to earth on the 19th, she had flown 70 hours and 40 minutes, longer than all the American astronauts to date combined. The Soviet press hailed her mission as a demonstration of gender equality in the USSR. In fact, most of the men in the Soviet and U.S. space programs believed that women were emotionally and physically unsuited for space flight, so twenty more years would elapse before another woman, the American Sally Ride, went into orbit. “They forbade me from flying, despite all my protests and arguments,” Tereshkova remembered. “After once being in space, I was desperately keen to go back there. But it didn’t happen.” She spent the rest of the 1960s on publicity tours at home and abroad. She also continued her military training, graduating from Zhukovskii Aviation Academy in 1969. Thereafter, Tereshkova became a high-profile Soviet representative, praising her country’s progressive programs for women at international meetings and pressing the case for similar social services everywhere.6