GLASNOST AND PERESTROÏKA
Brezhnev died in 1982, and was succeeded by Yuri Andropov, the head of the KGB, the powerful successor to the NKVD. Andropov succumbed to kidney failure in February 1984; the new head of the party was another member of the old guard, Konstantin Chernenko, who died a year later. In 1985 the younger generation of communists could no longer be put off; they elected fifty-four-year-old Mikhail Gorbachev first secretary of the party. Gorbachev and his colleagues in the new leadership believed that fundamental change in domestic and foreign policy was long overdue.
Many of these people had come of age under Khrushchev and they sought, as he had, to make Soviet socialism succeed by reforming it. They began that process, as Alexander II had, by loosening controls on intellectuals and the communications media in order to encourage criticism of the status quo and thereby build support for reform. They called this process glasnost (openness). They also undertook a program of economic restructuring (perestroika) that included decentralization of economic management, experimentation with private ownership of small businesses, and encouragement of foreign investment.
There was resistance to reform from the very beginning, openly from conservative party leaders, more covertly from factory and collective farm managers, directors of scientific institutes, and many others whose encrusted power and privileges were threatened. Gorbachev headed a shifting coalition of party leaders; as they encountered resistance, they pushed for more democratization in hopes that mobilizing public support would increase the pressure on entrenched interests. Demonstrations and strikes were permitted. New political parties began to form. A fairly representative legislature, the Congress of People’s Deputies, was elected in 1989.
At the same time, the government was pursuing a radically altered foreign policy. Gorbachev and foreign minister Edvard Shevardnadze negotiated disarmament treaties with the United States. In 1986 they began withdrawing Soviet troops from Afghanistan, ending a bloody war that had begun when the Soviet Union invaded the country in 1979. Three years later, as political ferment spread in Eastern Europe, Soviet leaders made it clear to the unpopular communist governments of Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and Poland that they were not going to deploy Soviet troops to prop them up. Poland was the first country to establish democratic government in 1989, the other Eastern Bloc countries quickly followed, and these developments emboldened independence movements within the Soviet Union itself. In March 1990 a newly elected legislature in Lithuania declared that republic’s independence. Kazimiera Prunskiene, the female prime minister of the breakaway government, wryly observed in May 1990, “Freedom, like a genie that’s been let out of the bottle, doesn’t necessarily want to listen to the dictates of the person who uncorked the bottle.”39 Early the next year there were bloody confrontations between protesters and army troops in Vilnius and Riga.
Perhaps Gorbachev and his allies could have survived the upwelling public discontent had they improved the economy. They had been more cautious with economic changes than with political reforms and foreign policy, because they wanted to preserve socialist structures and because they feared the disruptions that would come from dismantling the centralized system. Their indecision made things worse. By the end of the 1980s shortages were growing and the gross national product was falling. For women, for all Soviet people, this meant ever longer lines, ever more hardship, and ever greater discontent with the politicians.
By 1991 the Kremlin leadership was split between those who thought they could manage the swelling pressures for change and those who wanted to curtail, if not reverse, the reforms already granted. This conflict built to a crisis in August, when a small group of conservatives in the Politburo ordered military units in Moscow to arrest the reformers. Most of the generals, reluctant to get involved in a coup, hesitated, and as they stalled, the parliament of the Russian republic, led by its popular president, Boris Yeltsin, forced the conspirators to back down. Gorbachev, who had been held captive in his vacation home in the Crimea, returned to Moscow, weakened by his association with the fallen conservatives. Less than a month later a new leadership, headed by Yeltsin, ordered the Communist Party to suspend operations and seized control of the party’s property. The leaders of the republics then rushed to declare independence. The process was completed in December 1991, when the presidents of the Russian, Belarusian, and Ukrainian republics announced the abolition of the Soviet Union and its replacement by a loose confederation of independent states.
The difficulties of women’s lives were on Gorbachev’s agenda. He reaffirmed the importance of women’s domestic duties, and, like Khrushchev before him, criticized the double shift and pledged to improve social services. The new leadership also authorized the creation of still more social-science study groups to consider women’s problems. It charged the Soviet Women’s Committee, an organization that represented the Soviet Union at international women’s meetings, to take over leadership of the zhensovety and discuss the woman question. Gorbachev also appointed a female party official, Alexandra Biriukova, to the Politburo, and he sought the advice of a female economist and sociologist, Tatiana Zaslavskaia.
TATIANA ZASLAVSKAIA (b. 1927)
Zaslavskaia had earned her doctorate in economics in Moscow in the 1950s and, from the 1960s onward, had worked in a research institute in Novosibirsk, Siberia, which was home to a group of reformist economists. In 1982, asked to brief Gorbachev, then a Politburo member specializing in agricultural policy, Zaslavskaia delivered a frank report on the hardships of peasant life and the failures of government policy. It was soon leaked to the press, and Zaslavskaia and her colleagues were reprimanded by the administrators of their institute. For his part, Gorbachev had been impressed, not offended, by the Novosibirsk economists’ critique, so when he became party secretary, he brought them to Moscow to design reforms.40
Zaslavskaia quickly became a prominent advocate for democratizing the Soviet system. “It is not only impossible for top people to regulate everything from above but stupid of them to have insisted that they could,” she declared in 1987. She publicized perestroika at home and abroad through interviews, articles, and a book, The Second Soviet Revolution (1990). As the political struggle intensified, Zaslavskaia’s criticism sharpened. By 1991 she was denouncing the Communist Party for oppressing the working class.41
Zaslavskaia also argued passionately for the freeing of sociologists from ideological controls. To govern effectively, she argued, officials needed to understand how people felt and how society functioned, which they could only do if they consulted sociologists and pollsters who were free to tell them what they did not want to hear. To promote the development of such information, Gorbachev authorized the creation of the first national polling organization, the All-Union Institute for the Study of Public Opinion, in 1987 and appointed Zaslavskaia its head. Conservatives pushed back with articles attacking her, but she managed to get the institute up and running. Soon public-opinion polling was being done, for the first time in Soviet history.
After the Soviet Union ended, Zaslavskaia decided to go back to academe. “I am convinced that the personal qualities of a scientist and of a politician are diametrically opposite,” she said in 2005. “Politicians must be sly, dodgy, today say one thing and tomorrow contradict it. A scientist, on the contrary, must be straight, critical… but he will never succeed in politics, this is for sure.” She continued to call for reform in the years that followed and to defend her discipline from politicization.42
WOMEN IN POLITICS
Zaslavskaia was one of a handful of professional women who rose to political prominence in the late 1980s. Another was Kazimiera Prunskiene, an economist and prime minister of Lithuania’s secessionist government. In Azerbaijan, Elmira Gafarova, a philologist, chaired that republic’s parliament. Zaslavskaia, Prunskiene, and Gafarova were the exceptions. As usual in women’s history, the personal successes of a few individuals did not weaken male control over politics. Sixteen percent of the people elected to the national Congress of People’s Deputies in 1989 were women, because the Communist Party leadership, true to its commitment to encourage women to speak up, had allotted some of the seats to women. Far smaller percentages of women served in the more democratically elected legislatures in the Soviet republics.43
Women did participate in political life in the late 1980s, even though, as in 1917, most did not join political parties. They voted in large numbers for reform candidates; Boris Yeltsin, for example, claimed to have drawn much of his support from the women of Moscow. Women joined men in petitioning, demonstrating, and striking, as they had in 1917, and were active in the resistance to the coup attempted in August 1991.
WOMEN DISCUSS THE WOMAN QUESTION
Women also spoke out about the hardships of their lives in interviews and letters to the press. At first most repeated publicly the complaints that they had been making privately, that men were lazy and party leaders did not keep their promises. “In general in this country we have so many problems,” said Olya, a seventeen-year-old vocational student interviewed in 1989. “Men don’t want to face them, and they can’t resolve them, and the women take everything on themselves.” Many bemoaned the dismal economy. E. Frolova, A. Govorukhina, and N. Borisova, three women from the provincial city of Morshansk, wrote to the magazine Ogonok in 1987, “People who have been to Paris are ecstatic over the women there. They look so young and elegant. In our opinion, the point is not the women themselves. How are you supposed to be young-looking when you’re prematurely gray and there’s no hair dye available to give your hair the right color?”44
As public criticism of the Soviet regime intensified, a handful of professional women began to publish the feminist critique of Soviet-style emancipation that had been circulating quietly for years. The much-vaunted programs had not freed them, they declared; they had exploited and controlled them. Larisa Kuznetsova, a philologist, wrote in 1989, “Women have been manipulated through most of our history. Put on tractors or on steam engines, or dropped out of planes with parachutes…. Spiritual food and values have always been offered from without. From ready-made recipes… We won’t have any women’s movement until women have the chance to stop this race, to concentrate on themselves, to understand and hear their own voices.”45
Kuznetsova and others argued that it was time for men to share power with women in the Kremlin and in the family, a change that would only happen if a new woman’s movement arose. Journalist Nina Belaeva sketched out this feminist plan for social regeneration in 1989, in terms that would have pleased both Kollontai and the Russian feminists Kollontai had so often criticized: “Though there are still no signs of a mass movement, the first women’s associations have appeared. They will foster leaders, public figures, and politicians with a female face. Then women shall have a place in the social hierarchy worthy of our intellect, experience, education, and creativity. Women will occupy this place not by ‘battling their way’ into it, but by naturally imparting their womanhood to society. Maybe then society will also understand that whenever women flourish, the nation stands to gain.”46
Belaeva’s feminism, unlike Kollontai’s, was not Marxist; it did not attribute women’s subordination to economic forces, but rather to the persistence of patriarchal values. Belaeva and many other women who spoke up in the 1980s also subscribed to what the Federation of Women Writers labeled “the woman principle.” That is, they believed that women were naturally more sympathetic, generous, and loving than men. Belaeva saw this as a reason for women to be involved in the public world, where they would bring their natural virtues to bear on social problems. These traditional ideas about women—present in feminism since its inception—were being stressed in the 1980s by cultural feminists in the West as well, but Soviet feminists were not much influenced by Westerners, with whom they had little contact. Rather, they were staying true to the core principles of Soviet-style women’s emancipation—women should be free and equal citizens and they were, by nature, more moral than men—but joining them to calls for more democracy, which would enable women to work to reform patriarchy.
ACTIVISM ON THE WOMAN QUESTION
The rapid emergence of this feminist discussion suggests that feminist ideas had won widespread acceptance among elite women before glasnost began. So did the development of organizations dedicated to reforms for women. The largest was the Soviet Women’s Committee (SWC), which held a national meeting of representatives of the zhensovety in 1987. Valentina Tereshkova, the head of the SWC, who had spent decades singing the praises of Soviet women’s emancipation at international conferences, delivered an attack on sexism in Soviet society that repeated many of the officially approved themes. Delegates listened and then, in an effort to revitalize the SWC, replaced the cosmonaut with Zoia Pukhova, a regional party official. Pukhova soon drafted a proposal to extend paid maternity leave to two years and advocated the abolition of fees charged for daycare and abortions. In 1989 the SWC was awarded a block of seats in the Congress of People’s Deputies, and for the next two years Pukhova and her successor Alevtina Fedulova worked to promote attention to women’s problems.47
There were many female activists, most of them professionals, who scorned the SWC as a tool of the regime. They created a variety of independent organizations in the larger cities, some of these small associations of friends who shared ideas and support, others larger groups dedicated to propagating feminist ideas and developing feminist scholarship. In 1989, Anastasia Posadskaia, Natalia Rimashevskaia, Natalia Zakharova, and Valentina Konstantinova, all academics in Moscow, formed the League for the Emancipation from Sexual Stereotypes. The following year, they won government approval for the establishment of the Moscow Center for Gender Studies in the Institute of Socioeconomic Population Problems. That year also saw the launching of other feminist groups, among them the Independent Women’s Democratic Initiative (its Russian acronym is NeZhDI, which means “Don’t wait”) and the Free Association of Feminist Organizations (SAFO). In 1991, NeZhDi, SAFO, and others held a conference at Dubna, near Moscow, that brought together two hundred delegates from forty-eight women’s organizations. The authorities stationed police at the meetings, as the tsarist police had done at the 1908 Women’s Congress, but they could not dampen the enthusiasm of the delegates or prevent lively discussions and networking.
OTHER ACTIVISM
Women’s activism in the late 1980s extended beyond the ranks of the feminists to become almost as wide-ranging as the activism of the late nineteenth century. Once again women mounted a religious revival. An easing of government regulation permitted the number of convents to grow from a dozen in the mid-1980s to more than one hundred in the early 1990s. Most remained small, for Orthodox authorities were as reluctant as their nineteenth-century predecessors to admit large numbers of women to religious orders. They did welcome the laywomen who held Bible-study classes and helped maintain church property. The restore-the-church movement was also strong in the Baltics, Ukraine, and Georgia, where religious faith (Lutheranism and Catholicism in the Baltics, Ukrainian Orthodoxy and the Uniate Church in the Ukraine, and Georgian Orthodoxy in Georgia) was bolstered by a nationalist belief that the churches were repositories of ethnic identity. In Siberia as well, religious practices that had been performed in secret began to come out into the open. For decades Yakut women had hung salamas, decorated ropes that solicited the good will of the spirits, in their cow sheds, only to take them down when outsiders came around. Now newly braided salamas went up in late winter, when the cows were due to calve, and stayed there for the rest of the year.48
Less religious women also felt the pull of ethnic and national loyalties. Evdokia Gayer, a member of the Nanai tribe of northern Siberia, was one of the organizers of the Association of Small Peoples of the North, which advocated the improvement of living conditions for native peoples and the ending of environmentally destructive development on their ancestral lands. Two of the largest of the independence movements, Rukh in Ukraine and Sajudis in Lithuania, recruited female members. In Baku, the Association in Defense of Azerbaijan Women’s Rights worked as a women’s auxiliary of the Popular Front of Azerbaijan. In Tatarstan, three women’s organizations, Apa, Ak Aky, and Ak Kalfak, demonstrated for national independence. Like the revolutionaries and nationalists of the nineteenth century, these women denigrated feminism as self-interested and declared themselves dedicated to the emancipation of all their people. Many repeated the widespread belief that women had a special role to play in preserving native cultures and thus that they should leave the paid-labor force to concentrate on their families.
Activists also worked in many other volunteer organizations, some of them exclusively female. The smaller groups were usually confined to a single city, where they pursued all sorts of projects, from philanthropy and historic preservation to handcrafts. There were also larger organizations, such as the Committee of Soldiers’ Mothers, that lobbied in Moscow for increased veterans’ benefits and better treatment of soldiers. Similar groups in Ukraine and Georgia demonstrated against young men’s being sent to military service outside their home republics. Within the professions, academics and writers formed all-female organizations to promote contacts with Western Europe and North America, as well as to press claims for funding. Memorial, an organization that publicized the atrocities of the Stalin era and encouraged Gulag survivors to write down their stories, had many female members. All this volunteerism added up to the highest levels of independent organizing by women since the Revolution.
Conclusions
The last decades of Soviet history were far easier than the earlier ones had been. The terror diminished to police surveillance and occasional brutality. Differences between classes and ethnicities eased. Conveniences were few, but the basics were within the reach of many. The government, attentive to domestic needs and international opinion, improved women’s marital and reproductive options and encouraged analysis of the difficulties in their lives. Then, as the economy slowed and the leadership proved unable to rise to the challenge, women’s grumbling about the double shift became one of the major themes in a subdued but pervasive chorus of complaint about the shortcomings of the Soviet system.
When real reform began, most women soldiered on with their everyday lives, as they had done through good and bad times in the past. A few revived the independent social activism of the pre-revolutionary era. The Soviet Women’s Committee asserted itself, while feminists, nationalists, religious women, soldiers’ mothers, and women concerned about the plight of their neighbors organized their own independent groups. Meanwhile the economy faltered, the borderlands broke away, and then, on a December day in 1991, the leaders of the Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian Republics dissolved the Soviet Union. The empire that most had thought unshakeable had collapsed, taking with it the hard-won stability of the post-war era.