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In the 1990s, the peoples of the fifteen nations that emerged from the collapse of the Soviet Union—Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Estonia, Georgia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, Lithuania, Moldova, Russia, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan—set about remaking their political and economic systems. The largest and most populous of these successor states was Russia, presided over for eight years by President Boris Yeltsin. A courageous, boisterous, undisciplined man, Yeltsin seemed to embody the chaos of the 1990s. In 1999 he handed power to his hand-picked successor, a former intelligence agent named Vladimir Putin. Putin rebuilt the power of the center, repressed critics, and pursued an assertive foreign policy. In 2008, at the end of the two terms permitted to the president by the new Russian constitution, he became prime minister and was succeeded as president by an ally, Dmitri Medvedev.
Some of the governments of the other republics were more democratic than Russia’s, some less. In Belarus and Central Asia, Soviet-era leaders and renamed communist parties remained in power into the early twenty-first century. Ukraine and the states of the Baltic and Caucasus developed more democratic regimes. All these governments instituted similar economic reforms: they shut down inefficient factories, privatized some state-owned enterprises, encouraged the creation of privately owned farms and businesses, and cut funding for social services and benefits programs.
These developments had similar consequences for women across the former Soviet Union (FSU). Many, particularly the elderly, felt that much had been lost with the passing of a system that was a source of security and pride for those who had worked so hard to build it. These feelings of loss were fed by severe economic problems. Unemployment rose, especially for women, as did the cost of living; social services declined. Gender values and practices were not much affected, and so the double shift became still more laborious.
The post-Soviet period did bring more freedom of information and expression, particularly in the European republics and the Caucasus. Relaxation of censorship made it possible to read a much greater variety of books and periodicals, more people could travel abroad, and many had access to the internet. Property rights were extended with the legalization of private business and farming. The easing of controls that occurred in some republics enabled women to set up thousands of voluntary organizations. Greater religious freedom permitted still more Christian women to join convents, Muslim ones to teach the faith in girls’ schools, and Siberian shamans to practice their healing arts openly. These new liberties resulted in still more social activism among women and the most unfettered consideration of gender arrangements since the revolutionary era.
For the great majority of women, the post-Soviet period began with great hardship. When antiquated factories were closed and government ministries downsized, some managers responded as they had in the NEP years, that is, they laid women off and refused to hire new ones because they judged women more expensive employees than men. Government figures suggest that roughly the same percentages of women and men lost their jobs in Russia; in Ukraine, in the Caucasus, and among some native people in Siberia, more women than men became unemployed. Most people remained officially employed, but received no wages for months or were paid only with goods from the enterprise or produce from the collective farms. They stayed on the job because there were so few others available and because they hoped thereby to remain vested in government pension programs.1
Making the situation worse was the fact that the cost of living rose, wiping out savings and reducing the value of already meager incomes. This occurred because governments had pegged local currencies to international standards, because expensive imports flooded in and domestic manufacturing dropped, and because the resulting economic depression cut government revenues, causing funding for social services to fall and the price of those services to the public to rise. The poverty was worst in the places that had always been poorest—the countryside, small towns, Central Asia, native settlements in Siberia—and among the most vulnerable—children, the disabled, the elderly, and single mothers. Single older women, who made up the great majority of those living on pensions, were particularly hard hit. Hundreds of them begged outside subway stations and churches in the mid-1990s.
More fortunate people worked harder and relied on family and friends. In the cities, women put in overtime at their regular jobs or took additional part-time jobs. “Everyone around, degree or no degree, seemed to be looking for work that could bring quick cash: this could be a translating job, as well as babysitting for an affluent family or going into retail business,” remembered Elena Gapova, a history graduate student in Minsk in the early 1990s. “No one knew where opportunities were and who would win, in the end. People tried what they could.” Teachers became cleaning women after hours; professors tutored high-school students; doctors took on private patients. Friends and family loaned one another money and traded goods. It had long been common for urban people to grow some of their own food in community gardens near the cities or at rural cottages (dachas); now they grew more. Grandmothers pitched in, putting up the food grown at the dachas and taking care of children when daycare centers closed or became too expensive.2
In the countryside, the peasants doubled or even tripled the output of their kitchen gardens so as to have more to sell at local markets. Women did much of this additional work, because the private plots had long been their responsibility, but men in Russia, Kazakhstan, and Siberia helped out more than in the past. Among the Sakha (formerly the Yakuts), men left unemployed by the closing of collective farms looked after the children while their wives planted and weeded and the old women tended the cows. By 2003, the private plots, the source of much of Soviet produce since Stalin’s time, were growing 93 percent of Russia’s potatoes and 80 percent of other vegetables.3
Millions of people coped with the hard times by leaving home. One million ethnic Russians living in Central Asia and Siberia moved to European Russia in 1994 alone. Some returned to their hometowns or to places where relatives lived. Those who lacked such connections settled in the smaller cities, where residency permits were easier to obtain. Even though building a new life was not easy, families moved in hopes that their children would have more opportunities in predominantly Russian areas than they had as minorities in the other successor states.4
Many others went on the road to find permanent or temporary jobs. A million Armenians journeyed to work in the Slavic republics in the 1990s. For some citizens of the FSU, this migration took on epic proportions. In the early 2000s, Mikhail Sondak, a mechanic, and his wife Ekaterina, a retired feldsher, drove every six weeks or so from Pinsk, Belarus, to the White Sea port of Murmansk, 1500 miles to the northeast. In that frigid city, Mikhail could earn higher wages than at home. Periodically, the couple would drive back to Pinsk to check on their teenaged daughter, Irina. Tens of thousands of other people from the FSU found work in Western and Central Europe and in North America. Between 1995 and 2000, 400,000 women left Ukraine for the West. They were part of the largest migration out of Eastern Europe since World War II.5
Some of the women who stayed home found work in the new economy. Female entrepreneurs set up beauty salons, cosmetics distributorships, groceries, and laundries. Others became small traders, selling food, consumer goods, and handcrafts in hometown markets. In the Caucasus and Central Asia, such women created burgeoning family businesses. By the mid-1990s, many had become importers, traveling abroad to buy clothes, packaged foods, and other portable consumer goods for resale at home. Ekaterina and Mikhail Sondak made the reverse choice: in the early 2000s they opened a clothing store in Murmansk. Hiring an accountant and a salesperson to conduct daily business, the couple continued to make the three-thousand-mile round-trip to Pinsk to buy inventory produced in new Belarusian factories.6
Female entrepreneurs were most likely to succeed in small businesses with low start-up costs and female clienteles, such as beauty parlors and clothing stores. Even these ventures were risky, and women struggled against gender beliefs as well. Many people considered it disreputable to be a merchant, an opinion that had been around since long before the Revolution and was strengthened in the post-Soviet period by the rampant corruption. The common wisdom held that women should not sully themselves by getting involved in such things. Nor were women welcome in the higher levels of the new economy, which was run, as the Soviet economy had been, by networks of men. Gender and age discrimination were common, even in fields such as banking that had employed many female managers during the Soviet period. To provide support for one another, businesswomen set up clubs in large and small cities.7
Some women resorted to making a living in the sex trade. Law enforcement had kept prostitution and pornography underground throughout the Soviet period. After 1991, that enforcement languished and they came out in the open, particularly in the European republics of the FSU. Pornography was sold at neighborhood newsstands. Well-dressed call girls frequented hotel lobbies in the big cities. Hundreds of websites aimed at foreign men featured gorgeous young women available for on-line chat or marriage. When interviewed, many of these women gave economic necessity as their motive for being sex workers or for seeking foreign husbands. Liuda, a teenager in the small city of Efremov, Russia, confided to documentary filmmaker Josef Pasternak in 2002 that she had become a stripper in order to save enough money to go to acting school in Moscow.8
The press publicized the criminal side of the sex trade, particularly incidents of women being recruited for jobs abroad, only to discover when they got to Germany or the United States, that they were virtual slaves to pimps who forced them into prostitution. Such stories horrified many people, who came to see the legal and the illegal trafficking in sex to be a product of post-Soviet decadence, created by a corrupt new elite and the influx of Western influences. This decadence, like other malign developments of the 1990s, seemed to be disproportionately affecting women.9