As so often during periods of rapid change in Russian history, there was a widespread perception in the post-Soviet years that gender required discussion. When that discussion began in the early 1990s, it centered on the perception that women’s burdens, considerable in Soviet times, had increased. They were being laid off in record numbers, the social services they relied on to ease the double shift had been slashed, and they were openly discriminated against in the new economy. The family seemed imperiled as well. The birthrate fell, along with male life expectancy, and by the late 1990s the populations of all the successor states save those in Central Asia were declining. Alarming statistics documented widespread domestic violence in families stressed by the hard times. Bride capture was reportedly on the rise in Kazakhstan. Because so many people believed that survival of the family depended primarily on women, the question of how they were to live in the new societies took on critical importance. The result was a broadening and deepening of the discussion begun under Gorbachev into the liveliest public consideration of gender matters since NEP.10
Most participants agreed that the Soviet system had exploited women. Historian Liudmila Popkova summed up a widespread attitude when she wrote, “The Soviet state institutionalized a distinctive order in which the roles of men and women were defined according to the needs of the communist state.” Galina Starovoitova, an ethnographer, declared sardonically that women had “enjoyed the privilege of heavy manual labor, work in foundries and metallurgical plants, and could sit in the make-believe parliament of a dictatorial regime; it was not real equality.” Opinion on how to rectify that situation quickly divided into two schools of thought, the “feminist” and the “maternalist.”11
The feminists developed the arguments they had begun making under Gorbachev. They declared that women should be men’s equals in the new society and that they should not suffer disproportionately from the economic collapse. To remedy the situation, feminists made the argument made so long ago by Zhenotdel leaders: political parties should encourage women to move into leadership positions. Governments should enforce equal access to new economic, political, and cultural opportunities and increase funding for health care, daycare, and maternity leave. Furthermore, society’s awareness of the pervasiveness of sexism had to be increased. Men should do more housework; benefits programs should be conceptualized as assisting families rather than enabling women to work the double shift. “We advocate harmony in the development of society, healthy families, partnership between men and women in making decisions regarding the government, society, the economy, and daily life. But unfortunately, patriarchal traditions are still strong in our society, asserting the priority of male strength, intelligence, and power,” wrote Liudmila Iacheistova, a member of the zhensovet of Vologda, northeast of Moscow. If those traditions could be overcome, feminists argued, women could enjoy equality of rights and opportunities. They could make their own choices, wrote philosopher Olga Lipovskaia, “to create, to earn money, to sit at home with the children, or go on a business trip.”12
Feminists believed that the transformation had to begin with individuals shaking off the shackles of Soviet-era thinking. This was a common belief in the 1990s, as people across the FSU struggled to orient themselves to the new world. Anastasia Posadskaia, a founding member of feminist organizations during perestroika, declared, “I believe that women should understand that no one ever has liberated us and no one ever will liberate us, unless we do it ourselves. We must free ourselves from our silence, stereotypes and political manipulation. Only a revolution of morals and ideology can transform women from the objects of a policy formulated by others into the driving force of social change.”13 That revolution must begin, Posadskaia and other feminists believed, with women joining together with like-minded others, as feminists in the West had done during the early stages of second-wave feminism.
The maternalists agreed with the feminists that women had been exploited by the Soviet system. They proposed very different remedies for this exploitation, however. Rather than become even more engaged in the public world, women should leave the paid-labor force, maternalists argued. Childrearing was women’s primary social duty and most rewarding undertaking, but too many had been unable to be good mothers in the past because the state had made them work outside the home. If they became homemakers, they could nourish their own well-being and restore the family, which had been battered by Soviet policies. The state, the maternalists declared, had taught children that it was the authority on morality, and had thereby usurped the role of parents and undermined their authority. By paying benefits to mothers, it had weakened the standing of men within their families. “What emerged was a situation in which women relied increasingly on the state as the omnipresent, reliable father and husband,” wrote historian Sergei Khukhterin, “while men were effectively marginalized, their domestic power curtailed, along with their ultimate responsibility to and for their families.”14 The consequences were high divorce rates, domestic violence, alcoholism and drug abuse, the alienation of young people, and the early death of dispirited men. To get society on the right track, maternalists wanted women to have more children, create happy homes, and support the authority of their husbands.
Nationalists added that if women stayed home, they could better preserve native cultures and nurture the next generation. This venerable argument was very popular in all the successor states, where people and governments were attempting to define their national identities. As part of this effort, nationalists across the FSU coupled their praise of real mothers with veneration of folklore heroines. The most spectacular example of this unearthing of earth mothers was the gigantic winged statue of Oranta-Berehynia erected in Kyiv’s (Kiev’s) Independence Square in 2001. Critics charged that this purported goddess of the ancient Slavs was an especially gaudy and expensive example of myths manufactured by maternalist nationalists.15
The leaders of the predominantly Muslim republics of the Caucasus and Central Asia were seeking to build national identity and cohesion too. To that end, they endorsed Islam as the faith of their people. They did not, however, adopt the conservative Islamic prescriptions about women popular in neighboring Iran and Afghanistan. Indeed, they held Islamism at arm’s length and sometimes arrested its proponents. Governments and social commentators in Azerbaijan and Central Asia also endorsed women’s legal and civil equality and their right to education and employment. The authoritarian politics of the Soviet era lived on in these countries, and so did the principles of women’s emancipation.16
Soviet ideas, and older feminist ones, were at the heart of the discussions of gender in the post-Soviet world. The maternalists’ core notion— that a woman’s most gratifying experience and greatest social service was motherhood—had been a constant theme of the Brezhnev years. It was widely accepted by women as well as men. Although the feminists asserted the importance of gender equality and women’s participation in the world beyond the family, many of them agreed with the maternalists that women were innately more nurturing and moral than men. Some used this claim of women’s superiority, a legacy of the cult of domesticity, to justify civic engagement, as women had from the earliest days of feminism. What was new after 1991 was the principle, stressed by both sides, that women should be free to make their own choices, rather than being marshaled to tasks set for them by the state. Feminists and maternalists added the promise that women would make choices that promoted social welfare, and in this pledge too they were echoing the reassurances issued by feminists since the nineteenth century.17
Discussions of masculinity also continued the themes of the Brezhnev years; they focused on male weakness and decline. Social commentators and ordinary folk alike feared that men, who had been demoralized by the Soviet system, were now collapsing under the strain of the crisis, leaving their wives to keep families going. “The women take absolutely everything on themselves,” a peasant woman told historian Susan Bridger. “The men are all alcoholics, they won’t do anything.” Tatiana Khainovskaia, a Belarusian university student, complained in 2007 that the biggest problems in women’s lives were “lack of real men and lack of money.”18
These laments were reinforced by dismal statistics. Between 1992 and 2000, male life expectancy fell from 62 years to 59 in Russia; female life expectancy in 2000 was 72 years. The most horrifying examples of displaced men were the veterans of the wars in Afghanistan and Chechnya, many of whom had returned to civilian life suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, but had received little treatment or social support. Less stricken men worried about how to define themselves. A nineteen-year-old Siberian interviewed by Sergei Oushakine in the late 1990s expressed a common feeling when he declared, “Masculinity has lost its former essence, and no new definitions have popped up on the surface yet. I cannot even tell what the contemporary meaning of such a notion as masculinity consists of.” Similar laments were heard in the Caucasus.19
There were tales of men who were thriving. Websites and magazines glowed with images of stylish, handsome “New Ukrainians” and “New Georgians” who had become rich in private business. These men were successful, press coverage suggested, because they had the energy, courage, and will to reinvent themselves. In the summer of 2007, Vladimir Putin laid claim to being such a man by circulating photographs of himself fishing, bare-chested, in a Siberian river and captaining a sailboat, with his beautiful family alongside. In December 2010 Putin, now prime minister, added cosmopolitan coolness to his resume. He took the stage at a gala fund-raiser in St. Petersburg to sing, badly and sheepishly, the rock-and-roll classic “Blueberry Hill.”20
Putin’s elevation to a paragon of post-Soviet masculinity did not mean that his government had the power to lay down hegemonic masculine ideals, as its predecessors had. In the age of the internet and a flourishing commercial press at home, it could not control the dissemination of masculine ideals, and indeed, it did not try to do so. It also faced a public that did not admire the “New Men.” Ordinary people viewed most of them as nouveauriche thieves in league with corrupt politicians.