Some women responded to the freedoms and stresses of post-Soviet times by joining a wide variety of volunteer groups, the so-called “civic organizations.” In the early 2000s, 2 to 2.5 million people, the majority of them women, belonged to these groups in Russia alone. They joined for a variety of reasons. Some were attempting to help themselves by helping others. This was the case with the women who established an organization, Our House, to give aid to large families in Kyiv. Others, such as the midwives who did home-birthing in St. Petersburg, were applying their professional skills to volunteer work. Still others were continuing the projects begun during the Soviet period by the zhensovety. Many members of civic organizations believed that their work fostered the development of democratic politics; feminists also saw them as a way to organize women to achieve their emancipation. Activists and the public believed that civic organizations were suited to women because they were philanthropic and because they were independent of the government. Julie Hemment has written, “The market and formal politics were regarded as dirty, but also as masculine domains…. The non-governmental… sphere was seen to be decent, moral, and in this way peculiarly feminine.”35
WOMEN-CENTERED CIVIC ORGANIZATIONS
Soviet women began organizing civic organizations to address issues of particular concern to women in the late 1980s, as we have seen. To establish connections between groups, hundreds of these activists met at Dubna, outside Moscow, in 1991 and again in 1992. Their networking led to the creation in 1994 of the Moscow Information Center of the Independent Women’s Forum, an umbrella organization that maintained communications between groups, distributed information, provided grants, and sponsored regional and national conferences. Meanwhile, in Ukraine, the Baltics, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, members of the women’s auxiliaries of the pre-1991 independence movements were creating civic organizations. They too coordinated their activities through national committees.36
Most of the women-centered civic organizations were small local groups set up to help women, including the volunteers themselves. The Ivanovo Committee of Single-Parent Families, led by single mothers, lobbied that city’s government to fund programs and organized support groups. In Kiev, For Life worked with pensioners. In Armenia, women’s civic organizations helped families of men killed in the war with Azerbaijan in the early 1990s.37
The number of professional organizations grew as well. Businesswomen in many cities, most in the European republics, set up clubs to share information about entrepreneurship. In Moscow, Tvorchestvo (Creative Work) did fund-raising, held job-training classes for unemployed artists, and, in a poignant echo of the 1860s, organized sewing workshops. Societies established by female academics sponsored conferences, published scholarly proceedings, and assisted their members in obtaining funding for research. Particularly influential was the Moscow Center for Gender Studies, organized in 1990 with the goal of “using the results of our own and foreign scholarship to overcome discrimination against women.” It and centers at universities in Kharkov, Minsk, St. Petersburg, Tver, and elsewhere promoted the development of gender studies and a lively critique of gender inequality.38
This activism was not confined to the European successor states. In the Caucasus, Baku once again became a center of female activism. Women there established civic organizations to support female entrepreneurs and assist the poor and victims of domestic violence. In 2002, female academics set up the Azerbaijan Gender Information Center to serve as “the first informational, analytical, bibliographical, and documentary center of the women’s movement in the territory of the South Caucasus.” The organization’s website published articles on international activism and on the history of Azeri women. It publicized conferences, government programs, and sources of information on legal and psychological counseling and medical care.
Some women-centered civic organizations undertook public advocacy. Many lobbied local, regional, and national governments for supportive legislation and increases in benefits. Sappho-Petersburg published a newsletter for lesbians and held educational meetings to counter homophobia. Sestri (Sisters) ran a domestic-violence hotline and held workshops on sexual violence for the general public as well as for safety forces. In the late 1990s its leaders worked with female attorneys and counselors across Russia to establish the Russian Association of Crisis Centers for Women, which acted as an informational clearinghouse for people helping victims of rape and domestic violence.39
OTHER CIVIC ORGANIZATIONS
Women worked as well in civic organizations advocating for environmental conservation and human rights. Of the latter groups, one of the largest was the Union of Committees of Soldiers’ Mothers; it was also the largest women’s civic organization. Founded in 1989 to protest the brutal treatment of draftees in the Soviet army, it grew into a network of committees spread across Russia and Ukraine and coordinated by a national board headquartered in Moscow. “They [the local committees] were born of maternal love,” the committee declared on its website, “of a refusal to accept violence, and of a strong sense of civic responsibility.” The soldiers’ mothers lobbied the government for army reforms, advised parents of draftees on their legal rights, and even, on occasion, sheltered AWOL soldiers. They set up a website that published investigations of beatings and other abuse. The committees protested the war in Chechnya and publicized the war’s horrors. They helped the mothers of soldiers who were imprisoned in Chechnya to travel to the area to plead for their sons’ release. All this activism earned the committees widespread public support in Russia and Ukraine and inspired the formation of other groups, including the Mothers of Beslan, which sought to uncover the truth about the botched attempt to free the hostages taken by Chechen terrorists in the school siege of September 2004.40
LIUDMILA ALEXEEVA (b. 1927)
Most human-rights organizations were led by men, but there was one important exception: Helsinki Watch Moscow, set up by dissidents in the 1970s. In 1996, it invited Liudmila Alexeeva, one of its founders, to become its head. Two years later she was elected president of the International Helsinki Federation on Human Rights. Famous among the intelligentsia as a “legendary dissident and human-rights defender,” Alexeeva proved to be a forceful critic of the government. She spoke up against the repression and the brutality of the Chechen war. She scorned Yeltsin as “Bloody Boris,” and was just as critical of Putin. At a demonstration on the first anniversary of Anna Politkovskaia’s assassination, Alexeeva declared, “They murdered her because she was fearless. She was fighting against lawlessness, against violence, and against lies.” The octogenarian scoffed at the dangers of being so blunt. “If I were to be killed, no one would say, ‘Oh, what a tragedy, she was cut down so young,’” she told an interviewer in 2007. “But I also think it’s better to go [on] doing what you want.”41
Alexeeva happily took part in annual rallies held on New Year’s Eve to dramatize the government’s refusal to honor the constitutional guarantee of freedom of assembly. On December 31, 2009, she showed up dressed as the mythic snow maiden, in a sparkling blue gown and white muff. She was quickly arrested and almost as quickly released, because the government wanted to avoid martyring an old woman with an international reputation. It did not escape embarrassment. The U.S. government and the European Parliament promptly condemned the arrest, and a picture of Alexeeva being manhandled by police ran in newspapers across Europe. “If it serves as a lesson to them,” Alexeeva told a New York Times reporter, “I wouldn’t call it a victory, but it would be useful. Whether it will serve as a lesson I can’t say, because they study very badly.”42
ACHIEVEMENTS AND DIFFICULTIES
There were parallels between post-Soviet activism and that of the pre-revolutionary era. The post-Soviet activists, many of them professionals, were a tiny minority of women, as their predecessors had been. They struggled to sustain the morale, staffing, and funding of their organizations and they coped with government intransigence and sometimes with oppression. As in the past, women with connections to the political leadership had the greatest success. Unlike the pre-revolutionary generations, some of the activists of the post-Soviet world enjoyed support from international sources and access to modern communications that facilitated organizing. Their endeavors were made easier by nearly universal literacy and widespread acceptance, thanks to progress in the Soviet era, of the notion that women should be involved in public life.
Self-identified feminists were a tiny minority among the women in civic organizations. Maternalist ideas, especially the notion that activists were applying their nurturing skills to helping mothers and children, were far more common, especially in the early 1990s. As time passed, awareness of the systemic nature of gender inequities grew among the activists, because they found themselves struggling against them and because contacts with feminists from abroad proliferated. Particularly important for the women of the Baltics, the Caucasus, and Central Asia was the United Nations Women’s Conference of 1995. The governments of the successor states, eager to be accepted into the international community, sent female delegates to the meeting in Beijing, and there they met thousands of female activists from around the world.43
The contact with foreigners, particularly international aid agencies and foundations, was a mixed blessing. Their grants buoyed the fortunes of many civic organizations. For example, the Ford Foundation and the Canadian Fund for Gender Equality supported the Tver Center for Women’s History and Gender Studies. The U.S. Agency for International Development gave grants to battered women’s shelters, and the League of Women Voters sponsored travel by female politicians from Russia and Ukraine to the United States. Foundations from Europe and the United States underwrote research projects and scholarly publications. But the relationship between the foreigners and the activists could be problematic. Many of the outsiders took a patronizing attitude toward the people of the FSU, and their assumption of the superiority of their own perspectives affected which projects received funding. Battered women’s shelters were a favorite in the late 1990s, while organizations that espoused maternalism were not. The funding priorities of the international agencies also shifted over time, and grants were usually short-term, leaving civic organizations to redirect their activities or find other sources of support when the money ran out. This situation also plagued women’s groups elsewhere in Eastern Europe.44
Another frustration arose from frictions between the civic organizations and national, regional, and local governments. In smaller cities, particularly in the European republics, many workers in civic organizations maintained good relations with the authorities. The activists gained access thereby to office space in publicly owned buildings and funding for their projects from officials glad to have the volunteers’ help in providing services. In Ivanovo, Russia, for example, the leaders of the local chapter of the Union of Women of Russia, the successor to the Soviet Women’s Committee, collaborated with the bureaucracy in the late 1990s in establishing programs to help poor families. Civic organizations in the major cities were more suspicious of involvement with government, and government officials often viewed the larger and more feminist groups as troublemakers. The most autocratic regimes, such as that of President Alexander Lukashenko of Belarus, permitted only politically compliant philanthropic organizations to operate. The Russian government under Yeltsin was more tolerant, under Putin less so. It issued regulations in 2004 and 2005 tightening oversight, particularly over the public-advocacy civic organizations and foreign funders. Perhaps following the Russian example, Lukashenko then began harassing with regulations even such resolutely apolitical groups as the American-based Children of Chernobyl, which brought Belarusian children to the United States in the summer for vacations and medical care. By the mid-2000s, governments in the autocratic successor states were still letting volunteers help out with problems caused by the drastic cuts in social services, especially if those volunteers would fund their projects themselves, but they were keeping a close eye on them. Here was yet another carryover of Soviet practices, and of tsarist ones as well.45
The women of the civic organizations trained millions of women in social activism, helped millions more cope with hardship, and disseminated reformist ideas. But their immediate impact on the great majority of women in the FSU was limited. A 2002 poll of women in Russia found that 70 percent of respondents did not know whether civic organizations were active in their regions. Still worse, more than half of those who were aware of them doubted that they themselves might benefit from their operations, and, when asked whether women were better than men at defending women’s interests, only 62 percent answered in the affirmative. Better-educated women were more likely to have heard about and participated in civic organizations, a finding that reflected the organizations’ base among such women.46
This weakness plagued all civic organizations. Across the FSU, people were far less likely to participate in volunteer groups than were citizens of the Western democracies.47 This was a legacy of Soviet times, when volunteerism had been required and controlled by the regime and people had avoided it when possible. There was little motivation to change that habit after 1991, with survival demanding so much and volunteerism giving back so little. Once again, as in the past, female social activists worked assiduously to improve their own situation, preserve their organizations, cultivate government support, and reach out to poorer women. The poor concentrated on getting by and relied on family, friends, and help from local governments.