In the second decade after the end of the Soviet Union, women across the FSU voiced many of the same satisfactions and concerns about their personal lives and their societies. The hardships and disappointments of the period had provoked widespread feelings that the new world was less secure and less fair than the old. Remembering Soviet times, Ekaterina Sondak, the feldsher from Pinsk who became a businesswoman, commented, “There were many good things. In spite of everything, life was very calm and people were sure that tomorrow would be like today. In 1991, all people were in the same material position. They had the same possibilities; everybody had the same clothes, the same food. There was no range of production in shops. Everyone was equal, with equal salaries and wages.” Elena Khainovskaia, a Belarusian physician, agreed: “There were many really good things [in the Soviet period]. Free education, free health care; for different work credits, you could get a car or a flat or something else. There were some bad things, but as the time passes I forget them.”48
The old world had not been as egalitarian as Sondak and Khainovskaia remembered; the elite then too enjoyed a far higher standard of living than did less fortunate folk. Much had been lost, though. The Soviet guarantees—employment for high-school and university graduates, job security once hired, cheap public services, and low prices for the goods that were available—were either gone or greatly weakened. Now money and connections mattered more than ever, income disparities grew, and professionals, who had enjoyed high status as members of the intelligentsia in the Soviet system, struggled to get by on wages that did not keep up with rising prices. Tatiana Khainovskaia, Elena’s daughter, summed up the situation eloquently in 2010: “So the people who have some of the most important jobs (doctors save people’s lives and teachers sometimes save students’ souls) earn the same amount of money (if not less) than someone working in a clothing store.”49
For the great majority of women, life was harder. Eighty-five percent of respondents to a 2002 poll of women in Russia said childrearing had become more difficult since 1991. Substantial percentages of these women also reported that they now had more trouble finding employment (79 percent), getting a good education (64.8 percent), having a rewarding private life (53 percent), and doing their housework (47 percent).50
No strangers to hardship, many of these women said that they were learning to cope with the new challenges. Sixty-three percent of the respondents described their personal situations as “satisfactory,” and 25 percent said that theirs were “good.” The majority rated as adequate the availability of consumer goods and food, and said the same of their housing. Naturally enough, poorer women reported greater discontents, while those who held good jobs and lived in big cities were the most satisfied. Strong majorities of rural and urban women in Russia reported in other polls that they considered their husbands loving, hard-working, supportive, and attentive to the children. Perhaps this was because, even as public opinion bemoaned the crisis in masculinity, most men were successfully adjusting to the new reality.51
Women speaking to pollsters and the press took a much more critical view of the world beyond their families, and they worried about that world’s impact on their children. In the Soviet system, education had been a pathway to good jobs, economic security, and social mobility. After 1991 the cost of education, particularly higher education, rose, so poorer women feared that their children would be unable to better themselves by studying hard. As always, the peasants were the most disadvantaged and the most pessimistic. In rural areas of Central Asia and the Caucasus by the mid-1990s, some parents had to keep their daughters out of school because they could only afford to pay tuition for their sons.52
Women across the FSU also worried about the difficulties of teaching children morality in a society that seemed to have lost its moral compass. Most felt that they themselves could resist the temptations of the new times. Ninety-one percent of the women questioned in the 2002 Russian poll affirmed that they could “live an honest life” even in a society that they regarded as more corrupt than the one they had lost. The children were another matter. When asked in 2007 to name the greatest changes since 1991, Liudmila Buloichik, an English teacher in Minsk, pointed to rising rudeness and materialism among young people, brought on by exposure to Western consumer culture and by a lack of discipline at home and in the schools. A group calling itself “Vologda Mothers for the Morality of Children” expressed the same concerns in a 2004 letter to President Putin: “The reasons for our anxiety and pain are not only local conflicts and wars, the lingering economic and political crises, poverty and unemployment. No less terrible fears arise from the loss of faith and hope, from apathy and depression, from the immorality overwhelming our society, from the ever more rampant deficiencies of alcoholism and drug addiction, sexual dissipation and prostitution, permissiveness and lawlessness.”53
Few women agreed with the maternalist argument that they should leave the paid-labor force. Work, for most of them, was an economic necessity, and the majority told pollsters that their jobs gave them a sense of personal fulfillment and a community of colleagues and friends. Furthermore, their jobs were less boring than housework and provided a break from the pressures of family life. Many women, particularly in the European republics, still resented the double shift, and their criticism of it echoed those Soviet women had made for decades. “Nowadays, though women and men are considered to be equal, women remain hearth-keepers,” lamented Irina, a university student and daughter of the businesswoman Ekaterina Sondak, in 2007. “So her duty is not only to earn money, but to be a good mother, to cook, to keep the house, clean, etc. Not a lot of men help women with these duties because they believe it’s not masculine work.” Opinion polls in the 1990s reported that two-thirds of wives and husbands thought that the refusal of men to do housework was a major cause of strife between spouses. This statistic seems particularly unfortunate in view of the fact that, as a consequence of the cutbacks in social services, women’s chores, particularly childcare, had become more time-consuming. “Leisure for the majority of our contemporaries,” wrote the authors of the 2002 Russian poll, “for the most part is reduced to breaks between paid work and housework, during which they pay some attention to the children and watch t.v.” Many women complained, as they had done during the Brezhnev years, that the double shift prevented them from upgrading their credentials in order to qualify for better jobs.54
Many women perceived as well that continuing gender inequities were affecting their economic opportunities. When asked in 2007 whether women and men were equals in Belarus, Tatiana Khainovskaia, the university student, replied, “Theoretically yes, but practically, men in Belarus seem to have more rights than women.” Respondents to the 2002 Russian poll reported that men were more able than women to pursue political careers and become entrepreneurs. They earned higher wages and had greater job mobility. When explaining these inequities, women often attributed them not to gender discrimination, but to natural differences between the sexes. “We know from the Holy Bible that all the people are equal,” declared Liudmila Yushko, a student at the Belarusian State University in Minsk in 2007. “But, of course, there are a lot of differences in their psychologies. First of all, we have different values. So, for a woman the most important thing is her family, her children. For a man, it is his career.” The 2002 poll of women in Russia found that poorer women were more sensitive to gender discrimination than more privileged ones, probably because they experienced it more frequently.55
Polls also found that many women were optimistic about their personal prospects. In the 2002 poll, 75 percent of respondents said that they believed that they would be able to “find real love,” “create a happy family,” “raise good children,” and “have good friends and interesting work.” In 2007, the Belarusians Ekaterina Sondak, the businesswoman, and Elena Khainovskaia, the physician, shared this optimism. Despite the hardships and disruptions they had lived through, despite the political repression and poverty of Belarus, they had managed well. The Sondaks’ clothing store in Murmansk was a going concern, their son Andrei was an accountant, and their daughter Irina was a student at the best university in Minsk. The Khainovskiis had done well too. Elena’s husband Sergei worked in a bank, where he earned a decent salary, and she kept up her medical practice. Her daughter Tatiana and son Andrei were successful students. Both mothers hoped for still more for their daughters. Asked “Do you think Irina will have a better life than you did because of the changes since 1991?” Sondak replied, “I’m sure of that. She is getting a perfect education. And now if she wants to have success in her life, she will have more opportunities than I did in our times.” Khainovskaia was less certain. “I think so,” she said, “because our society develops and changes and I think that it will give Tania an opportunity to have a better life.”56
In 2007, the daughters, Irina and Tatiana, aspired to have good jobs and happy families, as their mothers had, but to enjoy more comforts and freedoms than the older generation had known. Tatiana, always enthusiastic and optimistic, declared, “I want to have three children and enough money to provide perfect lives for them, my brother, my parents, and my grandparents, and to work in the tourism business.” Irina, a steelier personality, had a less rosy vision: “When I was younger I wanted to become a businesswoman. But now I realize that this is very hard. And being a female is one of the hardships. That’s why I want to have a more or less well-paid job with the possibility of promotion. I want to get married, have children, and do everything possible to make their lives easier. I hope that in the future my children will be able not only to dream about a perfect job but to have it.” Her limited hopes were widely shared by women across the FSU.57
Tatiana Khainovskaia in 2010.
Author’s collection.
TATIANA KHAINOVSKAIA
In 2008–2009, Tatiana studied tourism at Central Washington University. A year later, asked about her hopes for the future, she wrote:
“I don’t want to leave my country. I was born here. I want to see it develop and flourish. I don’t want to have to explain to people from different countries what Belarus is and where it is situated. I want people to know my country. I don’t want tourists who are planning their European tour to miss my country. I want them to come here and to see what we have to show and to feel what we have to give them. We are young. We are only 20 years old. It takes time for any country to develop, to grow, to bloom. Rome wasn’t built in one day either.
I want to work in the tourism business, because to my mind it’s the easiest way of peaceful and beneficial communication between people from all over the world. Ideally, tourism is about creating, not about destroying, but in reality it’s not always true. So it’s our job, young peoples’ job, to create. I want to create an image of my country so that people will want to know about it. I want them not to be afraid of the mythical dangers that await them on the streets of our cities (many still believe that there are bears walking along the streets in Minsk).
I’m proud of my country and I want other people to understand why I’m proud of it. And when I say ‘country,’ I don’t mean the government or the economy… I mean the people and nature and everything around us that we see every day.”
SOURCE: TATIANA KHAINOVSKAIA, LETTER, NOVEMBER 23, 2010.
Conclusions
The first twenty years of the post-Soviet period were a mélange of gains and losses. By lowering the standard of living, increasing unemployment, and intensifying gender patterns that disadvantaged women, these decades made women’s lives more difficult. By weakening the remaining autocratic governments and giving birth to more democratic ones, they expanded civil liberties and contacts with the outside world. Activists grabbed the new opportunities, as they had done before in Russian history. A handful became leaders. Some confronted the authorities. Women in all the successor states launched independent organizations that addressed social problems. Feminism once again flourished within the intelligentsia.
While the activists organized, ordinary folk devoted themselves to adjusting to the new realities. By the early 2000s, women in some of the European republics were telling pollsters that although life was still hard, they had hope for the future. Elena Khainovskaia and Ekaterina Sondak were typical. No one had asked them if they wanted the Soviet Union to end. The country’s leaders had simply ended it, and expected them to deal with the wreckage. They had done that well.
Their daughters, Tatiana and Irina, were among the lucky children of the new world, for they had loving, hard-working parents who nurtured their talents. They were middle-class people, not rich by the standards of their country, but able to afford stylish clothes and automobiles. The girls surfed the web, watched pirated foreign movies on the social networking site V kontakte, and devoured the Harry Potter novels. They text-messaged. They were critical of the autocratic behavior of the Lukashenko regime. These liberties and possibilities, taken for granted by them, had been unimaginable when their mothers were their age. Their mothers, although wistful about what had been lost, rarely talked to their daughters about the way things had been before.
By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the nations that had been born from the dismantling of the Soviet Union were settling into revised political and economic arrangements and new social consensuses that preserved many Soviet values. With that stability came increasingly authoritarian governments that sought to rein in independent groups and independent voices. Foreign funding receded, regulations on civic organizations increased, and the difficulties of maintaining voluntary organizations overwhelmed many activists. Perhaps their movement would be seen, from the distance of several decades, as an efflorescence born of the instability of the immediate post-Soviet period.
Or perhaps the situation was very different now, because the world was very different—more mobile, more connected—so that emancipatory ideas flowed as freely across borders as the embroidered jeans and girly magazines. Irina and Tatiana were far freer to express themselves and explore the world than their mothers had been. They also had very different points of reference and expectations. In 2010, Tatiana and her classmates at the Belarusian State University publicly criticized one of their teachers for being “totalitarian,” because she discouraged classroom discussion. These students did not long for the old ways, which they associated with “totalitarianism.” They thought teachers should listen to them, not simply talk at them. Perhaps small rebellions such as theirs portended greater changes when they and the other millions of young women across the FSU became adults. Perhaps some of them would join the ranks of all those women in Russian history who demanded better than the status quo, and made history in the process.