Suny R.G. (ed.) The Cambridge History of Russia, Volume 3: The Twentieth Century
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barbara alpern engel
De-Stalinising the ‘woman question’
The death of Joseph Stalin and the rise of Nikita Khrushchev brought a shift
in the state’s relationship to the ‘question of women’. For the first time since
the 1930s, the leadership toned down propaganda celebrating women’s eman-
cipation and took steps to address some of the worst shortcomings. Yet poli-
cies were contradictory and results limited. Reproductive politics provide one
example. In 1955, the leadership legalised abortion, claiming the need to pro-
tect women’s health. While continuing to maintain that the duty of women
was to reproduce, and to warn of the danger of abortion, the Soviet state
explicitly acknowledged women’s freedom to choose for the first time. It was
up to women to decide ‘the question of motherhood’, declared the newspaper
Izvestiia. Women in state enterprises, although not collective farm women,
regained sixteen weeks of fully paid maternity leave. Legal abortion remained a
painful and humiliating procedure, however, and contraception unavailable.
48
Family policy reflected similar contradictions. In conformity with increased
openness,theleadership permitted a highlycritical discussion of the 1944 family
law. Many of the proponents of liberalising the law were women, beneficiaries
of post-revolutionary educational opportunities. Possessing the expertise to
participate in policy debates and drawing upon early Bolshevik discourse, they
spoke forcefully fora moreegalitarian viewofmarriage and the family than that
embodied in existing legislation. Reformers called for freedom of marriage and
divorce and equal rights for all children, regardless of whether the biological
parents were legally married. Reformers’ stance evoked fierce opposition from
conservatives, who upheld the double standard and feared the threat to men
and family stability of women bringing unfounded paternity suits. Khrushchev
sided with the conservatives; family law remained unchanged. Yet divorce
became more accessible. Taking advantage of greater freedom to exercise
initiative, judges responded favourably to applications for divorce, resolving
a growing proportion of them in favour of the plaintiff. Perhaps in response,
the number of divorce applications increased dramatically. Women initiated
the majority of divorces, a sign of new assertiveness. Between 1950 and 1965,
divorce rates per thousand people quadrupled.
49
The leadership also drew attention to women’s secondary economic status,
butdidlittleto ameliorateit.TheentireSoviet economyresteduponthe unpaid
48 Buckley, Women and Ideology,p.158.
49 Lapidus, Women and Soviet Society,pp.238–9, 251; Deborah Field, ‘ “Irreconcilable
Differences”: Divorce and Conceptions of Private Life in the Khrushchev Era’, Russian
Review 57, 4 (Oct. 1998): 599–613.
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Women and the state
and underpaid labour of women. Women comprised two-thirds of the agricul-
tural labour force, and virtually all collective farm women engaged in manual
labour. The majority of the work was seasonal, unskilled and poorly paid; it
remained difficult for women to advance. The most highly paid, year-round
work to which rural women could aspire was dairying, which also ranked
among the most arduous labour that collective farm workers performed. In
the industrial sector, the low wages paid to women in female-dominated trades
suchas textileshelpedto subsidise the entire industrial economy.Almostaquar-
ter of all women workers were employed in the textile or garment industry.
Work in these light industries was as intense as industrial work ever became:
women were on the job more than 95 per cent of the time, with only 8 to
10 minutes of break per shift. Poorly designed machinery, inadequate ventila-
tion and shifting schedules exacted an enormous physical toll. The stress of
the job put workers ‘right at the physiological limit of human capabilities’.
Yet such workers received less annual leave than all other industrial workers,
and earned less than 80 per cent of the average wage of an industrial worker
and two-thirds of that of a metalworker. Women’s low wages meant that
light industry turned a profit, which the state used to subsidise investment in
heavy industry. Women’s low wages also made it ‘unprofitable’ to invest in the
costlymachinery that would have lightened their work.Genderedassumptions
also contributed to restricting women to the least desirable positions. Where
machinery was introduced, men often took charge of it, leaving women to
perform the remaining unskilled, manual labour. This arrangement was sim-
ply too advantageous for the state to abandon voluntarily, and women lacked
the clout to force a change from the shop floor. The economic position of
women workers continued to deteriorate.
50
A major cause of women’s poor bargaining position was their infamous
‘double burden’, that is, keeping house as well as working full time for wages.
The double burden served to maintain Soviet women’s subordinate status
at work, while saving the government millions of roubles. In the post-war
period, urban women spent at least an hour a day on shopping, then another
one and a half to two hours preparing food and cleaning up. In the countryside,
running water, indoor plumbing and central heating remained almost non-
existent. Rural women, facing empty shelves in village shops, had to travel
50 Susan Bridger, Women in the Soviet Countryside: Women’s Roles in Rural Development in
the Soviet Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp. 19, 46–9;Donald
Filtzer, Soviet Workers and De-stalinization: The Consolidation of the Modern System of Soviet
Production Relations, 1953–1964 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 104,
193–4.
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periodically to a nearby city to stock up on necessities. Roughly 13 per cent
of children aged one to six could be accommodated in children’s institutions,
whereas over 75 per cent of women of childbearing age worked outside the
home.
51
Under Khrushchev’s leadership, the state tried to ease the double burden,
which prevented women from joining the labour force in the desired numbers.
Besides, consumption and comfort had become an important dimension of the
socialist promise, and failure to provide them, a source of humiliation inter-
nationally.
52
Khrushchev redirected resources away from defence and heavy
industry and towards consumer-related production for the first time since the
industrialisation drive of the 1930s. The government undertook vast new hous-
ing projects: between 1955 and 1964, the state’s housing stock nearly doubled.
Many of the new structures, although poorly built, were nevertheless supplied
with heat and water. The number of pre-school institutions increased, provid-
ing spaces for 22.5 per cent of eligible children by 1965 – about half of urban
children, less than 12 per cent of rural ones. The standard of living improved
modestly. However, because most women worked outside the home, the need
remained greater. Women still had to compensate with their time and energy
for the many shortcomings of the Soviet production and distribution system –
figuring out where to obtain scarce goods and cultivatingthe personal relations
that provided access to them, standing in queues and performing by hand the
work that Westerners performed by machine. Women’s ‘titanic efforts’ kept
the Soviet system functioning.
53
Their onerous double burden prevented them
from upgrading skills and advancing on the job; prevented most from even
seeking more demanding and well-paid employment, because such employ-
ment took more energy than most women had. As a result, many women
filled positions for which they were over-qualified. Ironically, such decisions
confirmed people’s prejudices about women’s inability to perform skilled or
responsible work.
Under Leonid Brezhnev the leadership finally reformed family law. In
December 1965, a new divorce law simplified procedures and reduced costs.
A new family law of 1968 permitted paternity suits and enabled mothers to
eliminate the blank space on the birth certificate of an out-of-wedlock child.
51 Michael Sacks, Women’s Work in Soviet Russia: Continuity in the Midst of Change (New York:
Praeger, 1976).
52 Susan Reid, ‘ “Masters of the Earth”: Gender and Destalinization in Soviet Reformist
Painting of the Khrushchev Thaw’, Gender and History 11, 2 (July1999): 295–9.
53 Alla Sariban, ‘The Soviet Woman: Support and Mainstay of the Regime’, in Tatyana
Mamonova (ed.), Women and Russia: Feminist Writings from the Soviet Union (Boston:
Beacon Press, 1984), p. 208.
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Women and the state
It also contained a definition of rape that included forced sexual intercourse
between spouses. Birth control became available on a limited basis, mainly bar-
rier methods, intra-uterine devices, and the condoms that men half-jokingly
referred to as ‘galoshes’ and often refused to use. Without abandoning the
priority given to heavy industry and defence, the leadership nevertheless redi-
rected greater resources to consumer goods. By the mid-1970s, about half
of Soviet families owned a refrigerator and two-thirds, a washing machine;
the places in childcare centres had grown to accommodate about 45 per cent
of pre-school children. Still, improvement was relative, shortages remained
endemic and women continued to bear a heavy double burden.
Growing numbers of women expressed discontent with their situation.
A survey published in 1970 found that 50 per cent of women who declared
themselves unhappily married were dissatisfied with the division of labour
in their household.
54
Discontent spread to the countryside, where the edu-
cational level of rural women had risen substantially in the post-war period.
By 1979, almost half of the rural female population over the age of ten had
received secondary or higher education. Well-educated rural women became
far less inclined than their mothers to tolerate lack of consumer amenities
and low-paying jobs that required heavy labour. In the European part of the
Soviet Union, the outcome was massive migration of rural women away
from the countryside and to the cities in pursuit of higher education and
more appealing work. Men, faced with a ‘bride problem’, abandoned collec-
tive farms, leaving behind them dying villages, where only ageing women
laboured.
55
Everywhere in the European sectors of the Soviet Union, although not in
Central Asia, urbanisation and women’s rising expectations led to a reduction
of the birth rate and increase in divorce. The birth rate steadily dropped,
from 26.7 births per 1,000 people in 1950,to24.9 in 1960,to23.8 in 1970,to
22.53 in 1980. Divorce rates doubled between 1963 and 1974;by1978 a third
of all marriages ended in divorce, half in Moscow and St Petersburg. Divorce
also grew more common in the countryside. Women initiated most divorces,
often citing men’s alcohol abuse as the primary reason. To the leadership, the
declining birth rate and family instability appeared a threat to productivity
and military strength, and aroused fears that the European population of the
Soviet Union would become a minority.
54 Lapidus, Women and Soviet Society,p.283.
55 Susan Allott, ‘Soviet Rural Women: Employment and Family Life’, in Barbara Holland
(ed.), Soviet Sisterhood (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), pp. 197–202.
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Debate on the ‘woman question’ intensified. Women as a ‘demographic
resource’ set the tone, as scholars and experts explored ways to induce women
to bear more children. Some methods, such as encouraging women to leave
the workforce, they ruled out immediately. The economy still depended on
women’s labour, and besides, ideology taught that labour provided the key
to women’s emancipation. Introducing part-time work and flexible sched-
ules, which many women requested, was discussed but never implemented.
Instead, the leadership offered more legal protection and financial incentives
to mothers. Thus, according to the new family code of 1968, it became illegal
for a man to divorce his wife without her consent while she was pregnant
or raising a child under the age of one. In addition to the already existing,
fully paid maternity leave of fifty-six days before and after birth, in March
1981, the government introduced a partially paid leave for working mothers,
to enable them to care for a child up to the age of one. Women (but not men)
gained the option of taking an additional six months of unpaid leave, with no
loss of position or job status, replacing the previous policy, which offered a
year’s unpaid leave. Women also received a lump sum payment of 50 roubles
for their first child, with double that amount for the second and third. These
policy changes failed to affect the birth rate, however. Starting in 1960, abor-
tions outnumbered live births every year, and were the primary cause of the
decline.
56
Concern with family instability permitted critics to attack women’s alleged
‘emancipation’ for the first time. Ever since women began to work outside
the home, men had lost ‘the title of family breadwinner’, ‘experts’ declared.
Without this role, ‘the very earth slips from beneath [a man’s] feet’. Newly
publicised social problems, such as hooliganism and alcoholism, were blamed
on women’s failure to be yielding and feminine. A truly feminine woman could
even cure the problems of men: ‘Marriage with a really feminine girl instills
in a man two things. On the one hand, he becomes more masculine from
the need to protect and defend her, and on the other hand, sharp traits in his
character soften; gradually, he becomes more tender and kind.’
57
To preserve
marital harmony, articles warned young rural women to avoid jealousy or pos-
sessiveness, and most importantly, not to nag.
58
Many women came to believe
that the much-vaunted emancipation, rather than incomplete emancipation,
was the source of their difficult lives.
56 Williams, ‘Abortion and Women’s Health’, p. 137.
57 Lynne Attwood, ‘The New Soviet Man and Woman – Soviet Views on Psychological
Sex Differences’, in Holland, Soviet Sisterhood,p.73.
58 Allott, ‘Soviet Rural Women’, p. 194.
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Women and the state
Gorbachev and after
Criticisms of the shortcomings in women’s emancipation and complaints that
emancipation had gone too far both intensified in the Gorbachev era. At a con-
ference in January 1987, members of the Soviet Women’s Committee, an offi-
cially sponsored organisation hitherto utterly loyal, launched biting critiques
of numerous party policies involving women. The head of the Committee, the
former astronaut Valentina Tereshkova, accused the leadership of disregard-
ing women workers’ health and implied that men in positions of authority
blocked the advance of women. Speakers even referred to infant mortality, a
topic so sensitive that for decades no statistical information about it had been
published. Noting that the Soviet Union’s infant mortality rate exceeded rates
in capitalist countries, they blamed the inadequacies of Soviet medical care and
environmental pollution.
59
Their statements prepared the way for still more
radical critiques. For the first time since 1930, the accusation that the Soviet
Union was ‘patriarchal’ appeared in print. The annual yearbook Women in the
USSR, having hitherto celebrated Soviet success in emancipating women, in
1990 offered instead a depressing summary of women’s working conditions.
At the same time, the ‘back to the home movement’ erupted into the open.
Male candidates in the election campaign of 1989 repeatedly called for the
‘emancipation’ of women from the double burden by returning them to the
home. Increasingly, political leaders, the media and even the general public
embraced the idea that women should withdraw from the workforce. The
‘back to the home’ movement was usually couched in the language of women’s
choice: women could be either workers or mothers; it was their choice.
60
But
if ‘choice’ was the language, policy pointed in a different direction. Virtually
every policy initiative aimed to encourage women to bear and raise children,
rather than help women advance on the job or combat discrimination at the
workplace. In 1987, two weeks were added to the period of fully paid maternity
leave, extending it from fifty-six to seventy days after the birth, and the period
of partially paid maternity leave was extended from one year to eighteen
months. Women also gained up to fourteen days’ paid leave each year to care
for a sick child. Making the pro-natalist intent of such legislation clear, its
provisions were introduced gradually, starting in the regions with the lowest
birth rates. In the context of Gorbachev’s economic reforms, this legislation
disadvantaged working women. Generous in principle, the legislation failed
59 Buckley, Women and Ideology,pp.201–3.
60 Sue Bridger, Rebecca Kay and Kathryn Pinnick, No More Heroines? Russia, Women and the
Market (New York: Routledge, 1996), p. 26.
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to obligate the government to pay for the leaves it decreed. Instead, employers
bore the cost of funding maternity-related leaves, as they had for years. Now,
however, enterprises had to watch their budgets carefully and consequently,
when they laid off workers, women with children were often first to go.
61
With the fall of Gorbachev, the state completely abandoned the responsi-
bility it had assumed in 1917 as an agent of women’s emancipation and social
welfare. The results were both positive and negative. Negatives included a dra-
matic decline in women’s standard of living. Millions of women lost their jobs.
Poverty became feminised. By the late 1990s, at least a quarter and perhaps as
much as half of the Russian population qualified as ‘poor’ or ‘very poor’, and
over two-thirds of those poor were female. In 1990, responsibility for childcare
establishments was transferred from the federal to the local level, with no
provision made for funding. Between 1990 and 1995, the number of children in
nurseries and kindergartens declined from 9 million to 6 million. The cost of
existing places escalated.
62
Such changes raised serious obstacles to women’s
work outside the home, although some studies suggested that on the whole,
women coped better than men in the new economy, and that younger women,
presumably unburdened by children, adapted to it successfully.
The quality of life deteriorated. Divorce rates rose, as did rates of mortality.
Between 1990 and 1997, women’s life expectancy at birth dropped from 74.3
to 72.8; men’s dropped even more drastically. The birth rate declined as well,
from 13.4 per 1,000 in 1990 to 8.6 per 1,000 in 1997. Between 1991 and 2000, the
population of Russia decreased by 3 million.
63
Motherhood itself became more
dangerous as a result of maternal ill-health and the drastic deterioration of the
public health system. Between 1987 and 1993, the number of mothers who
died during pregnancy or in childbirth rose from 49.3 to 70 for every 100,000
births; by 1998, the number had dropped to 50, still more than twice the aver-
age European level of 22. Women’s sexuality became commodified: product
advertisements featured semi or fully nude women; job advertisements some-
times openly solicited women’s sexual services. The traffic in women from the
former Soviet Union to Asia, the Middle East, Europe and the United States
became an internationally recognised problem.
On the positive side, the collapse of the Soviet era also ended the state’s
monopoly on defining women’s emancipation and brought new opportunities
61 Judith Shapiro, ‘The Industrial Labor Force’, in Mary Buckley (ed.), Perestroika and Soviet
Wo m e n (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 26.
62 Bertram Silverman and Murray Yanowitch, New Rich, New Poor, New Russia: Winners and
Losers on the Russian Road to Capitalism (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1997), p. 73.
63 ‘Russians Vanishing’, New York Times, 6 Dec. 2000,p.8
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Women and the state
for women to organise and express themselves. By the mid-1990s, hundreds
of women’s groups had registered with Russia’s Ministry of Justice; countless
more operated ‘unofficially’. Professional women,their thinking stimulated by
foreign travel and contact with Western feminists, led many of the feminist-
oriented organisations. Groups that sought to improve the lot of women
adopted a range of strategies, almost none of them permissible in the Soviet
period. They organised conferences; campaigned for women candidates and
against the war in Chechnya; ran charity events to assist women and children;
established support groups for single mothers or women artists and rape crisis
centres and domestic violence hotlines; offered retraining opportunities; pub-
lished journals and newsletters and much, much more. Gender and women’s
studies centres generated women-oriented scholarship; young scholars began
to explore hitherto neglected realms of women’s experience. Women writers,
more numerous than ever before, experimented with new forms of expression.
The movement scored one of its greatest victories in 1992, when the
Supreme Soviet considered a bill on the ‘Protection of the family, mother-
hood, fatherhood and childhood’ that would have seriously eroded women’s
civilrights. Had the bill been passed, the family rather than the individualwould
have become the basis of many civil rights, such as owning an apartment or a
plot of land. The law would have required women with children under four-
teen to work no more than thirty-five hours a week. The women’s movement
successfully mobilised to defeat the bill.
64
But such clear-cut victories were
few. Women experienced difficulty placing woman-oriented concerns on the
political agenda. The Soviet regime had appropriated the language of women’s
emancipation, making it difficult to discuss women-related issues. Once quotas
for female representation ended, the number of women elected to governing
bodies declined precipitously. From over a third of delegates to Republic-level
Supreme Soviets in the 1970s and 1980s, the proportion of women dropped
to 5.4 per cent in Russia and 7 per cent in Ukraine.
65
Despite the efforts of
feminists and other women activists, politics remained a man’s game, even as
the arena expanded.
Yet women enjoyed greater success in informal sectors of power and the
cultural sphere. For the first time since 1917, autonomous organisations offered
womenthepossibilityof actively shaping social change. Everywhere, the end of
64 Valerie Sperling, Organizing Women in Contemporary Russia: Engendering Transition (New
York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 114.
65 Mary Buckley, ‘Adaptation of the Soviet Women’s Committee: Deputies’ Voices from
“Women of Russia”’, in Mary Buckley (ed.), Post-Soviet Women: From the Baltic to Central
Asia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 162.
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the state’s monopoly on media has meant the end of its monopoly on images of
women, too. Women artists, film-makers, journalists, television personalities
and writers have presented the public with a profusion of images of women: ‘in
contrast to the unified “ideal mother and worker” of the Soviet period, there
are now a myriad of masculine and feminine types’.
66
These have complicated
and enriched ideas about womanhood, and offer alternatives to the essentialist
notions left over from the late Soviet era, still propounded by conservatives
and some experts. Nevertheless, essentialist notions remain powerful. Not
least among the ironies of the Soviet legacy is the intensely gendered nature of
the backlash against it. Rejecting the ‘emancipation’ that Stalinism celebrated,
many post-Soviet Russians have nevertheless embraced the domesticity that
became its counterpart. A blend of Soviet and pre-revolutionary gender dis-
courses, and linked to dreams of national revival, these ideas have assumed
new life in the vacuum left by Communism.
66 Hillary Pilkington, Gender, Generation and Identity in Contemporary Russia (New York:
Routledge, 1996), p. 16.
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18
Non-Russians in the Soviet
Union and after
jeremy smith
The end of the First World War was followed by a total reorganisation of the
political geography of Europe and parts of Asia, not so much as a direct
result of the defeat of Germany and her allies, as through the break-up
of the three great land-based empires of the region – the Russian, Austro-
Hungarian and Ottoman. From the rubble of the latter two, new nation-
states emerged. From the Russian Empire, some nations followed suit –
Finland, Poland, Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania – but for the others the out-
come was different. Although Lenin avowedly espoused a doctrine of national
self-determination similar in many ways to US President Woodrow Wilson’s
on which the new East European order was based, after a few years all the
remaining territories of the Russian Empire had been incorporated into the
world’s first socialist state, renamed in 1923 as the Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics, or Soviet Union. Instead of encouraging outright independence,
Lenin and his successors implemented nation-building policies within a ter-
ritorially defined federal structure. The constitutional structure of the Soviet
Union and many elements of the early policies remained largely unchanged
until 1991. In other respects, however, treatment of individual nationalities
varied greatly while an increasingly overt elevation of the political and cul-
tural dominance of the Russian nation contradicted earlier policies. The incor-
poration of Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania and Moldova into the USSR after the
Second World War further upset the balance of a system that collapsed in
1991.
The nineteenth century was the high-point of nation-building in Western
Europe, and in Eastern Europe minorities also began to articulate national
demands. In only a handful of cases, however, did national movements based
on the intelligentsia manage to obtain anything like broad popular support.
This was especially true of the Russian Empire, where from the 1880s onwards
the tsars’ policies of Russification initially succeeded in further radicalising
495