limited the production of specialized goods and services for women, including fashion and beauty products. These kinds of goods were obtainable mainly through illegal means and Party connections; they were coveted as emblems of unusual status, even subversive display. To a certain extent, therefore, Soviet women construed the image of the commodified woman as a goal rather than a target, an image valorized by both political censure and material lack. Of course, the commodification of Soviet women did reproduce the degradation and exploitation more explicit in its Western forms; Soviet women were as susceptible as any other group to a manipulative “beauty myth.” Yet in the absence of a capitalist market their extreme preoccupation with “looking feminine” (read bourgeois feminine) and obtaining hard-to-get makeup and stylish clothes also signified a personalized triumph over state-imposed norms and consumer priorities. Among her peers, the Soviet woman who managed a bourgeois feminine image without bourgeois advantages (in her context, Party ties) was admirable and enviable for her pragmatic ingenuity — her savvy and daring in manipulating various “private” and even illegal connections. As Elizabeth Waters remarks in an article on Soviet beauty contests, such attitudes very likely help fuel the current enthusiasm for beauty pageants and the seemingly unruffled public response to the new capitalist exploitation of women.15 She notes the “political statement encoded” in these contests and ascribes their visibility to “the long-frustrated desire for Western style, the sudden emergence of the market, and the freedom granted by glasnost to break old taboos, to explore femininity and sexuality.” At least in this transitional period, the market value recently tagged on women’s beauty and sexual desirability still resonates with an unofficial desire, a past quest in which women did not simply consume a prescribed ideal, but exercised their own creativity and constructed their own “unofficial” (if still convention-bound) self-image.
Yet the dominance of this state/society opposition, with its attendant material priorities, has wielded a reductive impact as well. Material shortages may have lent a “subversive” aspect to women’s commodification, but the combination of shortages, conservative social attitudes, and an historical tradition of women’s self-sacrifice has had a very negative effect on Soviet women’s well-being — most particularly, on their access to safe, progressive modes of contraception and maternity care.16 As Larissa Remennick notes in a recent study, “IA [induced abortion] has been the principal means of birth control” in the Soviet Union for the last forty years and IA-related mortality rates are shockingly high (10.09 deaths per 10,000 abortions in the USSR as opposed to 0.6 deaths in the US).17 Contraceptives have always been in short supply; perhaps more surprisingly, sex education has tended to encourage abortion over contraception as “a chosen birth control strategy.” Maternity care has varied in quality depending on location, but it has been standard Soviet practice to segregate mothers from their partners and families and to deny women a choice of options during labor and childbirth.18 Even as it assigned women sole responsibility for their newborns, the Soviet medical establishment invariably treated these mothers as patients, “not person[s].” Summarizing their analysis of Soviet maternity care, Barbara Holland and Teresa McKevitt identify the bitter paradox of Soviet motherhood: “Though in theory the state acknowledges that giving birth is a contribution to society and that mothers are owed respect and support, in practice women undergo lonely, unsupported and powerless labours” (173).19
Less overtly, the siege mentality resulting from decades of political opposition (either against a hostile outside world or a hostile state) has also censored women’s exploration and expression of their sexuality. In certain specifics, official icons have permeated the general Russian mindset: the role of the good mother still seems to dictate most Russian women’s ideal. The uniform model of a virtuous heterosexual woman — the chaste and maternal Party worker, the chaste and maternal dissident — has obstructed the emergence and acceptance of more diversified roles, nontraditional life-styles. It is characteristic that lesbians and bisexuals are not even “seen” in Russian society. Historically, they have surfaced in the criminalized margins of prisons and labor camps (although, unlike gay men, their sexuality was not recognized in the penal code), but most have opted to blend in with the heterosexual majority, to avoid attracting official and unofficial disapproval of their difference.20 While this homogeneity may be challenged in present-day Russia, a patriarchal and conservative hierarchy of “causes” is likely to endure, at least over the next decade, as the most powerful force shaping Russian women’s self-worth and political engagement.21
COMMON MARKET, COMMON CAUSE?
Grass-roots protest versus mandated change, insistence on individual rights and fulfillment versus self-sacrifice for presumably greater “causes,” career prospects versus obligatory work, domestic entrapment versus domestic refuge, commodification versus improvisation, a constantly generative factionalism versus an all-determining opposition — these are the sorts of historical differences that have jammed communications between Western and Russian women. In predictable consequence, these differences have also stymied exchange between scholars of Western cultures and Slavists in the West. The latter group has developed very much under the influence of successive generations of Russian emigré scholars, has become accustomed to regarding the Russian experience as singular and (at times) exemplary, and is especially wary about applying theories and premises based on Western contexts. As a result, many Slavists have been altogether reluctant to recognize gender (not to speak of sexuality) as an influential category of identity, experience, and perception. Their resistance (stiffened at times by a complacent isolationism) has complicated and retarded scholarly and curricular attempts to mediate between the worlds of Western and Russian women.
Yet now that the Soviet system has collapsed and Western and Russian politics and economies seem to be converging (academic convergence struggling to keep pace), we might at last entertain hopes for a more informed, mutually intelligible dialogue. Certainly the Russians seem more avid right now for Western goods, more alert to helpful voices in the present cacophony of Western advisors and opportunists. And the need for better, more nuanced translation has never seemed so urgent. Even making allowances for any first world bias, it is striking how much the new Russian powers-that-be are measurably diminishing or demoting women in their shift from socialist state to capitalist nation and their concomitant selection and adaptation of various Western “imports.” Women’s “paper rights” are even now being erased. The new Russian government has already “omitted the legal guarantees of equality for women in the workplace” in its draft constitution; women’s representation in the new Russian parliament has dropped precipitously from a once mandated 33 percent to 10 percent; and Yeltsin and other male leaders, by word and example, encourage the old patriarchal distribution of men in politics and women in the home.22 Lipovskaia characterizes these trends as “the emergence of so-called ‘male democracy,’ in which women, long associated with the home, are simply not seen in this newly emerging society.”23
The economic situation of Russian women is even grimmer. Not only has the rocky transition to a “free market” exacerbated women’s double burden to inconceivable extremes, but it has generated what I would call, embellishing on Lipovskaia’s example, a kind of “macho capitalism” dominated by young male entrepreneurs (the so-called “millionaires’ club”), ex-members of the old Soviet nomenklatura, and mafia-like networks of extortion and enforcement. Although some women have emerged as entrepreneurs, their businesses, according to one witness, tend to be “small and scarce” and their owners “less successful because they’re more law-abiding.”24 This “masculinization” of private enterprise revives one traditional fiction of man as the more competitive, capable, committed (i.e., undistracted by childbirth and children) employee and evokes corresponding fictions and job descriptions of woman as helpmate — as homemaker or whore. After decades of recruitment into the labor force, women workers are being laid off in large numbers, and in many cases, from more prestigious, higher-earning jobs. Posadskaia gives an eyewitness account of this metamorphosis:
The Soviet pattern was that a woman first got an
