Genders 22. Ellen E. Berry
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percent in 1993. Quoted from a translated excerpt of this article in The Current Digest of the Post-Soviet Press, vol. 46, no. 4, February 23, 1994: 23–24.
20. Cf. Igor Kon’s “Sexual Minorities,” in Kon and Riordan, Sex and Russian Society, esp. 103: “When talking of homosexuality, Russians almost always mean male homosexuality; the press has only recently started to mention lesbianism. All the same, life for lesbians is no better. It is true that their relationships do not come under any article in the criminal code, and intimacy between women is less remarkable to the surrounding world. On the other hand, a young girl in our society who is aware of her psychosexual difference finds it harder than a man to find a close relationship. And society’s attitude is just as obdurate: ridicule, persecution, expulsion from college or work, threats to take her children away. The idea that homosexuals, men or women, can actually be good parents would be absolutely anathema to virtually everyone in the former USSR.” See also Cath Jackson’s interview with Olga Zhuk, president of the Tchaikovsky Foundation, a lesbian and gay group based in Saint Petersburg; the interview is published in Trouble & Strife 24 (Summer 1992): 20–24. Zhuk speaks of the extreme difficulties of growing up lesbian in Russia — the loneliness and sense of isolation, the lack of any public meeting places for gay women, the fact that most gay women marry “because you are expected to and because women don’t identify as lesbians.” She describes the “sub-culture of lesbianism” that has been preserved in the camps and she notes gay women’s reluctance to come out publicly: “In general lesbians don’t want to work politically. They say that nobody’s bothering them, everything’s okay: it’s much better that no one should know they are lesbians and they don’t want to draw attention to it.” I thank Rebecca Wells for bringing this interview to my attention.
21. For one analysis of how service to these various “causes” has shaped Russian women’s self-representation, see my article “For the Good of the Cause: Russian Women’s Autobiography in the Twentieth Century,” in a forthcoming volume of essays, Russian Women’s Literature, ed. Toby Clyman and Diana Greene (London: Greenwood Press, 1994).
22. Shogren, “Russia’s Equality Erosion,” 11.
23. Lipovskaia, “New Women’s Organisations,” 80.
24. Kopkind, “What Is to Be Done?” 49. This quote also may be attributable to Lipovskaia; Kopkind is citing a Petersburg woman named Olga who is “an astute, exhippie feminist intellectual of 38” (Lipovskaia’s first name, age, location, and ideological self-identification).
25. Cited in ibid., 55. Shogren’s sources state that 80 percent of the unemployed are women (11).
26. Helena Goscilo, “New Members and Organs: The Politics of Porn,” in The Carl Beck Papers in Russian and East European Studies 1007 (1993).
27. See also Lynne Attwood’s discussion of women’s representation in current Russian films — their preponderant depiction as an “object of the male gaze” or the passive (and often supposedly symbolic) victim of male violence. “Sex and the Cinema,” in Kon and Riordan, Sex and Russian Society, 64–88.
28. Extending this principle of self-monitoring, we might also conduct a critical review of the kinds of “capitalist” and “democratic” models Western groups are currently exporting to Russia; we need to ascertain if these exported models bother or dare to specify policies about women’s inclusion, promotion, and rights in government and the workplace.
29. For an excellent example of this kind of networking, see the Cooperatives Initiative Program sponsored by the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. Their projects include cooperative seminars to develop women’s political participation and empowerment; training and support for women’s re-employment and entrepreneurship; and programs to provide better women’s health care and child care. Contact: Sarah Harder, Office of the Chancellor, Women’s Studies, UW-Eau Claire, WI 54702–4004. There are numerous other programs either in place or in process. For more information on such initiatives, see Women East-West, the newsletter issued by the Association for Women in Slavic Studies. Contact: Mary Zirin, 1178 Sonoma Drive, Altadena, CA 91001.
TWO Engendering the Russian Body Politic
Harriet Murav
One political myth that has persisted through the greater part of Russian history, regardless of the particular form in which political power was expressed, imagines Russia (both Imperial and Soviet) as consisting of two sometimes opposed entities: the state and the Russian people or nation. The mythologeme of the “Russian people” was well developed by the end of the nineteenth century and exploited most strikingly in the twentieth by Stalin. The opposition between the state and the people or nation is not gender neutral. The state, be it Tsarist or Soviet, is constructed as masculine, and the people or nation as feminine. As Joanna Hubbs shows, the bifurcation between “Father Tsar” and “Mother Russia” can be traced back to the reign of Ivan the Terrible, but a similar division of roles persists throughout the Soviet period.1 Nina Perlina points out that although the Russian word for “revolution” is grammatically feminine, the historical revolution “was largely a masculine undertaking” and was mythologized as such.2
The radical Utopias projected by such revolutionary feminists as Aleksandra Kollantai did little to dislodge traditional Russian gender mythologies. Kollantai, writing in 1921, says that the pregnant woman “ceases to belong to herself — she is in service to the collective — she ‘produces’ out of her own flesh and blood a new unit of work, a new member of the labor republic.”3 According to Kollantai, the needs of the family will be provided by the state in the form of communal housing, communal kitchens, children’s homes, and day-care centers, making it possible for women to combine professional work and family life. This revolutionary restructuring of everyday life was never realized. Furthermore, notwithstanding Kollantai’s Marxist definition of motherhood not as reproduction but as production, Soviet ideology revitalized the traditional myth of Mother Russia.
Maia Turovskaia, a feminist critic writing in post-Soviet Russia, traces the representation of this mythology in films made during the time of Stalin. The 1939 film The Member of the Government constructs the heroine’s genealogy as a creature of the party of Lenin and Stalin — as Turovskaia puts it, as a creature of “an all-encompassing patriarchal Will.” Chosen to become a member of the Supreme Soviet, Aleksandra Sokolova proclaims: “Here I stand before you, a simple Russian woman [she uses the somewhat derogatory term “baba”], beaten by my husband, frightened by the priest, shot at by our enemies. … And the party and our Soviet power elevated us and me as well to this tribune.”4 Turovskaia shows how in the postwar film The Oath the heroine is transformed into a mythologized “Mother Russia.” The heroine presents a letter written by her husband to Lenin to his new incarnation, Stalin, and in so doing embodies, as Turovskaia puts it, “a purely Russian mythology: the Motherland [Rodinamat’] before the face of the Father of nations.”5
Far from disappearing with the last vestiges of Soviet power, this mythology of Mother Russia, together with certain related constructions of the feminine, have reappeared with particular force during recent years, against the backdrop of glasnost, perestroika, and the collapse of the Soviet empire.6 These political changes have also made possible the creation and publication of new forms of criticism, both literary and social. A new generation of writers has appeared, among whom women writers figure importantly. Collections specifically devoted to “women’s writing” — certainly a vague and problematic term — have been steadily published at least since the late 1980s.
This chapter seeks to provide an overview of the reconfiguration of Mother Russia and the responses, both direct and indirect, to her resurrection. I will begin with the writings of politically conservative authors, some of whom are well known outside Russia. I will show how the revision of Mother Russia is itself a response to the perception of a breakdown in the political, social, and natural order. I then turn to a specific response to these writings in the work of two very