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A first version of this essay was presented at a March 1993 conference entitled “Rethinking the Second World” and sponsored by the University of California at Santa Cruz. My thanks to Stephanie Jed, Nicole Tonkovich, Pasquale Verdicchio, and Winnie Woodhull for their criticism and comments on subsequent versions; the mistakes remain my own.

1. Tat’iana Tolstaia, “Notes from Underground,” (a review of Francine du Plessix Gray’s Soviet Women: Walking the Tightrope), New York Review of Books, May 31, 1990: 3.

2. See Barbara Alpern Engel, “An Interview with Olga Lipovskaia,” Frontiers 10, no. 3 (1989): 6–10; Ol’ga Lipovskaia, “New Women’s Organisations,” in Perestroika and Soviet Women, ed. Mary Buckley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 73–74.

3. Andrew Kopkind, “What Is to Be Done?: From Russia with Love and Squalor,” Nation, January 18, 1993, vol. 256, no. 2, 50, 55.

4. Elizabeth Shogren, “Russia’s Equality Erosion,” Los Angeles Times, February 11, 1993, 1.

5. Jo Anna Isaak, “Reflections of Resistance: Women Artists on Both Sides of the M/V,” Heresies, special Russian/English bilingual edition entided Idiom’s, no. 26 (1992): 9–10: “Like many letters of the Russian alphabet that seem reversed to us, the ways in which ‘woman’ is represented is frequently the mirror inversion of the representation of woman in the West. In looking at the image of women on the other side of this mirror, we have an opportunity (almost as we could with computer image programming) to see how our lot would differ if our image was different.”

6. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Introduction” to Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, ed. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 7.

7. Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses,” the most updated and modified version of which is reprinted in Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, 52–80.

8. In Feminism and Nationalism in the Third World (London: Zed Books, 1992), Kumari Jayawardena does frame a more textured reading of this interaction, noting that “[t]he concept of feminism has also been the cause of much confusion in Third World countries” — scorned as a foreign or “bourgeois” product by “traditionalists, political conservatives and even certain leftists” and claimed as a solely Western phenomenon by North Americans and Western Europeans (2).

9. Barbara Holland, “Introduction,” to Soviet Sisterhood, ed. Barbara Holland (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 23.

10. Richard Stites, The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism, 1860–1930 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), 191. For a perceptive analysis of women’s participation in the Russian revolutionary underground, see Barbara Alpern Engel’s Mothers and Daughters: Women of the Intelligentsia in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

11. See Laura Engelstein’s nuanced analysis of the distinction between Russian and Western societies in the late nineteenth century: “But although they [the Russians] adopted the liberal ideal of the autonomous subject, they often rejected the Western bourgeois regard for self-interest and the goal of self-fulfillment.” In The Keys to Happiness: Sex and the Search for Modernity in Fin-de-Siecle Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992), 4.

12. In Women and Ideology in the Soviet Union (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), Mary Buckley provides a very useful overview of women’s situation in the various periods of Soviet history.

13. Tat’iana Tolstaia with Irena Martyniak, “The Human Spirit Is Androgynous,” Index on Censorship 19, no. 9 (October 1990): 29.

14. See Vladimir Shlapentokh’s study, Public and Private Life of the Soviet People: Changing Values in Post-Stalin Russia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). Shlapentokh argues that after Stalin’s death there ensued a process of “privatization” or “destatization” (14) in which the state gradually lost authority “over all strata of the population” (153) and the Soviet people shifted their interest “from the state to their primary groups (family, friends, and lovers) and to semilegal and illegal civil society as well as to illegal activity inside the public sector” (13).

15. Elizabeth Waters, “Soviet Beauty Contests,” in Sex and Russian Society, ed. Igor Kon and James Riordan (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 118, 132.

16. Russian commentator Nadia Kakurina identifies this historical tradition of self-sacrifice, dubbing it “the oppressive power of pity”; while she admits that “[t]here is … something deeply moving and decent about [women’s] tactful lack of emphasis on their own needs,” she recognizes the hazards of such self-denial. “The oppressive power of pity: Russian women and self-censorship,” Index on Censorship 19, no. 9 (October 1990): 28–29.

17. Larissa I. Remennick, “Patterns of Birth Control,” in Kon and Riordan, Sex and Russian Society, 45–63.

18. Barbara Holland and Teresa McKevitt, “Maternity Care in the Soviet Union,” in Holland, Soviet Sisterhood, 145–76. Holland and McKevitt base their analysis in part on interviews with Soviet women.

19. Yelena Shafran’s 26 January 1994 article in Izvestiia, “Why Women in Russia Are Afraid to Give Birth,” cites increasingly grim statistics about maternity care, charting the rise of infant mortality rates by 18 percent in 1992 and 18.6 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.