Russia's Lost Gentlemen

This is the first of two articles on women in Russia. "Stop and Smell the Flowers," by Yelena Kochkina and Louise Grogan, of the Moscow Center for Gender Studies, will appear Saturday.


By Tatyana Matsuk


March 8 is soon upon us. Few remember that this was marked as the day of international solidarity of women in the fight for social and political equality at the second International Conference of Socialists in Copenhagen in 1910. March 8 is simply known to everyone as a women's holiday. For many women, it is the only day of the year when they are liberated from any kind of work, including housework, when men take care of them, give them flowers, pay them compliments and give up their seats on public transport.


Especially ardent Western feminists would consider such signs of attention to be insulting. In their opinion, allowing a man to help a woman on with her coat or to offer her a hand when getting off the bus, to carry a heavy bag for her or to pay for dinner in a restaurant, much less to kiss her hand, means demonstrating her weakness and inequality.


Under conditions in which men and women are still paid different wages for similar work and in places like Peru, where women citizens acquired the right to vote only in 1979, such a position is justified. But in Russia, women have different problems.


Western society was urged on toward feminism by World War II, when women replaced the men who left for the front at factories. In Russia, this occurred much earlier. The feminist revolution followed in the wake of the proletarian revolution.


In accordance with communist ideology and because of the need to improve the destroyed economy, Lenin gave an order to "draw the woman into socially productive labor, tear her away from 'domestic slavery,' free her from deadening and humiliating subjection to the eternal and exclusive circumstance of the kitchen and children's room." This was to be done not by redividing up obligations between the sexes, but through communal buildings that would free every person from housework.


Communal apartment buildings arose in Moscow and Leningrad, which were later called by their inhabitants "tears of socialism." One such house, the House of the People's Commissariat of Finance, later turned out to be a neighbor of the U.S. Embassy on Novinsky Bulvar. The apartments, according to the wishes of their revolutionary dwellers, had no kitchens or places to dry diapers. But when food-ration coupons were done away with and life got back into a peaceful routine, the common dining room could not satisfy every taste, the laundry service left much to be desired, and small children were better raised at home.


Society could not take domestic chores on itself, and men did not want to do so either. Therefore, exactly half of Lenin's order was carried out: Women were drawn into industrial work while not freed from housework. Put on one level with their "comrades" of the "stronger sex," they took upon themselves all the burdens of collectivization, industrialization, Stalinist repressions and monstrous wars, during which most of the good, strong, educated and hard-working men died.


Women learned the most difficult of trades, worked indefatigably, risking ending up in a labor camp if they were even a minute late, raised children on their own and took care of their invalid husbands. "Ya i loshad, ya i byk, ya i baba, i muzhik" (I'm a horse, I'm a bull, I'm a woman and a man"), went a well-known folk verse, known as a chastushka. During the war, on liberated territories where no domestic livestock remained, women harnessed themselves to plows.


In the '60s and '70s the demographic situation began to improve, but the war in Afghanistan broke out, followed by perestroika with its local military conflicts, systemic crises and criminalized economy. Then came the war in Chechnya. As a result, the majority of the population is still now made up of women, whose average life expectancy is 72 years, against 57.4 years for men. Russia's social plague -- alcoholism -- is also a reason for this.


Even the inferiority-complex-stricken, uneducated, aggressive, hard-drinking Russian muzhik is a "deficit item." In predominantly women's regions, such as the textile center in Ivanovo, and in the depopulated countryside, any buck sells like hot cakes.


From the moment Soviet power was established, women formally had equal rights with men and equal pay for equal work. But virtually all the routine work and a significant part of physically heavy labor fell to them. Until quite recently, for example, women were charged with laying asphalt on the roads or looking after the animals on the kolkhozy, where there is not enough mechanization and men occupy the management positions. "Baby seyut, baby zhnut, muzhiki uchyot vedyt" ("Women sow, women reap, men take stock"), went another famous chastushka. Add to this practically all the everyday work at home, which in Russia is also hard because of a lack of development. Consumer services and appliances that make housework easier are still too expensive for most families. What emerges is a portrait of a woman who is not equal to a man, who is a workhorse and whose only dream is to take a rest and feel like a person.


What happiness if she finds a man who recognizes her not in words, but in deeds, as a representative of the weaker and especially fairer sex. For such a "real gentleman," you could go to the ends of the earth. And he would hardly be asked about his bank account or whether he had a villa in the Canary Islands. For, as the saying goes, "a cottage is a castle for those in love." If, of course, you don't have to wash the dirty pans there on your own.


Tatyana Matsuk is a senior analyst at the Academy of Sciences Institute for Employment Studies. She contributed this comment to The Moscow Times.