By Irina Glushchenko
MOSCOW — How did women live in the USSR when perestroika was in the future, and when the word "market" referred only to a large covered space where foodstuffs cost more than in the shops? Considerably worse than men, if the truth be known. For men, work generally finished when their shift ended. But when huge numbers of women arrived home from their jobs, their work began all over again.
Still, there were elements of Soviet state policy that made us envied by women in the West. This was the case particularly with maternity leave and child-care provisions.
The Soviet state needed labour power. The "great feats of communist construction" demanded ever more people. Women had to take their place at the lathe and the conveyor belt together with men.
At the same time, the authorities were anxious to ensure that the population kept growing. The result was the establishment of an extensive and virtually free network of children's pre-school centres. In the schools, children continued to be cared for after classes had finished. Countless children's activity circles operated, and children could be sent to Pioneer camps for the summer.
Single mothers and large families received special benefits. Maternity leave provisions were increased several times, so that women would not be tempted to leave the workforce altogether after the birth of a child. During the final years of "stagnation" government experts recommended extending maternity leave to three years, with wages continuing to be paid during the first half of this period.
The state was, of course, merely solving its own problems. The authorities saw women only as workers or as the mothers of children, not as individuals in their own right. Nevertheless, the state more or less in passing resolved some real difficulties. The choice of "a child or a career", "family or work", which represents a painful dilemma for many women in capitalist countries, did not in essence confront women here. It was possible without extreme difficulty to allow oneself both.
How much satisfaction women gained from their work, and whether their family lives were happy, were other questions. Having freed women for "productive work", the Soviet state could not free them, and did not try to free them, from the ordeals of daily life. The time which women had free as a result of child care was spent standing for hours in queues, and in searching for foodstuffs and other consumer goods.
The windows of Western shops, about which people here learned mainly by hearsay, could not fail to arouse a real longing in millions of Soviet women. They dreamed of a shining future in which everything in the shops would be "like there", but in which the child care, schools and social welfare benefits would remain "like here". The concept of "social welfare" was an unfamiliar one at the time — the benefits were accepted as natural, just like the nominal sums charged for housing, telephone services and electricity.
For the "free women of free Russia", however, the shift to the market has brought new forms of bondage. The system of social guarantees has practically collapsed, child care now costs sums equal to the entire wage of many workers, and inflation and unemployment have hit in a big way. There are now plush displays in shop windows, but in the main the goods are accessible only to a very narrow layer of well-heeled women from nomenklatura families. Tens of millions of Russian women are now finding out for themselves what it means to be poor under capitalism.
Eighty per cent of the unemployed people in Moscow are women. Forecasts indicate that by the end of 1992, 1.5 million workers will have been laid off throughout Russia from the defence complex alone. Most of these workers will be women.
The textile industry is now virtually paralysed, because its products are not finding buyers. This is not the fault of poor quality goods, but simply because people no longer have money. The textile factories are sending workers on unpaid leave, or are paying only 30% to 40% of wages. Again, the main victims of this crisis are women.
The new situation is also affecting birth rates; for the first time in the post-war years, the number of deaths in Russia now exceeds the number of births. "Experts have calculated that the minimum subsistence income for a child is higher than for an adult", Rossiyskaya Gazeta noted in August. "Only decidedly bourgeois families can now afford to give a child a normal upbringing. The effects of falling living standards on children are reflected in the increasing incidence of chronic illnesses, in slow growth and in other deviations from the norm." As many as 60% of children are now reported to show symptoms of rickets, and 10% of anemia.
Figures now being published confirm that the whole area of fertility is a disaster zone for Russian women. Nezavisimaya Gazeta early in October quoted research which showed that only 20.3% of women used modern methods of contraception. Every third woman had had a pregnancy terminated. In 1991 3.5 million abortions were performed — twice as many as the number of births. Some 54.4% of pregnant women suffered from obstetric disorders, and complications occurred in between 40 and 47% of births. Infant mortality in 1991 stood at 17.9 per thousand, roughly twice the rate in advanced Western countries.
One would expect the new problems to result in a stormy growth of the women's movement, especially since it is now legally possible to organise and defend one's rights. According to the Ministry of Justice, 62 women's associations and unions are now registered in Russia, and a number of women's newspapers have appeared. The strikes by teachers and doctors in the spring of 1992 were in essence women's actions.
But the process of politicisation of women has made only slight gains, and now appears to be losing momentum. A list of 392 leading political activists that was published at the end of October in Nezavisimaya Gazeta included the names of only ten women. As Galina Sillaste noted early this year in Moskovskaya Pravda, "The results of our surveys have shown that more often than not women themselves show a lack of confidence in women politicians."
Russian women, by and large, simply do not believe in the possibility of changing anything for the better. In this, they differ little from men. n