[It is important for us to rethink the usual categories, including
«defense of the Motherland,» clearing them of militarism. It is
worth defending the Motherland first of all from poverty, violence,
war, corrupt politicians and unscrupulous capital.]
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THE EIGHTH OF MARCH IN RUSSIA: USSR, WAR AND WOMEN’S RIGHTS  
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Sasha Talaver
March 8, 2023
LeftEast
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_ It is important for us to rethink the usual categories, including
«defense of the Motherland,» clearing them of militarism. It is
worth defending the Motherland first of all from poverty, violence,
war, corrupt politicians and unscrupulous capital. _

,

 

«The woman behind the wheel is the driver,» says the propaganda of
the Moscow region transport.

From the poster, a stern, old-fashioned cold wave-laden woman behind
the wheel looks into the distance. The nostalgic font, heavily
associated with the USSR, Rodchenko’s iconography, the tone of voice
— everything refers us to the imaginary USSR. In the slush of 2023,
the heroine of the poster «Girls Sit Boldly on the Tractor» from
1941 turned to the Russians. Only the man who is sent to beat the
fascists had to be removed from the poster —  after all, comradely
shaking hands with him would be too radical for the Putin regime,
which suffers from the phantom pains of «traditional values.»

This campaign, as well as the return of the Order of the Mother
Heroine [[link removed]], illustrates well
the attempts of the Russian government to mobilize Russian women on
all fronts using the methods of the Great Patriotic War. But at the
same time, the emancipatory foundation of the socialist project of
gender equality is washed out of modern Russian propaganda — only an
attempt to exploit women’s paid and unpaid labor and a militaristic
overtone remain.

SOVIET WOMEN AND WORLD WAR II

_Dear Joseph Vissarionovich!_
_In the battles for the Motherland, my husband, the Regimental
Commissar Oktyabrsky Ilya Fedotovich, was killed. For his death, for
the death of all Soviet people tortured by fascist barbarians, I want
revenge on these fascist dogs, a cause for which I contributed all my
personal savings into the State Bank as a means to build a tank –
50,000 rubles. I request that the tank be named ‘COMBAT
GIRLFRIEND’, and that I be allowed to operate it during frontline
operations. I CAN ALREADY DRIVE AND OPERATE A MACHINE-GUN, AND I HAVE
BEEN TRAINED AS A ‘VOROSHILOV’ SHARP-SHOOTER. I send you my
warmest greetings and wish you long, long years of life. May you
strike fear into our enemies and for the eternal glory of our
Socialist Motherland._

_Oktyabrskaya Maria Vasilyevna
[[link removed]].  _

In many European countries, the Second World War was a serious blow to
the pre-war gender contract: women had to be included in new areas and
professions, replacing men who had gone to the front. For the USSR,
the contrast was not at all so striking, because many women already
worked in industry, and were included in politics and local
government. Moreover, as researcher Anna Krylova writes, although
gender was conceptualized in the binary categories of male and female,
they were not opposed to each other, and contained many internal
conflicts and contradictions about what it meant to be a woman and
what it meant to be a man. Even the mass mobilization of women did not
cause a radical break in the already highly disoriented gender
contract of the Stalinist USSR.

«The Stalinist totalitarian regime in the 1930s, despite its
characteristic punitive treatment of its citizens, enabled more varied
popular ways of viewing and expressing gender than the more liberal
Soviet postwar and post-Stalinist era. In fact, I argue that prewar
official culture, institutional terrains, and gender policies promoted
and operated with varied, ambiguous, and, often, blatantly
contradictory notions of gender.<…> What connected the key media of
Stalinist cultural production such as press, literature, and film as
well as the terrain of Soviet education and paramilitary training was
a perpetual state of controversy over the meaning of such staple
notions of Stalinist ideology as women’s equality, gender relations,
and bourgeois prejudice_._

The parameters of this controversy introduce us to a society that was
acutely gender-aware, a society that routinely addressed itself, both
publicly and in its professional pedagogical journals, employing the
category of gender and debating its meanings_._» (Krylova 2010
[[link removed]],
20)

The changes brought about by the war in the position of women —
mobilizations, women’s battalions, the development of new military
professions, and their even greater inclusion in paid work — only
added more turbulence to the controversial Soviet gender policy. This
was also reflected at the level of legislation, for example, in the
decree of 1944 «On increasing state assistance to pregnant women,
large families, and single mothers.» This decree, on the one hand,
significantly improved the rights of working women: increased
maternity leave, prohibited the involvement of pregnant women in
overtime work, those with babies in night shifts, and so on. On the
other hand, the same law introduced the «single mother» category,
making it impossible to put the father’s name on the child’s birth
certificate if the parents’ marriage was not registered — this
was a huge step backward from previous Soviet legislation, according
to which children born out of wedlock had the same rights as children
in a formal marriage. Contradictions were often the result of the
participation in lawmaking of conflicting groups and interests, and,
to a large extent, women themselves.

THE WAR GENERATION IN THE SOVIET GENDER POLICY

Military experience and the great merit of Soviet women in the victory
over Nazi Germany played an important role in their self-determination
and political participation. As historian Mie Nakachi writes, the
experience of independent action during the war years made it possible
for many professional groups, including doctors, to feel empathy,
which gave them the opportunity to participate actively in post-war
politics. Nakachi, for example, attributes the decriminalization of
abortion in the USSR in 1955 to precisely this sense of self among
female doctors (Nakachi 2021, 
[[link removed]]6).
In that particular story, a key role was played by Maria Dmitrievna
Kovrigina, at that time the Minister of Health of the USSR. The way
Kovrigina described the contrast of Soviet women with French women in
the memoirs of her first trip to Europe in 1945 captures this
connection between the victory in the war and the special historical
mission of Soviet women:

_I am convinced that it was very interesting to watch us from afar.
There is a group of women, almost all of them tall (and of
considerable weight), dressed in solid heavy coats, some in gray,
well-fitted commander’s coats. The steps are large; the steps are
solid. You can’t confuse us with French women, most of them are
running in light coats [palʹtishki] and jackets [kurtochki], mincing
their feet [nozhki], tangled in short and tight skirts [iubochki]._

_<…> Our large and multinational delegation was greeted with loud
shouts and thunderous applause. It must be said that the Soviet
delegation was at the center of attention all the days of the
congress. WE WERE NOT ONLY CAREFULLY EXAMINED FROM HEAD TO TOE BUT
EVEN TOUCHED [BOLD ADDED — A.T.]. Everyone wanted to touch the
women of a DISTANT, UNFAMILIAR, AND MYSTERIOUS COUNTRY [BOLD ADDED
— A.T.], whose people made a decisive contribution to the victory
over German fascism._

Kovrigina 1985, 103-105

The «otherness» Kovrigina felt could develop into many different
affects: humiliation, discrimination, exclusivity, pride, and so on.
In the case of Kovrigina (and not only) her «otherness» compared to
Western women was articulated as a unique and heroic position in
international politics dedicated to the protection of women’s rights
and the struggle for peace. This special position was literally rooted
in their bodies, which had survived radical upward social mobility
(from peasant background to the Soviet representative in the
international arena) and the war.

This connection between the victory over Nazism and the special role
of Soviet women was reinforced by the fact that March 8 became a day
off in the USSR in 1965 «in commemoration of the outstanding merits
of Soviet women in communist construction, in defending the Motherland
during the Great Patriotic War, their heroism and dedication at the
front and in the rear, as well as noting the great contribution of
women to strengthening friendship between peoples and the struggle for
peace [[link removed]]». The
revolution and emancipation receded into the background, but the
defense of the Motherland, the front and rear, and the struggle for
peace appeared. Together with the first military parade on Red Square
since 1945 and the mass installation of war memorials, March 8,
International Women’s Day, became a public holiday. Women’s rights
turned out to be an organic part of the patriotic position, but they
also turned out to be closely intertwined with militarism.

The equality of Soviet women became a symbol of the progressiveness of
socialism in the international ideological battle against capitalism
— and this context set the aggressively militant tone of this
struggle during the Cold War with repeated references to the feat of
Soviet women in the Second World War. This cocktail of patriotism,
militarism, women’s rights and socialism poses a serious challenge
to current Russian feminist struggles.

Nevertheless, the militancy of the war generation of women in Soviet
politics brought us a lot: we are indebted to them for the right to
abortion, protective labor legislation, and the development of a
network of preschool institutions. Speculating, one might say that to
some extent, these Soviet women rethought their contribution to the
defense of the Motherland as protecting women from exploitation by the
state and their partners. But this is my interpretation and
inspiration. At the level of official discourse, women were required
to be unquestioningly patriotic — and this is what made their work
invisible.

The involvement of women in political and public work was discussed
from the very beginning of the Soviet state, in the Khrushchev years
it became loud again — in the late 1950s, women’s councils
appeared, which, in fact, consolidated the participation of women in
advocating their interests (albeit only in some spheres of life) as
part of women’s citizenship. A woman is not only a mother and worker
but also an activist. This made it impossible to talk about the
feminist movement in the USSR as autonomous from state-approved public
work. Despite the fact that this work brought many results in the
field of our rights, many scholars think that feminism in the USSR did
not exist.

«TRADITIONAL VALUES« AND «DEFENSE OF THE MOTHERLAND»

Being a Soviet woman meant being someone who knew that she had rights
and fought for them (often against other groups in state/party/trade
union management). And if we understand «traditional values» as
those practiced by previous generations, then in the case of Russian
feminists, this is what they are, gender equality (albeit not
achieved) as the pride of the country and the struggle for women’s
rights as part of women’s social citizenship. 

But this is where the «defense of the Motherland» comes into play,
this militaristic echo of women’s rights is turned upside down by
contemporary Russian government and is actively used to legitimize the
current war. It removes contradiction between women’s rights and
militarism and allows for actions like «Make-up for camouflage
[[link removed]]» or attempts to
mobilize women to support the war.

It is our feminist task in the present to rehabilitate the real Soviet
«traditional values» following the history of the women’s
movement, in the sense of egalitarian political-economic principles at
the level of laws, urban infrastructure and discourses. After all, as
history shows, authoritarian regimes are just dung for our growing
emancipation. On the other hand, it is important for us to rethink the
usual categories, including «defense of the Motherland,» clearing
them of militarism. It is worth defending the Motherland first of all
from poverty, violence, war, corrupt politicians and unscrupulous
capital.

_Translation of a column published in DOXA in Russian
[[link removed]]._

_SASHA TALAVER, a Ph.D. Candidate in Gender Studies (CEU, Vienna), a
left and feminist activist from Russia._

_LeftEast is a place where various voices, efforts and groups from
around the region, broadly understood, come together in a sustained
analytical and political effort. This is a platform where our common
struggles and political commitments come together beyond the national
borders or the straightjacket of national languages. Therefore, this
platform is a political act. Ideologically, it is explicitly left-wing
in orientation, that is, left of the classical social democracy.
Nonetheless, it aims to remain largely inclusive and open,
accommodating enough strands of the contemporary left without losing
the critical edge and while maintaining a dynamic environment for
intellectual conversations._

* International Women's Day
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* Soviet Union
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* Russia
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* Feminism
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