Annas vetenskapliga artiklar 1999-2000:
Gender
Liberalisation and Polarisation: Comparing Sexuality in St. Petersburg,
Finland and Sweden
Traveling maidens and men with parallel lives
Women's agency and the sexual revolution in Russia
Shame,
promisquity and social mobility
Loving
with or without words
Muistikuvia
suomettumisesta
Emma
Goldman's Life Writing
Och äldre:
The
fractured working mother and other gender contracts in contemporary Russia
(together with Anna Temkina), 1997
Fält
i skuggan av fält (tillsammans med J.P.Roos)
"Kuin
hökkelit suuren joen rannalla" - äidit ja tyttäret Venäjällä
Anna Rotkirch
Soviet citizens moved and traveled a lot after the biggest social upheavals of the first three decades of Bolshevik power. The migration waves to the big cities continued in the 1950s as well as smaller movements back to the countryside for holidays or to take care of sick relatives; or else elderly parents were moving to their children in the cities; adults moved around the country as work required; young men spent several years away from home while serving in the army; and with the growing living standards of the 1960s and 1970s holiday trips and leisure travel increased.
Some journeys were motivated by a need for private space. This need was both physical and psychological - everyday urban life was circumscribed by social conventions as much as by the crowded living spaces. On the basis of autobiographical accounts of ‘ordinary' St. Petersburg citizens, this article looks at sexual experiences as part of Soviet domestic tourism. The two most frequently mentioned types of journeys are vacations to the South and ‘komandirovkas' or Soviet business trips. While both sexes made both kind of trips, the vacations figure in my material as an ambivalent symbol of women's sexual autonomy and dangerous (mis)adventures, while work related travels emerge as a typical male way of arranging a life style with parallel relationships. The article describes two cultural configurations - the traveling maiden and the man with parallel lives - typical for late Soviet society, which in this context refers to urban life in the 1960s- early 1980s.
Escaping the everyday
The emblem of Soviet everyday life, including everyday sexuality, was the communal apartment. With a family of two or three generations in the same room, sharing the kitchen and bathroom with the neighbours, sexual encounters required careful organization and spatial innovation in the form of self-made walls, secret places and borrowed apartments. The shame and frustration created by the constant lack of private space is, not surprisingly, a leitmotif in collected autobiographies about love and sexuality from Leningrad / St. Petersburg: //footnote 1 here: The autobiographies were collected in 1996 through a competition organized by Alexandr Klyotzin and Liza Lagunova from the Institute of Sociology in St Petersburg. The material was part of the research project "Mosaic life. Transitional autobiographies from Finland, the Baltic States and St Petersburg", directed at the University of Helsinki by prof. J.P.Roos. Through an advertisment in the weekly newspaper Chas Pik and additionally distributed leaflets, people were invited to write about their love and sexual life "as they would talk to a close friend". The competition yielded 47 autobiographies, 24 written by women and 23 by men. The authors are in this article presented with pseudonyms and by reference to their sex, year of birth, and education or occupation. Sexual autobiographies have earlier been collected in a similar way in Finland. For comparisons of the Finnish and the Russian materials, see Rotkirch 1997 and Haavio-Mannila and Rotkirch 1998//end of footnote
Then the wedding - we had many guests: students, his friends and mine, in our one room in the communal apartment. We spent our wedding night on different beds, the place was full of drunken guests who stayed over night. The next night my mother left to her sister's place (it was the sister's idea) and we were on our own. (...) Later everything happened in one room, with my mother and grandmother sleeping beside us on the little sofa. We waited for them to fall asleep in order to, as they call it now, make love. (...) Practically all our private life took place before the eyes of our relatives. (Woman, higher education, born 1937)
In this description, the lack of square meters and proper beds is intertwined with both a lack of understanding support (the guests who won't leave on the wedding night; the mother who does not automatically leave the young couple alone) and an absence of (surviving) sexual vocabulary - nowadays people call it ‘to make love', the author notes, but does not tell us what possible expressions she and her husband used at the time.
Another author remembers the joyous image of a newly wed couple which occupied the kommunal'ka bathroom on Tuesday nights with foam bath, laughter and loud music from the transistor radio. There are also the painful memories of a divorced woman who visited a man in his room and, because of the neighbours on the other side of the wall, was too ashamed to protest aloud when he made unwelcome advances and silently suffered from forced intercourse. Several examples present the classic Soviet problem of having new sexual partners while your ex-spouse is still living in the same flat. There is the traumatic story of a girl who hated overhearing her parents making love and, when she grew up, never could relax with her husbands or lovers because she wanted to protect her daughters from the same experience; etc.
Also for couples with their own, but tiny apartments, the proximity of parents or children was problematic. As a divorced, middle-aged woman describes one very satisfying relationship:
We met in order to have sex, which literally helped both him and me to live happily. I started to think about why this was happening, why we felt so good together, and I came to the conclusion that we could relax completely, nothing and nobody prevented us from making love. He had two small children at home, a young wife and a small uncomfortable apartment. (Woman, higher education, born in 1936)
The Soviet everyday both provoked innovations and new affairs, and created resignation and suffering. footnote 2// Survey data from urban Finland and Petersburg show that Leningrad/Petersburg citizens have had a higher number of extramarital affairs than urban Finns. The Finns were, however, generally sexually more active and reported a higher number of sexual partners and more sexual satisfaction than the Russians. (Haavo-Mannila & Rotkirch 1998)// Yet another way of handling the situation was to escape. In our autobiographical material, traveling is one of the paradigmatic forms for mental and physical transgression. ‘Getting away' in order to acquire more psychological space is probably a basic mechanism in most cultures. footnote3// Already in early Christian asceticism, "/g/eographical movement away from home and its securities was seen as essential fo the creation of a new self" (Veijola & Jokinen 1997, 39).// In Soviet Russia journeys seem an especially important possibility of escaping conventional sexual morals and the surveillance of parents, spouses or children. As in other industrialized countries, in Soviet Russia the 1960s and 1970s meant increasing liberalization and pluralization of sexual behaviour. But due to Soviet censorship on practically all matters of ‘intimate life', the growing gap between the sexual experiences and values of the older and the younger generations was impossible to debate publicly. The norms of Communist ideology and those of the older generations coincided in supporting silence on sexual issues, abstinence from premarital sex, and a more permissive moral standard for men. Even when everyday family life diverged dramatically from this pattern, there was little space for young people in which to articulate other moral evaluations or elaborate new standards of behaviour. Of the few places available, many required traveling (we can also mention the pioneer camps for school children and student's yearly practice of leaving to work at collective farms during the summer). Additionally, travels of course provided the scarce commodity of private physical space, whether in the form of camping tents, train wagons, or hotel rooms.
Elena Hellberg-Hirn (1998) has sketched the dynamics of Russian space as arising from the opposition between the inwards, immobile center/home and a limitless, rapid move or escape away from the center. The secure and controllable home is in the Russian history of ideas especially preoccupied with borders and fences, the zabors. The centrifugal flight is of course connected with the vast steppes, and the vastness of the whole national space - prostor. This basic spatial axis would also appear to be structuring the ways of remembering and writing in our autobiographical material. Soviet social practices further encouraged a division between domestic (silenced, controlled, routine) sexuality and foreign (outdoor, dangerous, unpredictable) sex.. The ‘domestic' sphere here includes both life at home and in official Soviet public places (schools, working places). The ‘foreign' alludes to less regulated, semipublic places, such as certain cafés, transport vehicles, or the usually official places at unusual hours. footnote4// The term Soviet semi-public space was introduced by Elena Zdravomyslova (1997) in her analysis of the bohemian life style of café Saigon in Leningrad.// Under the puritanistic surface of Soviet urban life, even short trips on public transport and taxis were loaded with the possibility of anonymous and potentially dangerous sex, or sex in exchange for material favours.
Analysing gendered tourism
Both in traveling practices and the metaphors of travelers, tourism is gendered. Or, as Soile Vejola and Eeva Jokinen express it, ‘the tourist, the flâneur, the stranger and the adventurer ... are always embodied /relations/ and, accordingly, sexed.' Veijola & Jokinen speak of cultural configurations, ‘a local relationship of time, space and power', which can affect or encompass concrete social subjects. This article discusses the gender differences in connection with the cultural status and effects of the sexual encounters in the life course of men and women. I will also discuss the gendered differences in interpretation and moral evaluation through two types of cultural configurations, the Traveling maiden and the Man with parallell lives.
The journeys described in our corpus of autobiographies form two main types: vacations to the South and ‘komandirovkas'. Women and men tell about these types of journey with different emphasis and varying frequency. This difference in remembering and writing about journeys probably reflects direct gender differences in the amount of traveling. Soviet men were more likely to leave for longer working trips, as they had higher work positions and less caring obligations in family life. The women were more often tied to the home by the responsibilities of caring for dependent small children or elderly relatives. But also women could take one or two weeks of vacation, alone or with women friends. footnote 5 - which may also be put directly in the text-?// Lyudmila Petrushevskaya's short story "Clarissa's story" describes a young divorced woman who first fights to get custody over her child, then leaves the child and travels to a sea resort. For this single mother "it was a pure feast when she after one year got a vacation, which she for the first time in her life spent completely alone in the South after having left the boy at a kindergarden in the countryside. Having arrived to the South Clarissa first felt the overwhelming concern for her boy typical for mothers, she felt guilty thinking about the sea, the tan and the fruits and remembered her child, who had been left in the pooring rain of the North. ... But the sea, the tan and the fruits of the South, which Clarissa bought because they were so cheap, had their effect and Clarissa's outlook changed once again (...) At this point a domestic pilot fell in love with her...." (Petrushevskaja 1989, 135, translation - AR)
In analysing the travel stories, I will look at the interplay
between three modes of experience: feelings, social practices, and cultural
interpretations. This triad is based on C.S.Peirce's triad of experience
as elaborated by de Lauretis, Määttänen & Simpura, and
others. I do of course not assume that ‘feelings', ‘practices' or ‘interpretations'
could somehow be clearly detached from each other or directly presented
in a retrospective, written memory. My aim is to grasp the tensions and
dynamics between bodily experiences, social norms, and cultural interpretations,
as they present themselves to the authors at the moment of writing and
to me as a reader. An example of this way of analysing excerpts was given
already in connection with the first quote of this article, where I distinguished
between the deplored lack of sex due to the social behaviour of friends
(‘practices') and parents, and the lack of linguistic expressions
(‘interpretations').
The autobiographical examples I will discuss are from two generational
cohorts, those born between 1945 and 1960, and those born after 1960. The
first generation had its formative years in the post-war liberal climate
of Khruschev's rule. It represents the Russian shestidesyatniki,
known for a specific life style, tone and political attitude, but not,
like their Western counterparts, for making a gender or sexual revolution.
The second generation belongs to the so called period of stagnation, which
actually coincided with the behavioural sexual revolution in Russia. It
was during the Brezhnev-style late socialism that Soviet urban society
witnessed a significant increase in premarital and extramarital affairs
and a diversification of sexual behaviour. The journeys described by both
generations generally took place precisely during this behavioral revolution
of the 1970s-1980s.
Trips to the South
For the younger generation of Leningrad women, growing up in the late 1970s and early 1980s, stories of vacations to the South stand for sexual initiation. This is one of the key events in the autobiographies of both middle class ‘Masha' (b.1954) and working class ‘Valya' (b.1966). For girls the everyday at home meant pressure to behave strictly, even though values had already significantly loosened in the youngest generation.
In 1970 Masha was dating her first boyfriend. They did not go
further than kissing, but her father eventually had a serious talk with
the young man, who was some years older and from a lower social background.
As a result, the boy ended his relationship with what she describes as
the honest admission: ‘I would like to go further, but that would be bad
for your studies'. The father's regulation of his daughter's sexuality
is accompanied with ignorance and disinformation: in Masha's childhood,
the father told her she had been bought from a shop; and although she later
learned she came from her mothers belly she had in her late teens no concrete
idea of how human sexual organs look or function.
Masha's upbringing, including sexual education, was typical for
a girl from the educated Soviet milieus. By contrast, the permission or
possibility to travel alone was something exceptional. At 18, she decided
to quit her studies for a while and got the chance to work during four
summer months at the Black Sea in 1970:
There I was finally without parents, I was 18 years old, and I did not waste any time anymore. It is amazing /that nothing bad happened/, I must have been protected by God! There I finally experienced my first intercourse with a man (...) (Masha, born in 1954, higher education)
Ten years later, in the 1980s, it is Valya's turn to travel to the Black Sea. Valya went together with a girlfriend. She had been there on vacations earlier together with her mother. But now she had started her vocational studies and moved away from home. And as Valya was living alone renting a room, nobody could prevent her from what she calls a ‘summer of freedom'.
I was so much in love with the South, that all my complexes, all my insecurity, all my timidity disappeared there. I'm now very often trying to recall that first night [of vacation], in order to experience those feelings again. The music was roaring below. And we descended towards it from the house on the hill. We walked as if everybody immediately should look on these two snow-white young bodies, that attracted attention because of the lack of sunburn. I felt as if even the music fell silent. I really felt sensations like the ones in my frequent dreams about flying (...) I was overwhelmed by joy. (Valya, born in 1966, professional education)
For Masha, this was the summer of unashamed and loose behaviour. She recalls thinking she loved the local guy who soon became her boyfriend, but when he suggested they should marry she was ‘not at all interested'. On the contrary, she reflects on her own feeling of social (and geographical) superiority vis à vis her friend: ‘We were a few people from Leningrad there, like one group. We were supposed to be proud over being from Leningrad and feel a little above the local people. My lover was from the locals.'
While dating one of the boys, Masha also flirted widely. She recalls
how somebody asked:
‘Is this your girl?' My friend
answered, not without irony, ‘yes, this is OUR girl'. I have to say that
I was not actually hurt by that remark, but rather flattered. He could
not downgrade me. Dirt did not cling to me.
During that summer vacation, Masha fully enjoyed reading, nature, and writing poetry. ‘I was afraid of nothing then, I was strong and free. Imagine! [Nado zhe] I was happy then.'
Today, at the moment of writing, Masha is amazed that ‘nothing bad happened'. But for Valya the adventure ended violently. footnote 6// Valya does not herself use the word "rape" about the event. It would in contemporary Western terminology be labelled either rape or forced sex.// Already during the first magic evening described above, two local boys started clinging to her and her girlfriend ‘with an iron grip':
Our young small heads could not even think about how this could end. That night they did not insist on their invitations to go to a café and accompanied us home. (...) the [next] evening we went to the dances again. Now we had to be only with them. This time we went with them to a café. That was the first stupid thing to do. The second was that we separated into couples, when they accompanied us home. In the Caucasian darkness... Almost without any sudden movements and almost without using any force, the one who accompanied me pushed me at some suitable moment into some small building on the beach. Before I knew where I was I was thrown down (it turned out to be the watch tower at the row-boat station). Later it seemed to me, that I simply did not resist all the way, that I didn't fight as much as I could... But it was an instinct of self- preservation, on the one hand, and the superiority of male force over female, on the other. And my curiosity. (...) Then he helped me to get dressed and accompanied me home. My friend arrived just after me. The same thing had happened to her, but on the bare sand. We had nothing left to do but to laugh through half of the night over all the details of these events and our own foolisheness.' (Valya, born in 1966)
Threats to the Traveling maiden
British feminists have analyzed the gendered differences in experiencing and telling about ‘the first time'. In their analysis, men and the norms of masculinity dominate the experience, leaving women with little space for feelings of autonomy and resistance:
The two worlds of adolescent masculinity and femininity come together at the moment of ‘first sex' in a way that powerfully confirms respective positions of agency and object, of doing sex and being done to. These meanings and positions are difficult to escape, despite the self- awareness and resistance expressed by many of our respondents. (...) the only potential positions of female power appear to be negative and disembodied: either by saying ‘no' or by ridiculing her partner's performance.
In my reading, both Masha's and Valya's stories present a less simple picture. Certainly, we detect both contradictory and ambivalent relationships between the three levels of analysis I use: feelings, social events, and the (retrospective) interpretations and justifications. But it seems to me the Soviet stories both present strong evidence of at least partly successful female sexual autonomy. footnote 7// The difference between the conclusions of Holland et al (1996) and this article may reflect the ideology of the researchers, real cultural differences, and/or differences in the type of research material (Holland et al. made interviews with strong interaction between the teenager and the adult researcher, while the autobiographies I am using present fuller, more complex stories that are structured by another interaction - that between the teen and adult self of the autobiographical author). I suspect all three causes to be at work, but the scope of our this article does not allow for a deeper comparison.// At the same time, the desirability of such feminine independence was perhaps harder to justify in the Soviet Russian context than in Great Britain.
The Black Sea travel descriptions begin with colorfully described feelings of freedom and adventure. They obviously stem both from the lack of social surveillance and the exotic sensuality of the landscape, the food and the people. The strength of the feelings themselves remains important at the moment of writing. The summer is said to be one of Masha's happiest times, and Valya remembers that ‘nevertheless, the summer left memories of warmth and light. As for my unconscious fear of men - how was I to know, that it would stem from precisely that summer.'
The initial happy feelings are then contrasted with the actual social interaction between young people. The first obstacle facing the self sufficient travelling maiden was the threat of irresponsible or violent men. The men's behaviour is on the one hand relativized and belittled - ‘we had nothing left to do but laugh', writes Valya after what happened to her and her girlfriend. On the other hand, it is elevated to a continuous threat to ignorant young women, with (in Valya's case) unpredictable imprints e.g. on the unconscious.
This actual social threat is enforced by ethnic cultural stereotypes. Southern - Armenian, Georgian, Caucasian, Azerbaijani, etc. - ethnicity is in several female (but no male) autobiographies mentioned as an unsuitable trait in itself. footnote 8// It is a great linguistic irony that ‘kavkazkij chelovek', literally "Caucasian man", in Russian is a strongly negative stereotype of a passionate, violent and often criminal person, while contemporary English uses the same word to describe a white, Western man.//For instance, one woman who longs to get married rejected an Uzbek suitor whom she fell in love with only because of being afraid of living with an ‘Eastern man' (vostochnyi chelovek); a young disabled girl's mother forbade her daughter to marry one of her few boyfriends, who was from Tajikistan. (In our material, accounts of harassment and rapes by Southern men also appear mostly in connection with exotic trips and ‘foolish mistakes', although they were perhaps not less usual in domestic everyday settings.)
At the level of presenting interpretations and evaluations of their experiences, both Masha and Valya partly defend their right to, and enjoyment of, sexual adventures. Valya mentions her own curiosity about sex as one reason for not fighting more when she is forced to have sex. But the women also continuously moralize and blame their own behaviour. Valya describes her and her girlfriend's innocence and ‘young small heads', thus casting herself both as a powerless victim and as a girl who should have known better. Valya also blames herself for not fighting more to protect her virginity - ‘later it seemed to me, that I did not resist all the way'.
Valya also interprets her first violent sexual experience as being the root of her present ‘fear of men'. Her current situation is certainly problematic, as she has started a long, complicated and unhappy relationship with an elder, married, sick and alcoholic man. Masha was, quite to the contrary, at the moment of writing living through a very experimental and exciting period of her sexual life. Nevertheless, she also judges her adventurous younger self:
[My boyfriend] also liked to drink, and I was so unused to it I started drinking in big dosages. I am still amazed over how I did not get pregnant or infected from him with some disgusting crap. (...) Now I remember myself with horror, wondering how that could have been me? I was very porochna: drank myself drunk, smoked, behaved extremely loosely [raskovanno], fucked with my boyfriend wherever we could. (Masha, born in 1954)
It seems that in Masha's retrospective evaluation, fitting into conventions - ‘how could that be me?' - is almost as big a problem as the concrete social risks of pregnancy, venereal disease or sexual violence. Masha also continuously raises the theme of unjustly received, unearned happiness, of behaving in a too egotistic way.
[My lover] arranged fantastic adventures for me. He took me to the mountains, let me ride on a yacht and a teplochod, took me on excursions. (...) I did not think that my trip [on a yacht] was made possible by somebody's hands. I had not crossed one single finger [to help]. I got it for free. Why? I did not think that I had to pay for this in any way. I was irresponsible and bezzabotna, insocuiant. I don't know who had to pay for that happiness of mine, nor how. (Masha, born in 1954)
In the British study, Holland et al. claimed the impossibility of fully autonomous female sexuality. The successful stories of women's resistance were, according to them, basically connected with denying pleasure - thus women present agency mainly by refusing to have sex, ending the relationship, and so on. The implicit assumption of the British researchers is that women would like to be (and be seen as) autonomous beings, and suffer from their passive role: ‘The range of young women's responses reflects different approaches to the problems of managing their lack of agency. His achievement of manhood is her loss of autonomy.'
As already said, I have less problems with detecting clear and sensual representations of women's autonomous sexuality from the Soviet autobiographies. In Valya's case, the autonomy is connected with the gorgeous surroundings and anticipating sexual adventures, while actual intercourse proves a dramatic and traumatic event. The young Masha fully realizes herself as a self-centered sexual subject. However, she cannot approve of this behaviour in retrospect. Her problems do not lie with initiating the sexual exploration, or telling her story, but with justifying it for herself and the readers. Even when psychological and physical space was found for young women's independent sexuality, there was not the cultural space available for expressing herself in positive terms.
Thus the second obstacle facing the traveling maiden is that too self-centered a life style is in itself culpable, not fitting into the ideal of a self-sacrificing, altruistic woman. footnote 9// A comparison of Finnish and Soviet women's ways of coping with sexism and harassment showed women's sacrifice - coping by stressing the value of sacrifice - to be one Russian way that was not mentioned in Finland. The other major difference was that Finnish women resorted to public and legal means, whereas Russian women took to personal revenge. (Verkkoniemi 1998)// Also Valya is at the moment justifying her continuing current unhappy and worsening relationship by way of the man's heart problems and his need for her help and self-sacrifice.
In Soviet Russia, the self-approving, young and sexually active woman was a rare phenomenon. One of the social types dominating the corresponding Finnish autobiographical material - the single, childless, active woman in search of adventures and different partners - is all but lacking from the Petersburg material, both when we look at the authors themselves and the people they describe. But however rare, this type of woman did exist. One man with a previous broad sexual experience describes his astonishment at meeting such a woman, Vika, during a tourist trip abroad. She was the one making sexual advances, and she was openly enjoying sex:
Vika thought sex was a very important and central thing for a woman. Perhaps, as she did not have children, for her this substituted for children, and a regular husband. She dressed very well, but, the main thing I have remembered about her (and which was pointed out by the ladies in our group), was that she did not wear a bra. In those times (1975) it was against customs and conventions. (Man, born in 1930, construction worker)
Only one of the youngest women in our autobiographies (a physician born in 1972), describes a traveling life style, where the declared goal is self-fulfillment and pleasure, not responsibilities, marriage and children. Her sexual memoir is told in a detached and funny tone, with the amorous adventures in the US clearly separated from domestic everyday life back at home.
By contrast, somewhat older, middle-aged women give more examples of rich but unproblematic sex lives. Women of the middle generation have written accounts of Southern trips and exotic lovers where the threat of violence and the need for self- judgment and moralizing is absent. Thus a woman born in 1946, holding the especially prestigious (in Soviet times) position as the head of a supermarket department, describes her most recent love story as a beautiful romance at the Black Sea. The man was 16 years younger than she was, quiet, delicate, and very romantic. She took the initiative to have sex with him. The first problems arose only as she, when they parted, gave him her card encouraging him to contact her in Petersburg, and he froze when he understood her social position.
Komandirovkas
Soviet sexual practices during late socialism followed a ‘double moral standard' in two senses: the declared ideological and social values were far from actual sexual behaviour, and the behaviour and morals of men differed from those of women. This double standard is exemplified in the autobiography of ‘Vera', whose story also has the most detailed descriptions of advances made during train journeys. (Night trains were famous for presenting good opportunities, as men and women shared the coupés on Soviet trains.)
‘During one kommandirovka to Moscow I traveled with the head engineer of the project in a first class SV wagon, in a coupé for two. After champagne, chocolate candy and mandarins, while a romance in Shalyapin's performance was playing, he, like a serpent-seducer, made me forget about everything. He was a 40 year old Armenian, a married man, who, in his own way, was deeply attached to his wife, and their daughters, but at the same time nothing could prevent the gossip of his new passion from spreading around the institute. I was seeing him for about one year.(Vera, born in 1937, secretary)
At that time Vera was herself married, and had already had some extramarital relationships. However, she wants to stress that she consciously had a ‘taboo' against workplace affairs: several men were chasing her, while she maintained that ‘you should never have relationships at work, in order to escape gossip, jealousy and misunderstandings.' Although the one-year affair described above is first depicted as romantically and sexually very satisfying, she now sees it as a ‘stupid error' (glupost').
As we were both married, we basically met during working trips,
which there were quite a lot of. When there were no trips we met at
my place a few times, but that was not enough for him and he started to
follow me at work, begging for a new meeting and insisting we should rent
an apartment for our meetings. I refused his offer, because I was tired
of his harassment and fed up with hiding, lying, and feeling ashamed, especially
as he was a terrible coward in this respect (that nothing would come out,
that nobody would see or think anything). (Vera, born in 1937, secretary)
The relationship ended brutally one Sunday, when they both had
happened to come to work. The man locked Vera in a room, threatened her
and raped her. She was hurt and shocked, ‘I felt like I would have been
thrown away as garbage (vyvalyali v pomoykach). As they say, there is one
step from love to hate.' After that, Vera escaped every kind of contact
with the man, who eventually began an affair with another woman at the
work place.
Vera's autobiography then continues with telling about how Vera
successfully rejected another advance made on a train. Again, the man had
arranged for a first class wagon for only two persons, and arrived slightly
drunk to what he had planned as an amorous night. Vera found him disgusting
and unattractive:
When we met in the coupé I told him to be ashamed [for planning to sleep with her]. Then he started to make advances, and I said rude things to him and asked him to go outside. I quickly undressed and lay down on the upper bed, which surprised him when he entered the coupé, but he accepted my decision. However, in the middle of the night he woke me up, climbing to my bed and begging me to give myself to him. I was sleepy and at first did not understand what was happening. When I finally awoke, I was filled with such disgust at his spitty kisses, that I suffocated with anger. I pushed him away with all my strength and it was a wonder he did not hurt himself on the small table when he fell down from the bed. The next morning he excused himself. I told him to approach me only on work- related matters (...) (Vera, born in 1937, secretary)
Thus the only female autobiography in our material with detailed descriptions of affairs during komandirovkas is very ambivalent: Vera did not approve of work-place relations in principle, unwelcomed advances gave her long lasting memories of disgust, and a longer relationship ended in violence and mutual anger. She tells us she complained about the lying and hiding connected with her affair, while her lover on the contrary wanted to intensify the affair - and even to aggravate the lies by arranging a special apartment to meet in. Although Vera's personal feelings and her interpretations of adultery are not presented as very contradictory, she is explicitly criticizing the (male) social norms of organizing and conducting extramarital affairs for being morally unacceptable.
Men With Parallell Lives
For Vera's married male colleagues, by contrast, work place affairs and komandirovkasseem more like an acceptable way to arrange love affairs, a constant way of leading parallel lives. This impression is supported both by statistical comparisons and comparative analysis of autobiographies: while European men generally have more parallel affairs than women, St. Petersburg men more often demonstrate infidelity as a way of life, compared to Finnish and Estonian men.
Infidelity in the form of consciously sought and upheld parallel lives is clear from this man's words of advice:
It is evident that love affairs should not be conducted with single women, if you are married and cannot have a divorce. Single women always have the hope that you will be with her all the time, and it is not possible in most cases. You begin to feel guilty, and the meetings turn into family quarrels. Even the sexual meetings start to become monotonous. And, evidently, the affairs cannot last too long. It is better when they finish soon - you are left with the memories but no aftertaste of hurting each other. (Man, born in 1930, construction worker)
The prototype of a Russian Don Juan is found in autobiographies from the youngest generation, notably a rock musician born in 1960. This man is unfaithful to his wife before, during and after their wedding (they divorced soon afterwards), and the biggest part of the autobiography consists of hundreds of short encounters in hotel rooms and massage parlors. An almost identical sexual life story has been analyzed by Tatyana Baraulina. According to her, restless promiscuity is one of the paradigmatic forms for late Soviet and post-Soviet masculinity:
As /the interviewee/ continues to look for reasons for his polygamy, he runs out of explanations. (...)/quote:/ ‘I don't know, why I do it, I can't explain it, I mean... I don't know, why do you, say, smoke - well it's like that and, well...' (...) The experience of one- night stands is the fundament o which the identity of the narrator is built. It is what he cannot explain, it is ‘like smoking', it is what he is doing because he is - a Man.(Tatyana Baraulina: ‘Konstruirovanie muzhestvennosti cherez ee problematizatsiiu v biograficheskikh narrativah', umpublished magisterskaia dissertatsiia, European University of St Petersburg, June 1997, pp. 41-42)
Of course, not all Soviet men were young seductive Don Juans, or married men in in high status professions. One of our autobiographical authors, ‘Georgii', presents himself as a shy and socially awkward man. He was ruthlessly used by a woman, who left him once the trip was over. For Georgii, komandirovkas were among the few possibilities of meeting a new woman after he divorced his first wife in his early 30s. He participated in geological trips with the explicit (if failed) aim of arranging his sexual life.
When I parted with [my first wife], I thought that changing woman would not be a problem and everything would go smoothly [kak po maslu]. There were no ‘personal' advertisments at the time and my only source of contacts was the expedition in the summer (...) In the expeditions there were usually very short-lasting love affairs, they ended together with the expedition. But you don't think of that in the beginning, and the atmosphere of living together in field conditions facilitated the proximity of bodies and souls. The important thing is not to loose time when people are forming into groups. (...) When the time came, [my girlfriend] parted and left only memories. After returning home from the expedition, I tried to continue our games, but she made it clear that she was not the least interested. I suffered for some time, but catching sight of a distant star in the sky one autumn evening, I understood how far we were from each other.' (Man, born in1949, various occupations)
Georgii's account of this komandirovka is just the opposite of the summer journey to the South told by Masha. Masha deplored her lack of love for the local guy she had an affair with and moralized over her sexual exploits. Georgii, by contrast, presents sex as the main (and completely acceptable) reason for starting an affair. Nevertheless, his suffering after being left - looking at the stars to console himself - unexpectedly reveals to the reader quite other feelings. In the next paragraph, however, Georgii again uses ‘pure' sex as his only motive for starting to date. He tells us how after the sad end of his geological expedition, he finally managed to find a sexually available woman whom he says he used to call ‘piece of meat' even in her presence.
Discussions about gender and autobiography have centered around the axis of ‘autonomy' versus ‘relationality'. Feminist scholars claimed that male autobiographers seem independent and heroic, while women authors tend to write about themselves as interdependent and part of surrounding social networks. Thus the autonomous self has been seen as typical for the classical Western male autobiography, while relational depictions are sometimes more easily found in women's writings.
In the descriptions of komandirovki related here, the Petersburg men also start from inside the the rhetoric of autonomy. As in the case of the construction worker quoted above, or in Georgii's case, the men often stress the instrumental and pragmatic aim of their social and sexual relations. The configuration of the Man with parallell lives is supported by an active, seductive man, who seems not to bother with more complex psychological and moral issues. (One could speculate to what extent this configuration was enforced by the perceived lack of control and autonomy - or Manhood - in other spheres of Soviet life. Leading parallell love lives and making ceaseless conquests would then appear as analogous to the obstinate refusal of Russian / Soviet men to wear car bealts - power is taken in the situations it can be exercised.)
However, more recent contributions to autobiographical theory stress
that the division between autonomy and relationality should not be applied
too simply. In many texts, images of autonomy and relationality intertwine
in both men's and women's autobiographies and vary according to what part
of the life course is being described. As we have seen, this is true for
a closer reading of Georgii's story. He may long to be the sexual hero,
but his experiences also touche upon relationality, the longing for love
and a significant other in his life.
Conclusions
It has been said that Soviet culture did not perceive ‘sex' as a separate sphere of existence. Instead, sexuality was understood as something embarrassingly banal.Journeys, by contrast, seem to have provided both physical, psychological and cultural space for non-trivial sexual adventures. We have looked at two typical forms of Soviet domestic tourism, vacations in the South and business trips, in their gender dimensions.
The ultimate goal of traveling - transgression - is approached differently in the male and female autobiographies presented here. What the women found, and cherished, were autonomy, freedom, and the possibility of making sexual initiatives that were lacking and/or condemned in everyday domestic life. In the journeys to the Black Sea retold here, it is the allure of the foreign, of the rapid and risky ‘letting go' that characterize the stories, which were often verging on the border to culturally culpable carelessness and physical risk-taking.
Similar configurations of ‘Traveling maidens' can be found in other cultures (think, for instance, of the habit of Japanese girls of traveling to Europe or the US before returning home, marrying and leading the life of a proper wife). In Soviet Russia, traveling young women faced two main obstacles: the actual threats of violence, and the cultural difficulty of justifying a sexually self-sufficient and independent life-style. Even when there was, exceptionally, social space for women's sexual adventures, it could not be accommodated in the prevalent cultural configuration of the self-sacrificing Russian woman.
The men were, on the one hand, fulfilling the ideals of autonomy,
initiative and freedom by dividing their lives into married domestic life
and foreign traveling affairs. The configuration of the ‘Man with parallel
lives' of course fits into the much described absence of Soviet Russian
men from everyday family life. On the other hand, one male autobiographer
started from the assumption of autonomous exploits, but ended up telling
about his longing for emotional proximity and deeper relationships with
women. Here, the quest for space and foreign experiences was a getting
away in order to come ‘home' - escaping the everyday in order to look for
a new centre.
Published in Pirkkoliisa Ahponen (ed): Women's Active Citizenship, University of Joensuu, Dept of Social Policy and Philosophy, 1999
Anna Rotkirch
Dept of Social Policy, P.O.B 18, 00014 University of Helsinki
anna.rotkirch@helsinki.fi
This paper approaches the question of women's agency in contemporary Russia on the basis of autobiographies about sexuality and love, written by Petersburg citizens. I will argue that although women's social and political agency in post-socialist Russia has been quite weak, there are significant developments taking place in the private sphere. An overemphasis on the public sphere has made these changes underreported in much of current Russian women's studies. I will illustrate my argument with examples of how the "sexual revolution", that began in public life in Russia from the end of the 1980s, has influenced women's sexual lives by providing access to knowledge and new spaces for reflection.
Background: The academic colonisation of Russian women
In 1997, I got access to a research data bank with presentations of
mainly Northern American scholars doing Russian studies. The section of
history and social sciences had over 300 names, and I was amazed to realise
that almost one fifth of them listed Russian or Eastern European women's
issues and women's movements as their topic. If we include Western Europe,
we can be quite sure to end up with more Western scholars interested in
Russian women's issues than there are feminist scholars and feminist activists
in contemporary Russia. Most of the research is - just like this piece
- written in English, which the women of the former Soviet Union usually
cannot read or afford to purchase. Russian women can be said to be the
object of academic colonisation: they represent a new and still quite unexplored
topic in the business of academic writing and publishing.
I myself belong to this strange group of Western academic
women. I am not always sure of being able to justify my research theme:
often, when travelling to a conference, I think that the money would have
served better in the hands of a small Russian women's NGO. But I do think
I understand why so many scholars ended up with this research subject,
often long before it became fashionable. This path, which is also mine,
has evidently (and often explicitly) influenced the way in which we try
to understand Russian women and conceptualise the country's gender system,
which is why I will try to summarize it here.
It is the story of a more or less leftish woman who first
looked to the Soviet Union as an example of living socialism, or an interesting
attempt of women's emancipation. When that illusion dissolved, the woman
had learned to like and love the country and the Soviet people. After the
Gorbachev reforms began, she was eagerly waiting for a "real" feminism
to develop. When the new Russian women's movement did get organised at
the end of the 1980s, she often developed close personal and organisational
ties (including fund raising) to Russian feminists. Still, many Western
women were disappointed that feminism remained a marginal political movement
that was rejected by most Russian women. (This disappointment or surprise
is discussed in a number of texts, e.g. Funk 1993; Lindquist 1994; Holmgren
1995). Thus the prevalence of anti-feminist values and practices was understood
as the question needing explanation. It became the main field of inquiry
together with the negative changes in the situation of women during the
social and economic reforms. Much less attention was given to the "good
news" - that Russia already has several new prominent and even pro-feminist
women politicians (Temkina 1996); that the Russian independent women's
movement is the most active and well organised of all post-socialist countries;
that women's organisations are a vital part of the developing third sector
in Russia (Liborakina 1996); or that women in Russia have (literally) survived
the transition process much better than the men, whose drastic fall in
life expectancy has still not been explained by social scientists. We may
ask whether the high initial expectations of many Western feminists have
not directed our attentions too narrowly. To develop this point, I will
look at how academic feminism (as well as Western journalism when it tells
about "Russian women") usually tends to describe the consequences to the
position of women by the perestroika reforms.
Gender traditionalism
The Gorbachev reform policies were from the beginning explicitly against
the idea of emancipated women. With sharpened social problems and stratification,
women often became both the symbolic and actual victims of the changes
initiated by perestroika reforms. Western feminists renamed the 1980s policies
to "paterstroika" or "domostroika" (from the infamous old Russian codex
domostroi). The Russian sociologist and feminist Anastasia Posadskaya used
the more restrained description "post-socialist patriarchal renaissance".
The current phase of societal reforms has recently been described by Lynn
Attwood, a specialist on Soviet and Russian sex roles, as "aggressive re-masculinization",
which she defines as "an attempt to reassert male dominance in post-Soviet
Russia after decades of concern that women were challenging male supremacy."
(Attwood 1996a, 264)
Despite these disturbing tendencies (which I by no means want
to deny) it soon became clear that feminism was not very attractive to
most Russian men and women. Instead, they declared that Soviet ideology
had prevented them from behaving like "normal" men and women. We have several
Western publications attempting to explain this conservative flavour of
the Soviet and post-Soviet gender ideologies (Funk & Mueller 1993;
Attwod 1991, Liljeström 1995; Rotkirch and Haavio-Mannila 1996; etc).
One of the best analyses has been made by Peggy Watson (1993),
who argues that state socialism not only was not emancipatory, but actually
promoted gender traditionalism. This was, firstly, a result of the informal
personal networking that emerged in order to compensate the failures of
the rigid official economical system of state socialism. From buying furniture
to choosing a doctor, Soviet citizens were dependent on the advice and
support from relatives, friends and friends of friends. This extended the
realm of the private and personal well into the public sphere, blurring
the borders of both. Watson claims that these networks "pushed" towards
a preservation of traditional (patriarchal, pre-modern) gender roles. //footnote
1: This statement needs to be confirmed by empirical research, but at least
in the US, close interaction with kin has been shown to create "pressure
to conform to the elders' more conventional standards" (Coltrane 1996,
146). A complementing* line of argument has been presetend by J.P.Roos
(1985), who on the basis of Finnish autobiographies claims that big socio-eocomic
upheavals (that Russia and the Soviet Union of course has repeatedly throughout
the 20th century) tend to reinforce cultural traditionalism, especially
inside the family.//end of footnote 1
Second, the Soviet public sphere lacked institutions and expert
systems that would "pull" towards active reflection on gender and sexual
identities. From the 1930's and onwards Soviet ideology propagated only
the monogamous, heterosexual nuclear family and increasingly soft and domesticized
ideals of femininity (Liljeström 1995). There were no social movements,
commercial mechanisms, or wide-spread psychotherapeutic practices that
would have built on and furthered people's interest in changing their sexual
and gender identities. On the contrary, pre-revolutionary gender markers
such as "aristocratic manners" were adopted in some milieus as a means
of criticizing socialist ideology (cf Pilkington 1994). Watson concludes
that gender identities under state socialism were formed reactively, rather
than reflectively. "State socialism, in fact, acts as a life support system
for traditionally based identity." (1993, 482)
Furthermore, the values of Soviet people were often more
traditional than what the actual organization of labour, living and loving
in society permitted. There existed a normative pressure in gender and
other identity issues - a pressure that was eventually released during
the rebuilding of the postsocialist European societies in the 1980's and
early 1990's (Watson 1993, 472). This facilitated the agressive male attack
Attwood and others describe.
This approach to the situation of women in Russia can be summarized
in the notion "aggressive re-masculini zation". It has three main and interrelated
features, connected to changes in the social, the ideological and the sexual
spheres, respectively: a reorganisation of the public sphere; an open devaluation
of women and femininity; and increased erotization of women (see figure
1).
Figure 1
Aggressive remasculinization
Reorganisation of the public sphere:
- the public sphere as a "man's world"
and the domestication of women
Devaluation of women and femininity:
- sexist rhetorics and policies
- images of passive women
Erotization of women:
- the commercialization of women's bodies
- increased sexual harassment and violence
The notion of aggressive re-masculinization
The reorganisation of the public sphere and the devaluation of women
Peggy Watson (1993) argues that it is no coincidence that the process
of democratization in Eastern Europe has excluded women. In her analysis,
the slogan of the Independent Women's Forum in the CIS countries - Democracy
without women is no democracy - is just wishful thinking. Actually, democratization
and marketization are and have by definition been launched to the detriment
of women: through an increased separation of the public and the private
spheres and a polarization of sex roles.
"(T)he creation of a civil society and market economy in Eastern Europe fundamentally entails the construction of a 'man's world' and the propagation of masculinism in the public sphere." (Watson 1993, 472)
Neither is this situation unique for the 1980s. Watson draws parallels between the post-socialist situation and events like the French Revolution and the Chartist period in England. In all these cases, so called democratic citizenship was in fact built upon an exclusion of women from the human rights.
"(W)omen's exclusion from public activity varied in direct proportion with the degree to which the powerless gained power. Another parallel lay in the fact that the gaining of a measure of emancipation on the part of men was accompanied by the sentimentalisation of home and family." (Watson 1993, 479)
This structural feature of young democracies is certainly a point that has been underestimated in most research on post-socialist societies. It explains the often openly sexist and misogynic rhetorics and policies of Russian politicians (cf Temkina 1996; Liborakina 1996). However, Watson mentions only negative influences of the reform policies on the position of women. Even things the women themselves may see as positive changes are in her view only part of increased subordination of women.
"The domestication and marketing of women, and the de- grading of feminine identity, is the inevitable corollary of this process, even though it may not be immediately experienced as such." (Watson 1993, 472, emphasis added)
The erotization of women
With regards to the so called sexual revolution taking place in Eastern
Europe since the 1980s, Watson is no more optimistic: "The reproductive
rights which were accorded to women under state socialism are everywhere
being challenged, while the domesticity of women is widely projected as
a social virtue." (Watson 1993, 472)
Other feminist scholars have also stressed the degrading of
women in the young Russian sexual revolution (see especially Goscilo 1996).
The Finnish historian Marianne Liljeström (1995) has interpreted today's
erotization of the press and commercialization of women's bodies in Russia
as a continuation of century-long misogyny and subordination of women.
Lynn Attwood deplores the spread of media images where the woman is depicted
as a "passive victim of male violence". This is acording to her mainly
due to the rapidly growing pornographic industry, but she also points to
degrading images of nude women in popular mainstream publications and films
(1996a, 259).
As stressed above, these accounts ignore or fail to explain
the positive changes that are taking place in today's Russia. Even in the
undeniably incredibly sexist Russian media there are strong female actors.
One popular weekly talk show of the 90s, Ya sama or I myself, has two hostesses,
one with "feminist" and one with "traditional" opinions, who then discuss
relationship and sexual problems with their guests. Watson's statement
about the supposed ubiquitous questioning of reproductive rights is especially
hard to understand. I would say that with the exclusion of Poland, women's
reproductive rights are in many ways better in today's Eastern Europe:
is it not preferable to have access to modern contraceptives than the "reproductive
right" of state socialism to make your family planning through (often dangerous
and painful) abortions? Only at the end of the 1980s did Soviet social
policy begin to mention the need of widely available adequate contraceptives.
This was an effect of glasnost, which made it possible to talk about sexual
and reproductive issues in print, including everything from safe sex-brochures
to pornography (which is mostly in the form of pin-ups and soft porn) (Gessen
1995).
Most importantly, the reactions of ordinary Russian women to
the "sexual revolution" are not considered in the Western scholarly works
referred to above.
Women's experiences of sexual agency
In the corpus of autobiographies I shall be using, twenty five were
written by women. These women were between twenty four and seventy three
years old and from all social classes except farmers. The texts were collected
through a competition for autobiographies. //footnote 2: The autobiographies
were collected in the research project "Mosaic life. Upbringing, gender
and sexuality in Finland, the Baltic countries and St Petersburg" directed
by professor J.P.Roos from the University of Helsinki. The material from
Russia was collected and transcribed by Alexandr Klyotzin and Liza Lagunova
from the Institute of Sociology in St Petersburg. Through an advertisment
in the weekly newspaper Chas Pik and additionally distributed leaflets,
people were invited to write about their love and sexual life. We received
forty seven autobiographies, twenty five written by women and twenty two
by men, born between 1923 and 1973. The length of the autobiographies varies
from two pages to about seventy pages. A jury selected six "winning" biographies
that received monetary awards. The biographies have been compared with
the results from a representative survey with questions about love and
sexual life made in St Petersburg in 1996 (Gronow et al 1996). The autobiographical
writers have received more education than the population in general, but
do not in other ways differ significantly from the average Petersburg citizen.//end
of footnote 2
In the context of this paper it should be noted that the
autobiographical competition most probably attracted women who, firstly,
did think sexuality was a legitimate theme of talk and research. (The opposite
is common in Russia. One of the entries that did not qualify as a biography
was sent by an anonymous woman who in a few lines objected to the subject
of the study, saying that intimate questions do not profit from public
comparisons. We do not have the life experiences of her kind in this material.)
Second, the autobiographical format per se activates or develops
a reflective and agency-oriented view of the self. You feel more compelled
to write your biography at certain moments in life, often in connection
with a turning point, and using rhetorical modes (e.g. individual decision-making)
that are not necessarily the dominant behavioural models in real life.
Taking this into account, we can still see the biograhical
accounts as evidence of new practical and mental opportunities. I have
here chosen to quote the women from the middle and younger generations
- born in the 1940s-1960s - who do tell about significant improvements
of their sexual lives due to social changes.//footnote 3 I have discussed
similar "emancipatory" autobiographies also from the older generation elsewhere
(cf Rotkirch 1997). For both the middle aged and the elderly women, the
period of big personal change took place in the 1980s and 1990s.//end of
footnote3// (These "emancipatory" stories constitute about one third of
all the female autobiographical writers in our material. None of the women
(but some of the men) described direct negative impacts due to the social
and cultural changes.) The women describe the impact of access to knowledge
and to new spaces of reflection concerning sexuality and gender.
Access to knowledge
"I firstly became conscious of my orgasm when I was about 37 years old. Before that I did not know anything about it and did not notice it. I read about it in books and became surprised and frustrated because I did not have it. (...) I asked the man I was close to then: "Yura, am I a usual woman?" "No, you're a fantastic woman!" After some difficult considerations I asked again: "Why don't I have, in the end, what you have?" And he showed me in slow motion that I did."
This is how Natalya, a teacher born in 1946, describes her discovery of female orgasm. She stresses that this event did not suffice to make her enjoy sex, which happened only when she some years later met the big passion of her life. But her story shows how access to printed material - at the time, the early 1980s, probably one of the erotic novels, pornographic journals or books about sexual techniques that were circulated in the unofficial samizdat or bought abroad - made her raise a new subject with her lover. Of course it also shows how the female orgasm (or rather its absence) becomes a matter of concern, just as it became in the West two decades earlier. It creates new requirements of sexual satisfaction and new ways of being "not as usual women". But my point here is more simple: to emphasize the positive impact of the sexual information, and contraceptives, that in the late 1980s became available to most urban women. This is how Natalya described her sexual life before these changes, during her second marriage in the 1970s:
"We got married. Those were happy years. I was crazily in love with him. I always wanted to be by his side. The whole day I was longing to meet him again. And my heart was anxiously beating when, at last, he came home. But we did not have 'sex' with him during all the thirteen years that we lived together. Although we protected ourselves (condoms and interrupted intercourse), I was chronically pregnant. It looked like this: we are terrified (of pregnancy), did it, then I was pregnant (with all the horrible things again: a suffocating headache, nausea, vomiting, irritation), then an abortion with all its pleasant attributes, then we were not allowed to, and then the circle began again. How can you talk about sex!"
The autobiographies written by younger women show the impact of being able to plan their family life from the very beginning. Valentina, a librarian born in 1964, describes herself as being very ignorant on sexual matters in her childhood and youth. She married at the age of twenty-seven without previous experience of intercourse. On her wedding night she "had taken a contraceptive pill in advance and was not afraid to become pregnant." Valentina enjoys marital sex from the very beginning. She also continues to consciously avoid the usual life course of Soviet women, who got their first child early in their marriages (Haavio-Mannila & Rotkirch 1998).
"I had three years left to study and there was no way a child would have fitted in. And then I had a plan: to live with the person at least one year (...) and only after that think about children."
As Valentina married in 1992, she could some weeks later go to one of
the new medical structures, a "medical cooperative", to get an IUD. The
couple first stays with the husband's parents in a small provincial town.
But the parents-in-law, who expect grand-children, get furious when they
find out about Valentina's contraception and the young couple has to move
out. This is of course a vivid example of the earlier discussed pressure
to behave traditionally in a situation of close kinship ties.
Sexual violence is yet another issue that became publicly articulated
only during perestroika. Masha, educated as a worker in a technical field,
was born in 1954 and is married with three children. One line in her fascinating
and rich biography is about repeatedly, during many years, being followed
from the bus and attacked by the same man. The first time she is terrified,
as well as humiliated when her boyfriend sees it as her fault. Some of
the times she is attacked she manages to escape. But the last time she
spotted the same man on the bus and had the courage to confront him publicly.
"From the victim I had turned into the hunter. That happened just a short time ago. After twenty-two years of confrontation. Now I'm not afraid for myself, but for my daughters. (...) I really want my experiences to be quoted in scientific literature, so that it could help to change people's awareness and attitudes towards men's violence over women."
Information access was also important in one additional, perhaps more unexpected area: that of contact agencies, that also emerged during the late 1980s. Leningrad has had a proportional shortage of men since WWII, whereas people from the provinces are eager to move to the big cities, so the contact bureaus often provide addresses from other towns. Valentina used these bureaus several times in her search for a suitable husband, and Masha is still using them to seek love and erotic adventure.
The pluralisation and social stratification of Russian society creates new areas of "trying out" new identities. The earlier quoted Masha called her autobiography: "Love - my way of learning". She points out how the same year the Soviet Union dissolved, 1991, was a year of overwhelming personal changes for her. She changes her professional interests and becomes interested in humanistic disciplines, falls in love, is baptized in church, and tries out different spiritual movements, as well as psychotherapy.
"91 was the year of my second birth. After that life sort of started to repeat itself very fast. Keeping to my previous body, I spiritually went through the stages of childhood, teenage years, youth, and gradually approaching maturity. (...) That was the time of my intensive professional reeducation. (...) I started to learn how to allow myself to create, independently and fearlessly, how to live and make decisions without the approval of the people surrounding me. I got to know new people who were absolutely different from the people I used to know, women for whom I felt respect and interest, and even love - that was the first time - in 91 - that I felt sexual desire for a woman (although on the background, again on the background, of my love for a man). It was not realized in action, but it has always been more important to me to experience with the soul rather than the body. That was, by the way, the time when I learnt how to use contraceptives the right way and became more liberated sexually."
As noted above, Peggy Watson stresses that self identity during state
socialism was not constituted reflexively, but reactively (Watson 1993,
482). It is, however, surprising that she does not discuss the difference
brought by perestroika. In contemporary Russia, even so called traditional
identities cannot automatically be said to be constructed reactively. Adopting
not only old fashioned or traditional ideals, but a whole way of life consistent
with these ideals, is surely something "new" for the person in question.
In my view, they should be judged not so much to their contents - because
then we would have to label Masha's Christian faith "traditional" and her
desire for women "modern" - but rather as different reflective steps. For
instance, a woman who becomes a housewife is not only proof of the "domestication
of women (entailing) acquiescence to a view of themselves as creatures
of intrinsically lesser worth" (Watson 1993, 479). She also acquires a
new life experience and with it increased capacity for reflection and,
in some instances, for changing her way of life again (cf Zdravomyslova
1996). Even the soap operas that have been extremely popular among ex-Soviet
women from all classes and milieus (although they are not mentioned in
the autobiographies we have collected) can be seen as one device promoting
reflection. Especially Santa Barbara introduced issues such as coming out
as gay or lesbian, sexual harassment and marital rape into general knowledge
in Russia.
As Masha's story showed, among the spaces of sexual reflection
are new social, religious and spiritual interests, often in connection
with life style communities and/or social movements (charity, ecological,
gay & lesbian, feminist, new age communities, etc). A third significant
change is the spread of psychotherapeutic discourse and practice. In our
material, few (two) women told about seeing some kind of psychologist,
but many more referred directly to psychological books they have read,
or used typical therapeutical terms ("sexual blocks", "introvert", etc.).
Interestingly, none of our writers complained about pornography or the
use of women in advertisments. They did object, for instance, to couples
kissing on the streets, explicit sex education in schools, openly lesbian
women, the lack of morals and religion, and sexist stereotypes in men's
behaviour. But for these women, the spread of pornography was not perceived
as any acute problem.
Reflective agency
In contrast to the first view of the situation of women in Russia,
we can now outline another, stressing the development of reflective agency
(see Figure 2).
Figure 2
Two views of women's agency and the sexual revolution in Russia
(public) (private)
Aggressive re Reflective
-masculinization agency
Reorganisation of the public and the private:
- the public sphere as a "man's world" - wider possibilities
and the domestication of women to plan family life
Re-evaluation of women and femininity:
- sexist rhetorics and policies - spaces for reflection: life style
communities, social movements, *therapeutic discourse
- images of passive women
The sexual revolution:
- the commercialisation of women's bodies - information
access
- increased sexual harassment - articulated
and violence, dissatisfaction
The current emphasis in Western feminist research on re- masculinization
may be due to different factors (which usually intertwine). One is the
already mentioned personal ideology and personal history of the researcher.
(This point is well put in Beth Holmgren's essay on the problems of "translating
feminism into Russia" (1995). However, after having criticized the preconceived
ideas of Western feminists, she goes on to quote Attwood and Goscilo about
the state of women's affairs in Russia without asking to what degree their
work is tainted by those preconceptions.) Indeed, the younger generation
of feminist Russian scholars seems to detect a more colourful and complex
gender culture - I think, for instance, about Hilary Pilkington's study
of Moscow youth subculture (1994) and Michele Rivkin-Fish's (1997) work
on the interaction of women and medical doctors in St Petersburg. The difference
may also be a question of research methods and materials: Pilkington and
Rivkin- Fish both do participant observation while the earlier quoted authors
mainly use published documents. When Lynn Attwood (1996b) does use interactive
methods (structured group discussions with students), she notices positive
trends among her respondents, such as an openness to change, notwithstandning
the usual strong gender stereotypes. But in this paper I have stressed
the impact of theory, and namely, that focusing on the public sphere- media,
legislation, politics (as Watson and Attwood in the cited works do) - is
a limitation. Women's social and political agency often grows from tensions
in the private, which cannot be exluded from analyses. When we turn to
the personal sphere and women's own accounts of their lives, the picture
of almost total female denigration in post-socialist Russia is quite drastically
modified.
Still, the left and the right side of Figure 2 do not depict
the same things and are not meant to "outweigh" or invalidate each other.
Rather, the contradictions and tensions between them could further our
understanding of the developmental dynamics in Russian society. With regards
to the social changes (the reorganisation of public and private), the right
side of Figure 2 merely emphasises the already mentioned positive impact
of the widened possibilities for adequate contraceptives and general family
planning (including housing, which has approved for the majority of middle
class respondents in Petersburg (Gronow et al 1996)). The positive developments
of the re-evaluation of womanhood and femininity and the sexual revolution
have already been discussed in more detail above. To summarize them, we
can quote from the last pages of Masha's autobiography:
"Two years ago, during one of my deep depressions, I came to the conclusion that I should seek erotic experiences and relations with actual men (and perhaps also women, that is still and open question) as regularly, assiduosly and obstinately as I take care of the children, of our daily bread and health. (...) First it was terrifying. It was terrifying to buy a contact journal, hide it from the family, and read them. (...) But then my experience grew. At times it was painful. (...) But it is an experience of life and of patience, of love, anticipations, knowledge and of just an inner sensitivity to my own discoveries. I am becoming less and less romantic and more and more sober. I make my life myself. I choose and discard. (...) I study myself and the world."
Conclusion
This article has compared two differing approaches of women's agency in Russia (Figure 2). The views can be seen as complementary. We could argue that in today's Russia, the limitations of women's political and economic agency are "compensated" - or made invisible - by an interest in sexual agency and autonomy. (This would be similar to the situation that arose in the United States during the advent of consumerism in the beginning of the century (Laslett & Brennan 1989, 393).) But we can also argue that greater personal autonomy and reflective space can serve as the first steps towards empowerment and public action. At least, any general assessment of women's situation in contemporary Russia should try to take both sides into account.
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