Profile : Galina Semyonova: No Mere Token in Soviet Politburo : The first woman in the country’s highest policy body refuses to be categorized or limited. She is smart, outspoken and a rising star in Kremlin politics.

“Token,” people said when Galina Semyonova was elected to the Soviet Communist Party’s Politburo, the first woman to hold full membership in the party’s highest body.

“She is a woman--that’s all there is to it,” the party spokesman said, explaining her inclusion in the leadership. “Oh, but she does have a doctorate in philosophy.”

Even President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, who had called for more women in the party hierarchy and had nominated Semyonova, 53, as a member of the party’s policy-making Central Committee and then the Politburo, said she would handle “the women-family-children portfolio.”

“Stereotypes, stereotypes--they are like straitjackets, binding you so tightly, forcing you to submit against your will, making any struggle seem pointless,” Semyonova said, reflecting on her election six months ago. “A woman at the top is naturally supposed to look after ‘women’s issues’ and not concern herself with other matters.

“But, assessing it soberly, you can see that these ‘women’s issues’ are of the utmost importance today. Women constitute more than half the population of the Soviet Union, and it is on them that the economic burden falls heaviest . . . “Besides,” she said, pausing, “I simply refuse to be limited. I would not tolerate it for a minute. I consider that my portfolio covers virtually everything that comes before the Politburo or party Secretariat. Not a single item passes with me keeping silent or without somebody asking, ‘Galina, what do you think about this?’

Semyonova, with a full calendar of meetings and speaking with increasing frequency on a variety of issues, is becoming one of the party’s most visible leaders, and her agenda is focused on women’s issues as not only an area of urgent need but as an approach to the country’s overall crisis.

“We are in the midst of a severe social crisis, and almost anywhere a social crisis, if we are to be frank, has a feminine face,” she said in an interview at Communist Party headquarters here. “Women bear the burden.”

It is women who do most of the shopping in the Soviet Union, who face the empty shelves and endless lines each day and who must then, somehow, feed their families.

It is women who are faced with the tasks of clothing their children, finding detergent for washing and organizing the gatherings of family and friends, but now without even the meager supplies that Soviet stores formerly carried.

And it is women who, as wives and mothers, are expected to uphold the nation’s moral and cultural values at a time of growing social discontent and deepening alienation .

“It is our plight as women,” Semyonova said, running through the laments of Soviet women today, “and we have no simple remedy. . . .

“We can talk in the high-flown terms of the international feminist movement, but we have very tough, very real problems that must be solved before we can speak of women’s liberation in a philosophic or a political way.”

The vast political and economic changes under way as a result of Gorbachev’s perestroika reform program appear likely to have a particular impact on women, according to Semyonova.

Proportionately more women will probably lose their jobs, according to recent economic forecasts here, and without a major retraining program, they will have more trouble finding new ones as the country’s employment structure changes with the development of a market economy and its emphasis on productivity.

Women will also suffer more as government benefits--pensions, medical care, student bursaries, welfare payments--are held down, or even cut, as the state attempts to reduce its huge deficit.

Many more women want to participate in politics, according to recent opinion surveys, in order to ensure that the government tackles the country’s problems as they see them. Now that deputies are chosen through direct, multi-candidate elections rather than “nominated” according to an informal quota system by the Communist Party, however, substantially fewer women--sometimes only 5% of the total--are being elected to the local, regional and national soviets--or governing councils.

“An important, a major task is to enable women to be at a level where they can make decisions,” Semyonova said.

“In our country, we are living through a time of real, concrete politics and real, concrete decisions. In the past, men formed the majority at the top in our state; in fact, they still do. Perhaps this was so because people had an abstract vision of the world and its problems. But times have changed, and this is a period of not abstract policy formulation but of concrete measures.

“Women are just the right people for this, I believe,” Semyonova continued. “They are very practical, they have to know how to make ends meet at home, they are economists by nature and their practical experience would be very useful now. We do not need women as a decoration on the facade while building democracy nor as ornaments in the masculine corridors of power.”

As a journalist for 31 years as well as holding a doctorate in philosophy, Semyonova has a broader background and more contacts with a greater range of people than many other Politburo members, most of whom are party leaders in the Soviet Union’s constituent republics or longtime party cadres.

For the past decade, she had edited the weekly magazine Krestyanka for rural women and had taken its circulation from 6 million to 22 million with more articles on fashions, family and culture and fewer on tractor driving, the care of cows and love of the party.

She joined the Politburo, once the ruling body of the Soviet Union, at a time when the party’s power has been significantly diminished.

“This is a time of crisis for the party, as it is for the country,” Semyonova said, “but the crisis must not paralyze us. The only way that we will emerge as a nation from all this is by struggling through it--there is no easy way--and the only way that we as the Communist Party will maintain and regain our strength and influence is by acting boldly, decisively and effectively.”

She also joined in a period when the privileges of the party hierarchy are being reduced. “Privileges? I have fewer than when I was a chief editor,” she said, laughing. “We don’t have special guards, we don’t have special stores, we don’t have long limousines. I have no special hairdresser, no personal tailor. At the magazine, I had a bigger office and exactly the same kind of car. The other day I saw a line for cabbage and immediately jumped in it and counted myself lucky to get some.”

Semyonova lives with her husband, a journalist on a business paper, and her 73-year-old mother in the same small apartment (two rooms, a kitchen, bath and large hallway) she had before. Her son, a biophysicist at a research institute, and 3 year-old grandson, live in the same building.

“My mother is the head of our family,” she said. “She’s our commander in chief and political commissar all at once. She’s the real housekeeper and a great consolation.”

The transition from journalism to politics has been natural but difficult, Semyonova continued.

“In my new position I have found that successes do not come as quickly as they do in journalism. Here, you see the problems, and they are so numerous and acute right now. And you work hard on them, 12 or even 15 hours a day. But then no results; certainly, none come quickly, and some problems we are probably years away from solving. This work is not at all like sending an edition to press.”

Still, Semyonova said, she retains a journalist’s tendency to “look at problems from a variety of viewpoints” and “work face to face with the people. This experience is solid and valuable, particularly when compared with the past practice of our politicians in dealing with problems rather remotely and from one point of view--theirs alone,” she said.

Like most leaders of the Gorbachev generation, Semyonova is highly critical of the political system in which she lived and worked most of her career but was unable to change until now.

“That system worked only for itself, developed only itself and in the end came only to exist for itself,” she said. “There was nothing for or about people in all this, and so we had politics without people. This is what brought us to perestroika, the restructuring of our political and economic system, of our whole society.

Over the past six months, Semyonova has tried to become the bridge between women and the country’s leadership, and she said she sees the start a dialogue between them.

She has used her Politburo authority to help form clubs for businesswomen, to broaden discussion in the press of women’s issues to include unemployment, retraining and advanced education, to work with cultural figures on strengthening spiritual and moral values after decades of increasing alienation and to nurture women leaders for the political contests that lie ahead.

She supported the women’s groups that have been protesting against the brutality directed at conscripts in the Soviet army and took the issue up with Gorbachev and Marshal Dmitri T. Yazov, the defense minister, helping to persuade them to meet with the women and then issue orders to protect the draftees from the incessant bullying and improve their living conditions.

“This is a matter of great pain,” Semyonova said. “It is one of the great sorrows of this country--for a mother to raise her son, entrust him to the Soviet army to serve the motherland and then get him back in a box, killed in peacetime by his own comrades. . . . This agony just gnaws at us.”

She is also arranging the publication of Soviet legislation on women and the family as a basic step to ensure their rights.

“All too often our women do not even suspect these laws and benefits exist,” she said. “Our leaders for far too long have felt that it is not their job to make women aware of the protection our laws have afforded them, and women should know.

“From the founding of our state, we have many very humane laws. Lenin personally signed many decisions and laws on the family, on marriage, the political rights of women, the liquidation of illiteracy among the female population. But these laws, in fact, were quite often counteracted by social-economic practice. The result was that women were not prepared to assume the leading role in society.”

This has been the Soviet Union’s loss, as it would be any society’s, Semyonova argues, because “women are able to make policy, as well as overall relations within society, more harmonious.

“This is now our main goal--to come to citizens with a shared point of view around which there will be a consensus,” she continued. “There are many sharply different points of view, often stridently expressed, in our society today, and they are tearing at us. I am absolutely sure that women’s participation in policy-formation will make it more humane and prevent it from becoming too aggressive.”