Awaiting Another Revolution

In a country where real women don’t drive and a milkmaid remains the ideal of the working female, Irina Khakamada and Galina Starovoitova are breaking the molds.

Influential women in politics can be counted on virtually one hand in Russia, where patriarchal tradition and resentment of Communist-era tokenism have combined to create a power structure that is almost exclusively male.

But a few vanguard feminists who have dared to push against the barricades insist that the outlook for equal opportunity is not as bleak as the current picture suggests and that concepts such as diversity are beginning to dawn on those reshaping this country.

“Politics is not a fair game, and gender is a great obstacle,” says Khakamada, a 41-year-old political party leader and member of parliament. “But Russia is doomed to success. It will definitely, eventually, start accepting the values of the civilized world if it wants to avoid isolation.”

Trailblazers such as Khakamada and fellow parliament member Starovoitova have learned to tune out the boos and hisses of their fellow citizens--both male and female--to stay focused on their objectives of bringing about a more just and representative system of government.

Once the economy stabilizes and more women are freed from the double workload of a full-time job and responsibility for the household, today’s pioneers say, tomorrow’s hierarchy will more accurately reflect the society it rules.

“The current price of participation is just too high,” says Starovoitova, 50, who attributes her divorce to her decision to enter politics eight years ago. “For most of us, it is still a choice between a career and a family, because men here still expect their wives to cook dinner for them, and the 20-hour days of a politician do not permit that.”

Just how far Russia has to turn around was clear with one young politician’s proposal in October for overcoming the problem of women who come home from work too exhausted to serve their men. Parliament member Sergei Semenov has introduced a bill to legalize polygamy.

Sexist traditions are largely blamed for holding back women from the current power structure, which shows a decidedly male face to the world.

Although Russia has embassies in 165 countries, not one of its ambassadors is a woman.

Closer to home, of the country’s 89 regions and territories, only one is governed by a woman--the Koryak Autonomous Area in the remote and desolate Kamchatka region, where lawyer Valentina Bronievich won election in mid-November.

The 450-seat Duma in which both Khakamada and Starovoitova serve includes 42 other women. But most are with Communist parties that continue to employ patronizing quotas in doling out powerless places on their electoral lists according to gender, type of labor and years of membership in party organizations. In the 189-member upper house of parliament, the Federation Council, there is one woman.

Two dozen ministries compose the government of Prime Minister Viktor S. Chernomyrdin, yet only one Cabinet post is held by a woman, Health Minister Tatyana Dmitrieva.

President Boris N. Yeltsin has done little better in making his administration reflective of the population. None of his top appointments have been women or minorities. His daughter, Tatyana Dyachenko, has been serving as an unofficial and unpaid liaison during his recent heart surgery and convalescence, but she holds no formal position.

Knee-Jerk Opposition

In fact, the cyclone of controversy stirred by the sudden visibility of Dyachenko has illuminated the knee-jerk opposition felt by many Russians toward women who dare to seek the political limelight.

Like the smart and stylish Raisa Gorbachev, who drew vitriolic attacks from countrymen for drawing notice along with her husband, Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev, on his trips abroad in the late 1980s, Dyachenko is resented for having the temerity to publicly acknowledge that she has connections.

The 36-year-old mother of two has done little more than help her father with his reelection campaign and make a goodwill trip to injured children in Rostov. Yet Dyachenko has displaced the likes of Khakamada and Starovoitova as the political woman Russians love to hate.

On the other hand, she is the only woman to appear in the latest ranking of the 100 most influential people in Russia--placing 19th.

Newspaper articles have cast her as Lady Macbeth, plotting and influencing from behind the leader. Yet in the double-edged sexism that afflicts Russia, most gossips insist that Dyachenko is the instrument rather than the architect of political scheming, putty in the hands of self-interested men trying to influence Yeltsin through her.

“People think a woman can’t do things on her own. That’s why she is always matched with someone” in the unsubstantiated reports of political collusion, says Maria Zolotukhina, an expert on gender issues at Moscow’s Institute for Ethnology and Anthropology. “No one wants to suggest she is smart enough or powerful enough to influence policy on her own.”

Some analysts insist that the anger directed at Dyachenko and Raisa Gorbachev has nothing to do with gender, even though the involvement of sons, brothers and other male relatives of previous leaders never raised eyebrows.

“These women are disliked not because they are women, but because they are prominent only because they are related to those in power,” says sociologist Mikhail Matskovsky, head of Moscow’s International Center for Human Values.

Having a husband or father in a position to provide favors is considered an unfair advantage, he explains, and public display of that relationship makes a woman look as if she considers herself queen bee.

Like the few other women who have muscled their way into the world of politics here, Khakamada sees the reaction to Dyachenko’s involvement in the president’s political work as a reflection of a general distrust of women in the power structure.

“We have very traditional attitudes toward women in Russia, so when one appears in an untraditional venue, like politics, the immediate reaction is one of rejection,” Khakamada says.

Minorities Affected

Minorities in Russia face even more daunting obstacles to equal opportunity--especially those from the southern Caucasus region, where wars and unrest have sapped the country’s army and dented national pride.

“The constitution may guarantee equality of all Russia’s peoples, but in practice it is only the Russian culture and nationality represented in the government, the power structure and in the media,” says Mara Ustinova, a sociologist of Latvian origin who heads an Academy of Sciences committee aimed at deterring further outbreaks of ethnic conflict. “It is an especially dangerous time for minorities now because of the difficult economic conditions brought on by transition. People are looking for someone to blame, and minorities are always convenient scapegoats.”

The case of Boris Berezovsky, Yeltsin’s new deputy Security Council chief, is even more blatant testimony to Russian prejudice than the widespread criticism of Dyachenko. The wealthy media magnate is reputed to have ties to the underworld and numerous other skeletons in his political closet, but Russians were far more riled that he is Jewish.

Reports that he held dual Russian-Israeli citizenship spurred a slander case from Berezovsky and a request to the Israeli government from the parliament here for verification that he held no other passport.

Khakamada, who as the daughter of a Russian mother and Japanese father says she has experienced persistent low-grade discrimination throughout her life, blames this country’s immature media for fostering stereotypes and spreading rumors.

She sees the fuss stirred up around Berezovsky as a legacy of the anti-Semitism spread among Russians in the paranoid later years of dictator Josef Stalin.

As discouraging as the current state of affairs may be for Russia’s few champions of diversity, empowerment of women and political correctness--concepts so alien here that they have no Russian translation--those who are breaking the stereotypes are among the most optimistic about the future.

“Strong women like Khakamada and Starovoitova may have very small circles of supporters, but they have carved out niches for themselves in the political world and they will serve as role models for younger women,” says Valentina Matviyenko, a career diplomat, wife and mother, and the only woman on the Russian government’s Foreign Affairs Council.

Russia’s recent record on diversity “is not a pretty picture,” concedes Matviyenko, noting that only about 200 of the Foreign Ministry’s more than 10,000 employees are women with diplomatic status. But she notes that priority is now being given to placing women and minorities at the prestigious Moscow State Institute of International Relations that prepares young Russians for careers in the diplomatic service.

Too Tired to Care

One impediment to speedier resolution of current imbalances is the ambivalence many women feel about broadening their horizons.

“Many women say they are just too tired to care about these issues. They have spent so much time taking care of their families and working and waiting in lines and worrying about prices that what they really want now is to stay home and read books,” says Zolotukhina, the gender-issues analyst. “For women in their 40s and 50s and 60s, the concept of equal work opportunities is not that attractive.”

That indifference to justice in the labor field is blamed on the Communist era, when an artificial picture of national harmony and sexual equality convinced women that to be free to work meant to be exploited.

The Soviet Constitution guaranteed work to all citizens, yet the patriarchal society that existed before the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution ensured that all domestic and family chores remained the exclusive domain of women.

“Women were never asked if they wanted these rights” to work outside the home and serve as token representatives on governing bodies of the Soviet system, Zolotukhina says. “They were just imposed by the system.”

The Supreme Soviet that rubber-stamped party decisions during the Soviet era always included about 15% to 20% women, but they and the pseudo-parliament in general were powerless to change the policies that ruled their lives.

But many women, especially older Russians, have begun waxing nostalgic for the minimal guarantees the Communist system provided. Day care was free, if crude. Every citizen had the right to medical care, even if a network of bribes and favor-trading was necessary to see a doctor or obtain a prescription. Life was hard, with two jobs necessary, one at home and one at the factory, but subsistence pensions were paid to women as soon as they reached 55.

Today, factory kindergartens have closed as enterprises try to survive the loss of state subsidies and medical care, and pension benefits are little more than symbolic.

“There’s now a strong polarization of women in our society,” sociologist Matskovsky says. “Some are showing up as shuttle traders or opening new businesses and doing quite well for themselves, while others have lost this guaranteed social minimum and cannot even maintain good nutrition.”

That stratification is most apparent in traditionally male-dominated arenas such as politics and business, where a few brave women have broken down barriers and made names for themselves as movers and shakers while discrimination and distorted wage scales remain the norm for most working women. Poorly compensated jobs, like those of teachers, secretaries, doctors and street sweepers, are almost exclusively filled by women.

With the collapse of state-financed day care and an astronomically more expensive health care system, opportunities for many blue-collar working women are even bleaker than during the Communist era.

Under such circumstances, concedes Health Minister Dmitrieva, diversity “is definitely not a priority for Russians,” even though most would agree society would benefit from a more representative power structure.

“Protection of the family and peace and stability are part of women’s psychological makeup, and that is why it is important that women occupy important positions in the leadership of the country,” says Dmitrieva, who sees her appointment to the Cabinet three months ago as a kind of trial balloon that could influence opportunities for women in the future.

Old Stereotypes

Other prominent women say they can ease the path to power for others only through example, not just in the workplace but also in all other aspects of Russian life.

“Look at the way men react when they see a woman driving,” says Ustinova, the ethnic-relations analyst. “A man can be driving like a complete idiot and no one will take notice, but if a woman is on the road, she is immediately suspect.”

Licensing authorities claim they have no breakdown of drivers by gender, but even in this bustling capital no more than 5% of drivers are women, many of them foreigners, and in the provinces the figure is thought to be well below 1%.

But here too the barriers may be falling. One Moscow licensing official, Mikhail Zubarev, says women make up about half of those enrolled in driving courses in his district of the capital.

“I love to drive, but this is about the only sphere of life where I feel overt discrimination,” Ustinova says. “I’ll know that Russia has made some progress toward becoming a democracy when men stop regarding me as some granny behind the wheel.”