Mothers and Soldiers

Gender, Citizenship, and Civil Society in Contemporary Russia

Amy Caiazza

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781136769931
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

As the Soviet communist regime gave way to democracy, the emergence of an entirely new political and social landscape had the potential to turn Russian society upside down. In Mothers and Soldiers: Organizing Men andWomen in 1990s Russia, Amy Caiazza looks at the effects of this seismic change on gender roles, and specifically the role of women in a newly democratic Russia. By observing through a gendered lens institutions like the military, and the process of making public policy, Caiazza finds that despite the institutional disruption, the pattern of gender role ideologies maintained continuity from the former times while at the same time embracing aspects of Western feminism.

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Introduction

Women, Men, and Policymaking in 1990s Russia

The 1990s were a time of rapid change and brimming promise in Russia. In June 1990, the Russian Parliament, chaired by Boris Yeltsin, declared its sovereignty from the central Soviet state. Throughout the summer and fall, the Supreme Soviet of the USSR and the Russian Congress of People's Deputies argued over the future of economic reform and Soviet-Russian federalism. On October 31, the Russian Parliament appropriated natural resources and state property within its borders. Mikhail Gorbachev, leader of the USSR, demanded more power, while Yeltsin gathered popular support. Thus began a chain of events leading to the breakup of the Soviet Union and the establishment of the Russian Federation.

With these events, Russia embarked on one of the more challenging processes that any country faces: reconstituting itself. Russia needed to build new political institutions and choose new leaders. It needed to unify or deal with the particular demands of the dozens of nationalities within its borders, from the dominant ethnic Russians to smaller groups such as the Ingush, the Dagestanis, and the Chechens. After years of centralized authoritarian rule, its citizens demanded new political parties and competitive elections. Russia also needed to build a new system of citizen involvement in interest groups and other civic organizations—it needed to build civil society. Through all these changes, Russians hoped to create a more healthy and responsive relationship with their state and with other citizens.

In doing so, Russians raised an interesting set of questions: What is the role of modern citizens? What rights do they have, and what obligations must they fulfill in return? To what extent should citizens be able to choose the obligations they feel are just, and to what extent does living in a polity determine political obligation for them? Do all citizens have the same rights and obligations, or do they vary by race, class, and gender?

In most settings, these questions are not asked or answered explicitly. Even in Russia, many of them were discussed only implicitly in debates about the structure of political institutions or policies affecting citizens' rights and responsibilities. Nonetheless, ideas about the nature of rights and obligations—that is, the terms of citizenship—were central to the arguments presented and decisions made in many political debates. Ideas about citizenship were very much up in the air.

This book examines the importance of ideas about citizenship within the Russian policymaking process of the 1990s. In particular, it assesses the influence of ideologies of gender and citizenship on the opportunities available to interest groups. Were men and women expected to fulfill the same sets of civic obligations? How did ideas about male and female civic obligation influence the avenues and opportunities that men's and women's groups could exploit? The book answers these questions within the context of Russia's evolving institutions and transition from communism through case studies of four Russian organizations seeking to influence policy relevant to men's and women's civic rights and obligations.

During the 1990s, the Russian Federation was explicitly embroiled in an argument about young men's obligation to serve in the military. Because of its internal war with Chechnya, the government was drafting an increasing number of young men into active military service. Many draftees, however, refused to serve, instead evading the draft. Their resistance stemmed from both particularly harsh conditions in the military and wavering support for the war.

The growing crisis led Russia into a debate about the fundamental rights and obligations of its citizens, and especially of its young men. Do young Russian men have a duty to serve in the military when called? Is that obligation absolute, or does it depend on the circumstances of their service? Representing one side of the debate, Anatolii Novikov, chief of staff of the Defense Committee of the Duma (the lower house of Parliament), argued that all young men bore the obligation to serve—to kill and die for their country—when their state deemed it necessary. Novikov argued,

Why should one person bear the burden of protecting society, while another, because of his personal feelings, does not? It's not right. The second person is obligated to give back to the state as well, because the state protects his living space. Just like the first person, the other one, too, owes a debt to society.¹

In contrast, long-time human rights activist and Soviet dissident Liudmilla Alekseeva opposed the mandatory draft as counterproductive to building democracy, especially when military service involves traditions of harsh treatment and subordination:

As long as the army exists as a school of slavery, we will not become a democratic country. Because, after all, for civil society to develop, we need to develop a sense of civic consciousness, not slave consciousness. If all our young men [become slaves], if they are infected with a slave mentality, can we ever become a democratic country?²

Into this debate stepped an organization that would become one of the most prominent and effective interest groups in Russia: the Committee of Soldiers' Mothers (Komitet Soldatskikh Materei, or CSM). This organization opposed the mandatory draft among young men, especially in the terrible conditions plaguing the Russian military. To make that point, it took swift and effective action. CSM organized mothers from throughout the country. These women bombarded their elected officials with protests against the draft. CSM also educated them about the legal loopholes allowing exemptions from the draft, so that they could advocate for their sons to avoid service. In its most visible action, the group led large groups of typical Russian, middle-aged women on forays to military bases and to the front in Chechnya, to steal their sons away from service.

In all this, CSM maintained not only that young men should be able to choose whether to serve as soldiers, but that as mothers, women had their own kind of political obligation: to advocate for their children. As spokesperson Valentina Mel'nikova stated, "The reckless, biological impulse to protect our children should remain a part of [women] ... we have biological laws obligating us to act when they are in danger."³ Moreover, CSM argued that as mothers, as women who had given birth to and raised children, the state had an obligation to listen to their concerns.

At the same time that Russians were grappling with the dilemmas of military service, another important debate about citizens' rights and obligations was developing in other, very different circles. This time, the debate concerned women's rights to political and economic equality. During the early 1990s, Russian women were hit hard by the economic and social hardships exacted by the country's transition from communism. Prices rose, wages fell, and women quickly made up a majority of the unemployed. With the loss of Soviet-era quotas in government, their representation in elected office plummeted.

Responding to these developments, a new political party, Women of Russia (Zhenshchiny Rossii, or WR), emerged in 1993. WR was formed to increase women's representation in political decision making and to protect the political interests of women, which the party's leaders defined largely in relation to their roles as mothers and wives. WR also claimed to bring a new voice to politics by encouraging a more "feminine" kind of political discussion. It argued that women had an obligation to bring their uniquely feminine traits to the political process. As WR's electoral platform noted, "Women can and should qualitatively change politics, to make them moral, addressed to the vital interests of each and every person, respectful of the dignity of the individual and of the right to free choice of a way of life."⁴

WR's rise coincided with the development of another type of women's organization, focused less on electoral politics and more on mobilizing women and changing attitudes toward women's place in society. One of these groups was the Moscow Center for Gender Studies (Moskovskii Tsentr Gendernykh Issledovanii, or MCGS). Like WR, MCGS was formed to promote women's rights and destroy remaining obstacles to equality. Its leaders, however, did not stress women's political activism for its so-called feminine benefits to Russian society and politics, but simply to hold Russia's leaders accountable for protecting women's rights and interests. MCGS's leaders defined women's rights and interests as equal access to the rights and resources available to men. MCGS saw women's political involvement as an attempt to claim their unfulfilled rights, not a duty to fulfill their unique political roles. The Center's central claim was summed up in a statement from the platform of a convention of women's groups it helped convene: "Democracy without women is not democracy."⁵

Male and Female Civic Right and Obligation: Military Service and Motherhood

Russian discussions about military service policy and women's rights in the 1990s were in many ways very different, but they had a few things in common. Ultimately, both addressed questions of civic and political obligation. Do men have an obligation to protect their country in the military? Do women have an obligation to bring morality to politics? Do mothers have an obligation to advocate for their children? Fundamentally, these questions get at one of the core issues of democracy: What do citizens owe their state and their society? They also suggest that ideas about gender are important to ideas about civic obligation: men and women have different civic obligations that each are expected to fulfill.

The idea of citizenship is central to understanding the role of citizens in their political systems, the rights they can claim, and the obligations they are expected to fulfill. As Judith Shklar points out, most societies develop and reproduce a standard of "good citizenship" for their residents. According to Shklar, "Good citizens fulfill the demands of their polity.... They support the public good as it is defined by their constitution and its fundamental ethos."⁶ Citizens are expected to live up to certain standards of political behavior to fulfill their end of a social contract with other citizens and their state.

What it takes to be a good citizen, though, depends on who you are. In many contexts, gender ideologies influence ideas about civic obligation.⁷ In the Soviet Union, motherhood was glorified as women's unique obligation to society. Women were supposed to bear and raise a new generation of Soviet citizens who would help build a communist society. To encourage them to do so, the Soviet government granted mothers of many children awards and gave all mothers stipends. Women were still expected to work, primarily because their labor was necessary to the economy. To balance the demands of work and family, the Soviets provided women with paid maternity leave, stipends for children, and other benefits.

In contrast, for Soviet men, one of the most prominent obligations was military service. Throughout the history of the Soviet Union, men were required to serve in the military. The Soviet state originally saw service as necessary to the development of communism, because a large army could spread class warfare throughout the world.⁸ The army eventually became a school for patriotism, civic and moral virtue, and courage. In 1990s Russia, military service remained a requirement. The draft allowed Russia to fight an intermittent civil war with a secessionist group, the Chechens.

As a form of civic obligation, military service requires men to protect their polity from external or internal threat, and it can involve killing and/or dying for one's country—the ultimate sacrifice. In most countries, male citizens agree as part and parcel of their citizenship to become soldiers when drafted. Because they enjoy the rights and protections of the polity, they must help maintain it.⁹ Only a few male citizens—those who can prove they are morally opposed to war—can legally avoid it.

In Russia, motherhood and military service represented the pinnacle of what female and male citizens were expected to contribute to society. For women, it was a new generation of young citizens. For men, it was national security. By examining policy and policymaking in these two areas, this book assesses the importance of ideas about gender and civic obligation to the Russian policymaking process.

Civic Obligation in the Policymaking Process

Male and female versions of civic obligation can influence the policymaking process in several ways. First, they shape the policies affecting men's and women's lives. Throughout the world, countries have established policies that either make male and female civic obligation difficult to avoid (through, for example, draft policies or anticontraceptive policies) or encourage it through a system of incentives (for example, financial benefits for military service or motherhood). Russian and Soviet policies historically reflected an expectation that women would serve the state as mothers and men would serve as soldiers, and they continue to do so today.

Male and female civic obligations are also evident in the dynamics of the policymaking process. They are apparent in how groups present themselves and frame the policies they promote. Groups often explicitly challenge or reinforce notions of male and female citizenship in their public images, in the strategies they choose, and in the policies they advance. As chapter 4 will discuss, for example, WR relied on ideas about female civic obligation in its arguments that women should participate in the political process in part to bring their supposedly feminine qualities of consensus building and moral rectitude to it. Once in power, it also chose a compromise-based strategy for its legislating, claiming that this was central to women's politics.

Notions of civic obligation also shape the strategic options open to groups, and how well groups conform to or exploit those opportunities can be crucial to their success. For example, groups of Russian men who challenged male military service defied commonly accepted notions of men's political roles. In part because those notions are deeply imbedded in Russian ideas about male civic obligation, these groups were not very successful at mobilizing young men to defy their service— even though many men individually opposed it. In contrast, CSM was able to mobilize women by casting mothers' maternal roles as civic roles. CSM chose political strategies that emphasized women's maternal obligation to their children—such as leading a group of mothers to Chechnya to negotiate their sons' release from prisoner-of-war camps—and, as a result, the organization also won popular support.

To examine and analyze the importance of ideas about male and female civic obligation in the Russian policymaking process, this book focuses on the activities of several groups deeply involved in debates over policy concerning men and women's respective civic roles in Russia during the 1990s. The first set of organizations was directly involved in advancing women's equality and women's rights, including their rights as mothers...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Note on Transliteration
• Series Editor Preface
• Chapter 1: Introduction: Women, Men, and Policymaking in 1990s Russia
• Chapter 2: The Russian Institutional Opportunity Structure
• Gender Ideologies and Motherhood Policy
• Gender Ideologies and Military Service Policy
• Appendix: Standard Interview Questions
• Bibliography
• Index