No More Heroines?

Russia, Women and the Market

Sue Bridger, Rebecca Kay, Kathryn Pinnick

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• eBook ISBN: 9781134803286
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

With the collapse of Soviet rule and the emergence of independent Russia, the image of Russian women in the Western imagination has changed dramatically. The robust tractor drivers and athletes have been replaced by glamorous but vulnerable beauty queens or the dishevelled and downcast women trading goods on the streets.
The authors of this work take a closer look at what lies behind the above images and how Russian women are coping with a very different sort of life. The main focus is on the effect of unemployment on Russian women and how they are coping with it.
Based on case studies and personal interviews carried out in the Moscow region in 1993-94, No More Heroines? will provide both specialist and non-specialist alike with access to the thinking of women and their organisations in Russia today.

Part I

THE IMPACT OF CHANGE

1

THE LEGACY OF PERESTROIKA

In the mid-1980s the period of change ushered in by Mikhail Gorbachev's accession to power gave rise to an unprecedented upsurge of interest in the West in events in the USSR. As terms such as glasnost and perestroika became common currency in the English language, a wave of international optimism greeted the dawning of a new era in East—West relations. The former ‘evil empire’ was setting free its political prisoners, ending censorship and facing up to its Stalinist past. Alongside greater political freedom at home, the period heralded dramatic changes in foreign policy which brought the troops home from Afghanistan and ultimately redrew the map of Europe. The Soviet Union's new generation of leaders were fêted in world capitals, Gorbachev himself receiving the Nobel Prize for Peace even as the forces he had unleashed were spiralling out of control and bringing about the collapse of both communism and the empire it had created.

In the midst of the radical reforms which characterised the final years of Soviet power, government policies on issues of concern to women frequently appeared curiously conservative. While previous administrations, most notably that of Leonid Brezhnev, were being heavily criticised and characterised as a time of ‘stagnation’, Brezhnev-period policies on women and the family were not merely condoned but effectively extended. On the issue of sexual equality, perhaps more than any other, the Gorbachev administration embraced a different perspective from that of other advanced industrial countries and from the thinking of its many admirers in the West. Its approach to the issues of women's employment and domestic responsibilities was in part a legacy of the past and in part a preparation for the future. Soviet women were to find themselves squeezed between these twin constraints in a way which continues to be all too visible in the market-oriented Russia of today.

WOMEN AND EMPLOYMENT

The mass involvement of women in waged work outside the home was a central plank in Marxist—Leninist ideology on the emancipation of women. With the introduction of a planned programme of rapid industrialisation from the late 1920s and the enormous loss of male lives in the Second World War, women were drawn into Soviet enterprises in their millions. As late as the 1970s, the sex imbalance in the Soviet population was reflected in the fact that women formed over half the workforce, with around 90 per cent of working-age women in either full-time employment or education. The concept of the ‘career break’ was effectively unknown in the USSR as women on average were out of full-time employment for only 3.6 years to have their families (Kotliar and Turchaninova 1975: 106–7). By 1989, women still made up no less than 48 per cent of the Soviet workforce (Vestnik statistiki 1991:39). Until the advent of glasnost, this high level of participation of women in the workforce was almost invariably presented as an indicator of emancipation, one of the prime achievements of the Soviet brand of socialism. As the Brezhnev years progressed, however, the statistics presented became ever more selective. While the numbers of women with higher degrees or employment in science and education were published as indicators of social progress, statistics on the armies of women manual workers became notoriously elusive.

Once the policy of glasnost had been instituted as the motor of economic and political reform, however, this situation was to change dramatically. From a position of state-enforced silence on the less palatable realities of women's working lives, the Soviet media moved rapidly and radically into a wholesale investigation of working conditions, health and safety provisions and discrimination against women at work. The signal for the relaxation of censorship on discussion of female employment came in July 1987 at the National Women's Conference in Moscow when the outgoing chair of the Soviet Women's Committee, former cosmonaut Valentina Tereshkova, spoke critically and at length on the subject. For the head of what had previously been one of the most docile Soviet institutions to break so abruptly with virtually all her past pronouncements on the position of women was the clearest possible signal of the Communist Party's policy shift (‘Vsesoiuznaia konferentsiia zhenshchin…’ 1987:3). For the next two years press and television presented regular features on the nature of women's work and canvassed women's responses through studio discussions and letters to the editor.

What emerged from all of this, as with so many social issues explored through glasnost, was a picture of almost unmitigated gloom. On questions of low pay, night shifts, heavy and dangerous conditions or overt and systematic discrimination in promotion, the reality made a mockery of the much-vaunted emancipation of the Soviet woman worker. Inevitably, the investigation of women's working conditions led very rapidly into a discussion of how these multiple problems might be solved. Yet, as we shall see in the next section, given the Soviet record on sex equality, the social policies pursued by previous administrations and the economic agenda of perestroika itself, the solutions put forward would not necessarily be in women's best interests.

In launching the discussion of the issue of working conditions, Valentina Tereshkova quoted the latest national figures showing women's wide-spread involvement in heavy physical work in a range of industries. Subsequent press articles and readers' letters in response put flesh on the statistical bones. In textile factories and timber mills, on building sites and on the railways women were to be found lifting weights well in excess of the limits laid down by legislation. If the law allowed women to lift no more than a 10 kilo weight and a total of 7 tonnes per shift, women construction workers could be lifting 30 tonnes a shift, while dairy women and even shop assistants might be required to handle sacks weighing over 50 kilos (Redkollegiia zhurnala Rabotnitsa 1989:11). Moreover, this excessive lifting might well take place in difficult climatic conditions:

The work women do on the railways is exceptionally heavy. It's physical work and practically all done by hand. It's not every man who could cope with it. Our women have to work in the open air, in the heat and the cold, in rain and mud. They get paid the same as men and are on the same grades and they're expected to do the same work. We've got complete ‘equality’ here.

(Baryshev 1988:17)

As this example suggests, other factors came into play making women's work difficult. In textile factories, in particular, surveys had found women working in uncomfortable postures for as much as 80 per cent of their working day. In addition, high humidity and noise levels affected their health. As one journalist observed, ‘The first time you come to Ivanovo it strikes you even in the tram from the station that you have to talk more loudly here than you would normally’ (Telen 1988:2). For women in the textile industry all this was crowned by compulsory night work. Here again, reality ran counter to legislation. Women, by law, could not be compelled to work night shifts except as a ‘temporary measure’, yet, in practice, almost four million women worked nights and the number was expected to rise. Considerably more women than men were working nights not only in the highly feminised textile industry but also in chemicals and in other light industries. For women who continued to bear the brunt of housework and child care, night shifts resulted in extreme fatigue, for, as one textile worker put it, ‘you don't get to sleep enough during the day because you've got to do your shift at the cooker and the washing machine’ (Telen 1988:2). In other industries, where women were not subject to conditions such as these, complaints came in about continual compulsory and, again, illegal overtime (Cherepakhova 1987:15–17).

Night shifts and work in hazardous conditions remained, however, one way in which women could compensate for a further disadvantage they suffered, namely that of low pay. Women's wages, as women themselves were well aware, were consistently lower than those of men, around 70 per cent of male earnings, reflecting both their lower skill gradings and their concentration in sectors of the economy which had become relatively low-paid. Average wages in trade and catering, for example, where 83 per cent of the workforce was female, stood at only 64 per cent of average earnings in the construction industry, where 72 per cent of employees were male (Zhenshchina i deti 1985: 51; Narodnoe khoziaistvo v SSSR…1985: 417–18). Employees in the highly feminised spheres of health, culture and education received between 53 and 78 per cent of average industrial earnings, while, within industry itself, the general rule was the greater the proportion of women workers, the lower the average rates of pay (Narodnoe khoziaistvo v SSSR…1989:77–8; Klopov et al. 1987:30). In every branch of industry women's average skill grades were lower than those of men and, although women's gradings had been steadily rising since 1970, men's gradings had risen more sharply still, increasing the discrepancy between the sexes (Klopov et al. 1987:59).

If much of this information was available prior to the advent of glasnost, what was new was both its extensive discussion in the mass media and the course that the discussion was to take. In the past, low skill grades and low pay were habitually presented as the effect of women's involvement in housework and child care. While women's energies were taken up in the domestic sphere, spending more than double the time spent by men on unpaid domestic work and leaving employment, however briefly, to have children, men's skill grades continued to rise with age and experience. In practice, women experienced great difficulty raising their grading once they had had children, and the more children they had, the further they lagged behind (Khotkina 1987:60; Lukina and Nekhoroshkov 1982: 125–6). Moreover, the need to find adequate child care and to fit in with domestic routines often led women to look for work nearer home or offering better facilities, irrespective of whether it corresponded to their levels of education and skill. While these factors undeniably continued to exert a significant influence on women's gradings and, hence, wage levels, a further, previously unacknowledged factor now entered the discussion. Readers writing in from all over the USSR to the major Soviet women's magazines offered a catalogue of blatantly discriminatory behaviour by management in allocating skill grades. Where women and men had the same level of skills, only the men would be placed on a higher grading. After additional training, some women complained that they still failed to receive the appropriate grade, while the men they had trained with were automatically promoted. Others described being continually subordinate to men, despite their skills and experience:

I'm a refrigeration plant operator in a dairy produce factory…. Two of us work together per shift—a senior operator (grade 5) and a junior operator (grade 4). My workmate (the senior operator) has usually gone harvesting for the whole summer. During that time I've acted as senior operator and been paid on grade 5…. But whenever he came back they put me back on grade 4. My workmate recently retired and who do you think was appointed senior operator? The young man who had been my assistant in the summer and had only just been put on grade 4…. That's sexual equality for you! What's more, in May I'd once more passed the test on knowledge of the plant. I passed with distinction and put in for a higher grade, but all in vain! It looks like there's a grade 5 for men but there isn't one for women, doesn't it?

(‘Prodolzhaem operatsiiu “Stupeni masterstva”’ 1987:20)

Zoia Pukhova, replacing Tereshkova as head of the Soviet Women's Committee, noted that, far from being atypical, these complaints reflected a well-established practice ‘whereby managements keep down the wage bill’ (Gavriushenko 1988:21). Nevertheless, the fact that such actions could now be roundly condemned as the discrimination they undoubtedly were, in the short term brought women no closer to a solution.

Given the sheer scale of the problems thrown up by this exploration of women's working lives, the question of whether genuine improvements could have been quickly made appears highly problematical. In the light of the political and economic priorities of the time it seems doubtful whether they were ever on the agenda. Nevertheless, there were calls by journalists writing in both women's magazines and national newspapers to tackle what they regarded as the exploitation of women in the workplace.

Describing the extremely arduous and primitive conditions endured by so many women in Soviet factories and farms inevitably raised the question of what could be done. For some, the answer lay in increased and improved mechanisation, the effective enforcement of the USSR's extensive health and safety legislation and a more aggressive role for what they saw as the country's supine trade unions.

The question of automation remained, however, a very tricky one not only for factory managements and industrial ministries but also for women workers themselves. As long as there appeared to be sufficient numbers of women prepared to work in poor conditions the economic rationale for not mechanising production tasks could appear overwhelming. Because of wage discrimination, women represented a cheap and relatively docile labour force, readily accepting the status quo in return for wage levels and benefits they could not otherwise attain. Locked into economic dependence on the extra payments for heavy and dangerous work or for night shifts, women have often resisted mechanisation, both in industry and in branches of agriculture such as dairying, or been strongly opposed to redeployment onto lighter work (Zybtsev 1987:110; Khotkina 1987:69). When these factors were added to the massive cost of investment in new plant and machinery, the continual postponement of modernisation appeared virtually inevitable.

If mechanisation was problematical, transforming the role of the courts and the trade unions within the confines of the one-party state was an impossible goal, as subsequent events were to demonstrate. With the growing debate from 1987 on how the USSR might become a ‘law-governed state’, lawyers were frequently quoted in the press bemoaning the levels of legal illiteracy of the population at large. Yet a far more fundamental problem remained the difficulty of obtaining redress through the courts even where there was a case to answer. Derisory levels of fines and compensation in cases involving labour legislation together with political interference in the legal process led many workers to regard media publicity and press intervention as more fruitful avenues to explore. As journalists on national newspapers and magazines began to question why their role in this area remained so crucial, the issue of the function of trade unions in Soviet society was raised for the first time in decades.

In the former USSR, trade unions had a dual function of both defending workers and helping to ensure enterprises met their production targets. In practice, the latter function came to take precedence over the former and the trade unions' involvement in employee welfare was largely reduced to the allocation of benefits. With a more frank appraisal of working conditions the common perspective of management and trade union committees began, albeit cautiously at first, to be challenged. ‘For decades, trade union organisers have in practice given unconditional support to management. They have viewed everything, including disputes with ordinary workers, through management's eyes’, noted one journalist condemning the treatment of women workers, after carefully citing Gorbachev himself in her defence (Ronina 1987:11).

Perhaps predictably, the heart of the official trade union structure, the AUCCTU (All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions), chose to counter developing criticism of its role by blaming ‘the shortcomings of the local trade unions’. As the head of the AUCCTU's department for women's employment protection went on, ‘The law provides every possibility for organising proper working conditions. They only have to make use of it’ (Korina 1987:18). Yet, as this speaker would have known only too well, neither the trade unions' habitual support of management, nor the ineffectiveness of the courts in civil matters arose because officials did not try hard enough. Both resulted from policy decisions made by the Communist Party in its assertion of control over Soviet society and its promotion of rapid industrialisation. The cautiousness with which journalists and social scientists initially tackled these issues in print reflected their appreciation that calling for improvements in women's working conditions might imply a major potential threat to the political status quo. By the end of the 1980s, when the miners at least had begun developing workers' organisations of their own, commentators could afford to be far more contemptuous of the official trade unions' efforts. Bitterly criticising the AUCCTU for its failure to take effective action over dairy women's working conditions, for example, the journalist, Nikolai Tere...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Series editors' preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: No more heroines?
• Part I The impact of change
• Part II Responding to change
• In conclusion: Transition's victims or heroines of survival?
• Appendix: Background to the case-studies
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index