Democratization and Gender in Contemporary Russia

Suvi Salmenniemi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9781134069057
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Democracy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book examines civic activism, democratization and gender in contemporary Russian society.

It describes the character and central organizing principles of Russian democratic civic life, considering how it has developed since the Soviet period, and analyzing the goals and identities of important civic groups - including trade unions - and the meanings they have acquired in the context of wider Russian society. In particular, Suvi Salmenniemi investigates the gender dimensions, both masculine and feminine, of socio-political participation in Russia, considering what kinds of gendered meanings are given to civic organizations and formal politics, and how femininity and masculinity are represented in this context. Exploring the role of state institutions in the development of democratic civic life, the volume shows how, under the increasingly authoritarian Putin regime and its policy of 'managed democracy', independent civic activism is both thriving yet at the same constrained. Based on extensive fieldwork research, it provides much needed information on how Russians themselves view these developments, both from the perspective of civic activists and the local authorities.

1 Introduction

I travelled for the first time to the Soviet Union, to the Yalta holiday resort, in the 1980s when I was a ten-year-old schoolgirl. The incident that I still remember most vividly from this holiday is how a local woman relentlessly persuaded my mother to sell her new, beautiful sun dress. After several days of ‘negotiations’ my mother gave in and sold the dress to the woman. I remember having been confused why anyone would want to buy a used dress—why did she not just go to a shop and buy a new one? During the 1980s my contacts with the Soviet Union continued as I got a pen friend, Sergei, from my school’s ‘twin-school’ in the city of Vyborg. Sergei used to send me cassettes on which he had recorded albums of the famous Soviet rock band ‘Kino’. The cassettes were always accompanied by an exercise book, in which Sergei had written the lyrics both in Russian and English in beautiful handwriting. These exercise books were my first guide to the Russian language. Later I visited Sergei and his family several times and learned much about Soviet everyday and family life.

I believe these personal experiences of the Soviet Union have played an important role in my scholarly interests. My experiences always seemed to fit uneasily with the Cold War-era hegemonic narratives about Soviet society. Holidays and friendship opened up to me a glimpse of the ‘other’ Soviet life that was not recognized or discussed in the official discourse either in the Soviet Union or in Finland. My interest in the stories and practices residing outside or in the margins of the official sphere has guided the research for this study, too. Media discourses on post-Soviet Russia have often focused on the centers of power: Putin, the Kremlin, and Moscow. By contrast, this study explores the ‘other’ Russia outside the echelons of central power and high politics. It examines the logics of civic activity and citizenship and their gendered dimensions at the grassroots level, in the Russian province. It is based on extensive fieldwork conducted in the city of Tver′ in the vicinity of Moscow. The empirical data includes interviews, participant observation and a quantitative survey.

In 2001 when research for this book began, Russian civic activity still appeared to be developing in a promising way. Organizations were springing up, Western and Russian groups were forging collaborative networks and projects, civil society and democracy were being discussed in a lively and, for the most part, optimistic tone, despite many problems and shortcomings. Western donor agencies regarded the development of independent civic activity as a central element of democracy and distributed a considerable amount of resources to the emerging non-governmental organization (NGO) sector, thus giving a vital impulse to civic activities. Civic groups and the state were taking their first steps on the path of co-operation and were beginning to develop mechanisms of partnership. Despite some problematic tendencies, the civic activists I interviewed in Tver′ in 2001 regarded their future prospects in a predominantly optimistic way.

As I write this Introduction in 2007, the state of Russian civic activity seems very different. The law on civic associations was amended in a significant way in 2006, despite numerous protests and concerns presented by Russian and Western commentators. It tightens up conditions for registration of civic organizations and obliges organizations to report to the authorities in more detail about their activities and funding. It also impedes co-operation with foreign donors and Russian organizations. Foreign support to Russian civic groups has fallen considerably, leaving many groups without any resources to continue their activities.

Civic activity seems to be in a tighter corner than at any time since the collapse of the Soviet Union. When I talked with activists in Tver′ in 2004–5, the mood was disappointed and disillusioned. The cautious optimism that the activists had shared in 2001 seemed to have almost withered away. One activist stated that “Just a bit more and we’ll turn into a dissident organization”. Another activist compared the work of her organization to “growing flowers in the frost”. This metaphor aptly illustrates the current state of civic activism in Russia and also envisions a position of resistance. The environment is not conducive to civic activity, though its roots are struggling to survive in the harsh climate.

This study traces the shifting interpretations and practices of civic activity during the era of President Vladimir Putin’s ‘managed democracy’. It documents and highlights a historically significant era in the Russian democratization process: the thriving of independent civic activity and the increased state control and pressure towards it. The study sets itself four main research tasks. First, it maps the general logics, practices and structures of civic activity in Tver′. Second, it examines how socio-political agency and citizenship are gendered: how femininity, masculinity and their interrelationships are represented in the context of socio-political activity, and how women and men participate in formal politics and civic organizations. As such, this study engages in a discussion of the gendered dimensions of Russian transformation at large: how gender has articulated the division of labor, power and space in post-Soviet Russia.

Third, this study explores collective identity formation in two different types of civic organizations in Tver′: the Center for Women’s History and Gender Studies (CGS), a feminist grassroots group that was founded in 1999 and has received funding from foreign donors, and the Trade Union of Health Care Workers (TUHW), which was founded during the Soviet era, has a national-level organizational structure and co-operates closely with the Russian state. The study examines how these organizations’ members define and represent their organizations and construct their identities, and the meanings they give to their activities. The analysis of collective identities highlights the logics of organizational activities and how these activities are sustained. Finally, this inquiry examines how civic groups and the state interact in Russia. It analyzes conceptions of citizenship, that is, how civic activists and authorities articulate their mutual relationships, and what kind of subject positions, rights and duties they construct for each other.

This work contributes to the study of Russian civic activity, citizenship and gender relations by developing theoretical understanding of these phenomena and their interrelationships based on a closely detailed empirical inquiry. It highlights dimensions of civic activity that have up to now been neglected and provides new methodological and theoretical perspectives for understanding and explaining them. Previous research on civil society and politics in post-socialism, although prolific and lively, has often overlooked the micro-sociological, grassroots perspective and focused on a macro-level analysis of the formal political domain. As a consequence, surprisingly little is known about the perceptions of practitioners of civic activity.¹ This study aims at filling this gap by providing an in-depth empirical analysis of activists’ self-understanding and organizational practices at the local level. Examining civic activity through a local case study is important precisely because of the localized nature of civic activity in Russia. There are considerable differences between the regions of the Russian Federation, and in order to understand how civic activity and its dynamics are shaped in these different contexts, studies that address the local developments are needed.

The existing literature on Russian civic activity also has devoted relatively little attention to studying the role of state institutions in determining the conditions under which associational life and democracy operate, although, as will be demonstrated, the state’s participation in delineating the boundaries of and opportunities for civic activity is of crucial importance. In this inquiry, the relationships between the authorities and civic organizations and citizenship are analyzed from the perspective of both activists and the authorities.

Furthermore, there are today two separate and seldom intersecting discussions concerning socio-political activity in Russia. On the one hand, there is the ‘general’ discussion of civic activity that rarely takes gender into account,² and, on the other hand, there are several studies about the Russian women’s movement and women’s organizations.³ This work is among the first empirical studies that examines both women’s organizations and other civic organizations and the experiences and accounts of both male and female activists.⁴ The focus is on analyzing gendering practices in Russian organized socio-political life and the role of civic activities in the social construction of gender.

Citizens’ organizations have been referred to in Russian by a range of notions. The term I encountered most often during my fieldwork was obshchestvennaia organizatsiia, which seems to function as an umbrella term for a wide array of citizens’ collective activities.⁵ Other terms include obshchestvennoe ob″edinenie (civic association), blagotvoritel′naia organizatsiia (charitable organization), nekommercheskaia organizatsiia (non-profit organization), nepravitel′stvennaia/negosudarstvennaia organizatsiia (non-governmental organization), and tretii sektor (the third sector). The last three terms emerged in the mid-1990s as translations from English-language terms and were adopted in order to mark a distinction from Soviet organizational patterns (Belokurova 2002, 42).

I refer to citizens’ socio-political activity by the terms ‘civic activity’ and ‘civic organization’, by which I mean citizens’ collective and organized activities, which are not part of the state, although many receive support from it, do not pursue profit and are based on voluntary participation. I have chosen these terms, because they are less burdened by ideological and normative underpinnings and encompass a wider scope of citizens’ activity than the terms non-profit or non-governmental organization (NGO) that are often used both in everyday and scholarly discourse. The term non-profit organization is too intimately linked with the American associational model, the so-called third sector, which refers to formal and professionalized non-profit groups that are often engaged in service delivery (see Richter 2000). The term NGO, by contrast, although widely used, is ambiguous and seems to lack a theoretically informed definition—in fact, it is rarely defined at all (Martens 2002, 272). In practice the term NGO has come to refer, as Martens (ibid., 279) observes, to “non-profit but professionalized groups”, which links it to the theoretical framework of non-profit organizations. Lewis (2001, 3) has also suggested that the term NGO is, in general, closely connected with the neoliberal vision of development and the so-called good governance agenda, which tends to equate civil society with the third sector. In the post-socialist context, the term NGO has referred to a rather narrow and specific set of institutions, namely, organizations that were founded after the demise of the Soviet Union, which are frequently professional and enjoy foreign funding. NGO-focused research has often overlooked small-scale organizational activities as well as organizations that were established during the Soviet era and still continue their activities, such as Veterans’ Councils and the Russian trade union movement.

Understanding the activities of Russian civic organizations requires examining them in relation to the changing forms of state power. The state in this study is defined in terms of ‘functions’ and ‘territory’. Functionally, the state is divided into legislative (legislatures; zakonodatel′naia vlast′) and executive (administrative organs; ispol′nitel′naia vlast′) power,⁶ and territorially into federal (Moscow), regional (federal subjects) and municipal (cities and villages) power.⁷ Thus, the state is not a monolith or unitary in its practices, policies or effects, but rather it is “ensembles of institutions and practises with powerful cultural consequences” (Schild 1998, 97; see also Yuval-Davis 1997, 14).

This study concentrates on studying participants of civic organizations. They can be seen as somewhat exceptional, since citizens in Russia and other Former Soviet Union countries are much less likely than citizens in other countries to join civic organizations. Marc Morjé Howard’s (2003) analysis, based on World Value Survey data about the membership of civic organizations, reveals that Russia and other countries of the former Soviet Union have notably lower average numbers of organizational memberships per person in comparison to Central and Eastern European countries. In Russia, only 35 percent of the population reports belonging to at least one civic organization (Kubik 2005, 110). All post-communist societies have a much lower level of civic participation in comparison to older democracies and post-authoritarian (Latin American) societies. Studying the people who are actively engaged in civic activities in Russia can provide information about which social groups are represented in socio-political life (gender, social class, etc.), and what types of discourses, ideals and practices are publicly articulated and promoted. This type of analysis also tells us what motivates people to act in an environment marked by a general withdrawal from socio-political activism, and how this activism is structured and sustained.

Theorizing civic activity: civil society

Research pertaining to civic activity in post-communism has been dominated above all by civil society theories. Civil society has become a key signifier of the democratization process, and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have frequently been considered as its main agents and manifestations. This chain ‘NGOs=civil society=democracy’ can be referred to as ‘civil society orthodoxy’—so influential has it become amongst scholars and in democracy aid programs.⁸ In particular international donor agencies and market-oriented liberals have tended to perceive civil society as liberating and empowering, facilitating democratization and bringing about all manner of good to post-socialist societies (Hemment 1998). By contrast, a number of critics have seen civil society and democracy aid programmes to Russia as a way for the West to colonize the East and they have represented civil society as a foreign idea imposed on the post-socialist world by external forces (Sampson 2002b; Mandel 2002).

The post-Soviet period has witnessed a bourgeoning of empirical and theoretical research on civil society that addresses the question of whether there is civil society in Russia or not. If civil society exists, what is it like and how should it be understood, measured or conceptualized? What are the institutions that Russian civil society is built upon? Is civil society a fruitful concept in the Russian context, or would some other term be better? And indeed, what is ‘civil society’ and how is it to be defined? In this discussion, the West has operated as a self-evident point of reference, as ‘Westernness’ can be seen as built into the historicity of the concept of civil society: Russia (and other non-Western societies) functions as the ‘Constitutive outside’ (Butler 1993) of civil society. I also started this research with civil society theory, but during my fieldwork I realized that it fitted uneasily with the social reality faced in Tver′. It did not help me to understand how the Russian organizational sector operated. In what follows, I will first discuss how civil society has been conceived and the problems of applying it in post-communism. In the next section I will present the theoretical approach that has been adopted in this research to studying Russian civic activity.

We can distinguish two conceptualizations of civil society in the existing literature: civil society conceptualized in terms of space—civil society as a distinctive sphere—and functions—what tasks civil society is supposed to perform.⁹ In practice these dimensions often intertwine, but this analytical distinction is instructive, in particular, for understanding the debate whether civil society existed in the Soviet Union and, consequently, how it could develop and manifest itself in post-Soviet conditions. A standard spatial definition of civil society is that it is a social sphere operating outside the realm of government, business, and the family and embodied in civic organizations (see e.g. Henderson 2003, Howard 2003). It operates with the conceptual pair of private and public spheres. The public-private dichotomy has traditionally referred to two distinctions: the state versus society (public vs. private ownership), and the state and society versus the domestic sphere. In the first distinction, civil society is placed in the private sphere and in the latter in the public (Okin 1991, 68). This points to the context-bound nature of civil society.

A functionally oriented civil society theory is presented, for example, by Foley and Edwards (1996). They distinguish between two versions of civil society, ‘Civil Society I’ and ‘Civil Society II’. Civil Society I draws on the intellectual traditions associated with Alexis de Tocqueville and Robert Putnam and emphasizes associational life as a facilitator of patterns of civility in the actions of citizenry, cultivating norms of reciprocity, trust and democracy. Civil Society II, by contrast, refers to the Eastern European intellectual tradition that draws on the Gramscian notion of counter-hegemony and sees civil society as a sphere independent from the state and defending the individual against it. The first civil society model emphasizes the positive effects of associational life for governance, while the second model stresses the conflictual potential of civil society as a counterforce to the state.

The difference between ‘space’ and ‘function’ conceptualizations is at the heart of the debate whether civil society structures and practices existed in the Soviet Union or not. Those who contend that some sort of civil society existed in the Soviet Union usually adopt the spatial point of view, whereas those who think that civil society did not exist ground their arguments in the ‘function’ approach. For example, Rigby (1991, quoted in Alapuro 1993, 197) sees that there were elements of civil society in Soviet society, such as trade unions, the Komsomol, sport organizations, and composers’ and writers’ unions. Shlapentokh (1989), for his part, mentions the bard movement, the shadow economy, samizdat, and the holiday industry as structures of Soviet civil society. By contrast, L. P. Borisov (1996) argues that there was no civil society in the Soviet Union:

Some elements of civil society (family, working community, social organizations) can appear…under a totalitarian regime as well, but the lack of necessary conditions that could ensure the independence of those elements from political power and their right to self-governance and independent activity makes it impossible to consider a society a civil one. (quoted in Pursiainen 2004)

Thus, although alternative social spheres that were somewhat independent from state control existed, they cannot be said to have constituted civil society, because they lacked independence and autonomy from the state and the ability to exert sustained and organized pressure on it. Kharkhordin (1998, 961) observes in a similar vein that “civil society makes sense only if it includes individual freedom”. That is why, he argues, Soviet collectives cannot be regarded as institutions of civil society.

I have identified three prominent approaches to understanding postcommunist civil society in contemporary scholarly literature: evaluative, theoretical and empirical-comparative. They are based on different intellectual roots and methodologies and consequently suggest different research programmes and understandings of civil society in Russia.¹⁰ The evaluative approach has been popular in particular in studying the effects of Western democracy aid to Russian civic organizations. This approach is usually linked with the spatial conception of civil society and focuses on NGOs. It approaches civic activity from a so-called neo-Tocquevillean (Henderson 2003) perspective and aims at assessing and measuring Russian civil society. Is there a civil society and what is...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Patterns of civic activity in Soviet and post-Soviet Russia
• 3 Gender in socio-political activity: power, participation and agency
• 4 Action and affective ties: identity formation of the Centre for Women’s History and Gender Studies
• 5 The weakness of collective identity: the Trade Union of Health Care Workers
• 6 Redefining citizenship: views of the authorities
• 7 Collaboration and contestation: views of the activists
• 8 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography