A survey of the key political, economic, social, and cultural developments in Russian women's history from 900 to 2010, and their impact on the nation. Synthesizing several decades of scholarship by historians East and West, Barbara Evans Clements traces the major developments in the history of women in Russia and their impact on the history of the nation. Sketching lived experiences across the centuries, she demonstrates the key roles that women played in shaping Russia's political, economic, social, and cultural development for over a millennium. The story Clements tells is one of hardship and endurance, but also one of achievement by women who, for example, promoted the conversion to Christianity, governed estates, created great art, rebelled against the government, established charities, built the tanks that rolled into Berlin in 1945, and flew the planes that strafed the retreating Wehrmacht. This daunting and complex history is presented in an engaging survey that integrates this scholarship into the field of Russian and post-Soviet history. "The product of a lifetime of engagement by one of the preeminent authorities on the history of Russian women, the book reflects the author's deep expertise in primary sources as well as her familiarity with the secondary literature." âChoi Chatterjee, California State University Los Angeles "A significant achievement in scholarship on Russian women and gender.... Among this text's many strengths are its lucidity, readability, and engaging synthesis of a large number of both primary and secondary sources.... Its erudite contextualization of the history of Russian women within a larger European framework ensures its interest for and accessibility to a wide readership, especially those outside of the Slavic field." â Slavic and East European Journal "Clements's writing is engaging, clear, and jargon free, making this book easily accessible to a general audience.... Highly recommended." â Choice "This daunting and complex history is presented in an engaging survey that integrates this scholarship into the field of Russian and post-Soviet history." â Journal of Turkish Weekly
Frequently asked questions
How do I cancel my subscription?
Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on âCancel Subscriptionâ - itâs as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time youâve paid for. Learn more here.
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlegoâs features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan youâll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, weâve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is A History of Women in Russia an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access A History of Women in Russia by Barbara Evans Clements in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Storia & Storia russa. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.
In 950, two peoples at the far-eastern reaches of Europe were pooling their fortunes. They were the Rus, Scandinavians who had ventured south seeking riches, and the Slavs, farmers who had lived in the great expanses of steppe and forest for centuries. The Rus brought to this alliance their skills in warfare, trade, and manufacture; the Slavs provided food and furs. Off and on for decades the two groups made alliances and marriages that brought them into ever-closer cooperation. By the year 1000, Slavs and Scandinavians were merging into one people, whom history would call the Rus, after their swashbuckling leaders.
Most Rus women spent their lives working. In the countryside, they harvested the fields and forests. In the cities, they participated in family businesses. Among the ruling elite, they managed households. Women of all classes also married, had children, experienced youthâs pleasures and hopes, and found ways to endure advancing old age. The Rus believed that men should rule women and that young women should obey their seniors. When women became seniors themselves, they required their daughters, daughters-in-law, and sons to honor and obey them. They also advised their menfolk, a custom that, among the elite, led to women becoming political advisers and, on a few occasions, regents.
Rus womenâs work, family lives, participation in their communities, and spirituality were similar to those of women elsewhere in Europe, because the gender values that structured those practices were pan-European. The differences in their history arose from their existence on Europeâs far-eastern frontier. A powerful ruling elite and an omnipresent established church came to them later than they did to other Europeans. So for most of Rus history, the great majority of women were legally free farmers, living in small villages, moving to new lands at will, preserving their customs and their ancient faiths, and trying to stay out of the way of the warriors who lived to trade and fight.
The Kievan Period, Tenth Century to 1240
POLITICS
Most Rus warriors were fair-skinned, blue-eyed, and bearded, like their Viking cousins. In leather armor and pointed helmets, they navigated the broad rivers of their adopted homeland, pursuing a profitable trade in furs, honey, slaves, Persian silver, and fine manufactured goods from Byzantium. They made their capital at Kiev on the Dniepr River in todayâs Ukraine and hailed the prince who ruled that city as their paramount leader. Though loosely organized, the Rus dominated the commerce of their region and even sent periodic delegations to Constantinople, the sophisticated capital of the Byzantine Empire, far to the south across the Black Sea.
The rules of Rus society were patriarchal. Family affiliations, titles, and property descended through male kin and men held all public offices, secular and religious. Age and social rank figured in the making of gender hierarchies, as they do universally, and so senior men had power over the junior men in their families as well as over all the men who ranked below them in the larger society. Older women had considerable authority over younger female kin and were supposed to receive the respect and attention of their sons and husbands. Widows may have been allowed more autonomy than married women; that was the case elsewhere in Europe and can be documented in later periods of Russian history. Elite women also commanded the obedience of the servants and slaves, male and female, who worked for them. This granting of power according to a womanâs age and her status in her familyâs and societyâs hierarchy extended to the lower-ranking members of Rus society as well. It would endure throughout subsequent centuries in Russia and across Europe.
Prominent among the early rulers of Kiev were Olga (c. 915âc. 969), a princess who served as regent for her son, and her grandson Vladimir I (ruled 980â1015), later canonized for converting the Rus to Christianity. Vladimir also expanded his home city and increased his control over the hinterland that supplied him with food and trade goods. His successor Iaroslav (1018â54) promoted Christianity, issued the first written law code, and sponsored still more building in Kiev.
Iaroslav did not establish a method of passing power peacefully from one generation to the next. The Rus practiced lateral successionâthat is, brothers could claim the title of a deceased brother, and only after all brotherly claims were exhausted did sons inherit. Since princely families were large, this custom often led to prolonged warfare. Shortly before he died, Iaroslav commanded his sons and brothers to promise to abide by a scheme he had devised, one that ranked Rus cities in a hierarchy from Kiev down, and dispersed them as dependencies to brothers and then their sons in order of seniority by birth. His kin duly swore, then broke their oaths after his death. Iaroslav and Vladimir before him had come to power through fratricidal war, and their successors did so as well.
Such violence was common in European monarchies in the medieval period, and primogeniture, the right of the first-born son to inherit his fatherâs title and landed estates, even where securely established, did not guarantee peaceful succession. The special peril faced by the Rus was the presence nearby of nomadic tribes, such as the Pechenegs and Polovotsy, which were eager to take advantage of Rus disunity. Warfare among princes usually led to warfare with the surrounding peoples, disruption of trade, and the pillaging of Rus cities.
And yet, despite periodic eruptions of civil war in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, the Rus population grew and spread across a sprawling territory. This expansion testified to the peopleâs success in wresting a living from the land and trading with their neighbors, but it also exacerbated tensions that plagued the warrior class. As families grew, claims to titles multiplied. Princely families that had settled in towns far from Kiev developed local ties and consequently felt less loyalty to the center. Even politically skilled princes, who managed to rally their cousinsâ support for defense and trade, could not reverse the consequences of the eliteâs proliferation and dispersal. By the early thirteenth century, therefore, political bonds between the rulers were growing dangerously weak.
THE LIVES OF WOMEN IN THE COUNTRYSIDE
The Slavic farmers on whom the warriors depended for food and taxes lived in small, stockaded villages scattered across the rolling grasslands of Ukraine and through the forests of todayâs Belarus and western Russia. These country folk, like peasants elsewhere in Europe, were self-sufficient, feeding themselves by hunting, fishing, keeping livestock, gathering wild foods, and growing grains and vegetables. They made their clothes of flax, wool, and fur, their houses of wood, and their tools and weapons of wood and metal. To clear land for cultivation, they chopped down bushes and trees, burned the brush, and spread the resulting ash to enrich the soil. Then they planted seeds in shallow holes dug in the cleared land. This slash-and-burn agriculture quickly exhausted the soilâs fertility, but there was so much land that when the productivity of one field declined, the farmers could move on to another.
The rural folk of the Rus confederation were not serfs, as were so many peasants in Western Europe at the time. Instead, they were free to run their own lives, so long as they paid their taxes. They could even dodge that obligation by relocating to places beyond the reach of the warriors. There were no local landlords, adjudicating disputes and managing agriculture, as in Western Europe, because Rus warriors, true to their Viking roots, spent most of their time at war or on trading expeditions. The farmers only saw them or their representatives once a year or so, when they came around to collect taxes, paid mostly in furs and honey. The rest of the time the men in armor left the peasants alone.
The peasantsâ relationship to the church was similarly remote, which was another major difference from the situation in Western and Central Europe. The Rus warrior elite began converting to Christianity in the eleventh century, but because the rulers had so little contact with the farmers and because their territory was so immense, it took centuries for the clergy, which worked under warrior sponsorship and with warrior funding, to extend their influence into rural areas. So the peasants kept on worshipping their nature gods and goddesses and lived free of church supervision for most of the Rus period. The churchâs ability to enforce its will on the countryside would remain weak for centuries thereafter.
Women in the countryside spent most of their time producing the food and clothing that sustained their families. Dressed in homespun linen and wool, they cared for small livestock, grew vegetables, gleaned the fields after the men had reaped the grain, and gathered mushrooms, berries, medicinal plants, and wood for fuel. In their smoky cabins (chimneys were not common until much later), they made clothes, prepared food, and tended babies and young children. Midwives attended births, casting spells to keep evil spirits at bay and welcoming newborns into the world with potions, amulets, and lullabies. Men did the heaviest workâconstructing tools and houses, chopping down trees and chopping up firewood, digging wells, plowing, and caring for cattle and horses. This division of labor, an ancient one among the tribes of Europe, was built on the differences in physical strength between men and women and on the fact that women spent much of their adult life pregnant or nursing. By Rus times, it was seen as the natural way of things across Europe. Plowing was menâs work, gleaning womenâs.
THE LIVES OF WOMEN IN THE CITIES
The cities of the Rus confederation boomed in the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries. Many of them were little more than trading posts, but others, such as Kiev and Novgorod, grew into thriving communities graced by substantial churches and palaces. Historians have estimated the population of Kiev at the end of the twelfth century at forty or fifty thousand, which was roughly the size of Paris or London at the same time.1 In its crowded neighborhoods, artisans crafted weapons and tools, jewelry, enamelware, pottery, glass, and wooden goods. Merchants distributed all this, as well as luxury products brought from Byzantine and Arab lands. Some townspeople, women as well as men, could read, write, and do arithmetic, skills they used in managing their financial affairs. At the bottom of urban society, mostly working for the rich, were slaves, who had come into bondage by being captured in war.
As was common elsewhere in Europe during the medieval period, Rus cities were self-governing, with their own local leaders, town meetings, and common law. When Kievan princes began to exert more control in the eleventh century, townspeople zealously defended their rights. Contemporary chronicles refer to abusive princes being overthrown and even lynched by angry crowds.
MERCHANT WOMEN
The women of the middle ranks of town society supervised housework, shopped, kept financial records, and conferred with their husbands on the management of the family business, as merchant women did elsewhere in Europe. Some owned property in their own names and lent and borrowed money. Their clothes may have been similar in design to those of rural folk, but rich merchant women could afford much finer fabrics, including silk brought in by traders. They also bought imported and locally made jewelry, especially intricately carved combs, silver brooches, necklaces, and gold and silver bracelets and rings. Less affluent women dressed more plainly and lived more simply, selling goods in the markets and working as artisans. Spinning was considered womenâs work among the Rus as elsewhere in Europe. Some surviving spindles have womenâs names carved on them.2
WOMEN OF THE RULING CLASS
The women of the Rus warrior elite had much in common with lower-ranking women. They too married men of their parentsâ choosing, for marriage was considered an alliance between families, not a private matter to be decided by the couple. Elite and poor women were expected to be dutiful wives who bore healthy children and worked to support their familiesâ well-being. The women of the warrior class had more luxuries and status than poorer women, of course, and some additional obligations. They were supposed to set pious examples for their communities and to participate in their familiesâ jockeying for power and wealth, that is, in politics.
Elite womenâs most passive involvement in politics was entering into the arranged marriages that helped establish and maintain good relations between powerful families. Daughters of the princes of Kiev became the brides of foreign kings, which attests to the fact that royalty abroad regarded Rus princes as their equalsâand their daughters, therefore, as suitable consorts. Four of the granddaughters of Vladimir Monomakh (ruled 1113â25) married non-Rus princes: Malfrid became queen of Norway, Evfrosinia queen of Hungary, and Ingeborg queen of Denmark, and Dobrodeia married the nephew of the Byzantine emperor.
Elite women were also actively engaged in their familiesâ affairs. This was not unusual in medieval Europe, where politics took place within families and clans. The female relatives of Rus warriors were expected to advise their male kin, and that obligation entailed staying on top of political developments so as to inform brothers, husbands, or fathers of impending treacheries. Indeed, in that turbulent age it might mean death to discount the value of a wifeâs sharp eyes and attentive ears.3
Among the Rus, as among other Scandinavian and Germanic peoples, women were also valued for their peacemaking skills. The Primary Chronicle, a history of the Kievan princes written by monks in the twelfth century, tells of a princess trying to mediate between her warring sons. Identified only as Vsevolodâs widow, she was the mother of Vladimir Monomakh and grandmother of those four princesses who married foreign royals. In 1097, when her sons and their cousins were vying for the throne at Kiev, she went, with the head of the church, the metropolitan, to urge Vladimir to make peace. âWe beseech you, oh Prince, and your brethren not to ruin the land of Rus,â she pleaded. Vladimir burst into tears and agreed. âThus he obeyed her as he was bound to obey his mother,â the chronicler intones. She returned to Kiev to beg Vladimirâs cousin Sviatopolk, the reigning prince, to reconcile with his enemies. Sadly, her motherly appeals did not end the dispute.4
Princesses could not become rulers in their own right. This was the general practice across Europe, although the feudalism of the West did enable a few women who inherited fiefdoms to exercise considerable power. Far more common among the Rus and other Europeans was the custom of widows serving as regents for their minor children or taking up their husbandsâ administrative duties when the men were away. Seals bearing the names of such Rus women have been unearthed in archaeological digs. We do not know how many regents or temporary administrators there were, but we can identify the one whose political career earned her the greatest fame.
OLGA (c. 915-c. 969)
Olga, the widow of Prince Igor of Kiev, was regent to her son Sviatoslav from 945 to the late 950s or early 960s. She is best remembered for the murderous revenge she took on the Derevlians, perennial enemies of the Rus, after they had defeated and beheaded her husband. The Primary Chronicle recounts that the victorious Derevlians proposed to Olga that she marry their prince and thus unite the two warring peoples. It was an offer they expected her, a vulnerable woman, to accept. This proved to be a fatal misunderstanding of her character. Olga buried alive the first group of Derevlian ambassadors who came to arrange the marriage. Then, on the pretext of accepting their offer, she went to the Derevliansâ capital, camped outside the city walls, hosted a great feast, and finished the celebration by massacring her drunken guests. She then laid siege to their city. When the townspeople sued for peace, Olga directed each household to give her an offering of three pigeons and three sparrows. They sent them to her, and she ordered her soldiers to tie matches to the birdsâ feet and light them. Released, the terrified creatures took their flaming burdens home and set the city afire. Thus did Olga avenge Igor and defend the Rus lands from the Derevlians.
This bloody tale is probably a myth. Scandinavian folklore delights in stories of widows exacting hideous revenge. The monk who wrote about Olgaâs life in The Primary Chronicle almost two centuries after her death probably told the story to illustrate her cleverness and courage, and her willingness to use those talents in defense of her peopleâs independence. These were the themes of the rest of his account of her life, which is more solidly ...
