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real proletarians - wage slaves - and thus part of the universal class. Once
the laws of history have worked themselves out, production for private profit
ended, class antagonisms melted away, and reproductive functions taken
over or subsumed by the sphere of production or society
in toto,
then, and
only then pure sex-love will reign supreme. People actually believed this, but
contemporary Soviet women are not among the gullible, as Francine Gray's
fascinating new book reveals.
Whom one meets in the pages of
Soviet Women
are angry, exhausted
men and women pretty much at the end of their tethers. Forget the new
Soviet man; forget the new Soviet woman. What one finds - and anyone
who has visited the Soviet Union can verify Gray's depictions with the
evidence of her own eyes and ears - are human beings under terrific
pressure from old habits and continuing traumas, state-induced. Gray hits the
reader immediately with powerful images: to Western feminists the Soviet
Union may be a patriarchy. To Russian women, it is a world in which
women dominate
and
in which women suffer.
On the one hand, one encounters a culture in which men are incessantly
put down, mocked and scorned by women. Teachers tend to favor girls
"because their behavior is more closely modeled on the Soviet system of
social values - on communitarian obedience, orderliness, altruism, dutifulness,"
according to one of Gray's respondents, Maria Osorina, a Leningrad
psychologist and analyst of "The Powerful Woman Syndrome" in the Soviet
Union. Even as Soviet men were killed off by the millions in World War
Two and felt most powerfully the full force of the State's decrees against a
public life and anything resembling an independent politics (it was
overwhelmingly men who were convicted under the Soviet "parasitism"
laws, that is, failure to work at a state-sanctioned job), women ruled over a
domestic sphere to which they could retreat.
Soviet writer Tatyana Tolstaya has noted: "Home, hearth, household,
children, birth, family ties, the close relationship of mothers, grandmothers,
and daughters: the attention to all details, control over everything, power, at
times extending to tyranny - all this is Russian woman, who both frightens
and attracts, enchants and oppresses. To imagine that Russian women are
subservient to men and that they must therefore struggle psychologically or
otherwise to assert their individuality vis-a-vis men, is, at the very least,
naive." Women, by contrast to men, ruled over their domestic kingdoms and
"never suffered an equal sense of helplessness." According to Gray, "the
overwhelming majority of even the most progressive Soviet intellectuals,"
including, or especially, the women, have "only hostile feelings toward the
concept of a 'women's movement'." They are trying to figure out how to
shore up the men; how to deal with such dismal realities as the fact that,
despite the desperate need for solid responsible role models, young men with
university degrees in pedagogy are uniformly rejected for work in children's
