Оригинал материала
OVERCOMING STEREOTYPES
by Natalya Startseva and Nina Kurasova
It was in the heat of battle over local elections in Rostov region that we spoke with a representative of one of the parties actively promoting its candidates. We spoke about a particular woman candidate, a successful entrepreneur, running for the post of head of government in the famous northern agricultural district that was home to the writer Mikhail Sholokhov [a Nobel Laureate]. "Nah, she won't make it," he drawled with a condescending laugh. "Even if she were wise as Solomon and waged a real smart campaign, our people would never elect a woman! With us, it's the same as it's always been on the farms and in the villages: the big-chested Cossack walks in front and the woman walks behind him so she won't offend the other women whose husbands did not come home from the war."
This district is an idiosyncratic "communist preserve" in a region whose leader at some point in the past made a smooth transfer from being First Secretary of the Communist Party's district committee to being head of the local government. Precisely he was that woman's main opponent in these elections.
Poverty in the region grew in the 1990's, after Perestroika. Lovers of literature stopped making pilgrimages to this once popular home of the Nobel Laureate. School and agriculture club buildings started crumbling, fields were neglected, pensioners and welfare recipients stopped receiving their money from the government.
However, the head of the local government, an older man with a Russian Communist Party membership card in his pocket, managed to persuade his countrymen that teachers and doctors were finally being paid right around election time thanks largely to his interventions up there "in the center" [Moscow], and he promised to continue those efforts. It sufficed to get him the votes.
The woman who had put forth a whole new dynamic platform for revitalizing the region, got left out in the elections. Very possibly, the "Cossack mentality" of the local population played some part in her defeat.
It is a different story in places where patriarchal stereotypes do not define the way of life. For instance, the rural Kuibyshev district in Rostov region has a population made up largely of newcomers from neighboring areas of Russia and from Ukraine. For the second time in recent years a woman has been elected as head of the district administration.
One has to pay tribute to Tamara Zabrodna's remarkable personal qualilties. An economist by training, she used to work for the Ukraine State Farm in this district. In the post-Soviet era, she and her husband established their own small farm, and the impressive results they have achieved are enough to show anyone there that a woman's management capabilities can be of great use in difficult times.
Tamara Zabrodna's success is also a tribute to Olga Liashchenko, who headed the district during the preceding term, which coincided with the most troubled, impoverished and unmanageable period, for the district and the country as a whole. It is fair to say that she shouldered the burdens of transition and restructuring in the district without getting her hands dirty in dubious dealings, unlike many of her male colleagues, with their shady enterprises.
Today we can say that the number of women with political power in Rostov region has grown by one. Our meager statistics on women are now as follows: there are no women from the Don in the Duma of the Russian Federation, there is one woman who is a deputy in the legislative assembly of Rostov region, and one is head of the regional administration.
Yet local elections in the Don brought some surprises.
Women were quite active in the election campaigns. For instance, in the Zverevo settlement (an important stop on the Northern Cossack railroad) 10 out of the 27 candidates for the city duma were women; 12 women campaigned for deputy in the city of Semikarakorska (former Cossack capital), and 5 in the city of Azov. Overall, women were more than 30% of the candidates in these elections. Among them were representatives of the intelligentsia (teachers, doctors, middle-level administrators) well acquainted with their constituents. Many of them got elected. The number of women deputies in the city duma of Millerovo doubled-now there are six of them, including the school director Liubov Pianova. She is typical of the elected representative who has acquired a solid reputation over the years. Many of those voting for her are her former students. Liubov Fedorovna didn't make all sorts of populist statements during her campaign; like the majority of village schoolteachers, she has an impossible workload including housework and the vegetable garden. Nonetheless she is a tremendous resource as an activist, and the village voters value this.
"Revolutionary" changes have taken place in the city duma of Azov. In the past it had not one single woman, despite the fact that women make up 55% of the city's population. These days 11 of the deputies are women, and the first changes are making themselves felt in the duma.
"In times of financial hardship women are much more able to cut out unnecessary expenditures and to maximize the effects of careful spending," said Nadezhda Negodaeva, a deputy of the Azov city duma and chair of the trade union committee of the "Azov Optical-Mechanical Factory". "We women deputies have already done battle with the strong half of the duma over financial matters, but what's important is that we've had a chance to demonstrate the soundness of our views. You need to be able to win people over peaceably, to make logical arguments, and that comes naturally to most women." Zoe Melekhova was elected to a second term as a deputy in Zverevo, a fact that speaks for itself; and the deputies there chose Tatyana Chumachenko as their presider.
"I had some pretty strong opponents," Tatyana told us. "Of course I never felt a hundred percent sure that I would win. Besides, I had very little means at my disposal for my election campaign, only a videocamera. I think it helped that a lot of my constituents knew me as a teacher and and the vice principle of the school."
Also significant, the townspeople saw Tatyana Chumachenko in another role as well. In addition to graduating from the pedagogical institute, she also graduated from the institute of commerce, worked in retail trade and later as a store manager. Amazingly, she continued to work in the schools, teaching chemistry and biology, if only for a few hours a week, thereby keeping her tie to the profession without which life is unimaginable for Tatyana, and to which she has returned. Of course, now she has to combine her professional activities with her public service ones.
There is an unprecedented number of women in the legislative assembly in the Semikarakorsk district- eight. And statistics reflect this tendency in all districts of the region.
Will we be seeing a "women's daily news" report on the level of local government in the Rostov region? Hopefully so. If only because as one of their first reports, women deputies spoke about local women's issues. Nadezhda Negodaeva, a deputy from Azov, named women's unemployment as one of the basic economic problems of the city. Natalya Kachura, in her first interview as deputy in the district newspaper Semikarakorskie News, said, "It's only fair that women should make up the majority of deputies, given that women make up the majority of the working population in the region. Women bring into government their particular way of looking at problems, along with ways of solving them. Government is becoming more harmonious."
Of course, one would like to think that the appearance of women in local governing bodies heralds change in the economic and public life of our region. Women in power temper traditions. They encourage ways of doing things that are more just and more harmonious.
In the Rostov region we are witnessing a new social movement of multiple-and successful-attempts by women to enter the arena of political and public activity. (They have already proved themselves on the professional front.) Some radical sociologists see this as in fact evidence of the extreme patriarchal tendencies of the Don electorate, who, when it comes down to it, see women as a kind of "Big Mommy," who will take care of them and inspire hope in them.
Whether or not that is so, at the very least we can welcome such changes.