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WHERE THE ANGARA RISES
by Irina Sharova
The well known fact that the Siberian river called the Angara is born in mighty Lake Baikal, has given rise to any number of splendid legends. One tells how a beautiful daughter ran away from her harsh father to be with the brave warrior Yenisey... But we are not going to concern ourselves here with ancient tales. The point is that geographers still cannot agree on whether the Angara flows into the Yenisey or the Yenisey into the Angara. Reality, though, points us toward a different interpretation of the origins of that Siberian beauty. The fact is that the giant bowl of Baikal could not be endlessly filled with a massive influx of water carried by countless rivers and rivulets—there had to be an outflow. And the outflow that inevitably appeared was the beginning of a new river that people later came to call the Angara.
And so it was that the Baikal Area Women’s Union, otherwise known as Angara, was not running from anyone and was not flowing into anything (power structures, political parties, revenue streams—the traditional destinations are well known). It was, rather, born in a brimming sea of problems that became part of Russian life in the tumultuous nineties.
Remember how it was before revolution turned everything upside down? The government was a sort of mother and father to each and all, or at least so they wanted us to think. Some people believed in that idyll, others had serious doubts, but if anything happened, everyone knew where to go and complain, where to look for support: the Party committee, the local committee, the trade union committee... Then every one of those entities burst like a balloon and the government decided that it did not have to take care of its wards any more. Resources were in short supply, so let everyone shift for himself.
And thus we were tossed into the stream of independent life before being taught how to swim. What could we do, where could we turn with our troubles? Life was overflowing with problems large and small, problems that were a complete mystery to us: unemployment, the cash crunch, inflation, juvenile drug addiction, crime, prostitution, the slave trade. Some way out of this pit of despair, an outflow, a new channel had to be found. One could do as many others have done, and stage public demonstrations, bawl in the kitchen, leave no bureaucratic stone unturned. That was no way out, though, but a dead end. Yet a genuinely new channel was eventually found, and it was called the Baikal Area Women’s Union -- Angara.
The first harbinger of its birth was the Vera [Faith, Belief, Trust] women’s club, which was founded by Vera Soloveva, a psychotherapist. What was her reason for doing that? Well, naturally, just to bring people together. In the early years of perestroika, college professors, scientists and scholars, doctors, and teachers were in such dire financial straits that the symbolic salaries they were paid were not a means of support but an instrument of humiliation.
The first meetings were held in people’s apartments, then they moved to the business club, and finally the university’s research library became their regular venue for several years. Contacts were made with organizations in Russia and abroad, and they began hearing about the women’s movement.
Then one day, Vera Soloveva just happened to meet up with Tatyana Shestakova, Valentina Kazimirovskaya, and Albina Shirobokova in Moscow. And right then and there she persuaded them all to go to an Independent Women’s Forum that was being held in Dubna, on the outskirts of Moscow [in the early 1990s]. Tatyana Shestakova headed the Patent Department at Irkutsk State Technical University; Valentina Kazimirovskaya, a prominent scientist with a doctorate in biology, was in charge of the Pharmacology Laboratory at the Academy of Science’s Institute of Organic Chemistry; and Albina Shirobokova, an associate professor at Irkutsk Technical University, was serving at the time on the Supreme Economic Council of the Presidium of the Russian Federation’s Supreme Soviet. They were all busy women, with plenty of problems of their own, and had no time to waste on “girly” nonsense. Even so, they all went to the Forum, just to find out what was all about.
What they saw convinced them of how much women teachers, female entrepreneurs, doctors, and the mothers of servicemen can achieve when they act together, united by a determination to make changes for the better. The Forum was mostly attended by women of accomplishment—prominent professionals in their field, with academic degrees and in fairly high-profile positions. The apprehension that the women from Irkutsk had been harboring, their concern about “feminist” eccentricities, evaporated without a trace. They joined the organizing committee’s various groups and began working energetically.
Once back in Irkutsk they of course shared their impressions with their friends at the next meeting of the Vera Club and decided to create an identical association, comprising active women’s organizations, initiative groups, etc. that would concentrate their efforts and organize them into a coalition. And by March 1995, the association’s founders, enriched by their work experience, by the inevitable errors made along the way, and by their contacts with various social organizations in Russia and abroad, had matured to the point at which they were ready to register the organization. That was when Angara, the Baikal Area Women’s Union, officially came into being.
Albina Shirobokova was elected President on the strength of her superior social activism. Shirobokova, a natural-born leader, was well experienced not only in teaching and research but also in dealing with legislative bodies, the production sector, and management. The process, as they say, was in motion.
Hundreds and even thousands of social associations and parties sprang up in Russia during the 1990s, with just as many bowing out a year or two later. But Angara stood its ground, asserted itself, and today wields quite a lot of authority, both in this country and abroad. It has even been recognized as a partner-organization of the United Nations. What is the secret of its success?
I would say that the secret is that its mission, tactics, and action strategy were meaningfully formulated at the very outset. Many newly fledged social organizations waste their core efforts on finding sources of financing, the cherished goal being to get underwriting from the state budget or to charm wealthy sponsors. But budgets—and sponsors even more so—can often be unpredictable and unreliable. The rules of the game must be followed without a single misstep and someone else is always calling the shots. So, if such an organization stays afloat, it has clearly done nothing to deserve the appellation “social.”
Yet another—and even more prevalent—stereotype of action is to dive head-first into the political struggle, the purpose here being to propel one’s “own” people into positions of power. In that line of work, as in a sapper’s job, mistakes are not forgiven: it takes only a couple of failures to nullify completely any influence that might have been established in the past. And practice shows that even a successfully orchestrated electoral campaign does not guarantee real success: once having secured a power mandate, the candidate soon forgets to whom he owes his new post, from whose nest he first took flight. His former comrades-in-arms are slighted, as a rule, because people in power do not appreciate being beholden to anyone.
Shirobokova, being a specialist in systems integration and management, took a different path. She directed all her irrepressible energy into locating and uniting resources—human, organizational, intellectual, material, etc. In 1996, when she threw herself into arranging the first international (!) women’s forum, Women for the Survival of the Planet, to be held in Irkutsk, she became acutely aware of the money pit that organizational expenses represented. And Angara had no cash and was never likely to have any. Yet cash is needed not as an end in itself but as a means to rent facilities, lease office equipment, secure transportation, etc. On the other hand, there might, for example, be a school with a fine auditorium but no money to buy computers. And then there might be a company with too many computers and no resources for personnel retraining. And right next door could be a transportation business that is scarcely making ends meet, with more vehicles than it knows what to do with but not enough orders and no funds for advertising.
Angara’s job is to find those loose ends and tie them up: the school lets the Forum use its premises, the children get a computer class, the computer company gets training in Moscow or internships abroad, the transportation business gets specialist consultations on the best routes and how to advertise in the media, the Forum gets its transportation, etc. Still, that “etc.,” although so easy to write, takes a lot of hard work to achieve. It involves bringing together tens and hundreds of people, understanding their interests and requirements, devising a common vector of mutual benefit, and countless other problems.
With money it’s always simpler, you just go out and buy the item or service that you need. But who really believes that Russia has transitioned to a market economy? It might seem that the folks in the Angara Union were doing nothing more than making creative use of the unspoken socialist principle of “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours”—a home-grown invention that had been perfected over decades of currency devaluation. But when only the very rich have money, the rules have gone out the window, and everyone is madly filching from everyone else—then why not resort to a mechanism that is tried and true? To date, this approach has worked almost flawlessly—uniting people, bringing them into partnership, fostering independence in an atmosphere of criminalized pseudo-capitalism.
Yet these examples of the computers and all the rest of it are deliberately primitive and do not reflect what the Union is really all about. They just show the outward result. It is a lot like explaining that a vehicle moves because its wheels go round... In actual fact, attracting resources so that nonprofit organizations can function is called fundraising and there is a real art to it. And what looks like a simple exchange of services has a technological designation of its own: the coordinating of resources via projects of mutual interest. And all that has to be learned.
This is why study was and remains the chief component, the foundation upon which the entire Angara edifice is constructed. Before starting to build their organization, the women studied hard and long, attending courses in Russia and abroad, going to seminars and conferences, and absorbing peer experience during internships and via Internet communities. And they learned a lot, to be sure: an understanding of current social processes, organization management, how to back their own projects, how to work with laws and documents, and, finally, how to teach others. One might wonder what it is that women need to learn. The one important thing that they need to know is how to live in a different world.
Take the most painful problem of all—unemployment, which has affected women disproportionately. These days, job hunting is an exact science. How to behave on the job market? How to grab an employer’s interest? How to analyze job postings? What job announcements are not worth replying to? What proposals can one make oneself? And so forth. The job market is like an iceberg: every proposal is merely a silhouette, and in its depths one can either find oneself or lose oneself forever. It is therefore extremely important to know how to correctly evaluate one’s own potential relative to market demands.
They began in the usual way, organizing several free business courses and setting up a consultancy, and then launched into large-scale educational projects such as Management, a nonprofit joint venture with Irkutsk State Technical University. Under the auspices of this project, 12 ISTU instructors underwent specialized training on the organization, development, and financing of initiative groups and social organizations, and today this course is one of the University’s official academic offerings. Similar projects are currently under way with other of Irkutsk’s higher educational institutions.
It can be said that today Angara is not just a social organization but a smoothly functioning educational and production complex that develops and implements new social technologies, trains skilled personnel, creates jobs, participates in international events, and conducts research. And it functions on two levels. The first focuses on things that society knows it needs, here and now: crisis centers, groups for the prevention of drug addition, and a lot more besides. And the second is future-oriented and involves things for which there is no current demand but which will definitely be needed tomorrow, such as preparing the ground and the public mindset for gender balance in society. (Practice has shown that the only socially prosperous countries are those in which at least 30% of the positions of power and leadership posts are occupied by women, while in our patriarchal country, this correlation is more on the order of 3%!)
Today Angara unites more than 30 women’s initiative groups, is holding the Fourth International Women’s Forum (not in Moscow, but in Irkutsk, by Lake Baikal!), and has founded crisis centers, the Association of Women Entrepreneurs, the Baikal Youth Information Center, the BAIKALiYA tourist information company, and many other nonprofit entities. Its ability to pay its own way is the envy of many large industrial concerns. One ruble put into social projects results ten rubles-worth of work done. On those terms, Angara records an annual turnover of at least $500,000.
It has been the inspiration for the Nonprofit Council of Irkutsk and Irkutsk Region, the Siberian women’s coalition known as the Women’s Lobby (53 organizations), the Baikal Network of Women’s Organizations in Irkutsk Region and the Republic of Buryatiya, a national company called My Right to Live without Violence, the Golos [Voice] coalition for the protection of voters’ rights, and other such organizations. Other ongoing projects are Equal Rights and Equal Opportunities for Women and Men in the Russian Federation, the Global Initiative for the Primary Prevention of Psychoactive Substance Abuse among Young People, Slave Trade Prevention, Homeless Children, Gender Education in the Baikal Area, Baikal Area Women’s Initiatives, Justice Restored... Just to list all the projects would require an entire brochure.
Meanwhile, Angara’s youth component deserves a special mention. The number of attractive twenty-year-old faces in its offices is simply overwhelming. And the activists include not only girls but a fair number of boys too. The atmosphere that the Union’s founders have managed to create make the young volunteers, it seems, even willing to pay extra for the chance to work for Angara. At least, the free time that they spend working there with none of the usual humdrum hassles are more like a holiday to them. These people are open to anything new: new knowledge, new skills, new acquaintances, new opportunities for professional growth. And where there are youngsters, there is a future.
Some of the unique features of Angara’s success may be judged from the BAIKALiYA tourist information company, which is run by the youngest enthusiasts. The company is only in its third year, but a steady and growing customer demand distinguishes it among dozens of other comparable tourist companies. In any event, right now—at the height of the current season—every month of next year is already completely booked. BAIKALiYA specializes in vacations for children and when they send the little ones to Baikal or to the village of Arshan, the last thing on the minds of the Angara women with children of their own is profit. What they care about is that the kids are fed on time, do not catch cold, are kept interested, and are not exposed to any of the risks that are so likely to arise when men are in charge.
But BAIKALiYA’s success is attributable to more than motherly concern and simple decency. For Angara this undertaking too, like all the others, rests on a global strategy and involves far-reaching plans. The women of Angara believe that the most promising source of employment for women consists in the proximity of Baikal and the development of tourism. And therefore BAIKALiYA is a pilot project that is being used to refine the necessary technologies and study the tourist market. And it was no accident that it all began with children. In the vacation camps, the little ones attend courses in ecological leadership, pick up trash, learn how to care about nature, prepare to become proponents of a healthy lifestyle, and take lessons in exerting the right kind of peer pressure on age-mates who might be inclined to abuse drugs. And so, in that vacation setting, the women of Angara are raising helpers and future comrades-in-arms.
The Angara’s stream is deep, its current is powerful, its goals are limpid and pure.