DITOR'S INTRODUCTION

A decade ago people in Eastern Europe and the USSR dreamed about freedom of speech - genuine freedom without the prohibitions of censorship and deleted paragraphs if not whole chapters from books and magazines, without "the word" from bosses on the presidium, without the crackle of radio-channel jamming so familiar to all who lived in the "cold war" era.

We got this freedom, each country in its own way, and for some years now we have prided ourselves that at least we have this, and it cannot be taken away. It is one of the major palpable positive results of "the velvet revolution" in Eastern Europe, of the struggle for independence in the Baltic countries, of opposing the ideological system, and of the heroic and romantic years of Perestroika in Russia.

Now, years after this long-awaited liberation from serfdom (and this is precisely how some analysts characterize what happened in the USSR during Perestroika), many people are discontented. It turns out that freedom does not bring prosperity and happiness to the majority, but is often problematic in and of itself. This is so, not only because freedom of speech has in these past years become a war of the mass media empires, and not only because mass culture has swamped our country, imposing a severe censoring in the selection of goods and services, and tastes and preferences. Analysts and journalists increasingly talk about self-censorship, that insidious legacy of Soviet censorship, about censorship by financial capital, and about the dependence of those who write and photograph on various political interests.

Virtually no one mentions that there is yet another level of censorship, gender censorship. It makes itself felt, like all kinds of gender discrimination in the former communist bloc countries, in hidden ways, but it is immediately visible to the observant eye and reveals itself in the dominant images of the culture, as well as in the attitudes of creative men and women, and in the differences between them in position and status in various spheres of life.

You can see this most clearly in literature. A considerable part of We/Myi's current issue is devoted to the problem of gender censorship in the literature of various countries. The conversation about this began several years ago when the article by the American writer Meredith Tax first appeared in Russian in our magazine. Now we offer our readers some articles by writers from several European countries, along with a new one by Meredith. These articles are about dramatic and alarming facts and tendencies. Taken together, in our view, they not only give an emotional impulse, but also the hope that gender censorship, now that it has been named and analyzed, will recede into history.

We trust you will also find interesting the articles prepared for our latest "Journal Within a Journal" by our colleagues in Chelyabinsk with guest editor, Tatiana Kalinina. All best to you,

Nadezhda Azhgikhina