NADIA, NADINA, NADEZHDA

by Anna Dunaevskaia.

[this is a summary]

Nadia Kuznetsova learned to catch fish when she was six years old. No one taught her how to do it; she was just extremely jealous of the boys from the kolkhoz [collective farm], who would sit silently, out on the bank of the local stream, and fish in the early mornings. One morning she couldn't hold back and tore off three meters of white thread from a spool to make a fishing line, used a paper clip for a hook, and set to work. Her grandmother was amazed to see her granddaughter, fish in hand, running home. "Nadia! What did you do that for?" And the six year old Nadia firmly answered, "We need to eat meat. And fish - is meat."

Nadia Kuznetsova understood too early what money was - or rather, the lack of it. Left without parents when she was very young, she lived with her grandmother, whose pension at that time was all of 12 rubles. Nadia's pension (for her parents) was bigger than that - 18 rubles. They lived on that 30 rubles. Once a month they bought salt, sugar, flour, and oil, and lived on it until the next pension payment arrived. Sometimes her grandmother would buy her some caramels from the village grocery store as a 'holiday' present. The rest of the time, the food on the table was exclusively from their garden.

On the day of her first catch, Nadia was lucky -- her uncle and aunt came to visit from town. Nadia, of course, didn't understand why her uncle's eyes glittered so, upon seeing her fishing tackle, but the next Sunday he brought her a gift -- a complete set of fishing equipment, and from then on Nadia learned how to catch fish better than the rest of the boys.

Her great grandmother didn't work a day in her life, though she could play the piano and the violin, and knew foreign languages, had seen Lenin, and was very well read. For the last 12 years of her life, she was completely blind, and had little Nadia read her the entirety of Ogonek magazine every month, and in return would tell her great granddaughter the stories of novels she had read in her youth... Nadia Kuznetsova went to a boarding school where the students were fed and clothed, which was a great source of support for her and her grandmother. And the school also had wonderful teachers, particularly her literature teacher, who was very strict with Nadia, asking twice as much of her, and who loved her very much, and called her Nadina... In the fifth grade, Nadia had a dream -- to learn to play the violin. She went to the Petrovskaia music school and began to beg them to take her for violin studies. The director was amazed by her stubbornness, and knew that she would not be able to pay the monthly five-ruble fee for studies. He talked to the boarding school director, wondering if the school could support the talented youngster, but the school did not find the money. Instead of Nadia, the music school took the daughter of the kolkhoz's accountant, who had money but no desire to learn.

Kuznetsova suffered this injustice of fate very much, and never stopped hoping to learn to play some musical instrument. Years later, she made sure her daughter got into music school, studying the violin. Her daughter not only graduated, but loved the violin so much that playing it when she was sad would turn her mood around.

In the ninth grade Nadia decided that she wanted to go to college and study psychology. She was a participant in sports competitions in Saratov, and once got involved in a fight, and separated the combatants. An elderly woman who witnessed the fight noticed her, saying, "Hey, you're a psychologist!" And at home and at the school people constantly asked her, "What is psychology?" She would respond, it's the science of the soul; I'm going to study the human soul.

As it turned out, it was easy for her to get in, although there were 17 candidates for each place. But what would she live on? She wouldn't consider turning to her grandmother for help. Nadia started working the night shift at a bread factory, because they paid twice as much for the night shift. In the morning, after her shift, the workers received bread, milk, and vegetable oil. She would go to the university, feeling that she might fall asleep as she walked. She still has her lecture notes: for the first forty minutes, her handwriting looks normal, then it drifts off...

After university, things got harder. She had a husband with a salary of only 110 rubles, and a small sickly child, who needed care in expensive clinics. Nadia had to learn the art of sewing and began to sell sweaters and dresses....

By the time Nadia became seriously interested in legal psychology (which necessitated getting a legal education), she had taught herself to sleep only three hours a night. She entered the correspondence school of the law institute, and came across sex discrimination for the first time. Her daughter, Katya, was increasingly sickly and needed to go to Moscow for treatment, but Nadia couldn't send her there with her father (everyone thought that he wouldn't do things the right way, or would get things mixed up), but at work, people -- women, particularly! -- started to look askance at her. Women, who should have understood how a mother with a sick child would feel.

Katya grew up. And Nadezhda got thoroughly involved with the women's movement. More than anything else, she, the chair of the Women's Parliament of Saratov Region, can't stand it when the ideas of feminism are misused. The way she put it:

"Why, in my opinion, do men not let us women be equal with them? Because women lack solidarity with each other. Men fight, disagree, and then drink a mug of beer and are friends again. Women can't do that, they're more petty. They remember some little thing, and can't forgive it until the end of their days. And that's not just a matter of vindictiveness, it's an amazing psychological phenomenon that doesn't allow the majority of women to rise above envy and vanity. It's these women that curse me as a feminist, and ask whether I hate men. And I patiently answer that, as long as we haven't overcome these female complexes -- impatience, dissatisfaction, spitefulness, envy -- there can't be any talk of women's full rights in contemporary society. I know what I'm talking about, based on the example of my own life."