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MEMORIES OF DUBNA Thoughts on a Seminar: “Developing Strategies to Help Women’s NGOs in Russia and the CIS Defend the Interests of Women” August 2002
by Olga Lipovskaya
Although Dubna is a historically rich venue, our history with it has covered a mere 11 years. Yet it is history all the same. Eleven years ago have passed since we first came here—full of hope, in fighting trim, and scandalized by official efforts to prevent the meeting from taking place—to attend the first Independent Women’s Forum.
That was in perestroika’s romantic heyday, when hopes for a “bright future” were still alive and well, reinforced by our total lack of experience in the civil sector, our political naivete, and our swashbuckling sense of adventure. While open to internal dialog, there were times when we understood neither our own multifarious ideological positions nor the domestic political situation.
There is no point in going into too much detail about it: the events, experiences, sensations are all in the past now, and the train bringing us to Dubna 11 years later had changed beyond recognition. It is a high-speed commuter train now, and as we disembarked, I looked around and saw on every face and in every aspect the imprint of the passing years. That high-speed train had been just too speedy. (I was hit with that same sense of déjà vu on several later occasions, in multiple reflections produced by the distorting mirrors of time.)
What have we—the “women’s movement”—achieved in those ten-plus years: for women, for society, for ourselves as individuals, and for the movement? At a morning meeting that was compellingly reminiscent of old news footage of Party congresses, several of us had plenty of flattering things to say about ourselves and what we had done (this being another déjà vu, since it had all been said so many times before, every time we met in corridor, group, invitation-only, and public get-togethers).
The ten-year overview reminded me at one and the same time of the fake villages that Potemkin built to impress Catherine the Great and of a report by a Communist Party General Secretary. Our networks are huge, our projects gigantic. We keep each other informed in every possible way. The victory of feminism is just around the corner. Gender studies are advancing on a vast front, will soon win their rightful place in university and college departments and will transform the humanitarian discourse in academia.
And meanwhile, the women of Russia were wandering around wholesale warehouses and flea markets, trying to spot a bargain. Meanwhile, Dmitry Nagiev’s Windows—a blatant example of vulgarity and sexism—was being rerun on TV. Meanwhile, women in Chechnya were standing in one line after another for a certificate, a subsidy, a crust of bread, a response, a refusal. And the State Duma was in recess, which meant that it was vacation time too for those who for so many years and with such signal lack of success (in the sense of actually achieving their declared goal) have been “lobbying for a law on Equal Rights and Equal Opportunities” but in so doing have never bothered to seek the support of “the women at the grass roots.”
The movement, my dears, is not a “network,” not a “database,” not “gender studies.” The movement is militant fellowship, solidarity of action, mutual support in those times when our rights are being impugned and flouted. It is joint initiatives against violence in daily life and in society, against discriminatory legislation, the violation of good laws, sexism in the media and in culture. It is when a researcher is motivated in her work by the idea that an activist will convert her discoveries into action through the linkage of a “network” or “umbrella” organization that brings them together. But if you agree with this definition, then we have no movement at all. So let us try to figure out what we do have, breaking it down as “The Problem,” “Who or What Is To Blame?” and “What Is To Be Done?” We can get to “Where Do We Start?” later.
The Problem. We cannot presently flatter ourselves that we have anything resembling an organized—in terms of regions and problem areas—community. There is no solidarity. We go virtually unrecognized and unnoticed by society (simply put, by citizens, politicians, women, and the media). We are virtually invisible in the international women’s movement. It is hard to identify any serious positive changes that we have brought about, either in society or within society’s third sector, the civil sector—which, incidentally, also looks right past us. We have no common ideological position or strategy for joint initiatives. There are virtually no young people in “the women’s movement,” while conservationist and civil rights organizations have plenty.
Who or What Is To Blame? The main factor is our history. Russia has no tradition of a civil society, the embryonic beginnings of one having been smartly nipped in the bud at the turn of the last century, under pressure from a totalitarian system. In the opinion of many sociologists and political scientists, no real movement can develop in a mere 10 to 15 years. As a social group, women constitute a far more complex miscellany than, say, Social Democrats, veterans, pacifists, or conservationists. (Though they can, on the other hand, be members of those groups too, and therein lies our strength.) Therefore it is a more complicated matter for us to settle on a common platform and a common strategy. And let us not forget the “patriarchal” factor—that is to say, the eons of history that have defined a woman as secondary to a person wearing pants—which is firmly stuck in our heads too.
But these are external factors—in fact, we can call them “objective.” There are others, which relate directly to us and for which we are entirely responsible. Looking back at the development of our “movement,” you will find some interesting tendencies there, which also derive from historical roots—from repercussions of the Soviet era, for instance, or the economic “reforms.” The Soviet era shaped a certain personality type, a being whose take on life was really quite impenetrably cynical and not only placed personal interests higher than all others but even ranked them alone on the list of priorities. Such was the Soviet ruling clique, the nomenklatura.
And our “movement” has its own nomenklatura, which shares the same inherent characteristics: a cynical usurpation and assimilation of resources and other people’s achievements, an inflexible ousting of the competition, the manipulation of terminology, a hierarchical mindset. In the ten-plus years that have elapsed since perestroika began, they have occupied and reinforced their positions as “network and umbrella project heads” or “fund specialists.” While they aspire to “leadership,” they are in essence no more than big fish in a very small pond.
That small pond is us—those of us, that is, who have accepted, permitted, agreed to their subsisting on minor handouts and feeble dividends. The explanation is, of course, not far to seek: looking at a social cross-section of the “women’s movement,” it becomes clear that with dramatic economic changes and in an inert market, a huge cohort of women holding irrelevant advanced qualifications (technical or whatever) had fallen by the wayside. With the exception of those who had been prominent in the Party or the women’s soviets or had graduated from various major Soviet institutes—some of them academic but also those run by the Interior Ministry and the KGB—we were all of us forced to rub along somehow under these new circumstances. That was when the Western foundations, projects, grants made their first appearance. You snooze, you lose.
Some of us were, without question, naive, some were enterprising, and some were honest (although among them I do not, incidentally, number Masha Arbatova, who at one point stigmatized the “nomenklatura feminists” who were taking simple Russian women for a ride). But in percentage terms, thanks to the Soviet era, they offered no serious opposition to those who were not naive. Everybody has to eat. We women virtually always have families, children, all sorts of dependents, and the foundation market that had opened up was one port in the storm. The upshot was that the actual or priority motivation for activity in the women’s movement was not the desire to change anything for the many, for the majority, but the desire to make a living. (Incidentally, I am not against a person being rewarded for work done. It is just that, in my view, a balance should be maintained in the social sphere between the ideal goal and material satisfaction.)
But there it is, and what can you do about it? It is a known fact that claiming altruism as a justification for its actions is the human mind’s most wily, most Jesuitical gambit. (I remember many of my friends, male and female, in the civil rights movement justifying their emigration during perestroika, when one had to hurry up and get out even though the repressions were ongoing: “I would continue the fight, but I have to save my children.”) In a word, the Soviet era, like Lenin, was alive, is alive, and will be living for quite a while yet.
So now we have come to the question of “What is to be done?” It was still pleasant to hear some of the suggestions made in Dubna by women who had devoted a significant portion of their lives to our “movement.” Even if some did not agree with my radically critical position (another déjà vu: they did not stand up to speak but offered their comments in the corridors. Ladies, ladies, when will we ever be undaunted and at ease in a public space?) and preferred to praise rather than criticize. But the suggestions resonated. I reproduce them here from memory and from my notes.
We need to attract young women; we just need to figure out how.
We need to integrate ourselves into the third sector—that is, to establish links with other social organizations. We have quite a lot in common with them: we are, I hope, against the war in Chechnya (which is still going on, so don’t fool yourselves that it isn’t); we are against underground nuclear waste dumps; we are for environmental safety; we are against political repression. Aren’t we?
We need to “infiltrate the male community”—I am quoting Eleonora Ivanova here, and I agree. But perhaps we had better decide first what exactly we mean by that. And I hope that our views will not be diametrically opposed.
We need to exploit the national mechanism for improving the situation of women, to promote women’s interests. It has been written and signed, but not, I am sure, prescribed. And this means that at the very outset we need to make absolute pests of ourselves by doggedly demanding transparency and accountability from government agencies with regard to their “programs” on that head and by keeping a very close eye on the mechanism thereafter.
We need to study international legal documentation (tedious and interminable as it may be), so that we can use it as an argument in our “dialog with the power structure,” whose language (the language of the dialog, not of the power structure) we also need to learn. And I mean we—not the nomenklatura. They know it already but are not about to tell us. We must influence state budget allocations, the legislative process, the executive and judicial branches. As rhetoric, none of this is new. It is more complicated in practical application.
So now let us come back to the point. In order to organize joint initiatives and actions of solidarity, for us to be able to show that we are many and that we know what we want, there must be more of us. We must have leaders, coordinators, organizers. And I am not talking about those who are just faking it.
And it seems to me that we need to rid ourselves of an entirely superfluous nomenklatura—meaning that we need to go one-on-one, forgoing intermediaries, with the government agencies that have already begin to “make like” they are interested in “women’s problems,” in response to pressure from international agreements.
This will not be an easy process. But, painful as it will be, it should—since anything is possible—be a healing process. It will take quite some time (as the poet Nekrasov said, “And fine as fine that time will be / but it shall not be seen by you or me”), but for now—don’t get me wrong—“Developing Strategies to Help Women’s NGOs in Russia and the CIS Defend the Interests of Women” strikes me as more or less the way to go. Admittedly, I have said nothing here about the CIS, but I have a strong suspicion that it would not be a whole lot different. In short, my suggestion is to start working in the sweat of our brows with the pen-pushers in the halls of power. And by working, I mean exerting gradual, consistent, organized, cooperative pressure. We can leverage the experience we have had with our “internal” nomenklatura in dealing with its government counterpart.
I dare say that it is also a good idea to stay alert for terminological manipulation, which is what happens when higher-level functionaries start pretending that they know the meanings of “gender,” “equal rights and equal opportunities,” and, one of my personal favorites, “gender mainstreaming”—an international expression that to me is lip service, pure and simple. Which is to say, empty prattle intended to signify “panhuman values” and “dedication to the ideas of democracy and equality” in the higher echelons of patriarchal power (where everything is decided by weapons, oil, drugs, and gold). I mention this for a reason, because the nomenklatura is the same everywhere and its most powerful weapon is... “words, words, words.”
I enjoyed returning to Dubna. I remembered the kind of person I used to be, full of hopes and aspirations. That was the beginning of my new life, when I began doing what I love to do and want to do, and in my personal life these 11 years have without question represented a move in the right direction. Over those years, my children have grown and given me grandchildren. I have made a lot of friends in various corners of the world. Articles and translations have been published under my name. And even my weary skepticism about our “movement” does not leave me disappointed, because if you get on with it and if there is a lot to get on with, you will be busy for the rest of your life, and way beyond.
And the departure from Dubna was radiant. The previous evening, a string chamber ensemble had performed for us—luminous music that soothed the soul—and the sight of those young people playing those classical compositions with such enthusiasm inspired in me, for the umpteenth time, the hope that all is not yet lost. But then, if you ask me, nothing is ever really lost. The key is to believe, to work, to live. And to think. And to act.
31 August 2002