THE GODDESSES STAYED HOME

On the Results of the Ratings of Russia’s One Hundred Leading Politicians
By Nadezhda Azhgikhina

The female residents of Mount Olympus, according to Homer’s testimony, did not take part in the discussions about starting the Trojan War. The decision was taken by a council of male gods, and the storyteller’s brief comment on the female celestial beings was simply, “The goddesses stayed home.” This fully corresponded to the conceptions and everyday life of ancient Greece where a woman could not speak out in public, could not even leave her home without permission of the master, and if she engaged in learning and studies, she risked her life. In sum, the killing of a female individual (as of a child) was not considered by the ancient Greeks to be a major sin: she was just a thing. The difference between the political practices of Russia and the customs of ancient Greece is an abyss at least as wide as between a javelin and a self-guided missile. Yet a surprising parallel troubles the imagination, namely the results of the ratings of “the one hundred leading politicians of Russia,” done for “The Independent” newspaper by the “Vox Populi” firm and published in the newspaper every month starting with January 1993. More precisely troubling is the place that our women contemporaries occupy in this rating. Even correcting for the bias of the experts, one has to recognize that the total sum of these women enables one to draw conclusions about public opinion tendencies and about the character of the society in which we live.

Let us begin with 1993. Although there are no women among the top ten, their representation among the 100 Olympians over the entire year testifies to a pluralism of opinion and political discussion. There was Marina Salye (Democratic Russia, in January and February), Valeria Novodvorskaya (Democratic Union, in January), Sazhi Umalatova (The Front for National Salvation, in January), Nina Andreevna (All-Union Communist Party [b], in January), Elena Bonner (March, April, May, June, October, November, December), Galina Starovoitova (Democratic Russia, in March), Ludmila Vartazarova (chair of the Socialist Workers Party, in October), Alevtina Fedulova (leader of the bloc “Women of Russia,”). The indisputable leader of the contest was Ella Pamfilova (January, February, March, April, October, November, December) – only she made it into the “one hundred” most influential politicians for the entire year, placing 73-75 on the final list. In 1994 a new session of the State Duma began its work and it included for the first time the “Women of Russia” bloc [made up of several women’s groups which joined forces in order to qualify for the elections and gain enough votes to pass the 5% minimum required to get into the Duma]. Its leaders Alevtina Fedulova (at one time deputy speaker of the Duma) and Ekaterina Lakhova, are named by the survey experts nearly every month in 1994, and along with them is Irina Khakamada, the general secretary of the Party for Economic Freedom, and Ella Pamfilova continues to figure on the list. These four are the most influential women politicians for the entire year, with rankings as follows: Fedulova (83rd place), Lakhova (91st), Khakamada (92nd) and Pamfilova (100th). In February of 1995 this well known foursome is joined by the chair of the Central Bank Tatyana Paramonova, who moves from 52nd place in February to 20-21st place in July and then disappears in November. Nonetheless, overall for that year she ranks highest among the “political ladies,” in 42nd place, followed by the “Women of Russia” leaders Lakhova (59th) and Fedulova (88th), and then comes Khakamada in 79-80th place.

The influence of these Olympian women declined after the 1995 national elections: the two “Women of Russia” leaders disappeared from the list because their bloc failed to get 5% of the vote. Irina Khakamada hung on at the tail of the list through the spring months, but by early summer the “one hundred” included only Naina Yeltsina [wife of the president]. In August, as an echo of the just concluded electoral campaign’s slogan “vote or lose out,” Tatyana Dyachenko appeared on the list – Yeltsin’s younger daughter and the inspirational force of the campaign – in 26th place, ahead of regional governors and government ministers. The rest of the year her position rose to 14th and then 10th place. In the overall rating for 1996 Tatyana Dyachenko is the only woman, with 83 points.

In 1997 this tendency continues; Tatyana Dyachenko is securely among the top 20 (in July and August she is in 7th place, and 9th in November) and overall for the year in 12th place. Another woman who was already twice on the monthly list, Irina Khakamada, although she had become the new chair of the state committee for the support and development of small entreneurship, did not make it onto the year’s overall list.

A few words about 1998. In the first months the rating experts included, in addition to Tatyana Dyachenko, the director of ORT, Ksenia Ponomarev (65th place in January, 70th in February and 56th in March), Irina Khakamada (stabilized in 75-76th place) and a staff member of President Yeltsin’s administration Victoria Mitina (from 84th to 60th place in those months). In July, Paramonova’s name appeared once again (a result of a new appointment) and she remains on the list until December. In August there appears the Minister of Labor and Social Development Oksana Dmitrieva, and in October and continuing to year’s end, the new deputy chief of Yeltsin’s administration Joanne Pollyeva joins the “one hundred.” We do not yet have the final overall ratings for the year 1998 [this article was written early in 1999], but we can already surmise that Tatyana Dyachenko will be the only woman on the list, since her monthly ratings improved: in September and October she was in 5th place and the rest of the time mostly among the first ten – a big gap between her and the other women politicians.

It should be said that among the candidates for this list there were also other well known and influential women, for example, the first woman astronaut Valentina Tereshkova, the deputy speaker of the Duma Svetlana Goryacheva, the deputy speaker Elena Mizulina, and Naina Yeltsin. However the experts evidently did not consider them sufficiently authoritative and these four women were not in the “one hundred.”

This whole picture makes quite an impression. According to this study, the influence of women politicians is not just minimal, it is steadily declining. In 1993, even if only fleetingly on the list, there were women representing a broad spectrum of political forces from extreme left (Nina Andreevna) to the right (Valeria Novodvorskaya). In subsequent years the influence of the newer nomenklatura became stronger – persons defined not so much by convictions as by their positions (minister, banker, etc.) After the fall of “Women of Russia” women legislators disappeared from the list. From 1995 on not a single woman Duma deputy (and up to 1999 they were 11% of the total number of deputies), not even the women committee chairs and the deputy speaker came within the experts frame of vision. Instead another tendency was evident – the influence of women directly representing access to money (Paramonova of the Central Bank) and access to the body “Himself” (staffers of Yeltsin’s administration and his daughter). The phenomenon of Tatyana Dyachenko, whose rating steadily rose as Boris Yeltsin’s health declined, is a vivid illustration of today’s Russian-style perception of “the woman question.” Not an elected Russian activist but the daughter of a tsar, who maybe by exercising a firm hand can bring the country out of its chronic crisis; it happened before, that Russia was led by strong-willed clever women rulers. No other state had so many independent women sovereigns, beginning with Princess Olga, and the people’s memory in the depth of its sub-consciousness preserves this information. …

There was bad luck, a long time ago, when our tsarinas mounted the throne either after the death of their husbands or as a result of a palace revolution. In the Russian state at that time as in other countries, no constitution existed and not even the word “democracy.” The Russian democrats, extolling the idea of women’s active participation in public life [the author probably has in mind the 19th century], unwittingly hastened the coming of the Soviets ,who quickly harnessed the members of the weak sex to the work shifts of the five year plans and pushed them completely aside from such a troubling thing as politics. Was there not a single savvy woman in the USSR? Or was politics not women’s business? Or was it just not for the women inhabitants of one sixth of the earth’s landmass, and as for Europe, well let the people there do what they want? Or did the essence of the problem lie elsewhere? These are topical relevant questions even today.

Since those ratings began to be published, women have become only 7.7% of our parliament (as against 11% in the recent past) and fewer women politicians made the list of the “most influential.” There appeared deputy premier Valentina Matvienko, and Liubov Sliska, the first deputy speaker of the Duma, but this did not change the balance of forces. As before, the women politicians are low in the ratings. The exception until recent months is the very same Tatyana Dyachenko. The government has changed in composition, more than once. A new president was elected [Putin], but it seems that his promise to involve women in the processes of running the country remains just campaign rhetoric and the “second sex” does not have a worthy place on political Mount Olympus. “Democracy minus women is not democracy.” Under that slogan, at the crest of the period known as Perestroika, there arose a new social movement naively assuming that in the new Russia, the dream of liberals in all eras about equal rights and opportunities would at last be realized. The dreamers were wrong. Contemporary Russian politics, unlike in the so-called developed countries, is not inclined to integrate women into the decision-making process. Even if our government ratifies another hundred international documents, if the president issues more pre-election decrees on the need to include the weak sex in the structure of power, it will not change anything. There where democracy exists only nominally (as by the way in those famous Soviet times when women composed one third of all elected bodies), women’s voice will not be heard in politics. So much for “the voice of the people.”