Global Policy Forum

By Sabrina Tavernise

As women walked with bouquets of flowers, gifts from the men in their lives on this Women's Day, a small group of friends here in Russia's northern industrial and cultural center were celebrating in a different way.

Two were sitting in a smoke-filled art-scene café watching the film "I Shot Andy Warhol," about the radical American feminist Valerie Solanis. Another was home with her children. Still another was painting banners for a demonstration to remind residents what the Russian observance Saturday of International Women's Day - a national holiday here since Soviet times - is really about.

"It's a fake holiday," said Olga Lipovskaya, 49, chairwoman of the St. Petersburg Center for Gender Issues. "All these flowers, they are false offerings of affection. I don't want a tulip. I would rather have rights, power and money."

Only one of the four friends would call herself a feminist. But they find a sisterhood with one another and live in ways that even the most emancipated Western women might find intimidatingly liberated. For St. Petersburg, Women's Day has a meaningful past. Many historians argue that it was the women of St. Petersburg who celebrated the day in 1917 with a demonstration "for bread and peace" who touched off the overthrow of the czar. Soon thereafter, Russian women were among the first in the world to receive the right to vote.

Women's Day "is a holiday to celebrate the absolutely wonderful radicalism of the 1920s," said Alla Mitrofanova, one of the four friends, who helped Russian women learn about the Internet in the early 1990s. The Soviets imposed egalitarianism from above. A quota system ensured that women occupied a certain number of government posts. Women studied at universities alongside men. Cafeterias, laundries and day care centers opened in cities to ease women's burden at home.

In today's Russia, however, the quota system has been eliminated, and women have all but disappeared from top government posts. The privatization of state assets after the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 overwhelmingly benefited men. Women, who had worked in factories and on construction, were glad to abandon such toil for lives as homemakers. Mitrofanova, 43, made such a choice. Despite her untraditional approach to motherhood - she chose a father for her children by asking various male friends - she decided to become a stay-at-home mother for her two sons. She deplores the fact that women's work in the home is not valued and talks wistfully of the social services, like free day care, secured by feminists during the early Soviet era, but now in decline.

"Women will never win in the fight within the establishment for power," she said. "Why should I try when I can achieve so much more at home?"

In Russia today, feminism, and activism more generally, is regarded with suspicion. Russians, cynical from the economic chaos of the last decade and the force-fed politics of Soviet times, scorn activism as naive. Besides, the problems of other social groups, like migrants from the Caucasus, who face tremendous prejudice in Russia, are much more serious, the women in this circle said. Even so, Lipovskaya and her helpers were painting signs on Friday for the demonstration Saturday. A self-described former hippie, who worked in low-paying cleaning and doorman jobs in Soviet times, she is one of the very few advocates of political protest. In 1992, a year after the demise of the Soviet Union, she founded the Gender Center.

Lipovskaya asserts that women have lost out in the last decade during Russia's transition to capitalism. Even so, when men and women found themselves adrift in the free-for-all that followed communism's collapse, suddenly facing the loss of jobs and identities, it was women who proved more adaptable, landing jobs in service and in small businesses.

Despite the sharp decline in political representation, which many argue was in any case only for show and did not give women any real power, women seem to have done better than men in the economic transition.

While life expectancies for men fell four years, to 59 years from 63, in the decade ending in 2001, women's life spans fell by only two, to 72. Alcoholism was largely responsible for men's decline. Another in the group of friends, Roza Khatskelevich, provides a model for other women through her professional success. Khatskelevich, an arts academy administrator in Soviet times, runs a resource center for nongovernmental organizations, which she founded in 1992. She shies away from the feminist label, though, saying it puts her in a box.

"I have no political platforms," she said. "I don't like the system of rules the word 'feminist' implies."

Even so, she has raised her son as a single mother, while providing leadership to her mostly female staff, and, by all accounts, she has lived the life of an empowered woman. Russian women do not identify with Western models of feminism, she said, because, quite simply, they do not feel discriminated against.

That could be changing, as younger women come of age. Irina Aktuganova, director of the Cyber-Femin-Club, a group that helps women use the Internet, and of the small cafe where the film was showing, said universities are creating gender studies departments.

In addition, women are beginning to enter local governments, although in the lowest positions. The St. Petersburg League of Women Voters says 43 percent of local administrators are women, up from 32 percent in 1998.

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