Equality and quotas in Russia - Interview with Irina Tartakovskaya

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Face of the russian parliament building, the Duma. On top: The flag of the Russian Federation. Photo: marcella bona - Some rights reserved CC-BY-NC-SA

Irina Tartakovskaya
  • The Soviet Union was said to be the first country in which equality, including that between men and women, triumphed. But was that equality a reality?

Equality of the sexes was declared in the country. But in fact, if we look at Soviet history, we can detect different policies with respect to gender equality. The primary motive was not equality as such, but that of involving women in building of socialism. To that end, women had to be brought out of the traditional patriarchal family, be given the chance to become working mothers, buttressed in that context by the state. Was that equality? No, because women largely worked in economic sectors with low wages and low prestige. They earned less and were never allowed access to the reins of any power.

  • But in Soviet times, there were the 30-percent quotas for the Supreme Soviet...

Yes, but the Supreme Soviet was a decorative body, where no important decisions were made. The decisions were taken at the Central Committee of the Communist Party, and at the Politburo. Over the entire course of Soviet history, there was only one woman there, the minister of culture, Ekaterina Furtseva.

  • Did feminism exist in the Soviet Union?

In the USSR, from the very beginning, feminism was perceived (in accordance with Engels and Bebel) as a bourgeois movement, i.e. negatively.

  • In the 1990s, it seemed to many progressive women that gender equality was possible. It didn’t happen, though. Why?

The women’s movement that emerged at that time shared the fate of all of civil society in Russia in the following years. It was not an important element, and it quickly faded away, along with other political forces.

  • What do you think, does Russia need feminism as a political movement?

Feminism, as the struggle for the genuine acknowledgment of equal rights and equal opportunities for women (economical and political), for the possibility of choosing one’s own path through life, for respecting of the rights of persons of any sex, is, undoubtedly, needed.

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Irina Tartakovskaya. Sociologist, specialist in gender issues and the history of the feminist movement. Senior Fellow at the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Natalia Bitten Journalist, political
scientist, writer, feminist. Has published academic essays and the
novel 'Mainstream' (2007) under the pseudonym of Natalja Kim.

She specializes in Gender Studies. Edited the largest
political paper in the area of Kemerow. Currently she works on the
internet portal Klub (traveling women). She is an active member of
'Initiativegruppe Für Feminismus'.

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