Rites of Place: Public Commemoration in Russia and Eastern Europe

From Public, to Private, to Public Again: International Women's Day in Post-Soviet Russia

 From Public, to Private, to Public Again: International Women’s Day in Post-Soviet Russia Choi Chatterjee On March 8, 2000, Kukly (Puppets), the satirical show, sponsored by the then-independent and outspoken Russian television channel NTV, aired a segment called “Women’s Day.” The sly puppets in the show had built a considerable following across the Commonwealth of Independent States by savagely lampooning celebrities and politicians,and were popular among a vast audience who delighted in the wicked caricatures and satirical representations of Yeltsin, Putin, and other political figures. The creators of Kukly had effectively used popular historical analogies and literary references to ridicule modern politics and politicians. But this time it appeared that the show had overstepped the bounds of both satire and good taste. It featured Putin as a playboy, surrounded by leading Russian politicians dressed as prostitutes and brothel owners, all eager to service him. As Putin cruised down Okhotnyi Riad and Tverskaya in his limousine clad in a Japanese robe, famous politicians turned prostitutes crowded around the car, clamoring for his favors.The leader of the Communist Party, Gennady Zyuganov,appeared as an expert in sadomasochism,dressed in a tight black skirt and brandishing a whip. Grigory Yavlinsky, the leader of the Yabloko Party,on the other hand,was shown as an inexperienced virgin,too nervous to flaunt his/her charms openly. At the end of the show, as the politicians turned prostitutes began to disrobe in anticipation of a mass orgy, each part of the body that they unclothed seemed to dematerialize. As soon as a hat  choi chatterjee was lifted off a head, the head itself disappeared. And when a glove was removed, the hand it had covered vanished. At the end of the show, Putin, having observed what had happened, said that the prostitutes seemed to have a problem with their internal content. Alexander Voloshin, head of the presidential administration, replied that they seem to have “a deficit of male essence.”1 Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the iconic Soviet Woman, once a mighty pillar of the Bolshevik symbolic universe and an incarnation of feminine virtues both Russian and Soviet, suffered a downfall . Throughout the better part of the twentieth century, the new Soviet Woman had been praised in song and verse, commemorated in various media for her heroic achievements, and eulogized in state-sponsored rituals for her heroic sacrifices.2 Even when she had exhibited un-Bolshevik attitudes during NEP—the New Economic Policy of the 1920s—or during collectivization, it was ascribed to a political backwardness born of a lack of education, rather than a desire to sabotage or intentionally harm the nation.3 She had participated in campaigns to raise industrial production and agriculture, fought the Germans at the front, kept the home fires burning through desperate economic times and military sieges, and raised generations of good Soviet citizens.4 Later, in the years following the Second World War, when she occasionally faltered as a mother and was blamed in state discourse for the social deviance and crimes committed by the youth, it was regarded as something that could be rectified through paternalistic state intervention. State dicta repeatedly reminded the emancipated Soviet Woman about her maternal and housewifely obligations.5 After 1991, the course was reversed, and the events of the decade had a particularly adverse impact on both the material status of women and their symbolic referents. Not only did women suffer from high rates of unemployment in the disintegrating economy of the 1990s,but also,as the Soviet welfare state retracted, women lost access to unemployment benefits, state subsidized child care,and medical services.Russian women were forced into the informal sectors of the economy as illegal purveyors of black market goods.The explosion of pornography in the media led to the increasing representation of Russian women as hypersexualized objects. Violence against women grew at an alarming rate, and Russian women were trafficked and coerced into international prostitution on a large scale. At the same time conservative politicians and sections within the Orthodox Church called on Russian women to repudiate both the Soviet and Western legacies of emancipation and feminism and to return to their roles as mothers and caregivers within the family, presumably to reclaim their once heroic and sacred stature.6 from public, to private, to public again  In the 1990s...