A History of Women in Russia: From Earliest Times to the Present by Barbara Evans Clements (review)

This work by Barbara Evans Clements is a history of women in "all the Russias" from roughly Kyiv Rus' baptism until 2010. She states,

It concentrates on the Russians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Poles, Lithuanians, Estonians, Latvians, and Jews who made up a majority of the population

(P. xiii).

The book is designed to be a general history of women and their agency throughout this region's history by examining it through political, economic, legal, and social lenses, though not gender. It also seeks to examine the history of women in the conquered Far East and Central Asia and their complex relations with the Russian and Soviet states.

While these are all noble goals aimed at examining women as more than ancillaries, this work falls short on a number of issues. First, Clements presents very little original research. She names Barbara Alpern Engel and Natalia Pushkareva as scholars who have advanced the field of women's history in Russia and to whose work she would like to contribute. Unfortunately, she fails to achieve this by not providing anything new, original, enlightening, or even informative. Inaccuracies and inconsistencies abound in this book with numerous incorrect dates, facts, territory names, wrong countries of origin, and so on, which make the work unsuitable for those wanting even a basic understanding of women's history in Russia.

Overall, the need for this book is not obvious. Barbara Alpern Engel recently wrote Women in Russia 1700-2000, ¹ which sought to achieve Clements' goal of presenting a concise and general history of the topic. Clements has only "added" an earlier time frame, ² a brief discussion of non-European women, and individual perspectives of selected, high-profile women. The book's structure is temporal, with eight chapters beginning in the year 900 and ending in 2010. Each chapter has several subsections that include law, economics, different classes, culture, and politics. Her chapters are arranged in the following order: the Rus', the Domostroi, the eighteenth century, industrialization, revolutionary movements, terror and World War II, the late Soviet period, and the post-Soviet period. Every chapter includes a subsection on extraordinary or infamous women and their deeds with pictures, ³ quotes, diary entries, or short excerpts of published works. This offers an informative perspective from the women Clements chooses to discuss in her work and is something new in comparison to Engel.

Yet even with this seemingly good organization, Clements of ten mismatches and structures her chapters poorly, covering too much time in each without more thorough examination of particular topics. Her choice of women subjects is not exactly logical, as it is random and often excludes or minimizes many important women who should have been mentioned. For instance, Vladimir Lenin's wife and former Commissar of Education Nadezhda Krupskaya is not included in the chapter about revolutionary change. Vera Figner is also only briefly mentioned without noting that she was a former medical student, ⁴ Narodnik, and terrorist in the "Narodnaia Volia." Additionally, the poet Anna Akhmatova is never mentioned in the chapter about the Great Terror. Akhmatova is a giant figure of twentieth-century Russian literature who, in many ways, expressed in her poetry women's experiences of loss and uncertainty during the Stalinist terror. She is not even mentioned until the chapter about the final Soviet years where Clements discusses samizdat. Unlike Akhmatova, Evgenia Ginzburg is mentioned in both the chapters about terror and samizdat. Why not also mention Akhmatova in both?

The genre of the book under review can be categorized as narrative history, driven by a chronological account of events rather than an analytical argument or a particular research problem. Regrettably, the book did not avoid two pitfalls associated with this genre: a concentration on the deeds of great men (women in this case) and excessive generalizations. Except for the final chapter, where Clements personally interviews a...