Polls also found that many women were optimistic about their personal prospects. In the 2002 poll, 75 percent of respondents said that they believed that they would be able to “find real love,” “create a happy family,” “raise good children,” and “have good friends and interesting work.” In 2007, the Belarusians Ekaterina Sondak, the businesswoman, and Elena Khainovskaia, the physician, shared this optimism. Despite the hardships and disruptions they had lived through, despite the political repression and poverty of Belarus, they had managed well. The Sondaks’ clothing store in Murmansk was a going concern, their son Andrei was an accountant, and their daughter Irina was a student at the best university in Minsk. The Khainovskiis had done well too. Elena’s husband Sergei worked in a bank, where he earned a decent salary, and she kept up her medical practice. Her daughter Tatiana and son Andrei were successful students. Both mothers hoped for still more for their daughters. Asked “Do you think Irina will have a better life than you did because of the changes since 1991?” Sondak replied, “I’m sure of that. She is getting a perfect education. And now if she wants to have success in her life, she will have more opportunities than I did in our times.” Khainovskaia was less certain. “I think so,” she said, “because our society develops and changes and I think that it will give Tania an opportunity to have a better life.”56
In 2007, the daughters, Irina and Tatiana, aspired to have good jobs and happy families, as their mothers had, but to enjoy more comforts and freedoms than the older generation had known. Tatiana, always enthusiastic and optimistic, declared, “I want to have three children and enough money to provide perfect lives for them, my brother, my parents, and my grandparents, and to work in the tourism business.” Irina, a steelier personality, had a less rosy vision: “When I was younger I wanted to become a businesswoman. But now I realize that this is very hard. And being a female is one of the hardships. That’s why I want to have a more or less well-paid job with the possibility of promotion. I want to get married, have children, and do everything possible to make their lives easier. I hope that in the future my children will be able not only to dream about a perfect job but to have it.” Her limited hopes were widely shared by women across the FSU.57
In 2008–2009, Tatiana studied tourism at Central Washington University. A year later, asked about her hopes for the future, she wrote:
“I don’t want to leave my country. I was born here. I want to see it develop and flourish. I don’t want to have to explain to people from different countries what Belarus is and where it is situated. I want people to know my country. I don’t want tourists who are planning their European tour to miss my country. I want them to come here and to see what we have to show and to feel what we have to give them. We are young. We are only 20 years old. It takes time for any country to develop, to grow, to bloom. Rome wasn’t built in one day either.
I want to work in the tourism business, because to my mind it’s the easiest way of peaceful and beneficial communication between people from all over the world. Ideally, tourism is about creating, not about destroying, but in reality it’s not always true. So it’s our job, young peoples’ job, to create. I want to create an image of my country so that people will want to know about it. I want them not to be afraid of the mythical dangers that await them on the streets of our cities (many still believe that there are bears walking along the streets in Minsk).
I’m proud of my country and I want other people to understand why I’m proud of it. And when I say ‘country,’ I don’t mean the government or the economy… I mean the people and nature and everything around us that we see every day.”
SOURCE: TATIANA KHAINOVSKAIA, LETTER, NOVEMBER 23, 2010.
Conclusions
The first twenty years of the post-Soviet period were a mélange of gains and losses. By lowering the standard of living, increasing unemployment, and intensifying gender patterns that disadvantaged women, these decades made women’s lives more difficult. By weakening the remaining autocratic governments and giving birth to more democratic ones, they expanded civil liberties and contacts with the outside world. Activists grabbed the new opportunities, as they had done before in Russian history. A handful became leaders. Some confronted the authorities. Women in all the successor states launched independent organizations that addressed social problems. Feminism once again flourished within the intelligentsia.
While the activists organized, ordinary folk devoted themselves to adjusting to the new realities. By the early 2000s, women in some of the European republics were telling pollsters that although life was still hard, they had hope for the future. Elena Khainovskaia and Ekaterina Sondak were typical. No one had asked them if they wanted the Soviet Union to end. The country’s leaders had simply ended it, and expected them to deal with the wreckage. They had done that well.
Their daughters, Tatiana and Irina, were among the lucky children of the new world, for they had loving, hard-working parents who nurtured their talents. They were middle-class people, not rich by the standards of their country, but able to afford stylish clothes and automobiles. The girls surfed the web, watched pirated foreign movies on the social networking site V kontakte, and devoured the Harry Potter novels. They text-messaged. They were critical of the autocratic behavior of the Lukashenko regime. These liberties and possibilities, taken for granted by them, had been unimaginable when their mothers were their age. Their mothers, although wistful about what had been lost, rarely talked to their daughters about the way things had been before.
By the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, the nations that had been born from the dismantling of the Soviet Union were settling into revised political and economic arrangements and new social consensuses that preserved many Soviet values. With that stability came increasingly authoritarian governments that sought to rein in independent groups and independent voices. Foreign funding receded, regulations on civic organizations increased, and the difficulties of maintaining voluntary organizations overwhelmed many activists. Perhaps their movement would be seen, from the distance of several decades, as an efflorescence born of the instability of the immediate post-Soviet period.
Or perhaps the situation was very different now, because the world was very different—more mobile, more connected—so that emancipatory ideas flowed as freely across borders as the embroidered jeans and girly magazines. Irina and Tatiana were far freer to express themselves and explore the world than their mothers had been. They also had very different points of reference and expectations. In 2010, Tatiana and her classmates at the Belarusian State University publicly criticized one of their teachers for being “totalitarian,” because she discouraged classroom discussion. These students did not long for the old ways, which they associated with “totalitarianism.” They thought teachers should listen to them, not simply talk at them. Perhaps small rebellions such as theirs portended greater changes when they and the other millions of young women across the FSU became adults. Perhaps some of them would join the ranks of all those women in Russian history who demanded better than the status quo, and made history in the process.