Abstract
The dynamics of political processes in the postcommunist states of Eastern Europe in the 2000s to early 2020s demonstrated a significant number of new challenges and caused many issues, including those related to the transformation of the ways and models of political behavior, civic participation, protest actions, and so on. All these elements of social and political life, in my opinion, have a gender dimension deserving a detailed analysis. In this article, based on Belarusian, Russian, and Ukrainian cases, I consider what role women have played up to this point, and continue to play, in the public policy of the region and what ideological background serves the theoretical basis of this activity. In particular, these issues are analyzed in relation to the conflict situation—the war in Ukraine, which aggravated not only political, but also sociocultural and ideological confrontation in the studied societies. More or less commonplace is the conviction that to date none of these countries, considering all their fundamental differences, has achieved a sustainable gender balance in the highest governing institutions, and the gender approach is not sufficiently and/or effectively integrated into the policy-formulation process. At the same time, it is impossible to deny the fact that bright, charismatic persons who have appeared in the last 15 years—such as Yulia Tymoshenko, Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya, Maria Kalesnikava, Yulia Galyamina, Yulia Navalnaya, and more—have made up a kind of collective “female face of politics” in postcommunist societies of Eastern Europe. I examine the practical consequences of these changes, and also look at those ideas and ideologies that influenced the formation of this portrait of a new sociopolitical reality. The range of these ideas is very wide and includes the legacy of the Soviet female-emancipatory project, European liberal thought, post-Soviet national projects, and other similar phenomena.
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Notes
The following fact is quite indicative (and not in a good way): Pamfilova headed the Commission on Human Rights under the President of the Russian Federation for several years from 2002. Later (since 2014), she was also the Russian Ombudswoman and had a reputation as a fairly liberal public figure. However, in August 2022, journalists noticed that for an official meeting with Vladimir Putin, Pamfilova wore a brooch in the shape of the letter Z, which is considered a symbol of the war in Ukraine. Apparently, it is worth concluding that this letter completely crosses out Pamfilova’s entire “liberal” past.
One of the most prominent members of the movement is artist and LGBT activist Sasha Skochilenko, who was arrested for replacing price tags in a supermarket with leaflets with antiwar slogans. Currently, she remains in the pretrial detention center in St. Petersburg despite serious health problems.
Spivak, in her work “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, describes the situation of the double exclusion of the Other (of a different culture and politically lesser one) on the example of the relationship between Indian women and representatives of the British colonial administration (Spivak 2022, pp. 93–94). I would like to avoid direct analogies here, however, I cannot but wonder whether a similar situation is being reproduced in the conditions of the war on the territory of Ukraine within the interaction of the new pro-Russian administrations with local residents, primarily with women. I believe that in order to answer this question, reliable and voluminous empirical data, which are inaccessible at the moment to a satisfactory extent, are needed.
We are fully aware that this study turned out to be too “Moscow-centric” and does not reflect all the diversity of regional and local processes related to the representation of women in today’s Russian politics. Of course, the specifics of the evolution of feminism in Moscow and St. Petersburg differ from the corresponding processes in the Far East, and even more so in the republics of the North Caucasus. We hope that we will be able to overcome this shortcoming in further works.
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Sharova, V.L. Feminism as an antiwar strategy and practice: the case of Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine. Stud East Eur Thought 74, 521–534 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-022-09520-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11212-022-09520-y