From leaders Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and Mikhail Gorbachev, to cosmonauts Yuri Gagarin and Alexey Leonov, the enduring characters of the Soviet Union were rarely women. Laika was female, but she was a dog, and died a painful death shortly after her orbit in space.
Fast forward to the present day and president Vladimir Putin has built a cult of personality around wrestling tigers. Fighting in Ukraine has rejuvenated the military hero figure, football fans teeming with testosterone are causing havoc at Euro 2016 and the “Russian boy” is a cult look dominating the catwalk.
Now, a new exhibition launching in London wants to turn this macho culture on its head by celebrating the history of women’s contribution to the Russian state, from the time of relative liberation in the 1920s to the pressure to replenish the population after the second world war.
Elena Sudakova, the curator of Superwoman at Grad Gallery in London, says the ideal woman propagated by the Soviet authorities was “fearless, stoic and attractive”.
“She was a cow, a machine, a heroic worker, someone who could skydive, shoot to kill and a mother,” the curator says.
The exhibition is full of images produced by the state featuring women excelling at sport and caring for large broods of children, a collection which Sudakova says highlights the triple burden that women were expected to carry: work, family and children.
In the USSR “there was no way out” – especially from burden number three: “She had to become a mother,” Sudakova says. “The whole structure of the state was built around it.”
Like many struggles for women’s equality, the liberation of Russian women was closely tied to access to abortion.
Between 1917 to the mid 1920s, the Soviet Union witnessed a time of relative progress, during which it became only the seventh place in the world to allow women to vote, legalise abortion and introduce free mass education.
Under Lenin, the state built canteens and laundries so women could do less housework. Zhenotdels – women’s rights departments – were installed in government agencies, and key figures were promoted by the state, including Lenin’s own wife Nadezhda Krupskaya, who appeared in government propaganda.
But then things started to fall apart, Sudakova says. The Zhenotdels were disbanded because women’s rights were seen to have been resolvedand a declining population rate led to a ban on abortion in 1936.
Having babies became, according to the new leader Joseph Stalin, “a great and honourable duty... not a private affair but one of great social importance.”
‘Fetishising motherhood’
This social importance would be underlined with the outbreak of the second world war in 1939, during which as estimated 25 million Soviet citizens died.
Sudakova calls this “the darkest period for women Russia.” Men went to fight, and women, who soon became widows, were left behind while the state became obsessed with motherhood, from conception to birth.
Sudakova believes that this “fetishisation” legacy has contributed to an over-medicalisation of childbirth in post-Soviet Russia.
“Childbirth in Russia is miserable” wrote the LA Times in 1996, a place were “labour is viewed as a scary emergency. So it takes place in special facilities where every step is regimented,” yet many of these medical centres are not up to scratch.
Almost 20 years later journalist Natalia Antonova wrote about her own experience of childbirth. “Since the Soviet days, having a baby in Russia has been commonly understood as a nightmare of understaffed state hospitals and forbidding bureaucratic mazes.”
Although things have improved, the country still has one of the worst maternal mortality rates in Europe.
Another worrying allegation about the state’s interference with women’s bodies were claims that Soviet gymnasts were forced to become pregnant and then abort the foetuses at two months, because doctors thought this was the optimum moment to improve strength and performance due to the rush of red blood cells released into the pregnant body.
If the athletes were single, they’d be forced to have sex with their coaches. “In any other country it would have been called rape,” one coach said after the claims surfaced years later.
‘Dangerous feminism’
As the country started to recover from effects of war, access to abortion was reinstated in 1963, and by the end of the 1970s the first self-published feminist magazine called Women and Russia appeared on the streets of St Petersburg.
One copy somehow made its way to the UK where it was translated and published in English, and is now on show at the Grad exhibition. The magazine was eventually banned by the KGB in the 1980s.
In modern Russia it’s still a challenge to be a feminist. The head of the Orthodox church has denounced it as a “very dangerous” phenomenon that encourages women to take roles “beyond housekeeping and rearing children”, with numerous surveys suggesting that Russians prefer a more traditional domestic set up.
Natalia Khodyreva, head of the women’s crisis centre St Petersburg, one of the country’s oldest feminist organisations, says things have got markedly worse in the last three years.
Laws to protect women from domestic violence are inadequate and politicians are campaigning to restrict the right to abortion, she says.
However she does find hope in a new generation of “uncompromising and honest women” who never knew life under the Soviet Union. “They grew up with the conviction that the whole world is open to them, and they have mastered the internet.”
Sudakova says she has plans for a Superwoman exhibition focused on the years after the fall of the USSR in 1991, scheduled to open onInternational Women’s Day in 2017, to further explore the experience of women in the post-Soviet world.
