Soviet women and the birth of a nation

Press, 25 July 1986, Page 17

Soviet women and the birth of a nation

From

MARTIN WALKER,

of the

London “Guardian”, in Moscow.

There are some things about the Soviet Union that make me so angry I want to go and pelt the Kremlin with radioactive tomatoes. The latest infuriation is the cotton wool shortage. This is not simply for the selfish reason that our family includes an infant who still wears nappies. It is because this vast continent of a country, this second most powerful economy in the world, does not produce tampons. And if it does manufacture sanitary towels they are virtually impossible to find, even in privileged Moscow. In a country of almost 280 million people, that means getting on for a hundred million women are of child-bearing age. At any given time some ten million of them are menstruating. At a time of cotton wool shortage, what in the name of the Tsar of all Russia are they supposed to do about it?

The discomforts and humiliations to which this leads are bad enough. But it is worse than just a social and economic failure to provide for an elementary need of half the population. It is, in the plainest sense, an insult to Soviet women.

Nor is this spasmodic shortage of cotton wool an isolated example of a generally lamentable

attitude towards women. This is a country where the standard form of birth control is abortion. I have yet to meet a Soviet woman who has not been through an abortion. One friend has had seven, and such are the rigours of the Soviet health service that each single time is etched in her memory as a grief and humiliation.

If you are lucky or well connected, you can obtain Hungarian and East German contraceptive pills. If you have had a child already, you can get fitted for an intra-uterine device. Some diaphragms are available, but one woman doctor of my acquaintance, says: “They come in two sizes — too big or too small.” And in the absence of Spermicide creams, their reliability is sharply reduced. There are condoms and having examined the kind that are issued to Soviet soldiers, I can confirm the troops’ suspicion that they are meant to double as galoshes or rainproof overtrousers. I would not be surprised to learn that they are bulletproof. The ones produced for the civilian market, Soviet friends tell me, will certainly

tear during use, even if they are not holed already. As a result, I was not in the least surprised to see that the London Rubber Corporation’s profits soared since I first came to Moscow. Every time I return, I cram the corners of my suitcase with packets of their gossamer products to pass on to my Russian chums. It also secures me the most awed glances as my baggage is searched at Soviet customs, but that is by the way.

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It is not easy to fathom why all this should be. A centrally planned economy, whose constitution gave women _ full legal rights rather earlier than most of the world, ought to be able to produce sufficient contraceptive and sanitary equipment to cater for the needs of its citizens. Western cartoonists traditionally caricature frumpish Russian women cleaning the streets, building the roads and performing every kind of manual labour. They should not. This was largely the result of the war, and the desperate losses among men of working age.

What is more significant is the way that those professional jobs that women have come to domi-; nate — and they provide threequarters of the doctors and twothirds of the teachers — have suffered a sharp fall in status; They are among the lowest paid groups of Soviet society, earning about 70 per cent of the average industrial wage. We are starting now to get the; odd feminist stirring in Russia. The brave group of women in Leningrad who published the first feminist Samizdat Magazine have been exiled, but their cause goes on. At the recent congress of the Writers’ Union, wbmen asked why so few of them were represented on the ruling body. Indeed, the poetess, Bella Akhmadulina, is now a secretary of the union.

Similar calls at the last party congress led to the election of Alexandra Bryukova as a full secretary of the Central Committee, the! most powerful woman in Soviet life for a generation. Perhaps the second most powerful, if the widespread rumours of Raisa Gorbachev’s influence on cultural reform are to be believed. ■

But until you can buy Tampax anywhere in the country, I will remain sceptical of claims that the time of Soviet woman has come.