Carriers of the Country: Russian Women without Power
The Political Construction of Women in Russian Society1
Yukio Oosterling
6296564/1003505Gerben Nooteboom
Tweede lezer: Amade Mcharek Bachelor Scriptie
17/12/2012
Email: yukiooosterling@gmail.com Words: 11382
1 Four of the five Pussy Riot Girls during their Protest in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow http:// rt.com/news/pussy-riot-court-hearing-355/
Lay-out
Introduction
1. Role of women in Soviet society along political lines Lenin about women
Stalin about women Gorbachev about women 2. Role of women in Yeltsin’s Russia
Yeltsin’s reforms
Women’s role in Yeltsin’s politics
Yeltsin and gender: The ‘essentially feminine’ 3. Role of women in Putin’s Russia
Putin and politics: Who is in power? A democrat or just a new Stalin?
Putin and gender: The motherland and women's moral duty Putin, women and the Orthodox-Catholic Church
4. Pussy Riot, Putin and the role of women in society Pussy Riot: Who and why?
The protest as a reaction on Putin’s leadership Conclusion
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On February 21 2012, just before the re-election of Prime minister Putin, five girls in brightly colored clothes, with short skirts and faces covered in colored balaclavas, jump in front of the altar of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior, the biggest church in Moscow. The girls start singing lyrics such as ‘Shit, Holy shit’ and ‘Drive Putin away’ and in their song they ask Virgin Mary to end the regime of Putin. This so called ‘Punk Prayer’, titled ‘Mother of God Drive Putin Away’ was written as a protest against the regime of Putin and Putin’s close relationship with Kirill, the Patriarch of Russia. The girls are known as a punk group under the name Pussy Riot. Already after a minute the girls were dragged away from the altar by security personnel. This one minute of protest proved however to be long enough to make a statement. Within short notice, the girls’ protest was known in the whole country and abroad.2Some criticizers of Putin’s regime and nonreligious civilians supported Pussy Riot, but in the final instance most of the Russian civilians were disgusted by the protest. Since the protest, lots of debates are going on in Russia about the Pussy Riot girls and Putin’s leadership. Five girls, one song, in a Russian Orthodox-Catholic church in Moscow: Why does this protest have such an impact on Russian civilians? And what does the protest tell us about the position of women in Russian society?
During the regime of Putin there has been a lot of resistance against his regime. Lots of protests are held in Russia these last years and a dozen of Russian journalists and human rights activists that criticized the regime of Putin have even been murdered. Politkovskaja, a Russian journalist and activist, who wrote Putin’s Russia, a book about the scandals of Putin’s regime, was found dead in the elevator of her flat two years after publication of her book.3When people can actually be murdered for critique on the regime in Russia, why then does a punk performance, shorter than one minute, performed by a small group of only five people, without any violence, shock Russian civilians that much? The message of the protest to drive Putin away cannot be the only important factor for the upheaval. An important factor for this shock is the fact that the protest was held in an Orthodox-Catholic church. A provocative act in a holy place as a church can be seen as a sin, according to Orthodox-Catholic civilians. But there is still more going on.
‘We are representatives of our generation’, said Maria Alyokhina, one of the Pussy Riot girls that joined the protest.4 This sentence makes me curious. If the girls of Pussy Riot are true representatives of their generation, what then can Pussy Riot’s representation tell us about Russian society? A deeper inquiry into the band shows that the girls are feminists and stand up for women's rights in society. The group is critical about the constructed role of women within Russian society in particular. Is the upheaval more than one about different political and religious opinions of Russian individuals? Can the protest actually be seen as one that gives insight in the way current Russian women’s acts and thoughts have been shaped by society? If it is in some way true that the reactions of Russian women on the punk protest can be seen as a reaction constructed by political and religious processes in Russian society, the protest can help us to understand these processes.
2The Atlantic 18/08/12
3New York Times 26/06/12
In this paper I analyze the role of women in Russian society. ‘The role of women in society’ is shaped by social ideas in society about gender divisions. These gender divisions create expectations about how men and women are supposed to take part in society on levels of economy and politics and in social spheres as the nuclear family. I define these expectations as the ‘role’ of men and women in society. As a leader of Russian society, Putin has great influence in shaping women’s role by producing societal ideas about gender. With the shaping of these ideas, Putin influences the role of women in Russian society. The way Putin influences this role will be discussed in this paper. My main question is: How has Putin’s regime changed the role of women in current Russian society and how can the protest of Pussy Riot be seen as a reaction on this changed role?
Russian women have gone through different political phases in the previous and current century. Each political regime influenced the role of women in Russian society in a different way. The social role of women can thus only be understood in the historical perspective of Russia’s politics with a focus on the way political leaders changed this role. Therefore the history of politics and its view on women in Russia from the previous and current century will first be analyzed in this paper. After that I will be able to give an evaluation of the changing role of women under the regime of Putin. At the end of my paper I will return to the Pussy Riot protest, because then I will be able to reevaluate the meaning of this protest as a reaction on Putin’s politics and his influence on the changing of the role of women in Russian society.
This paper is based on sociological and political articles and books with a women-centered perspective. Most of the scientific resources I used are based on feministic theories, for the simple reason that most of the scientists who examine the role of women in Russian society have feministic backgrounds. Furthermore my goal is to evaluate the position of women on the ground and the opinions of these women. Feministic literature focuses mostly on these subjects.Since this paper focuses on women in Russian society, the role of men in Russian society is only discussed when needed to understand women's position. To put the woman-centered theories in a broader perspective, I will discuss the Russian situation in a global theoretical frame of gender.
1. Role of women in Soviet society along political lines
Russia has gone through a century of political change. From 1917 till 1991, the communist Bolshevik Party was in power and in this period the nation became known under the name Soviet Union. In this chapter, I will examine the different ideas about women of the political Soviet leaders Lenin, Stalin and Gorbachev. I discuss only the influence of these three political leaders, because they differ the most in their thoughts about women. In addition, the laws they introduced affected women. These will be discussed too. Examining these political thoughts and laws, the way women dealt with their changed and changing role in society come to the fore and will be evaluated.
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Lenin about women
In 1917, revolution took place in Russia. The Tsarist regime, that ruled the nation for more than a century, was replaced by a faction of the Communist Party with Vladimir Lenin on lead, called the Bolsheviks. Since the period of the Bolsheviks, an ideology of gender equality became prominent, argues the political scientist Noonan in his article Women’s Participation: From Lenin to Gorbachev. According to Lenin, men and women should have equal access to institutions on economic, political and social level. How did Lenin change the role of women in society on these three levels?
On an economic level, Lenin made new laws about work and income. In the communist period, most women had jobs. Because in this time men and women both took part in economic processes as workers, they needed to be seen as equally contributing partners. Women even got the right to get the same payment as men for comparable work (Rule & Noonan 1996: 15-16).
But did women also get the same political rights as men in Russia? The answer is simply no. Since Lenin did not advocate separate political movements, the Bolshevik Party was the only powerful political organization. In the Bolshevik party, only men were in power. Women did not take part in the leading political institutions. Yet, to give voice to women in a way that stimulated his regime, Lenin established Zhenotdel: A political department ruled by women, to recruit women into politics and to give voice to their needs (Ibid: 79-80).
To understand this political marginalization in a broader perspective, it is interesting to evaluate some gender theories. The feminist and sociologist Bernard argues that female participation in politics is only something of the last century. This can be explained by two theories. The first has to do with social perceptions. In most societies worldwide, men are still superior to women on multiple variables that are considered of higher value in society. These variables are autonomy, competitiveness, power, need for achievement and muscular strength. The fact that these variables are mostly considered ‘male’ can explain why women are marginalized in politics worldwide: Women are often considered as not capable to lead or to be autonomous. Furthermore, political institutions are simply created by men and therefore it is understandable that women do not totally fit in this male-centered world (Bernard 1975: 10-11).
On a social level, Lenin stimulated equality in marriage between husband and wife. Women were now able to get a divorce; also when their husbands did not agree. Women could now also choose to keep their own last name after marriage (Rule & Noonan 1996: 58). Moreover, husband and wife became both equally responsible for their shared property. Furthermore, by law marriage became a civil instead of a religious institution. This was a logical outcome of communist reforms, because religious practices were not permitted in the communist period. Russia’s communist ideology was based on Marxist theories about socialism, where religion was seen as counteracting with socialism. In Lenin's understanding, equality could not be perceived within a religious perspective.
In 1918 women got the right to vote and abortion became legal. Since then men and women got equal rights to education. Besides that, after a long period of dependency of men, women now got the right to choose their own places of residence (Ibid: 15-16).
How free did these laws make Russian women in daily life? Not all Soviet’s equality laws could create total independency of men for women. To give an example, I use an essay of McBride, a scholar of gender politics and female movements. She describes how the laws for equality were adapted in daily life. She notices, that since 1920 doctors got the right to perform abortions in the Soviet Union. To compensate this legalization, the government inserted restrictions for women that made it more difficult for them to get a legal abortion. The government of Lenin did introduce the abortion law mostly to reduce health problems and deprivation caused by the circumstances of the recent communist revolution and the civil war that followed. The chance that married women without health problems could get permission to do an abortion, was very low (Ibid: 155-156).
Abortions could only be performed by experienced doctors in hospitals. In the first half of the Soviet era the doctors were mostly males and these men had the power to refuse women an abortion. Moreover, women had to pay for their abortion and to get money for an abortion, in most cases women needed to ask men to pay for them. In this situation, men had to agree with the abortion. Another restriction was the fact that women had to ask permission by a local committee. All these restrictions bare witness to the fact that women were still not totally equal to men in daily life. But, the first steps to create a society where men and women were more equal were definitely made.
The Bolsheviks based their political ideas on Marxist theories about socialism. This Marxist base of politics had influence on the politically determined social perceptions of women’s duties. Lenin's view of women in society was in the first place based on their role as mothers and workers. Besides their duty to take part in the economy, women had to follow their ‘womanly mission’, namely the mission to reproduce. This was where women were made for, based on biological necessity, writes De Haan, a feministic political scientist (De Haan 1988: 9). Lenin’s wife, Nadezhda Krupskaia, shared this view and wrote an essay about this mother-worker role, called Mat-Rabotnitsa (worker-mother). With this essay, Krupskaia's view on the duties of Russian women became the central point of the Bolshevik party (Rule & Noonan 1996: 79). However, with the coming of Stalin, society changed drastically.
5 5Drawing of Soviet Woman and Child http://historymike.blogspot.nl/2007/12/
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Stalin about women
Since 1929, Stalin was in charge. In this period, the party came up with the First Five Year Plan. This plan was based on rapid industrialization, agricultural collectivization and State ownership of industry, states the political scientist Noonan (Ibid: 80). Stalin wanted to make Russia a strong, industrialized State with an economy based on factories. Just as Lenin, Stalin changed the role of women in society on the economic, political and social level.
On an economic level, women were now more than ever before seen as important labor forces. With an economy only managed by men, rapid industrialization could not be realized. Stalin promoted a moral of equal performance for both men and women in workplaces. He wanted to make labor a civic duty for women to help the economy grow. Because of Stalin’s brutal politics focused on transforming the Soviet Union into an empire with a global exposure, lots of Russian men had to fight in his battles against surrounding countries. The fact that men could not work in factories in times of war, made it even more important that women took part in economy. To be able to have different kinds of jobs, Stalin encouraged women to get a proper education. Therefore this period was one of employment chances for women. It became normal that women reached the same level of education
as men (Ibid: 19).
And what did Stalin think of women’s role in politics? The leader was against the political female department Zhenotdel, the one Lenin had formed to give voice to women's needs and to recruit women into politics. During Stalin's first years of ruling, he proclaimed that there had been given enough voice to women’s needs by politics and therefore Zhenotdel could be dismantled (Ibid: 80).
To put Russia’s political female marginalization in a broader perspective, it is instructive to compare Russia’s parliament with the Dutch. In the eighties the Dutch parliament was for one fifth leaded by females, while female political leaders in the Soviet Union were still exceptions.6 Since
1941, there has been a political organization in Russia exclusively for women, called Women’s Committee. This organization was stimulated by the communist regime, mostly to create links with female organizations in other countries. But, the organization was not allowed to criticize the Soviet regime, it was there to give voice to the regime’s achievements for Russian women, argues the political scientist Buckley (Buckley, M. 1997: 159).
During Stalin’s ruling period, more political organizations were created by female activists. These organizations criticized women’s role in the family, the household, women’s cultural and educative possibilities and their access to health and social and economic services. So, women made an effort to change their political marginalization. Unfortunately this did not have great success. As the political scientist Nechemias argues; ‘Women's presence fades in the upper reaches of pyramidal structures’ (Rule & Noonan: 21). Women stayed absent in the higher political spheres.
Speaking about social laws, the right to perform abortions was abrogated by Stalin. Now, abortion was only possible when the life of mother or child was in danger. In this period, it was even the case that doctors who thought that female patients suffered from effects of illegal abortion practices, had to report these patients to the government (Ibid: 15-1). This shows that women were much more controlled by the State than in Lenin's Russia.
Stalin had a particular social view of women as reproductive creatures. He linked them, even more than Lenin did, to motherhood and marriage: It became women’s most important duty to take care of their husbands and children (Ibid: 20). He claimed that mothers in the Soviet Union deserved all respect and therefore they needed more protection by law than in any other country of the world. In 1936, Stalin introduced provisions for men who did not pay enough alimony to their ex-wives. Women could easily get day-care for their children and pregnancy leave. Young mothers could even study during their working time (De Haan: 14-15). But getting a divorce became more difficult, because of the requiring of fees and a more complicated legal process. In Stalin's Family Edict law, all these provisions aimed to hold the nuclear family together (Rule & Noonan: 58-59).
It is clear that all these laws were made to stimulate women to get a husband and children. The reason for this propaganda for the family was most of all because there had been an ongoing decrease in birthrates in Russia caused by the multiple wars Russia had to deal with over time. To realize rapid industrialization, Stalin needed a lot of workers. To stimulate the economy, the birthrate needed to increase.
At the same time, Stalin gave women more educational options and allowed them the freedom of earning money. On the other hand, women got a more traditional role in the nuclear family and therefore they had to live with a heavy dual burden of being both mothers and workers (De Haan 1988: 7). This policy basically continued during the regimes of Khrushchev and Brezhnev till the Glasnost of Gorbachev.
Gorbachev about women
In 1985, Gorbachev became Soviet leader. Gorbachev came to lead in the period that the Soviet Union was in crisis. In contrast with the Stalinist period, Gorbachev wanted to create a humane society without governmental brutality and violence. With his ideology of Glasnost - openness - he wanted to break through the constructed myths in Russian society, made up by the previous Soviet regimes. How did Gorbachev change the role of women in society on economic, political and social level?
One important transformation Gorbachev wanted to achieve was the democratizing of the Union (Rule & Noonan: 109-110). Moreover, he introduced more freedom of speech. According to Noonan the leader concluded that democratization of society was only possible when women were fully participating in society and when they were involved in democratic reforms. Gorbachev stimulated women to work in economic and political institutions. At the collapse of the Soviet Union, 50 percent of the lawyers and 45 percent of the judges in Russia were female. Also lots of teachers were female and women were prominent as journalists. One of the most important advisers of Gorbachev was his own wife, Raisa Gorbacheva. She quitted her job in 1985 to become first lady. It
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was publicly known that she was not afraid to give her own opinions about political issues. And what was women’s role in politics in this period? Just before the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, 30 percent of the party members were female (Ibid: 115). To give a context, in this time 26,6 percent of the party members in the Netherlands were female and the Soviet Union had thus more women in the parliament than the Netherlands.7 But, Gorbachev's effort to get more women working in political institutions had nothing to do with getting more women working in the decision making party apparatuses, states Nechemias. In 1988, in contrast with the 26,6 percent in the Netherlands, only seven percent of the party members in the decision apparatuses were female. Because of the lack of women in the leading institutions, critics of the regime concluded that the democracy appeared to them to be still more a 'maleocracy' than a democracy (Ibid: 25).
To stimulate women to participate more in political institutions, the political regime tried to make the female burden of working and taking care of the family less heavy with, for example, daycare centers financed by the State and by the implementation of electric household tools so the household would be easier to take care of. But, as De Haan cited the words of a Soviet civilian: ‘A wash machine can make the woman’s work less heavy, but still it does not take her responsibility away’. As long as the gender division that was stimulated by Stalin stayed in place, participating in politics was almost impossible for women (De Haan 1988: 162-164).
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So, how did Gorbachev change the perceptions about the role of women in society? Under Gorbachev's regime, there was room for examination of the real situation of women in Soviet society. ‘Back to Lenin!’, wrote Gorbachev in his book Perestroika. In 1987, he took part in a congress of the Committee of Soviet Women, where social and economic problems of women were openly discussed. The lack of laws for women's protection and women's burdens in society were important topics.
7 http://www.parlement.com/9291000/modulesf/gm5ihvnw 30/11/12 8 Propaganda Picture of a Soviet Woman
http://www.sodahead.com/fun/whats-the-most-surprising-animal-youve-seen-fly/question-3105095/? link=ibaf&q=&imgurl=http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-7Wy8lS1Z33E/TmeBWngwKeI/AAAAAAAABDc/ SDR4ZOUWBBs/s1600/we%252Bcan%252Bdo%252Bit.jpg
But, just like Gorbachev's predecessors, the new leader linked women's problems to their 'burdens at home' (Ibid: 83-84). Women had the right to return to their ‘womanly mission’ of raising children. He argued that women needed to have diverse employment, with shorter working days, sliding work schedules and besides that, women needed to have the possibility to work at home. These were all changes to stimulate women to return partly to the home (Ibid: 109-111). According to De Haan, the root of Gorbachev’s thinking was conservative. He too still thought that female emancipation had gone too far and therefore women had to focus more on their womanly duties of giving birth and taking care of the household (De Haan 1988: 9). And so Russian women still had to deal with their dual burden.
The sociologist and feminist Bernard states that the gender division of women as home-oriented and men as career-oriented is prominent over the whole world. As I told before, political marginalization of women is also a worldwide phenomenon. According to Bernard, the problem lies in our thinking in oppositions: People are used to see polarities. When men and women are each other’s opposites, they could never work together. She states that when the perception of ‘oppositions’ will be changed to perceptions of ‘difference’, cooperation between the sexes would become more logical. Then one role would not only have to fit one sex; different sexes could achieve complementarities within the same spheres. This would make more room for women to participate in politics and in other spheres outside of the house (Bernard 1975: 21-22).
Till now one important question has been overlooked: How did Soviet women see themselves? According to De Haan women too saw themselves first of all as mothers. This mother role showed their femaleness and therefore jobs came on the second place, which is quite strange, because women were so important in the higher working spheres (De Haan 1988: 148). So the question then is: How ‘emancipated’ were Russian women? This depends on how emancipation is exactly defined. According to De Haan emancipation is about freedom. A woman with a job is not per se more emancipated than a woman without a job. Emancipation has to do with the feeling of having a choice, the feeling that you are free to choose your own life. In the West, a lot of mothers did not have a job in the end of the previous century. Still these mothers felt emancipated because they could choose to be housemothers (Ibid: 15-16). The question is, did Russian women really have a choice at the end of the Soviet period or were they still stuck in the double role of workers and mothers?
On the one hand communism made women strong and independent. They had more rights than they ever had before. On the other hand, while women were responsible for the household and a part of the income, which made it twice as heavy as for men, men were still Soviet Union’s political elite. In this way, women were the bearers of Soviet society without the power to truly lead the country. How did women’s position change with the coming of capitalism?
2. Role of women in Yeltsin’s Russia
In 1991, during the leading period of Gorbachev, the Soviet Union collapsed. After almost a century of socialism and planned economy, a period of westernization began (Rose et al 2011: 11-27). With the coming of Yeltsin, the communist regime fell and Russia became known under the name Russian
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Federation: A democratic, capitalist State. First I will look at how Yeltsin reformed society economically and religiously and on the level of working spheres. Second, I discuss women’s role in politics in this period and I end with an examination of how Yeltsin changed perceptions about women in society.
Yeltsin’s reforms
In this new epoch of democracy, Yeltsin came up with a radical economic plan, called ‘shock therapy’, writes political scientist and Russian specialist Racanska, in an article about Yelstin’s political strategies. This shock therapy would help Russia to become rapidly a market economy. The economy was in decline in the time that Yeltsin came to power, so a plan to save the economy was needed. Yeltsin wanted to privatize the industrial and private sector as soon as possible. Reductive or removed subsidies for food and high inflation made it hard for families to survive. As an effect of Yeltsin’s privatization, food and other groceries became more expensive while wages stayed more or less the same (Rule & Noonan: 120-122).
Along these democratic reforms, religious practices became legal again. Orthodox-Catholic churches were being recovered and religious practices could be practiced openly again. The percentage of Orthodox-Catholic Russians grew from 6.740 million people in 1988 to 10.267 million in 1991. The social scientist Kotovskaya argues that Russian women were definitely more often religious than Russian men: in 1987, 5.1 percent of the men and 12 percent of the women considered themselves religious. Kotovskaya writes that women have always had greater interest in spiritual national culture than men. Because of women’s sensitive and emotional characteristics, she states, women are more interested in spirituality than the less emotional and sensitive men. Women are also more often than men interested in cultural and religious norms and values. Because of this interest, women are more sensible for social rules that are made up along lines of religious norms and values. In Russia these rules were most of all rules of behavior, with a strong emphasizing of women’s duty to become mothers (Koval 1995: 101-107).
And what was the role of women in the capitalist working spheres? In an episode of a program called Van Moskou tot Moermansk, made by the journalist and Russian specialist Brandt Corstius in 2011, Brandt Corstius visits a tram company. 9 In this company almost all tram machinists are women. One of the female machinists tells that you need to have a strong personality to become a good tram machinist and therefore most machinists are females. In her opinion women are prepared to work harder, they have more patience and they are more balanced than men. When she tells this, the other female machinists in the room nod their heads to show that they agree with her.
In 1989, women formed the majority in the more educated working sectors: 71 percent of Russia's physicians, 77 percent of Russia's economists that had had education on university level and
68 percent of the workers in arts and culture were female. Compared to men, women had the highest education levels. Racanska argues that a reason for these high levels of education was the fact that women earned less money than men for the same jobs. They had to have a better education to be able to earn enough money to feed their children. Besides that, women needed higher educated jobs, because these gave women more beneficial rights during their pregnancy and children's childhood.
In contrast with their high education, 70 percent of the unemployed people in Russia in 1989 were women. An important reason for their unemployment was the fact that lots of people working in industries that were dominated by women, such as baking, sewing and textile and pastry making factories, were fired in this period. Next to this, the costs of living became higher, what made it even more difficult to survive (Rule & Noonan 1996: 124-126).
Role of women in Yeltsin’s politics
How did women’s political role change during capitalism? There was a difference between passive and active political participation. Women were passively involved in politics, which means that they had the right to vote. On the other side, women were not actively involved, which means that they could not easily join political parties and certainly not the decision apparatuses.
To compare Russia’s political situation with a European country: In 1997, one third of the politicians in the Netherlands were females. In this same year, Russia’s politics were still based on men. 10 Buckley argues that this can partly be explained by the fact that the capitalist regime of Yeltsin
was not as different as the former communist regime. Actually, the same politicians were on lead, redefined in a new context.
But, in 1993 the first female political party was formed. Women’ Committee, together with some other female organizations, founded a political party, called Women of Russia. In the same year, the party got 8.1 percent of the national votes. Unfortunately, in the next elections in 1995, they got less than 5 percent of the votes and therefore they could not join the party list (Ibid: 157-158). Why could they not get more votes? Was it their lack of experience in politics? This does not seem to be the reason, because they got less votes in 1995, in spite of already having experienced two years in politics. Apparently not all Russian women voted for the female party.
This shows that women's reasons to vote for a specific political party were not only based on gender issues. Not all Russian women shared the goal of achieving a society with men and women on lead, states Racanska. Actually, some female Russians wanted to keep women out of politics, because according to them women needed their time to take care of a family. Men were just more suited for political practices, because they did not have to run the household and raise the children. In the essay The Yeltsin Presidency, Economic Reform and Women, Racanska quotes two different statements of two educated Russian women: ‘If we continue to make government policies
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without the participation of women and taking into account the interests of women, we will never build a civilized democratic society’, and ‘A woman shouldn't take part in politics; a women's place is the home. She should raise the kids and not only raise them, but bear them too. If a woman is involved in politics, her husband has to wash the dishes and take care of all the household things. Their marriage would fall apart. We don't need that’ (Ibid: 126)
The first quote states that a real democracy can only be created when women are participating in politics. The second quote shows us the statement of a woman who states that women’s task is raising children and organizing the household. Apparently the Soviet vision of the reproductive woman was still alive in Russian society. Women could since Yeltsin’s regime be chosen as political leaders. The fact that lots of women did not want to or could not participate in politics, has to do with these reproductive ideas. I explain this in more detail in the next paragraph.
Yeltsin and gender: The ‘essentially feminine’
According to Yeltsin, the household was a more female domain than the labor market. Concentrating on family policies was important for the strength of a democratic society, said the head of the Department of Market Policies, Kochenko. Instead of the obligation to work in factories to support society in the communist period, women were now more stimulated to stay at home and take care of their family than in the Soviet Union. In this way, the role of women became even more traditional than it already was. On the one hand women acquired more freedom in society by law, on the other hand they became more limited in their possibilities by social ideologies.
In this new capitalist era with a private economy instead of a State-subsidized one, factories had their own rules. Women earned less money compared to men than in the Soviet era. Especially for single mothers, it became harder to earn enough money to support their children. The rights that were given to working mothers during their pregnancy and the period their children were small, were drastically minimized. Factories made up protective legislations and prohibitions that made it harder for women to keep working while raising their children. To make it even harder, Yeltsin reduced the governmental support for day-care centers (Ibid: 123-124).
Yeltsin’s policy to ‘release’ women from their dual burden by sending them back to the household was not just based on the will to send women back to the kitchen. In fact it was a smart way to solve national problems as unemployment and decrease of birthrate. As Kay, a professor of Russian gender studies, states: ‘What better solution than to promote a role for women based firmly and exclusively in the home, thus strengthening the family, increasing the birthrate and virtually halving the labor force all in one neat blow?’ (Buckley 1997: 77-78).
How did women’s perceptions about their role as mothers change since Yeltsin? In 1993 the birthrate was 56 percent lower than in 1987. The rate reached an amount of 1.385 million, which was the lowest rate since World War Two. Apparently lots of Russian women decided to take not as much children as in the Soviet period. Kay shows that most of Russia’s women saw themselves definitely as mothers, but being a mother was not seen as the goal of their lives. Most women found their personal
development very important, which could be stimulated by studying and working. There was thus still a strong will to work. Kay states that women found it still very important to have freedom of choice. Women needed the right to choose how they wanted to live their lives and thus how they found balance between family and work (Ibid: 88-90).
With capitalism, perceptions of the image of women changed. According to Kay, the Post- Soviet woman had to return to be ‘essentially feminine’. She had to be warm, sweet, graceful, fragile, willing and charming and she needed to take care of her husband and children. Following these ideas, men needed to go back to their most masculine form. Men had to guard over their women and children and they got, like in older periods, responsible for the family’s income. Important was that the women should in no case offend the male’s ego. Kay illustrates this with a text from an article about Russian women: ‘She lets a man feel the necessity of his leadership in life, lets him take charge in the family but always under her hidden control’. Of course, all these ideas about gender were just theoretical visions; reality was more complex. Still, lots of women were active in the economy and they had still a higher education level than men. With the communist background of Russian women, it was even more difficult to adapt to Yeltsin’s new unequal social ideas about women (Ibid: 80-83).
In order to show how prominent the gender division of masculine, leading men and fragile, dependent women in Post-Soviet society became, I give an example of social happenings that are influenced by this gender division. I discuss how society dealt with rape and domestic violence against women in the time of Yeltsin.
Attwood, a sociologist and Soviet specialist, tells in her article She was asking for it: Rape and domestic violence against women that in 1993 in Russia more than half of all the murdered people were women, murdered by their husbands. Besides that, there were 14,400 cases of rape recorded in the same year, what has been considered to be less than 10 percent of the total number of rapes, known or unknown by the government, in Russia (Ibid: 99). She explains how in Russian mainstream literature, the discourse is dominant that rape and domestic violence are phenomena where the woman plays an active role. One of the reasons why women could be raped or domestically abused is ‘the fact that the women has treated traditional norms of femininity’, as Attwood states. This means that women do not act as dependent, graceful, willing and caring creatures. A cting according to the dichotomy of strong, active men and weak, passive women is therefore seen as a possible solution to rape and domestic abuse. When a woman knows her place as dependent and weak, the man would feel more ‘recognized as a man’ and in this way he would protect a woman instead of raping or battering her.
According to Attwood, this theory emanates from the gender division that is stimulated by the regime, explained in the former paragraph (Ibid: 112-113). Her vision is shared by Johnson, a Post-Soviet and Russian political scientist. Johnson argues in her article The Postcommunist Politics of Rape that it is difficult to report rape for women, because according to criminal and political justice systems, lots of rape forms are not seen as ‘real’ rape, but as the woman’s own fault. This is the case with rapes performed by husbands or acquaintances or when there has only been little physical force (Kuehnast & Nechemias 2004: 233). This affirms how the gender role of women as feminine, dependent and caring has become socially accepted.
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These gender divisions are not only prominent in Russia. Bernard states that the social view of women as weak and dependent is a global phenomenon. She argues that this view is in contrast with the emphasis of women as mothers. Mothers need to be strong and courageous, while these characters are defined male. A mother is not supposed to be weak or dependent. Motherhood thus shows that women are definitely capable of being strong and independent (Bernard 1975: 33-34). A lack of strength and independency can thus not be the reason that women are not participating in political and economic spheres.
Yeltsin stated on television in 1999, when he was replaced by Putin as new president: ‘The main goal of my life: Russia will never return to the past’ (Rose et al 2011: 44). Till this day Russia favors the image of being a democratic State with a capitalist character. But lots of critical voices argue that Russia, since Putin is Russia’s president, has returned to totalitarianism. Has Yeltsin truly achieved his goal or is Russia socially going back in time with Putin as leader? To give an answer to this question, I will now discuss in what ways Putin’s leadership changed Russian society.
3. Role of women in Putin’s Russia
I am now able to evaluate the political performance of the man who was the reason for me to write this paper, namely the man Pussy Riot protested against: Vladimir Putin. He is the head of the democratic Russian Federation since 1999. What has exactly been going on in the Russian parliament and how did Putin change the role of women in society? First, I will show facts and opinions about Russia's current political context. Then I will discuss how Putin changed gender roles in society. I end with an evaluation of Putin's relationship with the Orthodox-Catholic Church.
Putin and Politics: Who is in power?
In Yeltsin’s ruling period it seemed that women would become more prominent in most important political parties. Strong female organizations appeared and these organizations got support of Russian female civilians. Unfortunately the votes for women declined in 1995 and during the elections of 1999, the year that Putin came to power, women’s political participation declined even more. In 1999, 33 of the 441 elected politicians were female. This is in contrast with the 64 women elected during the first elections in the nineties.
Why did Russian women vote less for female politicians in 1999 than before? According to Nechemias in his article Politics in Post-Soviet Russia: Where are the Women? this resulted from specific social ideas, strengthened by political statements. There were politicians that argued that women only voted for female parties because of gender issues. They stated that women voted for female politicians because of their sex, not because of their political ideologies. Second, the idea was present in society that tough, nationalistic leaders were needed in politics and that men were therefore more suitable for politics. A third important reason for the decline in votes for women was the fact that the women’s movements became too divided in itself: The female parties did not organize sufficient strategic unity and focus which made them weaker than the other parties based on men.11
What was Putin’s opinion about women in politics? Putin stated on 11th of January 2000 that
there were not enough women involved in politics. He argued that the next speaker of the Duma should be a woman. The movement Unity, a political pro Putin movement, even came up with a candidate, namely Lyubov Sliska. In 2000 she became the first speaker of the Duma. But, argues Nechemias, Putin’s effort to get women more politically involved was minimal, what made clear that getting more women in politics was not one of the leader’s highest priorities.
According to Nechemias, Russia still has a masculine system. In the first sentence of his article he names the title of a conference in the nineties for female organizations in Russia: ‘A Democracy Minus Women is Not Democracy’. Till today, women in Russian political institutions are seen as exceptions. They have already more political chances than during communism, but still they are a marginalized group. Given this inadequate representation of half of the population, can we actually speak11 of a democracy in the Russian Federation? This is a common question among scholars. To give an insight in people’s voices about this subject I now deal with the question whether Russia is a true democracy or not and how this question is dealt with by the human rights activist Politkovskaya, journalist and citizen of Moscow.
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A democrat or just a new Stalin?
Politkovskaya writes about Putin's regime in her book Putin's Russia. This book criticizes Putin from a personal perspective. During the election period of 2003, Putin did not debate with anyone, argues Politkovskaya. He did not want to talk about his political plans nor did he want to debate with his opponents. Putin did in no way lead a campaign. In spite of that during the election time he was seen on television every second of the day, drinking tea with important political leaders of other countries and showing them the Kremlin: All without any political debate. With Putin's second governmental inauguration, none of his political opponents were permitted to come.
According to Politkovskaya, these acts are similar to the methods Stalin used during his ruling period in the Soviet era. We could say, she states, that Russia in some way went back to its Soviet period. According to Politkovskaya, the democratic system is based on nothing more than corruption. She tells how her neighbors in Moscow that had voted for Putin reacted on the elections of 2003: ‘What can we do about it’ and ‘if that is really what they want us to do, we will’ (Ibid: 345). Apparently these Russians share the feeling that they cannot make a difference in Russian politics. On an international level Putin was supported by several Western leaders. Berlusconi, Blair, Chirac and Schröder, leaders of Italy, England, France and Germany, were fond of Putin and Bush Junior gave Putin all the credits the Russian leader wanted. With this support of the West, Putin had greater chances to stay in power. But still, as Politkovskaya mentions, a government cannot lead without support of its population (Ibid: 345-346).
12 Drawing of Putin and Stalin http://www.dropbears.com/gallery/
When I read the book of Politkovskaya, I can hardly believe that people can be fond of a man like Putin. She tells emotional stories about Putin's inhumanly actions, which have cost lives of many people, among others soldiers and political activists. Two years after writing the book, Politkovskaya was found dead in her elevator, as I told in the introduction of this essay. She was not the first murdered journalist that had criticized Putin's regime. Given these violent events one can imagine that Russians will not openly voice their critique on the government. But it is not only their fear to show their distrust in the regime. Lots of people truly trust the president and belief in his goals. And, as Politkovskaya states, a big part of Putin's fans are female. Why do women support their leader? To get a better understanding, I will scrutinize more closely the opinions Putin has about women and how these opinions change women's social role.
Putin and gender: The motherland and women's moral duty
And now for the most important matter. What is most important for our country? The Defense Ministry knows what is most important. Indeed, what I want to talk about is love, women, children. I want to talk about the family, about the most acute problem facing our country today - the demographic problem.
This is a statement of Putin and these sentences are written in the essay We All Must Give Birth, an essay written among others by Russian language and culture specialist Rosenholm in 2010. Rosenholm examines the way media comment on Putin's ideologies. She shows how the ideology about women as mothers is still alive in current Russia, however for a slightly different reason than in the Soviet period. Putin focuses in his statement on the necessity of giving birth because of a demographic problem, namely the problem of immigrants. The birthrate is increasing nowadays in the big cities of Russia. According to Putin, this has much to do with the high birthrates of immigrants. To keep the native 'Russian' civilization strong, native Russian women have to get more children (Rosenholm et al 2010: 79-80).
Putin focuses just like his Soviet predecessors on the potential enemy, from inside the society or outside in order to create a strong feeling of nationality among Russians. Within these theories he emphasizes the old Soviet gender divisions of the man as a warrior that has to be ready to fight for his country and the woman as an intuitive mother that keeps society strong and healthy by giving birth. A clear tactic of Putin is that he emphasizes morality and tradition. He argues that Russian culture is build on traditions and to keep the Russian morality and collective consciousness alive, it is needed to stick to the traditional gender roles in society (Ibid: 84-85). Rosenholm shows in her essay how the media plays with the concept of birth and how this concept is connected to women and the motherland Russia. As Dutch people speak about their nation as a 'fatherland', in Russia the nation is considered female. The female body is in the media often presented as a metaphor for the motherland. With this is meant that the female body takes care of society: Women are seen as responsible for the growth of the nation by increasing the birthrate. By
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comparing women with the motherland, women's duty to become mothers has acquired a political meaning. Men are absent in these theories. They are not considered as an important part of the nuclear family. In most Russian articles, states Rosenholm, the man is presented as a sexual hero that begets woman and with that the man's task in the nuclear family ends.
The absence of men in the family can partly be explained by the social fact of high mortality rates under men because of alcoholism (Ibid: 88-89). Alcoholism is Russia's biggest death cause, especially for men. The Medical Research Council states that 5 percent of all women and 25 percent of all men die before their 55th caused by their use of alcohol, not to mention the rate of deaths caused by alcohol after their 55th.13 This phenomenon did not start since the leading period of Putin. Already in
the Soviet period, alcohol was a major death cause. After Gorbachev's policy to lower alcohol use in Russia, numbers of alcoholics decreased.
Unfortunately, with the coming of capitalism the alcohol use increased more than ever before, states medical scientist Pridemore in his PhD essay called Patterns of Alcohol-Related Mortality in Russia.14 The ideology about the role of the father in the family is thus partly rooted in this social
phenomenon of alcoholism that has been a problem for more or less a century. Because of the uselessness of alcoholic men and the big amount of male deaths, women have to be the responsible sex that looks after children and earns money when the man is not able to work. Instead of the idea that men should take care of themselves, the common Russian media discourse has to do with women's responsibility to keep their husbands away from alcohol, according to Rosenholm. Following Putin's ideologies, women are the moral guardians of society.
How do women deal with al these responsibilities? Rosenholm writes that because of the Soviet moral of equal roles for men and women in the labor market, most women in current Russia see their freedom not in this dual burden of raising children and participating in the labor market but in the choice to focus only on their career (Ibid: 91-93). The wish of women that want to go back to their maternal duty has often to do with religious aspects. To show how important religion is in Putin's ruling strategies and how it effects the role of women in society, I need to discuss the role of the Orthodox-Catholic Church in the current Russian society.
13 http://www.mrc.ac.uk/Newspublications/News/MRC006174 30/11/12
14Pridemore, W. Research Note: Patterns of Alcohol-Related Mortality in Russia. Journal of Drug
Putin, women and the Orthodox-Catholic Church
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‘The restoration of the spiritual powers of the nation and its commitment to genuine moral values. Vladimir Vladimirovich, help us to disclose the soul of the nation’.
These are the words of Patriarch Alexii the Second during thanksgiving of 2000 in the Cathedral of the Annunciation in Moscow, just after the inauguration of the president. Since Putin came to power the relationship between the Orthodox-Catholic Church and Russia’s regime became much closer than in the previous periods.
Lots of Russians were afraid that the cooperation between State and Church became as tight as in the pre-Soviet period and that Russian society would go even further back in time. According to Anderson, an international relations scientist, this is not the case: The Kremlin kept al its power. Just on some political levels the Church got more authority than before, because giving the Church more power on these levels was in Putin’s favor. Anderson describes in his article about the relation between the Orthodox-Catholic Church and Putin’s politics on which levels the Church won power: On the level of westernization and liberalization, religious education, security and managed pluralism. But even on these levels the Kremlin kept the power to choose whether to involve the Church or not.16
According to Anderson, the power of the Church in no way equals the influence it had during the Tsarist era. It is actually not Putin’s goal to reunite Church and State. Putin has a different goal: He wants to revitalize traditional morality in Russian society and by using religion he can achieve this goal. So it was not the power that Putin gave the Church in politics that changed society the most, it was Putin’s emphasizing of the Orthodox-Catholic moral values. As I stated in the previous paragraph
15 Picture of Patriarch Kirill and President Putin
http://www.forgetthebox.net/mag/the-passion-of-the-pussy-riot.php/attachment/putin-kirill 16 Anderson, J. Putin and the Orthodox Church: Asymmetric Symphonia? Journal of International
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about gender, according to Putin religious morality is important to create a ‘healthy’ society. Brouwers, a correspondent of the Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant, writes in 2012 that Putin stated in one of his speeches in the parliament that Russia’s demographic problem, the problem of immigration Russia what I explained in the beginning of this chapter, can be solved when Russians attach great importance to basic moral values, traditional relationships and big families.17 Putin’s view is clearly
formulated in the following statement:
‘Orthodoxy had played a special role in Russian history. And largely determined the character of Russian civilization. Putin argues also that its ideals will make it possible to strengthen mutual understanding and consensus in our society, and contribute to the spiritual and moral rebirth of the Fatherland’18
Patriarch Alexii the Second argued in 2000 that the West was destroying Russian society with its unreligious, immoral, liberal way of thinking. The Patriarch stated that the problem of the West was the high individual authority created by liberalism. Because the lack of morality in Western countries civilians became egocentric and feelings of communal good disappeared.19 Putin agrees with the
religious leader on the lack of morality in Western civilizations. He also advocates this communal morality in order to strengthen Russian society.
Brouwers writes in his article that 70 percent of the Russians see themselves as Orthodox-Catholics. Because of Putin’s emphasizing of the Orthodox- Catholic Church he is supported by a lot of religious civilians. With the emphasizing of religious morality the president has revitalized traditional norms and values in Russian society. The gender roles of today in Russia, which I discussed in the previous paragraph, are based on these traditional religious norms and values. For example the moral appreciation of women as raising and housekeeping mothers is a value that is prominent in Orthodox-Catholic religion as well. By using religious lines Putin has created a moral consensus of traditional values giving a religious meaning to women’s productive role and men’s role as wage earners. Because of this connection between the religious and the social, religious women will feel more connected to these traditional values.
When Putin was chosen to be president for the second time, the new Patriarch Kirill called him a ‘miracle of God’, writes Brouwers. During the elections of 2012 the Patriarch spoke to the Orthodox-Catholic people of Russia and asked them to vote for Putin, ‘in the name of God’. This was the first time in more than hundred years that a clerical authority campaigned for a political leader.20
17 Volkskrant 18/04/12
18Anderson, J. Putin and the Orthodox Church: Asymmetric Symphonia? Journal of International
Affairs: Page 188
19Ibid: Pages 189-190
This call of the Patriarch triggered a lot of debate. And so I arrive at the last chapter about the band Pussy Riot, because this campaign was exactly what triggered the band to perform the Pussy Riot’s protest. 4. Pussy Riot, Putin and the role of women in society
After discussing who the girls of Pussy Riot exactly are and where they stand for, I examine how the protest of Pussy Riot can be seen as a reaction on Putin’s politics and Putin’s relationship with the Patriarch of the Orthodox-Catholic Church.
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Pussy Riot: Who and why
First of all, who are these girls exactly? Pussy Riot is a Russian feministic, anti-capitalist political punk band with fifteen feminine members between the age of 20 and 33. The band was formed in 2011 after Putin had declared that he wanted to campaign for president again. Provocative songs have been performed by the girls of Pussy Riot, in colorful clothes with balaclavas on their faces. Their performances are always unannounced and held on public places. The band is an activist formation and the performances are meant as protests against political practices.
Five girls of the group performed in February 2012, just after Russia’s political elections, an act in the Christ the Savior Cathedral in Moscow during a religious ceremony. In this performance the girls sang a punk song with the message that Putin had to be expelled from politics, this all by asking Holy Mary to save them from their political leader. The fact that this performance was held in a holy place instead of a public square or street made the girls internationally famous and caused that three of the five girls were sent to prison and were prosecuted for a punishment of more or less seven years, writes correspondent Hollingsworth in the American newspaper the Atlantic.22
21The Women of the Band Pussy Riot in their Performing Balaclavas http://restlesschronicles.com/2012/08/23/putin-and-the-pussy-riot/
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Lots of Orthodox-Catholic Russians, among others the Patriarch Kirill, found the performance a violation against Church. In an article of the Dutch newspaper Trouw the theologian Van Vlastuin calls the performance of Pussy Riot a godless act during a holy practice.23 Actually, most of the Pussy Riot girls are religious themselves. They are just critical about the way religion is used by the political order. The feministic theologian Kalsky states in the same article that we cannot speak of blasphemy in the case of Pussy Riot, the protest was only a critique on the way people use religion to win power. She argues that the protest and the upheaval about the protest show how close State and Church work together in Russia and how undemocratic Putin’s regime truly is. What she also argues is that the Church should not cooperate this much with the State, because the State has a monopoly on violence and the combination of religious and political power can be used with wrong intentions. The fact that three girls of Pussy Riot have been sent to prison shows how powerful the two institutions are together. According to Kalsky, this is exactly where Pussy Riot fights against. The main goal of the punk band is ending the cooperation between Putin and Kirill and the exploitation of religion by both of the leaders to win power. In what way do the girls think power is exploited? And how can this be seen as a reaction on Putin’s construction of the role of women in society?
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The protest as a reaction on Putin’s leadership
To show why Pussy Riot is a movement that responds to the regime of Putin and what the band’s statements have to do with the role of women in society, I begin this chapter with quotes of members of Pussy Riot. After quoting a statement I explain how this can be linked to Putin’s relationship with the Orthodox-Catholic Church and the role of women in Russian society.
23 Trouw 24/08/12
24Drawing of Putin and the Three Arrested Girls of Pussy Riot http://keithpp.wordpress.com/2012/08/20/free-pussy-riot/
The first quote is of Alyokhina, one of the girls that performed the punk prayer: ‘Our goal was to bring attention to Father Kirill's public statements that the Orthodox must vote for Putin’.25 Alyokhina said this after getting arrested for the protest. It becomes clear that the protest was a direct reaction to the statement that Patriarch Kirill made this year. Another argument Alyokhina used during court was this:
‘
It is important for me to understand whether the Church is growing along with society or whether it remains a conservative institution’.26With this statement Alyokhina shows that Pussy Riot fights against the conservative character of the Orthodox-Catholic Church. Pussy Riot wants to break with traditional, conservative social rules that are stimulated by Church. Putin, Pussy Riot argues, makes use of these traditional religious lines to empower his politics of morality. In this way conservative roles of women in society maintain.
‘Our anonymity and visual look aren't common for female bands. Even though we wear dresses, we make ‘unfeminine’ movements. It's a multilevel way of breaking with traditional feminine behavior’. 27 This is what Tyurya, one of the girls that also performed in the Christ the Savior Church, told the English newspaper the Guardian. With this statement she shows that Pussy Riot focuses on the role of women in Russian society nowadays. The girls argue that because of Putin’s emphasizing of religious conservative social rules, women are kept in their traditional role of raisers and householders and this role is in contrast with the modern, unreligious social norms and values of today. The conservative character of the Orthodox-Catholic Church is maintained, while society has arrived in a total different phase. I will explain what this means.
Since 1991 Russia is a democratic country with a law of equality between the sexes. Russian civilians are influenced by West European ideologies through Internet and television. As I showed earlier in my essay, lots of Russian women are highly educated and have jobs. Also does Russia belong to the top ten countries with the highest divorce rates of the world, tells Brandt Corstius in an episode of his program van Moskou tot Moermansk.28 This means that a lot of women cannot depend on their husbands and have to earn their own money. Because of Putin’s cooperation with Church and his emphasizing of traditional morals about women’s role as a raiser and householder, dependent of men, women are put in an old-fashioned, traditional role while the facts shown above
25The Guardian 17/08/12 26The Guardian 17/08/12 27The Guardian 17/08/12
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tell us a different story: Russian women are nowadays functioning on a total different level than Putin’s religious norms and values want them to. Of course it does not mean that these traditional gender roles have become reality in every Russian family since Putin is in power. A lot of people do not believe in Putin’s gender divisions, just like the girls of Pussy Riot. But, because of the emphasizing of this traditional role by the State, Putin’s ideologies become a norm is society: Women are expected to act in a certain traditional way. Besides this expectation to act traditional, Putin’s ideology of women in the private and men in the public sphere supports the idea of a nation ruled by men, what can keep women marginalized in politics. So, to conclude, what has this exactly to do with Putin’s relationship with the Church according to Pussy Riot?
The society that Putin creates is one in which gender roles are connected to religion and because of this ‘holiness’ of traditional gender roles, religious Russian civilians accept these roles easier. The connection to religion can also explain why lots of female civilians are angry with Pussy Riot because of their performance in the church. Breaking with Putin means breaking with the requirements of Patriarch Kirill and that means breaking with Orthodox-Catholic values. That means that the reactions of the Russian women who are against Pussy Riot are the logical outcome of the mind shaping transformation process of the Russian political regime in its relation with the Orthodox-Catholic Church.
Conclusion
Since 1917, when the Bolsheviks came to power, women became more equal to men by law than they ever had been before in Russia. They became important workforces during the regime of Stalin and when Gorbachev became president women were even stimulated to participate in the lower spheres of politics. The increasing female participation in the economy was matched with the increasing of women’s education levels. At the end of the Soviet period women reached higher education levels than their male partners.
Besides stimulating women to take part in different working spheres, all the Soviet leaders emphasized women’s role as traditional mothers. Women were told that their most important duty was the raising of children and looking after the household. These political stimulations created social expectations in Russian society and this resulted in the heavy dual burden for women of being both workers and mothers. The emphasizing of women’s reproductive features stayed an issue during all Russia’s communist eras and the capitalist period of Yeltsin.
When Yeltsin started the capitalist Russian Federation, after a century of prohibition, religious practices were permitted by the regime again. Putin started his leadership in 1999 and in the period Putin has been Russia’s political leader, the role of women in society changed in a negative sense, according to both intellectuals and artists like Pussy Riot. This changing has to do with Putin’s relationship with the Orthodox-Catholic Church. Pussy Riot protests against the way Putin uses the Orthodox-Catholic Church to validate traditional social norms and values about women in the
