A few years ago, when the Russian writer and lecturer-provocateur Tat’iana Tolstaia was endorsing the “truth” of Francine du Plessix Gray’s book on Soviet women, she penned this grim portrait of Western feminists rapping on the collective door of Soviet women and grilling them in the “cold, rigid manner” of bug inspectors: “How do your men oppress you? Why don’t they wash the dishes? Why don’t they prepare the meals? Why don’t they allow women into politics? Why don’t women rebel against the phallocracy?”¹ As comforting as it might be to dismiss this image as typical Tolstoyan reductionism, a less...

One political myth that has persisted through the greater part of Russian history, regardless of the particular form in which political power was expressed, imagines Russia (both Imperial and Soviet) as consisting of two sometimes opposed entities: the state and the Russian people or nation. The mythologeme of the “Russian people” was well developed by the end of the nineteenth century and exploited most strikingly in the twentieth by Stalin. The opposition between the state and the people or nation is not gender neutral. The state, be it Tsarist or Soviet, is constructed as masculine, and the people or nation...

As a woman from the “former Yugoslavia” who now lives in the United States, I am occasionally asked to speak about women in Yugoslavia. The request usually comes in the context of an interest in women of Eastern Europe, and has been, since the fall of the Eastern bloc, asked with an increased frequency. Whenever I am asked to speak about this topic, however, I experience unease which has little to do with the actual situation of women in Yugoslavia, and much more with the context and the assumptions within which this question is posed in American popular discourse. This...

After the unparalleled boldness in political imagination and praxis of the heroic Solidarity era, Poland is now busy re-defining the content of its national identity and restructuring the meaning of gender within it.¹ The postcommunist and post-Solidarity period is marked by competing symbolic politics in which pro-Western liberal forces are opposed by nationalistic factions (divided into Catholic and populist anti-Catholic) and all are confronted by an old communist and a new socialist Left.² In political discourse the issue of gender has been continuously in the foreground.

The gains of the Catholic nationalist faction have been considerable. Though by fall 1993...

In the midst of racist pogroms, East German workers striking to combat their exploitation by Western business, and the recently legalized eviction of asylum-seekers accused of draining the welfare state, the passing of a tightened abortion law in 1993, now among the most restrictive in Western Europe, aroused little popular attention or protest in Germany. Three years earlier, the question whether to maintain the liberal East German laws on reproductive rights, or the much more paternalistic legislation in the West, was explosive enough to threaten the unification proceedings.¹ The abortion issue attained tremendous symbolic weight, because it had come to...

The aftermath of German unification has not been easy for many women of the former German Democratic Republic (GDR). Ironically, the democratization of their land following unification in 1990 has meant a loss of both economic security and reproductive rights.¹ As many feminists in the East and West have pointed out, the conservative body politics of the German government has placed a heavy psychological and economic strain on many GDR women who had come of age within a system that permitted abortion and the guarantee of equal rights.² Although women in the GDR could make choices about their bodies, however,...

Until perestroika, finding pornography in Moscow was less likely than encountering a singing nun at a bazaar. Yet by 1990Moscow Newsreported a lively trade in girlie magazines at newsstands, an adolescent complained in print about the pornographic videos inundating the city, and metro stations and dashboards of taxis routinely displayed pictures of women wearing only a pout or a smile.¹ Public reactions to the relentless omnipresence of naked flesh pressured Gorbachev, in fact, on 5 December 1990 to establish a commission charged with elaborating measures to safeguard the country’s morality. Anyone curious about the effectiveness of that official...

During the first Communist Party congress after he took office, Mikhail Gorbachev outlined his agenda for change. He said the country was in crisis and needed to be reformed. He said the economic system was stagnant and needed to be reformed. And he said that the media was gray and needed to be reformed.

Six years later, Gorbachev was out of his two offices – as general secretary of the Communist Party and president of the Soviet Union – and the two offices had been eliminated, along with the institutions over which they presided. The country he had said needed...

InEpistemology of the ClosetEve Kosofsky Sedgwick argues for the centrality of homo/heterosexual definition in Western culture: “an understanding of virtually any aspect of modern Western culture must be, not merely incomplete, but damaged in its central substance to the degree that it does not incorporate a critical analysis of modern homo/heterosexual definition.”¹ While any hermeneutic analysis of literature foregrounds secrets the text may hold, secrets are approached differently by different critics. InThe Genesis of SecrecyFrank Kermode treats secrecy as a kind of will to be interpreted in all narrative.² Feminist critics like Adrienne Rich, Gayle Greene,...

The majority of readers will be unfamiliar with the name of Ivan Soloviev (1944–1984) unless the former students of one Moscow school, who will recall their prematurely deceased teacher, are among them.¹ Although Ivan Igorevich taught Russian language and literature, his knowledge was encyclopedic, encompassing the most diverse spheres of world culture. He could easily compare the lyrical works of Pushkin, Goethe, and Byron, or the philosophical views of Plato, Nietzsche, and Freud. Quite often his lessons violated the boundaries of traditional scholarly disciplines, thereby provoking keen interest among his students, jealousy among his colleagues, and suspicion and hostility...

Alcoholism is one of Russia’s oldest and most persistent social problems which over many generations has become a cultural norm and Russian “institution” in the sense that “the popular craving for alcohol has played as equally important [a] role as a set of needs, values, and attitudes related to the most essential determinants of social behavior: needs for food, for sex, for freedom, and for prosperity and success.”¹

Russian alcoholism has been a predominantly male problem – although the incidence of female alcoholism has increased in the late Soviet and post-Soviet period – and its consequences effect the relationships between...

In the drive toward capitalism that has overtaken Hungary since the collapse of communism, its consequences for the culture of cinema are often overlooked in media discourses, with their relentless, and often exclusive, focus on the vicissitudes of the transition to a market economy. Yet it is in the realm of the visual arts – and, in particular, cinema – that the evolution of subjectivity and political consciousness is perhaps most dramatically inscribed. The annual review of film production held in Budapest and known as “Film Week” offers an unparalleled opportunity for assessing the impact of the post-1989 changes on...