1. Introduction

Gender relations in post-Soviet Russia and other former Soviet Republics have undergone a marked shift since the early 20th century. Both democratization and neoliberal market reform since the collapse of the USSR have entailed a pronounced social and political reconfiguration concerning gender equality, largely guided by a Western capitalistic market logic. Indeed, the transition from Socialist legality to Capitalist legality has fundamentally altered the sociopolitical and sociocultural fabric of post-Soviet nation-states. Contemporary feminist engagements with such new forms of governance and culture in the post-Soviet framework have had various implications for the current state of gender equality, in both regressive and progressive terms. Evolving from a socialist gender parity model originally cultivated by the Bolshevik Party in the early 20th century to a neoliberal, individualistic feminist model today, gender equality in post-Soviet Russia as well as the FSU has undergone deep social, political, and economic transformations. Specifically, there has been a noticeable shift from ‘state feminism’ to ‘market feminism,’ resulting in the normalization of market privilege and the subordinate status of feminist agendas. But it has also resulted in, as Kantola and Squires note, the “emergence of new, flexible institutions pursuing gender equality” and a heightened feminist influence in the labor market (2012). While this ‘state’ to ‘market’ shift in feminist agendas has been a prevalent trend in most Western democracies paralleled by the rise of neoliberalism, in post-Soviet Russia and the FSU it has been particularly revealing of the socially regressive aspects of neoliberal market reform. In contrast to the optimistic theories regarding the fall of communism in the late 20th Century (Modernization Theory, Fukuyama’s ‘End of History’ Thesis, etc.), it seems that the neoliberal, democratic restructuring of Russia and the Eastern Bloc brought about certain negative effects, specifically concerning gender equality and social welfare.

This article, then, will look at post-Soviet Russia and two former Soviet Republics (Ukraine and Kazakhstan) and the evolution of gender equality since the collapse of the USSR. It will demonstrate that the shift from a socialist, state feminism to a neoliberal, market feminism has ultimately hindered the cultivation of true gender equality and given rise to unprecedented social and economic inequities. 

2. Soviet Legacy

Rooted in the sociopolitical philosophy of Marx, Engels and Lenin, the USSR was established with a decidedly gender-equal agenda. Indeed, communist and socialist theorists of the early 20th century gave particular importance to issues of gender relations and gender equality. Upon the advent of private property and the modern nuclear family unit, women took on the role of reproduction while men took on the role of production. And, as Engels suggested in The Origins of the Family, Private Property and the State, this coincided with the evolution of a “surplus of production” which advanced the economic and political position of men as the primary breadwinner and, in turn, subjugated women to a financially dependent role as domestic homemaker/caregiver. The gendered character of this “production–reproduction split” in class society resulted in a marked disparity between women’s economic citizenship and that of their male counterpart. Engels wrote of this disparity:

What we can now conjecture about the way in which sexual relations will be ordered after the impending overthrow of capitalist production is mainly of a negative character, limited for the most part to what will disappear. But what will there be new? That will be answered when a new generation has grown up: a generation of men who never in their lives have known what it is to buy a woman’s surrender with money or any other social instrument of power; a generation of women who have never known what it is to give themselves to a man from any other considerations than real love or to refuse to give themselves to their lover from fear of the economic consequences. (Engels, 1972, p. 145)

Gender equality was also central to Lenin’s philosophy of the state. In his interview with Clara Zetkin, prominent German Marxist theorist and feminist, Lenin described the preeminent goal of the Bolshevik party as creating “a powerful international women’s movement, on a clear theoretical basis” (Zetkin, 1975, p. 685). The traditional, patriarchal family model of the capitalist industrial revolution, marked by de facto “domestic slavery,” was replaced by the so-called “etacratic gender model.” That is, based on the Bolshevik agenda, women’s rights and gender equality initiatives were informed by class struggle and a communist agenda—full and equal gender rights were to be secured through labor and civic engagement. As Zetkin herself noted, “I was filled with enthusiasm about the work done by Russian women in the revolution and still being done by them in its defence and further development. And as for the position and activities of women comrades in the Bolshevik Party, that seemed to me a model Party” (Zetkin, 1975, p. 686). Indeed, the rise of the Bolshevik party signaled the establishment of the most gender equal state in the world. In fact, by 1918 there was already legal precedent concerning the rights of women. The Russian Central Executive Committee of Soviets ratified the Code on Marriage, the Family, and Guardianship in October 1918 which was specifically designed to dispel the former bourgeois, patriarchal ethics of marriage and gender relations and foster a new philosophy of state aimed primarily at familial equity and gender parity. Specifically, it sought to abolish the social function of the family and close the “private–public” gap in order to cultivate “free unions” based solely on love, equality and mutual benefit. In essence, “[t]he USSR demonstrated a higher level of equality in employment and education opportunities for women than most European countries during the period” (Little, 2005).  

As the USSR evolved and fell under Stalin’s regime, however, the Bolshevik ideals of gender equality were partly abandoned.  The fundamental tenet of Lenin’s socialist philosophy concerning holistic women’s empowerment was replaced by Stalin and his first government with economic and social pragmatism. The Bolshevik idea of the “new family” was not ever realized under Stalin’s regime; instead, an aggressively gendered division of labor was implemented in the name of industrial and economic progress.  While Stalin maintained the increased role for women in production and social life established by the Bolshevik party, he primarily emphasized women’s domestic role—house care and child rearing. As Oleksandr Pahiria remarks, “The state mobilized the work of women beyond the immediate economic necessity, and motherhood became their civic duty. The cult of motherhood promoted in the USSR under Stalin had a purely pragmatic basis: it was created to increase the population” (2012). Stalin’s so-called gender-parity model was certainly not designed to foster women’s emancipation for its own sake, but rather to compete with the economic rise of Western democracies, particularly the United States.

But despite the regressive gender policies under Stalin, Khrushchev and Brezhnez implemented more progressive and modern policies during their respective times in power which remained in place until the collapse of the Soviet Union. The first legal code adopted which signaled a more progressive gender/family policy was the Family Law of 1968. This law sought to strengthen the Soviet family, particularly the rights and services allocated to mothers and children, and firmly emphasized the equality between men and women (R’asentsev, 1971). Further, it sought to provide “the necessary social conditions for a happy combination of motherhood with increased active and creative involvement in industrial and socio-political life” (Pahiria, 2012). And by the 1980s, universal maternity leave was extended to eighteen months, which rivaled even the most progressive countries in the world at the time, most notably Sweden and Denmark.

Further, the labor-force participation of women in the USSR by the 1980s was also unrivaled in the international community: “[a]pproximately 80% of women in the Soviet Union ages 15–54 years [were] employed outside the home” (Ofer, 1983). In addition, women’s professional and academic education increased exponentially alongside labor-force participation, which gave Soviet women unprecedented economic citizenship and independence. However, women’s participation in political life never reached the ideals laid out in the Family Law of 1968, let alone in the original decrees established by the Bolshevik party. In fact, only two women were ever admitted into the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: Yekaterina Furtseva and Yelena Stasova. But it is important to note that this is similar to many Western democracies at the time; indeed, in the 1980s in the USA, before the so-called Year of the Woman in 1992, only two women held Senate seats and only 28 held Congressional seats.

In sum, it seems that while gender relations in the USSR were far from ideal, the Soviet system, based on a socialist gender parity model, gave rise to one of the most gender equal states in the world. Its system was directly guided by a deliberate and philosophical approach to human equality, informed by not only the economic benefits of universal, socialized childcare and parental leave, but also by the fundamental importance of equitable, humanistic relations in the labor market and domestic work at large.

3. Collapse of the USSR

To accurately understand and assess the shifts in gender equality in the FSU and Russia after the collapse of the USSR, the collapse itself should first be understood. The primary shift in governance and sociopolitical life after the collapse of the USSR can best be described as one from “Socialist legality” to “Capitalist legality.” This is crucial in understanding the evolution of gender equality as women’s rights and sociopolitical power/citizenship is inextricably tied with a society’s form of governance and economy (Kantola & Squires, 2012). Yet, the prevailing theories which seek to explain the demise of the Soviet Union is the Modernization Theory (Akturk, 2008) and Fukuyama’s “End of History” Thesis. However, both fail to account for the role of the Soviet Elite and how the collapse of the Soviet Union was largely guided by so-called principles of private property and a market capitalist ideology so as to benefit the elite in Soviet society. As Akturk notes in his essay “15 Years after the ‘Collapse’ of Soviet Socialism,” the collapse of the USSR was, in large part, the result of Soviet elite’s consolidation of power, prompted by a burgeoning threat to their privilege and status posed by the “socialist legality” campaigns of Andropov and Gorbachev in the 1980s.

Threatened with the prospect of being purged for corruption and losing their entitlements, the Soviet elite responded by transforming itself into an official bourgeoisie that had title to the power and property it had controlled informally in the Soviet system.  “Capitalist legality” was embraced to protect this power and property from possible re-appropriation from below (Akturk, 2008).

Indeed, the Soviet collapse ought not to be seen as merely the result of administrative failures and a natural modernization process because such a theory does not consider the immense role which the social and political elite played. Contrary to the position of the Modernization Theory, there was no optimistic or progressive societal reform after the USSR’s collapse. In Russia, for instance, the societal transformation was often referred to as “wild west capitalism” and a “social carnival” (attributed to Prof. John P. Willerton of University of Arizona), wherein the elite consolidated the nation’s resources and power with no regard to equitable distribution or the USSR’s socialist legacy (Akturk, 2008). The standing of feminist agendas and gender equality, then, were predictably relegated to a subordinate position in relation to capitalist market logic and interests, particularly in Russia and other former Soviet Eastern European Republics. And in the case of Kazakhstan (and other former Soviet Central Asian countries), feminist agendas and gender equality were jettisoned altogether.

In the following cross-state analysis, Russia was chosen as a primary variable as it is the mainstay of most post-Soviet theoretical work and most directly representative of the effects of the USSR’s dissolution. Furthermore, Russia has embraced its communist legacy both in terms of governance and social relations beyond all former Soviet states.

In choosing the remaining two states for a cross-state analysis, very simple criteria were established in order to satisfy temporal and geographic considerations. It was first necessary to include only states whose independence was declared at the onset of the USSR’s collapse so to ensure consistency in their respective evolution after the Soviet Union was dissolved. Secondly, due to the immense scale of the USSR, it was deemed necessary to choose states that represented exclusive geographic and geopolitical regions in order to ensure a proportional analytic scope. Thus, Ukraine was chosen to represent the FSU of Eastern Europe and Kazakhstan was chosen to represent the FSU of Central Asia.

In the absence of Soviet governance and policies, Russia, Ukraine and Kazakhstan will be analyzed to determine what the specific effects of the USSR’s collapse had on gender equality. And it will be argued that the shifts from socialist legality to capitalist legality and state feminism to market feminism cultivated a particularly unique socioeconomic multistate revolution, resulting in sudden market privilege and the subordination of feminist interests. It will be demonstrated that the neoliberal, individualistic feminist model which is currently in place in Russia and Ukraine has primarily resulted in a marked regression in gender relations compared to that of the Soviet Union. Further, in Kazakhstan, and the former Soviet Central Asia at large, feminist agendas and gender equality have been abandoned outright.

4. Russia

After the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991, capitalist legality quickly became the central governmental and economic paragon in Russia, resulting in the shift from ‘state’ to ‘market’ feminism. This shift is clearly identifiable in observed gender equity in the public sector compared to the private sector. Gender equality has in many respects increased in the private sector (e.g., increased leadership roles in business for women, increased earnings, etc.). In contrast, however, state-sponsored gender equality has decreased in almost every aspect. But in aggregate, this has cultivated a social system marked by fundamental gender inequality.

5. Russian Public Sector

While women’s access to primary education since the collapse of the USSR has increased slightly, their access to higher education has undergone a noticeable drop since the 1960s. “The gender factor alone reduced the chances of the female applicants to higher educational establishments by 2.4% in the 1960s [to] 12% [less likely] in the 1990s” (Mezentseva, 2006), and such discrimination continues to be a significant factor in educational access for women in Russia today. Furthermore, women’s material gain from a postgraduate degree rarely yields the same results from male counterparts with a similar degree, ranging from 6 to 10%. And in the years following the Soviet collapse, women’s labor-force participation fell by over 13 million. (Nevertheless, women’s labor-force participation rate in Russia still ranks as one of the highest in the world, largely owing to its communist legacy). While it may be argued that the above shifts ought to be attributed to the socioeconomic crisis which Russia faced after the Soviet government collapsed, the fact that these issues of gender inequality continue to be salient factors in Russia today necessitates an alternate explanation. Indeed, the absence of a state-endorsed gender parity model, the emphasis on market advancement, and the partnership between the Russian state and private sector resulted in (1) universities charging fees for female- dominated fields of study; (2) the “expenditure of federal budget money allocated for education […] becoming more and more gender asymmetric, and not in favor of women” (Mezentseva, 2006); (3) widespread workplace discrimination based on sex (largely by governmental employers) to avoid paying for women’s maternity leave (Human Rights Watch, 2000); and (4) a gross lack of governmental oversight of such discrimination. As a HRW investigation revealed, “The Russian government, and particularly its law enforcement agencies, also have denied women's right to equal protection of the law by failing to investigate and prosecute violence [and workplace discrimination] against women” (Human Rights Watch, 2000).

Furthermore, the shift from a socialist to capitalist legality has been the driving force behind the degradation and commodification of (formerly universal) health care and childcare. The degradation and commodification of health care have particularly affected women, resulting in the Russian government only covering “20% of women’s health care needs.” Moreover, it has caused Russia to have one of the highest maternal mortality rates in the world (32 in 100,000 live births) and abortion as “the most commonly used mean of birth control. In 2003, around 1.8 million abortions were registered, the figure being 1.3 times more than the number of births” (Mezentseva, 2006).

And the degradation and commodification of childcare has also particularly affected women. For instance, the provision of pre-school institutions has dropped precipitously since the socialist–capitalist legality shift: “In 1990 66.4% of all the children attended preschool institutions, in 1995 — 55.5%, in 2001 — 57.2 %” (Mezentseva, 2006). This, of course, was accompanied by the decrease in women’s labor-force participation and their general exclusion from the social sphere (Seckin, 2014), reinforcing neo-liberal patriarchal conventions. Indeed, as Ecim Seckin noted, “After Soviet rule, changing political and economic situations reduced the women’s social status and promoted the discriminatory processes in society” (2014).

In sum, it seems clear that feminist agendas in Russia following the shift from socialist legality to capitalist legality were chiefly influenced by market privilege and market consideration. To be sure, the deterioration of gender equality, specifically in the public sector, was the result of the commodification, privatization, and deregulation of formerly socialized institutions such as healthcare, childcare and the labor market. The influence of neoliberal market logic forced feminist groups to appeal to economic interests in order to foster reform, which ultimately caused further governmental ambivalence toward gender equality and the prioritization of market welfare and governmental austerity over gender parity and former ‘humanistic relations’ within the labor force.

6. Russian Private Sector

Owing largely to its communist legacy, Russia boasts the highest ratio of women in CEO or senior management positions in its private sector worldwide (Saab, 2014). Indeed, Russia has the world’s highest proportion of women in senior executive positions at 43%, with the international average at approximately 24%. To give context, the United States only boasts 22% and “only 3 percent of 145 Nordic large-cap companies have a female chief executive” (Saab, 2014). This disparity between Russia and its Western counterparts could certainly be attributed solely to its socialist/communist legacy of women in the workplace but the most likely contemporary factor is novel feminist engagements with the burgeoning private sector and new economic developments/opportunities. As Kantola and Squires note, representatives of current feminist movements “articulate [their] interests in ways that inevitably privilege particular conceptions of gender relations” in accordance with “the logic of the market” and embedded in “neoliberal market reform” (2012). But as public policy agendas have increasingly become tied with market interests since the prevalence of post-Soviet capitalist legality, so too must feminist progression be implemented in the context of market/capitalist logic. Such is demonstrated in the degradation of socialized, state-sponsored gender equality initiatives (healthcare, education, childcare, etc.) and the increase of women’s empowerment in the private sector. However, the apparent rise of equality in the labor market is persistently haunted by a parallel rise of underlying gendered inequities in wages, division of labor and unemployment. Albeit women have seen more ascendency in corporate hierarchies than any other country worldwide, their wages overall have plummeted since the collapse of the USSR. “While in the 1980s, the wages of women constituted, on average, 70% of men's, by the end of 1999 this figure had dropped to 52%, and in 2000, to only 50%” (Mezentseva, 2006). And by 2014, even though “[w]omen in Russia are better educated, more experienced and more productive than their male counterparts on average,” they still made 32.8% less than men according to the International Labor Organization’s 2014 Global Wage Report (ILO, 2014; “Russian Women,” 2014). The Russian wage gap can be understood as the confluence of two prominent trends in its labor market—simple wage discrimination and gendered division of labor. The gendered division of labor, for instance, is so commonplace that employers actively acknowledge the discrimination practices in their hiring processes. Mezentseva found in her 2006 study that

Most employers think the burden of family duties reduces value of women as labor force and prefer to hire workers who are ready for harder and overtime work (i.e. males). Equal professional skills and qualification provided, 23% of the employers questioned would have preferred to dismiss a woman while only 12% [would dismiss] a man.

Further, women’s unemployment is 1.5 times higher than men and, on average, women remain unemployed for far longer than their male counterparts (Mezentseva, 2006).

So, while contemporary feminist engagements with the new capitalist forms of government and economy in Russia have led in part to higher ascendancy in the labor market hierarchy, the degradation of socialized equality and universal welfare programs have had far worse effects on gender equality as a whole. To be sure, the ‘state’ to ‘market’ shift of feminist agendas has ultimately given primacy to market interests and stymied initiatives of gender equality for their own sake.

7. Ukraine

As in Russia, Ukraine saw significant advancements in women’s empowerment and gender equality in the 1980s, particularly during glasnost. But in the years following Ukraine’s independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, much of that progress was lost due to neoliberal market reform, governmental restructuring and corruption (Hrycak, 2001). In the late 1980s, Ukraine was marked by growing feminist influence and civic engagement aimed at increasing women’s political skills, financial independence, and social status. This trend was cultivated by large grassroots women’s federations and NGOs but upon the collapse of the USSR and the subsequent independence of Ukraine, these groups were replaced by “an increasing professionalization of women’s-rights work in the hands of a small, closed elite” (Hrycak, 2001), which catered to the interests of the ruling market class rather than working women. Indeed, post-Soviet Ukrainian working women were “treated as expendable and […] accounted for over eighty percent of the unemployment created by economic restructuring,” ultimately resulting in women “as victims of a conservative state that […] robbed them of the economic, social-welfare, and reproductive rights they enjoyed under Soviet rule” (Hrycak, 2001). And while it certainly could be argued that the patriarchal division of labor which emerged in post-Soviet Ukraine was a mere regression to the mid-20th-century gender policies propagated by the Communist Party, it is important to note that women’s unemployment was never so egregious under Soviet rule, nor was women’s position ever so subjugated to economic interests. While the so-called ‘cult of motherhood’ in the USSR relegated Ukrainian women to mostly domestic labor, their position in society was protected by state welfare programs which provided reliable healthcare, childcare, and education, as well as avenues toward civic engagement. The resulting shift, however, from ‘state’ to ‘market’ feminism after Ukraine’s independence, similar to Russia’s, gave rise to greater commodification of women’s welfare and the primacy of economic over egalitarian interests. But it is important to note that in contrast to the restructuring that occurred in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Ukraine never experienced any significant technological or economic development. This greatly limited the spread and normalization of neoliberal market reform and thus is often referred to as a country of “peripheral capitalism” (Merezhko, 2006). Nevertheless, there has been a marked trend away from former Soviet-style policies related to the socialized welfare of women and children, women’s health, and gender equality within the workplace.

8. Working Women in Ukraine

In the contemporary Ukrainian labor force, discrimination against women in both the recruitment and hiring phase is ubiquitous. In a 2003 Human Rights Watch investigation, it was revealed that employers in the public sector as well as private sector routinely discriminate on the basis of gender, often citing the inferiority of “women’s physical and intellectual capacities and their family responsibilities”: “As a result, women are increasingly pushed into low-wage service sector or public sector jobs or seek employment, including secondary employment, in the unregulated informal sector” (HRW, 2003). And such discrimination persists today: there are over 500 professions that women are prohibited from entering (Uvarova, 2016); a significantly larger number of women are unemployed than men; there is a wage gap nearing 25%; and no reliable legal or judicial standard exists to prevent such discrimination (Uvarova, 2016).

Furthermore, the consolidation of resources by the patriarchal elite after the collapse is clearly seen in the fact that “90–95 percent of financial resources in Ukraine are also controlled by men” (Makazan, 2013).  These effects are also compounded by the widespread “restrictions on female admission to higher educational institutions of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Ukraine” and the pension reforms of the early 2000s which “infringe on the rights of employed women” (Makazan, 2013). As it stands today, women’s economic and social mobility is restricted not only by workplace discrimination (and no reliable options for recourse) but also by educational limitations and an inability to plan for their economic futures.

In the absence of a strict socialist gender parity model in place, it does indeed seem that women are “robbed […] of the economic […] rights they enjoyed under Soviet rule” (Hrycak, 2001). In post-Soviet Ukraine, women experience far less labor-force participation as well as upward economic and social mobility. They, nevertheless, still bear the burden of childcare and domestic labor which exacerbates their economic dependence and role as primary caretaker.

9.  Healthcare and Childcare

The most troubling factor in Ukrainian gender inequality is the confluence between an utter lack of economic citizenship for women and the lack of a government subsidized welfare state. As noted above, women (despite the gross lack of financial and social mobility) still bear the burden of childcare and domestic labor. Unfortunately, as Ukraine shifted to a market economy, government subsidies to family care and childcare plummeted: “state programmes to promote family and child welfare have remained underfinanced, and have been implemented through weak administrative channels run by patron–client networks that have never been accountable to the needy populations they are expected to serve” (Hrycak, 2001). In fact, most women had to pay for their own reproductive healthcare out of pocket as gynecologists and obstetricians were forced to charge fees for medication and medical procedures to compensate for budgetary shortfalls. Further, as of 2001, “most people of reproductive age still [could not] afford to pay for non-surgical forms of contraception” (Hrycay, 2001). Sadly, the contraceptive prevalence among women ages 15–49 has only decreased since the turn of the century—from 67.5% (of any contraceptive form) in 1999 to 65.4% in 2012 (The World Bank, 2012). In 2011, the Ukrainian Ministry of Health reported that approximately one third of pregnancies end in abortion and the JSI Research Institute found that only “3.7% of Ukrainian women of reproductive age use contraceptive pills; 12.1% use IUDs” (JSI, 2011). Even as the economy stabilizes, funding for the so-called Family Planning Programme still remains a fraction of what it requires to run properly. 

These trends are spawned not only by lack of sex education and misinformation but also by an overt patriarchal agenda at the state level which withholds funding and support of gender equality initiatives. Ukrainian Parliament consistently fails to pass laws which seek to increase funding for maternity and women’s healthcare welfare programs and, moreover, maintains the status quo by limiting the number of female representatives. In 2006 and 2007, in an attempt to increase the number of women in parliament, a draft law was put forward to amend Ukrainian election laws, “which stipulated at least one candidate of the opposite sex for every five candidates. [But] the draft law did not receive support in the Parliament” (Makazan, 2013). 

As such, Soviet-era maternity and reproductive healthcare welfare benefits have been all but abandoned in favor of a strict division of labor wherein women are overwhelmingly tasked with domestic duties and are discouraged from entering the workforce or controlling their own reproductivity. While the regression of gender equality in Ukraine is not as heavily guided by a neoliberal market logic as seen in Russia, contemporary feminist engagements are still nonetheless subordinate to economic considerations and are forced to negotiate with a patriarchal market agenda which has little apparent regard for egalitarian/gender equal initiatives/institutions formerly in place in the USSR.

10. Kazakhstan

After Kazakhstan gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, as with most post-Soviet countries there was a slow shift to a market economy and social welfare and equality slowly diminished. However, Kazakhstan is unique in its comparative affluence to former Soviet countries. Relying heavily on energy exports, Kazakhstan has enjoyed consistent annual growth since the late 1990s. But this has not precluded the dominant trend towards social and economic welfare degradation guided by market logic. Indeed, shortly after gaining independence, universal healthcare, childcare and education were promptly removed and privatized. In her paper “On the Way to Democracy: Women 's Activism in Kazakhstan,” Galiya Khassanova, the director of the UNDP Gender in Development Bureau in Kazakhstan, recalls the state of affairs in Soviet Kazakhstan fondly:

I remember well when women had such privileges as paid maternity leave for up to one year, or up to three years unpaid, during which time it was illegal to dismiss a woman from her job (the time also counted as working time for the calculation of her pension). Women took for granted the state's health care system of obstetric clinics, gynecological institutions, sanatoriums, and delivery centers that cared for women free of charge. There were also a low-cost child-care system (free for disabled or sick children); free public education; government allowances for families with children; and state support for families with many children, including additional allowances, inexpensive children's clothing, housing privileges, and so on. (Khassanova, 2002)

In the absence of such far-reaching social and economic welfare, contemporary feminists with post-Soviet Kazakhstan were forced to resort to the burgeoning market economy. Women’s empowerment and the welfare of their children were now to be secured in the new marketplace economy. “Former [female] teachers, scientists, doctors, and engineers now go to the markets of cities and villages with cheap goods procured in Poland, China, Turkey, South Korea, and India.” Women were now obligated to choose between slavish motherhood supported by meager labor and their “professional and cultural development” (Khassanova, 2002). Furthermore, without the protection of a strong state marked by clear, theoretical gender equality and strong law enforcement institutions, violence against women in Kazakhstan has been worse than its Russian or Eastern European counterparts.

11. Working Women in Kazakhstan

The predominant post-Soviet economic trend in Kazakhstan is the commodification and privatization of state-owned enterprises and services. As previously noted, the primary effect of the removal of state services is the underemployment and exploitation of Soviet-educated women as they are forced to leave their rural hometowns where they previously worked in education or medicine and find work as vendors in city marketplaces in order to support themselves and their children. The effects of the privatization of state-owned enterprises bring about very similar trends.

The first and, perhaps most obvious, effect is that the privatized governmental organization is guided and motivated solely by profit—not by any social or cultural initiative or philosophy as in the Soviet Union. This has led to widespread workplace discrimination, just as in Russia and Ukraine. As a 2013 study conducted by the Asian Development Bank (ADB) found, “employment growth has not contributed to gender equality in the labor market” and discrimination has caused women’s labor-force participation rates and comparative wages to be abysmally low (ADB, 2013). But what is somewhat unique to Kazakhstan is the resulting amount of vulnerable employment (i.e. unregulated work in the informal economy: childcare, house care, etc.) and unpaid labor of women due to widespread discrimination: “Women not only are more likely to be in vulnerable employment but also are more likely to fall in the category of unpaid contributing family workers, which offers the fewest opportunities for decent work” (ADB, 2013).

With the removal of Soviet social welfare programs (universal healthcare, childcare, education, etc.), women were forced to take on meager employment in order to make ends meet. “Post-Soviet women are coping with the realities of an economy where the state has terminated its social contract with women and transferred many of the costs of social reproduction to the household level” (Werner, 2009). Furthermore, they are often barred from corporate ascendancy due to gender discrimination and are forced to vulnerable and informal sectors of the economy, all but losing their economic citizenship.

12. Violence Against Women

The most salient gendered regression of post-Soviet Kazakhstan is the prevalence of violence against women. Particularly in rural areas, the law enforcement institutions that formerly fostered relative safety and freedom from violence for women were dissolved after the collapse of the USSR. Additionally, as many scholars note, many FSU governments of Central Asia have exploited the collapse of the USSR as an opportunity to explore nationalist policies which seek to implement a “re-traditionalization” of their respective societies (Werner, 2009), which often gives rise to patriarchally condoned violence against women in forms including bridal kidnappings and domestic violence.

There has been, according to Dr. Werner’s 2009 study of gender relations in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan, a strong “revival of non-consensual bride abduction in Kazakhstan,” due mostly to the post-Soviet trend of shame and tradition which “have helped men assert further control over female mobility and female sexuality” (2009). Sadly, women have very little recourse against these trends. The issue of violence against women and bride kidnappings go largely unnoticed by the urban population and the state government.  In fact, the Kazakhstani Criminal Code of 1998 “dropped a previous clause that criminalized the abduction of women against their will” (Werner, 2009). Even feminist organizations within Kazakhstan are guided by a nationalist and “traditionalist agenda” as they hardly acknowledge the steep rise in bride kidnappings and violence against women at large; they are, instead, far more concerned with “the problems of trafficking women from Kazakhstan to other countries” (Werner, 2009).

The problems of bride kidnappings and widespread condonation of violence against women were never apparent in Soviet Central Asia. Law enforcement agencies and related institutions were practically ubiquitous in the USSR and such violence was never allowed to occur at the scale which is seen in Kazakhstan today. The removal of Soviet social control has certainly allowed for more individual freedoms, but it is important to recognize the negative effects of the USSR’s collapse, particularly regarding the repression of women, since the onset of market capitalism has primarily privileged the social and political elite.

13. Conclusion

The collapse of the Soviet Union and the resulting shifts from socialist to capitalist legality and from state feminism to market feminism marked the end of true socialized protection for gender equality in Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan. Forced to negotiate with neoliberal market interests, feminism and sociocultural equality in these countries were ultimately subordinated. While market feminism has been able to make some progress in women’s empowerment within labor markets, the liberal capitalist restructuring did not bring about the emancipation of women, nor did it heighten individual liberties for all. Indeed, the optimistic perspective of predominately Western theorists concerning the fall of the Soviet Union is largely misguided. In the absence of social and economic welfare and state protection, men and women alike have been subjugated to the overarching interests of market logic. And the voices of the repressed working class are drowned out by the self-praise and clamoring of the economic elite which have significant ties to Western markets. In sum, however, it is the rights of women and gender equality which have been most affected by the restructuring of the late 20th century. To be sure, the shift from a socialist, state feminism to a neoliberal, market feminism has ultimately hindered the cultivation of true gender equality and given rise to unprecedented social and economic inequities.

References

Akturk, S. “15 Years after the “Collapse” of Soviet Socialism: The Role of Elite Choices, Class Conflict, and a Critique of Modernization Theory.” University of California, Berkeley. Department of Political Science. 2008. http://iseees.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/u4/bps_/publications_/2008_02-akturk.pdf.

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