Русское зазеркалье (двуязычная версия)

Soviet Russia had her own ways to deal away with ‘the gender question.’ Gender identities other than heterosexual never were tolerated which has never stopped men and women to exchange their social or professional roles that are normally seen as ‘gender-specific’ in a truly patriarchal society. No wonder, considering that the Communist doctrine proclaimed ‘the liberation of a woman’ as one of its ideals. According to both Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin, women should be freed from their petty domestic concerns in order to become politically active members of the Communist society. Practical measures to achieve this effect were also taken: a big number of state nurseries and kindergartens were opened in the 20es of the last century. As a result, women in Soviet Russia gained access to basically all occupations that were seen as ‘male’ jobs in the Russian Empire before 1917. During WWII, Soviet women served in the army as soldiers, officers, political instructors, even as army pilots and snipers—voluntarily so, as there was no draft for them, meaning that no compulsory enrollment for women existed. It was probably these very women who, having returned from the front line, contributed to a very specific phenomenon of the Soviet culture which existed mostly in towns and which can, for the sake of our discussion, be referred to as ‘mild Soviet feminism.’ (You can write down the term, but I think you would never be able to find it either on Wikipedia or anywhere else on the web, your attempts to google it leading you to either Feminism in Russia orsuch articles as Is Feminism in Russia a Mortal Sin? [the author is Valeria Kostra-Kostritsky] and the like.)