ABSTRACT
Over the last two decades, feminist historiography has become a major subdiscipline, especially in the United States. It has found an echo in post-Soviet Russia, notably in the Moscow Centre for Gender Studies. The activists here are quite understandably concerned in the main with current developments. When they look back at the Stalinist era, the picture they see is unrelievedly grim. Olga Voronina, for example, writes of ‘a masculinist assault on the women’s movement’ that was launched c. 1930, as a result of which women’s right to work was transformed into ‘a very powerful instrument for their enslavement’.1 A certain exaggeration is perhaps to be expected among partisans of a (relatively) new cause that has to overcome deep-seated prejudices, and if pressed these writers would probably agree that other segments of Soviet society besides women were victims of Stalin’s rule. Did women suffer proportionately more than men? This is an idle question that could be answered, if at all, only after examining specific ‘gender issues’.
