The zhenskie sovety (women’s councils), or zhensovety in shortened form, were set up after 1958 under Nikita Khrushchev as part of his attempt to mobi1728 lize the Soviet people around issues concerning their lives. Involvement in trades unions, comrades courts, and citizens’ volunteer detachments was also encouraged during this period. The zhensovety were part of Khrushchev’s “differentiated approach” to politics, according to which women’s organizations were now acceptable again on the grounds that they targeted one particular group of citizens, just as other organizations dealt with particular groupings, such as youth and pensioners. From 1930 when Stalin declared the “woman question” to be solved, separate organizations for women, with the exception of the movement of wives (dvizhenie zhen), were closed down on the grounds that they smacked of “bourgeois feminism” and were divisive of working-class unity. Now it was recognized that the political education of women was one of the weakest areas of party work and in need of attention.
Zhensovety were formed in factories and offices and on farms. They were set up at regional (oblast), territory (kray), and district (rayon) levels of administration. Their sizes varied from around thirty to fifty members at regional levels and fifteen to twenty at district level to smaller groups of five to seventeen in factories and farms. There was no uniform pattern across the women’s councils, as some were closely affiliated with the party, others with the soviets, and still others with the trade union. They divided their work into sections such as daily life, culture, mass political work, child care, health care, and sanitation and hygiene. Their activities usually reflected official party priorities for work among women.
The zhensovety continued to exist on paper in the years of Leonid Brezhnev’s leadership but in fact did very little. They were formal in most areas rather than active. As part of his policy of democratization, Mikhail Gorbachev revived and restructured them. In 1986, at the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress in Moscow, Gorbachev called for their reinvigoration. By the spring of 1988, 2.3 million women were active in 236,000 zhensovety. As in the past, each women’s council was preoccupied with issues of local concern. Their work was divided into the typical sections of “daily life and social problems,” “production,” “children,” and “culture.”
At the nineteenth All-Union Conference of the CPSU in June 1988, Gorbachev argued that women’s voices were not heard and that this had been the case for years. He regretted that the women’s movement was at a “standstill,” at best “formal.” He placed the zhensovety for the first
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
time under the hierarchical umbrella of the Soviet Women’s Committee. In 1989 Gorbachev reformed the electoral system. In the newly elected Congress of People’s Deputies, the zhensovety had 75 “saved” seats among the 750 seats reserved for social organizations. See also: FEMINISM; MARRIAGE AND FAMILY LIFE
Browning, Genia. (1987). Women and Politics in the USSR. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Browning, Genia. (1992). “The Zhensovety Revisited.” In Perestroika and Soviet Women, ed. Mary Buckley. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Buckley, Mary. (1989). Women and Ideology in the Soviet Union. Ann Arbor: University of Mchigan Press. Buckley, Mary. (1996). “The Untold Story of Obshch-estvennitsa in the 1930s.” Europe-Asia Studies 48(4):569-586. Friedgut, Theodore H. (1979). Political Participation in the USSR. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Ultra-nationalist Vladimir Zhirinovsky rails against the United States during a January 19, 2003, rally in Moscow. © AFP/
CORBIS
(b. 1946), founder and leader of the Liberal-Democratic Party of Russia, deputy speaker of the State Duma.
Born in Alma-Ata in Kazakhstan, Vladimir Volfovich Zhirinovsky was the son of a Jewish lawyer from Lviv and a Russian woman. After his father’s death he was raised by his mother. He graduated from Moscow State University in 1969, then served in the army in Tiflis, where he worked in military intelligence. From 1973 to 1991 Zhirinovsky worked at various jobs in Moscow and at night attended law school at Moscow State University. In the 1980s he directed legal services for Mir publishing.
With the coming of perestroika Zhirinovsky began his political career. In 1988 he founded the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia (LDPR), the second legal party registered in the Soviet Union. In 1991 he ran for the presidency of Russia and received 6 million votes. Emphasizing populism and great-power chauvinism and denouncing corruption, he built up a loyal party organization. In the December 1993 parliamentary elections, ZhiriENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY novsky parlayed discontent with Boris Yeltsin into a plurality in the State Duma. In the complex election system for individual candidates and party slates, the LDPR received 23 percent of the total vote, fifty-nine of the party seats in the Duma, and five individual seats.
In the December 1995 Duma elections, the LDPR vote fell sharply to 11.1 percent, and the party won only fifty-five seats in the parliament, well behind the resurgent Communist Party. In 1996 Zhirinovsky ran for president again, but this time he finished fifth (5.7 percent) in the first round of voting and was eliminated.
In the Duma elections of 1999 the LDPR drew 6.4 percent of the vote and got nineteen seats. Zhirinovsky was elected deputy speaker of the Duma. In the 2000 presidential election he ran again and drew only 2.7 percent of the vote, or a little more than 2 million out of the 75 million who voted. Zhirinovsky supported both the first and the second Chechen War. An acute student of mass media, he remained in the national spotlight by combining outlandish behavior, populist appeal, and authoritarian nationalism. His antics included fist fights on the floor of the Duma and throwing
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orange juice on Boris Nemtsov during a television debate. He made headlines by threatening to take Alaska back from the United States and to flood the Baltic republics with radioactive waste. Zhirinovsky has called for a Russian dash to the south that would end “when Russian soldiers can wash their boots in the warm waters of the Indian Ocean.” See also: LIBERAL DEMOCRATIC PARTY
Fraser, Graham, and Lancelle, George. (1994). Absolute Zhirinovsky: A Transparent View of the Distinguished Russian Statesman. New York: Penguin Books. Kartsev, Vladimir, with Todd Bludeau. (1995). Zhirinovsky! New York: Columbia University Press. Kipp, Jacob W. (1994).“The Zhirinovsky Threat.” Foreign Affairs 73(3):72-86. Zhirinovsky, Vladimir. (1996). My Struggle: The Explosive Views of Russia’s Most Controversial Public Figure. New York: Barricade Books.
(1868-1953), Menshevik leader; president of Georgia.
The most important leader of the Georgian Social Democrats (Mensheviks), Noe Nikolayevich Zhordania was born in western Georgia to a petty noble family. Educated at the Tiflis Orthodox Seminary (just years before Josef Stalin entered that institute that bred so many revolutionaries), Zhordania went on to Warsaw for further education and there was introduced to Marxism. His writings in the Georgian progressive journal kvali (trace) in the early 1890s inspired young radicals soon to be known as the mesame dasi (third generation). Zhordania combined a Marxist critique of Russian autocracy and the Armenian-dominated capitalism of his native Georgia with a patriotism that appealed broadly to workers, students, and peasants. By 1905 he had affiliated with the more moderate wing of Russian Social Democracy, the Mensheviks, and took the bulk of Georgian Social Democrats along with him. Radicals like the young Stalin were isolated in the Georgian party and eventually made their careers outside the country.
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During the first Russian Revolution in 1905-1906, the Mensheviks dominated Georgia, essentially routing tsarist authority in the country, but brutal repression restored the rule of the government. In 1906 Zhordania was elected to the first State Duma, the new parliament conceded by the tsar. But within a few months the tsar
