Women's Social Activism in the New Ukraine: Development and the Politics of Differentiation
232
Women's Social Activism in the New Ukraine: Development and the Politics of Differentiation
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253219923 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 06/25/2008 |
| Series: | New Anthropologies of Europe |
| Pages: | 232 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.50(h) x 0.70(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Women's Social Activism in the New Ukraine
Development and the Politics of Differentiation
By Sarah D. Phillips
Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2008 Sarah D. PhillipsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-35164-7
CHAPTER 1
All Aboard the "Titanic Ukraina"
Kyiv, the Heart of Ukraine
To understand the lives of women like Ivana, Svetlana, Vira, and Sofiia, we first need to become familiar with the settings in which they lived and worked. Kyiv is Ukraine's capital city of around 2.6 million situated on both banks of the Dnipro River, Ukraine's largest waterway. Kyiv is the political and commercial heart of Ukraine and by far the largest city. Much of the world came to know Kyiv through compelling images of the Maidan Nezalezhnosti, or Independence Square, where up to a million protestors weathered the winter cold for seventeen days to challenge election fraud during the 2004 presidential elections. Media coverage of the Orange Revolution captured the sea of orange-clad and beribboned protestors, and the "tent city" where some protestors camped out, as well as the strange amalgam of built structures that make Kyiv a city of contrasts: ancient monasteries and churches, low-slung pre-Soviet buildings (former private homes of merchants and other local elites), imposing Stalinist structures, towering high-rise cookie-cutter apartment buildings, and the maze of statues, monuments, fountains, and other structures that now litter Independence Square.
Revolution or not, Independence Square (formerly Lenin Square) is always bustling with people. Located in the heart of the city center, the square is a hub for shopping, access to services such as Kyiv's main post office, and tourism. The square is bisected by Khreshchatyk, the wide street that has been Kyiv's main downtown thoroughfare for the last hundred years. Most of the street was destroyed during the Nazi occupation of Kyiv in World War II — only one block survived — but it was rebuilt by the city's residents. One side of the square is flanked by five tall Stalinist buildings, former apartment buildings and sites of government that now also sport stores, restaurants, and hotels, and are bedecked with neon advertisements for beer, banks, and construction companies. Narrow streets snake past each of these buildings, ascending up a steep hill to connect the Maidan with an equally grand venue — Sofiia Square, which boasts the ancient St. Sofiia's Cathedral at one end and the newly reconstructed St. Michael's monastery at the other. A beautiful yellow two-story prerevolutionary building stretches along the square. One of my friends lived in a communal apartment here in 1995 when I first visited Kyiv, but a few years later all the residents had been "bought out." Developers offered families private apartments (and more square meters) in other parts of the city, and the communal apartments were turned into offices and stores. In the middle of Sofiia Square stands a bronze monument (completed in 1888 by Mikhail Mikeshin) to Bohdan Khmel'nyts'kyi, who led the Zaporozhian Sich (Cossacks) in the 1648 Ukrainian uprising against the Poles, and through the 1654 Pereiaslav Agreement, accepted the Muscovite tsar's overlordship of Ukraine. The Hetman's mace in his hand still points toward Moscow. (Khmel'nyts'kyi's legacy is debated by Ukrainians; some see him as a great liberator who roused Ukrainians to national statehood, whereas others mourn Muscovy's subsequent domination of Ukrainian lands.) Nearby is a monument to the saints of ancient Rus' — Saints Cyril and Methodius (inventors of the Cyrillic alphabet) and Andrew the Apostle flank Olha, the first Christian ruler of Rus'. Turning left from the square onto a small side street, one passes several foreign embassies behind dark-paned security booths, as well as a state-run newspaper stand. After navigating a busy crosswalk, the street widens slightly and accommodates outdoor cafes with small umbrella-covered tables, where city dwellers and visitors to the city drink beer, soda, and vodka with snacks such as nuts, chips, and open-faced sandwiches. Further along the cobblestone street, which winds and descends down a steep hill, are street vendors selling original artwork, jewelry, handmade souvenirs (wooden spoons, embroidered Ukrainian blouses and towels, painted nesting dolls), Soviet watches and coins, propaganda posters, Che Guevara T-shirts, and many other treasures. This is Andriyivskyi uzviz (Andrew's descent), familiar to tourists as the quaint "historical street" leading down to Kyiv's Podil district, one of Kyiv's oldest neighborhoods. Located on the banks of the Dnipro river, the Podil was the birthplace of industry and trade in the city. In times past, Andriyivskyi uzviz was a creative center of Kyiv, and many famous writers and other cultural figures lived here, including the writer Mikhail Bulgakov, the cinema director Ivan Kavaleridze, and the medical professor Theofil Yanovsky.
Back on the Maidan, one can cross Khreshchatyk Street to access the other half of the square. This was once the site of a gigantic statue of Lenin, situated in the foreground of the towering Ukraina hotel. The statue, which was built directly into the largest and busiest subway station in Kyiv in 1946, was defaced during the failed putsch of August 1991 and was subsequently removed. This part of the square still sports a cascading fountain where, in the summertime, hot and tired walkers might dip their feet, as well as several newly erected statues depicting images from Ukrainian folklore. At the far end is an elaborate mirrored entrance to a new shopping mall. Most of the two-story shopping center is located underground, accessible via several entrances from the Maidan itself and from the smoky and close passages that connect the square to the Maidan Nezalezhnosti subway station. Such underground shopping venues now proliferate in the city, where practically every subterranean street crossing is jam-packed with kiosks, street vendors, and high-end shops. The underground passages around the Maidan are particularly busy with street musicians, panhandlers, and other entrepreneurs targeting Ukrainian and foreign tourists. Young Roma women hold babies and ask for money; elderly men and women collect coins in worn-out caps and sell small bouquets of homegrown and wild flowers secured with lengths of thread. Nuns singing hymns hold out collection boxes adorned with icons and Orthodox crosses; students from the nearby Kyiv Conservatory entertain passers-by with a lively jazz tune. Street-corner capitalists offer everything from furniture suites to shower caps, and the homeless and destitute reveal horrible sores and bloody cracked feet as they ask for alms. One elderly woman dressed all in black with huge plastic eyeglasses holds a sign reading, "Donate money for my coffin." Another woman's sign says, "My son is in prison. He is dying of tuberculosis. Please help save his life!"
Back outside, the wide Khreshchatyk Street, lined with chestnut trees and imposing Stalinist buildings — home to state institutions (such as the Kyiv City Administration building), stores (the huge Soviet-era mall called the TsUM, or Central Universal Store), and the residences of former and current government and cultural elites — leads to the famous and colorful indoor Besarabs'kyi market (commonly called the Besarabka). Here the prosperous shopper can buy pomegranates from the southern Caucasus, sturgeon from northern Russia, and everything else in between. Opposite the Besarabka stands the only remaining statue of Lenin in Kyiv (and one of the few left standing in Ukraine), whose pedestal is often adorned with bouquets of red and white flowers, offerings from those who mourn the downfall of communism.
On weekends and holidays, Khreshchatyk is closed to traffic and is transformed into a wide pedestrian street filled with vendors, street performers, and people on a stroll. Walking to the other end of the street brings one to a viewing area overlooking the Dnipro River, presided over by a huge monument to "People's Friendship." It is a huge silver-hued arc reminiscent of a steel rainbow that stretches over the plaza, under which stand two muscular men holding a banner decorated with the Soviet star, crest, and hammer and sickle. In both Russian and Ukrainian the pedestal used to read, "In celebration of the unification of Ukraine with Russia." "With Russia" has been scratched out. From here one can look across the Dnipro to the Left Bank, a newer district of the city where uniform concrete apartment buildings stretch on and on out of sight. The plaza also offers access, through a series of stone stairways, to one of the city's many parks and outdoor concert venues. Indeed, Kyiv boasts forty-one natural and artificial forest-parks and parks, and Kyivans claim that their city is one of the five "greenest" in Europe. Meandering through the series of parks brings us to the building of the Ukrainian Parliament and the sky-blue, baroque-style Mariyins'kyi Palace, designed by Bartolomeo Rastrelli and constructed in 1750–55.
Although the social activists I knew in Kyiv enjoyed strolling around the city center when they had a snatch of free time, most did not live in the fashionable central and historical districts. They were more likely to live in newer (but less well kept), more affordable areas far from the city center, such as Sviatoshyn, at the extreme west end of one of the city's three subway lines, or in the Left Bank neighborhoods of Darnytsia, or the rather desolate Kharkivs'kyi masyv ("housing unit"). Some lived in khrushchovky — five-story buildings that were mass-produced, and hastily and poorly constructed, as "temporary" housing during Krushchev's housing reforms of the 1960s and never vacated; others lived in the high-rise, nondescript and indistinguishable concrete apartment buildings ubiquitous in the former Soviet Union. Their living conditions varied, but many of my acquaintances' apartments were in a constant state of remont (repair) — some were involved in necessary maintenance such as replacing outdated and faulty plumbing, patching old wood floors, and making cosmetic renovations such as painting and hanging new wallpaper. Others with more means tore down walls, installed new appliances, and remodeled bathrooms. All my informants owned their apartments — they had received them from the state during the Soviet period and had "privatized" them after Ukrainian independence in 1991 — but it was also common for people to rent apartments, especially newcomers to the city. The high and ever-rising cost of apartments in Kyiv meant that grown children often lived at home and started their own families there, which made for some very crowded living spaces.
My friend Lidiia's experience was quite typical: Lidiia and her husband had been separated for some years, and in the late 1990s she lived with her teenage son, Myron, in a cramped one-room apartment (consisting of a living room, a tiny kitchen, and a toilet). There was hardly room to turn around, as the apartment measured a mere 26 square meters. In the living room Lidiia and Myron had managed to cram two pull-out couches, a wardrobe, a table, a computer and chair, and two large bookshelves. The only space left for Myron's collapsible bicycle was a corner of the small toilet — it hung from the ceiling over the commode. Lidiia spent three hours a day in public transport making her way to and from work at a research institute. She had to use three kinds of transport — the tram, the subway, and finally a bus. "I devote that time to the transport God," she laughed. In 1998, Lidiia's meager salary was $45 a month, but she only received about $15 a month because of the funding crisis in Ukraine's research and development sector. A full half of this amount went to pay for public transport to and from work. So Lidiia took on odd jobs tutoring and teaching piano lessons to support herself and her son.
Lidiia's experience of sudden poverty was common for many in Ukraine during the 1990s, when economic crisis gripped the newly independent country. In 1990 and 1991, runaway inflation caused many in Ukraine (including Lidiia) to lose their entire life savings in only a few short weeks. From the early 1990s until 2000 the Ukrainian economy was in shambles, with persistent declines in real GDP and surging inflation of at least 10 percent per year (including an unfathomable inflation rate of about 10,250 percent in 1993) (Kravchuk 2002:3). Poverty in Ukraine increased from 2 percent in 1987–88 to 63 percent in 1993–95 (Milanovic 1998). The country's economy worsened steadily during the 1990s, and Ukrainians were dealt a second blow in the fall of 1998 by a worldwide economic dip that resulted in a devaluation of the Ukrainian currency of nearly 60 percent (D'Anieri, Kravchuk, and Kuzio 1999:202). The crumbling of state socialism spurred the disintegration of the Soviet-era pillars of social support for citizens, such as guaranteed employment and social inclusion, subsidized prices, free high-quality medical care, and enterprise-based social welfare benefits (Iatridis 2000:4). In 1991, there were only sixty-eight hundred registered unemployed in Ukraine, but the number of official unemployed had risen to more than a million by the end of 1998 (Kravchuk 2002:26). Three-quarters of the unemployed are women, and Svetlana's experience of the economic crisis and sudden unemployment was typical for many women in Ukraine after the fall of socialism.
Before perestroika and Ukrainian independence, Svetlana worked at a factory and supported herself and her three children single-handedly. In the economic crash of the early 1990s, however, she lost her entire life savings of 3,000 rubles, money she had saved to secure the future of her three children, whose fathers had abandoned them. At that time she was on maternity leave with her youngest daughter and subsequently was made redundant at the factory. Without a job or her savings, her situation deteriorated quickly. Svetlana often recounted the difficulties of living with her three children in a one-room apartment; they all slept together on a pull-out couch. On several occasions Svetlana described her living conditions to me, but she did not invite me to visit her apartment. I understood that she was embarrassed, fearing judgment from a relatively well-off foreigner. By 1999 she had sold most of her furniture, leaving only a bureau she had found at a secondhand store, a worn divan, a refrigerator, and an old television on the floor. Svetlana blamed the postsocialist transition not only for turning all the money she had saved into "soap bubbles" but also for wounding her sense of social worth as a mother and a worker, transforming her almost overnight into a marginalized person. Recalling the tumultuous economic crisis of the early 1990s, Svetlana once said:
My money turned into trash, and I became destitute ... I was hysterical. I lost consciousness. My heart began to hurt, and I lost the feeling in my arm, from terror. And then I told myself ... I always get scared, but I survive somehow. I'm not going to get scared anymore. I will just live. And when we had the opportunity, we [families with many children] united together, because we were all in an identical situation: we became destitute all at once. It was a widespread hysteria. Not only large families, but everyone in the country — we were all in hysterics.
Svetlana thus criticized the government's failure to take responsibility for its citizens, argued for the importance of strategies of collective action, and described her own somatization of social crisis (heart pains, a numb arm). She repeated the self-descriptor "destitute" several times, indicating what a blow sudden impoverishment was to her sense of self-worth. Although one goal of Svetlana's civic organizing was to ensure the survival of impoverished families like her own by procuring humanitarian aid, she also strove to reeducate Ukrainian bureaucrats and the public about the social worth of large families. Socialist collapse in Ukraine produced economic crises and social suffering that made the work of mutual-aid associations and other charitable groups especially necessary, and it was in response to these economic and social crises that the women activists I knew had joined and organized NGOs to support vulnerable groups that were most affected — large families, single mothers, retirees, and the disabled and chronically ill. These efforts are taking place in a country with a long history of social turmoil and political instability, a context that must be understood before post-Soviet women's social activism can be put in proper perspective.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Women's Social Activism in the New Ukraine by Sarah D. Phillips. Copyright © 2008 Sarah D. Phillips. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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Table of Contents
ContentsPrefaceAcknowledgmentsNote on Transliteration and TranslationNote on the Purchasing Power of the Ukrainian Hryvnia (UAH)Introduction: Women, NGOs, and the Politics of Differentiation1. All Aboard the "Titanic Ukraina"2. Ukrainian NGO-graphy3. Claims and Class4. Movin' On Up: Social Activism and Upward MobilityConclusion: Dyferentsiatsiia, Democracy, and DevelopmentNotesBibliographyIndexWhat People are Saying About This
"The author includes material on the role of NGOs in Eastern European transitional states, the rise of antifeminist maternalism in the reworked national images of new ideology, and the deterioration in women's material status. —CHOICE"
A pioneering work in the study of Ukrainian femininity and feminism [that] makes an important contribution to feminist scholarship, to the still underdone scholarship on Ukrainian women, and to comparative studies of Eastern European women.
The author includes material on the role of NGOs in Eastern European transitional states, the rise of antifeminist maternalism in the reworked national images of new ideology, and the deterioration in women's material status. —CHOICE
The author includes material on the role of NGOs in Eastern European transitional states, the rise of antifeminist maternalism in the reworked national images of new ideology, and the deterioration in women's material status. —CHOICE