Soviet women could vote (it was a no-choice vote, but that's another matter), have professional careers, and occupy government jobs (Lenin famously said that every female cook must learn to govern the state). Women could have the same jobs as men, no matter how hard -- and there was no shortage of hard jobs, especially if you consider Stalin's forced labor camps. A popular Soviet children's poem edified that "Various kinds of mothers are needed and important" including mother pilots, engineers and policewomen.

Soviet liberation of women may have been grand and radical, but it was imposed from above by brutal force and was therefore deeply inhuman. Of course, compared to forced industrialization and collectivization, liberation of women was benign. It did not cost millions of human lives. But the results of gender equality inflicted by the state are inevitably quite different from women's rights secured by generations of public activism.

Under Soviet totalitarianism, social innovations were masterminded and disseminated by the state, while genuine public initiatives were outlawed. The state taught women professional skills, provided them with jobs and indoctrinated them with Communist propaganda. But most public attitudes remained largely unmodernized. Though men and women worked equally hard, housework and child rearing was regarded as unmanly. Such duties were not shared in the family; they were a woman's thing, just as contraception was considered to be a woman's business.

Scarcity of contraceptives (Hedrick Smith, a New York Times Moscow reporter in the 70's described Soviet-made condoms as 'thick and clumsy') resulted in abominable abortion rates. The USSR had the most liberal abortion legislation in the world). It was common for women, married or unmarried, to have a dozen or more abortions, which in the USSR were generally conducted without anesthesia.

Besides, even though women were assured of employment, and unwritten quotas for women were operated in the Soviet governing bodies (even the supreme decision-making center, the Politburo of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, would occasionally include one female member), the topmost positions were overwhelmingly occupied by men, and there was an obvious limit to women's self-fulfillment.

When the Soviet system collapsed, and the society became radically freer and more open, women's liberation, Communist style, produced controversial effects.

As new opportunities and new wealth began to emerge in Russia, younger women frequently looked for good husbands and comfortable life styles rather than good jobs. And they were not at all shy to admit this. Seeking to avoid the fate of their mothers who toiled at work and at home, dressed badly, and aged early, the young women of the 90's often entered prestigious universities because this was where they were more likely to find a good husband and avoid work.

Meanwhile, women demonstrated a high degree of adaptability to the dramatic socioeconomic changes. The experience of double work load and low ambition proved to be an advantage in a new and tough world of fledgling capitalism. Many of them succeeded in areas such as business or banking, polling and market research (some of these professions did not even have names in the Soviet times).

But as they succeed, they face the same problems feminists in the West were fighting decades ago. They were paid less money than men for the same work. They were commonly treated as inferior. Men resist women bosses, and, according to various polls, these men feel self-righteous about it.

The feminist movement is not very popular in Russia yet, but its popularity may grow as women get more ambitious and continue to fight career inequality.

In the political sphere, conservative attitudes prevailed as women began to compete with men for elected offices. At the height of the election flurry of the late perestroika years, women candidates were commonly told that they belonged in the kitchens, not in legislatures. Though some of them managed to overcome the gender bias, women still remained a tiny minority in both the legislative and the executive branches of power. Women account for about 8 percent in the national legislature; there is only one woman governor out of about 80 in Russia; and the Russian Cabinet does not have a single female minister,

At early stages of democratization, a few daring and independent-minded women politicians emerged on the Russian political scene, but they are all gone now -- one of them was assassinated, others have been either marginalized or quit politics altogether. The political system introduced by president Putin has gotten rid of political competition, scrapped checks and balances and brought back heavily centralized, paternalistic power. Loyalty has become the main rule of political life. In this environment the precious few women found in today's Russian politics today highly reminiscent of their Soviet predecessors -- picked by the men at the top to ensure a female presence.

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