His 15 years at the helm in Russia have taught him that he
could buy or break pretty much anyone. Encountering an indomitable human spirit
was a novel experience for him.
Whatever he had planned, in real life it worked out
differently. He found himself battling a prisoner who would not bend to his
will and who was ready to starve herself to death to prove her point. She
became a cause célèbre, outraged voices in her defense were raised around the
world and the sight of a young woman – captured at the age of 33, the same age
when Christ died – in the clutches of a brutal state provided another
illustration of the utter disregard for international norms of conduct by the
Putin regime.
Kidnapping a woman and staging a show trial for her was a bad
idea to start with. Somebody should have told that to Putin before the whole
mess started. But Russia’s president has it in for women. His wife Ludmila
recalls how young Vladimir Vladimirovich, as she still cravenly calls him, used
to humiliate her by making her wait for hours on street corners before showing
up for a date.
He has an especially troubling relationship with strong or
powerful women. His relationship with Germany’s Angela Merkel is enlightening
in this regard. Knowing that Merkel fears dogs, he once brought his large
labrador long to a meeting with her. It was as though he wanted to point out to
her that for all her power she was still a cowardly female and thus inferior to
him, a male. He also regularly tells her off-color jokes trying to get her
wrong-footed.
Russian ruler’s deep-seated inferiorities which make him want
to assert his dominance over women are only part of the explanation. Since the
1930s, most repressive regimes have tended to be male-dominated and misogynous,
and to be run almost exclusively by men. Such regimes were, in most cases, a
reaction of traditional societies against the spread of modernity, and the
emancipation of women was one of the most important aspects of modernity: the acquisition
of equal rights with men, including the right to vote and reproductive rights,
education, work outside the home, acknowledgement of female sexuality, etc.
Reactions against modernity invariably included some kind of a
rollback of emancipation and efforts to return women to their traditional roles
in the house and the family and to strip them of their newly acquired rights.
In the United States, for example, conservatives are waging a relentless – and
in many ways successful – campaign against legal abortion.
Russia has experienced two dramatic bursts of modernity in its
history, and twice it recoiled from it into a grotesque parody of traditional
society. The Russian Empire began industrializing rapidly after its defeat in
the Russo-Japanese War and subsequent reforms, undergoing major economic,
cultural and social changes. It then got a crushing dose of modernity during
World War I and, even more so, after the arrival of the Bolsheviks.
But starting in the 1930s, Stalin rolled back much of the
radical modernization introduced by the Bolsheviks, especially in the social
sphere and as it pertained to the role of women in Soviet society. Gone was the
view of “sex like a glass of water” promulgated by Lenin’s Alexandra Kollontai.
Simon Sebag Montefiore in his trilogy about Stalin, describes a close circle of
Stalin’s loyalists, famous for their promiscuity in the early 1930s, who
perished in the terror.
The early Bolsheviks condemned the family as a yoke for women.
Stalin quickly and aggressively reasserted their traditional roles as wives,
mothers and homemakers – except now they was also expected to toil full time
for the benefit of the Soviet State.
Western notions of modernity first started to penetrate the
Iron Curtain in the late 1960s and the 1970s, turned into a flood in the 1980s
and contributed to the destruction of the Soviet Union in 1991. But after seven
decades of isolation, the Soviets – not only in Russia but in all post-Soviet
republics – were often shocked by many things that have occurred in the big
world outside. A second backlash is now underway in Russia, which is evident in
social attitudes even more than in the revival of imperial ambitions.
The nostalgia for Soviet times involves a sharp turn toward
traditionalism in relations between the sexesl. This is what the ideologues of
Putinism mean when they harp on the notion that Russia is, presumably, the only
nation that still adheres to the traditional family values while the West has
abandoned them and is sinking into the morass of amorality.
While there are very few Russian women with real power in
Putin’s entourage and among his advisors, there are many more among leaders of
the opposition. And Galina Starovoytova and Anna Politkovskaya were among
several politicians assassinated in Putin’s Russia.
Women are also prominent among international leaders who have
stood up to Putin and condemned his aggression. Merkel has worked hard to build
and maintain a united front in Europe to counter Russia’s annexation of Crimea
and to punish him for starting a war in eastern Ukraine. Lithuania’s Dalia Grybauskaitė has been
consistent in her criticism of Russia’s policies. Hillary Clinton may soon join
them as the third – and most powerful – voice in this anti-Putin “kitchen
cabinet.”
On the other and, among Putin’s friends and clients around the
world there are few female politicians. Mary Le Pen, who heads a far-right
party of backlash in France, is rather an exception that emphatically confirms
the rule.
After being freed in a prisoner exchange last month, Savchenko
is poised to become one of the strongest anti-Putin voices on the international
arena. Ironically, Russia has no one but itself to blame for her rise. It was
her ordeal in the Russian that turned her into a hero, made her name known and
admired around the world and catapulted her into politics. She has been
compared to Joan of Arc, but she may prove herself capable of a more important
role on the Ukrainian and international political arena.
When the Soviet authorities arrested Joseph Brodsky in 1963 and
put him on trial for “parasitism,” Anna Akhmatova observed wryly that the
government was “creating his life story,” instantly giving young Brodsky
greater fame than a young poet could have hoped to achieve with is already
wonderful poems. In a similar way, Putin’s government has unwittingly launched
Savchenko on a political career. The fact that she is a woman was crucial in
promoting her as a Ukrainian national hero and it is likely to play an
important role in her country’s struggle to break loose from the embrace of its
past and to enter the modern world.
