A conservative turn in a patriarchal society?

Abstract

Recent research on the conservative turn of post-Soviet Russia has paid attention to the revival of the so-called ‘traditional values’ promoted through the government’s pro-natalist family policy. A patriarchal view of women, and their roles in society, is nothing new: pre-revolutionary Russia was a patriarchal society, where women were considered first of all as wives and mothers; even the Soviet society was patriarchal in its attitude towards women, with the burdens of both paid work, outside the home, and domestic responsibilities. The chapter introduces the mnemonic actors, the mnemonic signifiers, and their connections to the history of female participation in revolutionary struggle and to the post-Soviet female political activism. According to the Soviet mnemonic pattern, the revolutionaries, regardless of sex, were driven by the political beliefs that they cherished. All female revolutionaries are represented as women with ‘natural’ female desires, who ended up in the wrong place because of personal circumstances.