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WOMEN IN UKRAINE Where have all the women gone? Women are strangely absent in the overall process of liberation that has swept Eastern Europe and is now wending its way through the countries of the rapidly dis integrating Soviet Union. One does not hear any voices of women, no calls for women’s liberation, not even calls for women to rally in support of the restructuring of the country. I worked on Ukraine, in Ukraine, re searched Ukrainian women’s movements, and know that at least three major women’s organizations have emerged in the last year in that country. Why have we not heard from these women? Women in Ukraine had a tradition of community organizations that, even in times of violent national ten sion were able to bring together successfully women of different nationalities, faiths and social classes. Although documentation of this tradition exists in the police archives in Ukraine, no woman in that part of the Soviet Union will be able to tell you the story of women’s organizations in Ukraine, or in the Russian Empire for that matter. The communist system, dominant in the area until a year ago, had preempted the woman issue, as it had the cause of workers — the Communist party spoke on behalf of the workers and on behalf of the women with out bothering to find out the genuine needs of both groups. The workers were considered to have no mother land outside of Soviet Union, which to all intents and purposes became Russia. Non Russians were not only discriminated against, in Ukraine the Ukrainians were subject to a pervasive policy of Russification while at the same time being reduced to becoming second class citizens, very much the provincials. The party — indeed, the whole leftist tradition as it is perceived in Eastern Europe has done a grave disser vice to the women’s cause. Most women in the territory are firmly convinced that feminism is inextricably linked to Marxism and all leftism, and that it is primarily respon sible for the dual burden that plagues the life of all women — work outside the home, to earn the salary essential to keep body and soul together; and the inor dinate domestic chores that are exacerbated by severe shortages. Few scholars predicted the rapid demise of Com munist systems in the last year. The decline of Soviet force in Eastern Europe — yes; the erosion of Commu nist ideology and the liberation of the Soviet state —yes; yet another cultural thaw that could draw in wider cir cles of candidates for rehabilitation — yes; greater reli gious freedom for structured faiths — yes; but the over all open unabashed disintegration of the ideological and organizational underpinnings of the whole Communist system escaped even most imaginative observers. The dissolution of Communist parties, and the admission that not only Stalin, but Lenin, and even Marx himself may have been wrong appeared at best to us in the West a view that only the most brilliant of the dissidents could fathom. Certainly, we did not expect them to deduce this conclusion, nor did we ourselves conceive that such a view could resonate among the masses. л
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