WOMEN OF RUSSIA BLOC

Women of Russia (Zhenshchiny Rossii, or ZhR) was formed as a political movement on the eve of the 1993 Duma elections. It contained the Union of Russia's Women (formerly the Committee of Soviet Women), Association of Russia's Women Entrepreneurs, and the Union of Women of the Navy. The movement was headed by Alevtina Fedulova, leader of the Union of Women; Yekaterina Lakhova, adviser to Boris Yeltsin on matters of family, childbearing, and children; and the popular actress Natalia Gundareva, and received 4.4 million votes (8.1%, or fourth place) and twenty-one Duma seats in 1993. The success was due to the amorphousness of the political scene, where the lack of parties and transience of elections made a good flag sufficient. In the Duma, the ZhR faction, which was called the first of its kind in the history of world parliamentism, basically supported the government and did not distinguish itself in any way. At the beginning of the 1995 campaign, ZhR was regarded as a potential participant in a broad left-centrist coalition, but it chose to enter independently. In the end it did not attain the 5 percent threshold required to merit proportional representation, winning 3.2 million votes (4.6%, fifth place); three candidates, including Lakhova, were elected in single-mandate districts. At the time, incidentally, most electoral associations included their women candidates in the top three places on the lists.

In 1997, Lakhova, leaving ZhR, founded her own Sociopolitical Movement of Russia's Women (OPDZh). In the beginning of the 1999 campaign, both Fedulova of ZhR and Lakhova of OPDZh entered Yuri Luzhkov's Fatherland, then the bloc Fatherland-All Russia (OVR). After Lakhova was included in the central part of the OVR list, and Fedulova was not, ZhR announced its departure from the bloc, with the explanation that OVR, in assembling its list, had demonstrated its traditional, conservative approach to women's role in society. The ZhR results (2.0%, eighth place) were much lower than expected, partly because "women" diverged: some stayed in the OVR; in addition, ZhR had a double, the Russian Party for the Defense of Women (0.8%). Moreover, social problematics fundamental to ZhR were actively exploited by more powerful electoral associations: the Communist Party of the Russian Federation (KPRF) and OVR. On the threshold of the 2003 elections, a paradoxical situation arose, when Fedulova's virtual ZhR, having met for the last time in an all-Russian conference in the summer of 1999, and not having shown a sign of existence since that time, gathered 4 to 7 percent support in a social referendum. Lakhova's OPDZh, having dissolved into United Russia, tried to resurface politically, entering the April 2003 elections with the somewhat vague bill "concerning governmental guarantees of equal rights and freedoms of men and women and equal opportunities for their realization."

See also: constitution of 1993; fatherland-all russia; feminism

bibliography

McFaul, Michael. (2001). Russia's Unfinished Revolution: Political Change from Gorbachev to Putin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

McFaul, Michael, and Markov, Sergei. (1993). The Troubled Birth of Russian Democracy: Parties, Personalities, and Programs. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press.

McFaul, Michael, and Petrov, Nikolai, eds. (1995). Previewing Russia's 1995 Parliamentary Elections. Washington, DC: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Reddaway, Peter, and Glinski, Dmitri. (2001). The Tragedy of Russia's Reforms: Market Bolshevism against Democracry. Washington, DC: U.S. Institute of Peace Press.

Remington, Thomas. (2002). Politics in Russia, 2nd ed. New York: Longman.

Nikolai Petrov