The Sorrows of Mother Russia - by Susan Poizner
The Guardian, June 30,1992

Susan Poizner reports on the plight of a nation's single mothers who face poverty because of soaring prices.

Natalie Shumshurova and her nine-year-old daughter Alexandra are both fastidious in dress. Their home, on the other hand, is a shambles. The two share a single room in a communal flat. They have made little effort to disguise the cracked-concrete décor, apart from a few tattered magazine pictures of household pets on the walls. "It's awful living in this place," Natalie says. "We use our room as our bedroom, our study and for entertaining guests. But a girl my daughter's age needs her own room…I need my own room," she adds sadly.

For single mothers like Natalie, the housing problem is only one more in a long list of ills. With prices soaring as a result of economic reform, however, their economic problems are paramount. In Russia today, most two-income families are forced to spend all their earnings on food. Supporting their families on one income alone, single mothers wonder how they are to make ends meet.

"I go to the government agencies for help," says single mother Alexandra Chernikova, who left her work as an engineer and project manager to take care of her two-year old daughter, Victoria, "and they tell me that because I'm not an invalid and not a pensioner, they can't help me." Now the two are teetering on the edge of poverty, with Alexandra receiving about 480 rubles a month (roughly five pounds). "Considering that one kilogram of butter is 150 rubles, that's not enough," she says.

"The single mother is almost an inevitability in Russia," says Barbara Heldt, Professor of Russian at the University of British Columbia and author of Terrible Perfection (Indiana University Press, 1987). According to Heldt, single motherhood is epitomized by the sacred icon of Russian Orthodoxy, which depicts the mother and child. "Long before the revolution, Russians were keyed into this icon figure of the sorrowing mother, and by the time socialism came along, they just gave her a bit more economic support so that the sorrowing mother can just go on sorrowing."

Sometimes the sorrowing Russian mother's biggest sorrow is her husband. Russian husbands are reputed to be drunkards and philanderers who don't lift a finger at home. One survey showed that while the average woman interviewed spent 31.7 hours per week on childcare and household chores (which are even more arduous without modern conveniences such as washing machines and cars), men spent only 13.6 hours a week doing housework. This unequal distribution of labour, along with the high rate of alcoholism amongst Russian men, has been connected to the high divorce rate – and hence to the number of single mums. Russian men are also three times more likely to remarry than their wives.

Some women don't marry at all. About ten percent of children in the former USSR are born to unwed mothers. Some of them chose not to marry. Yet most young Russian girls are eager to marry and indeed, they marry young – sometimes when they are 16 or 17 years old. Although sex education is poor in Russia and contraception is expensive and hard to find, this in itself doesn't account for the rush to the registry. The Soviet system of birth control since the 1920s has been brutally efficient: it consists of easily-accessible assembly line style abortions. "I had an abortion in Leningrad," says one woman. "When I got on the table they were still wiping off the last woman's blood."

In Yeltsin's Russia, husbands are more important than ever, if only for the second income they provide. The fact that women earn only sixty to seventy percent of men's incomes has not changed, but the level of employment, especially for women, has. Women are estimated to make up 80 percent of those who have recently become redundant due to the cut in productivity in post-Soviet Russia. Again, single mothers feel the crunch.

"Theoretically, a new mother can return to her old job within three years," says Anastasia Posadskaya, Director of the Institute of Gender Studies at the Academy of Sciences of Russia. "In fact, that rule is violated all the time because either the job doesn't exist anymore or the enterprise has been privatized and the new owners feel no responsibility to take the women back."

Although aid for single mothers has at least doubled since the price reforms began in January, prices have risen 10 to 30 times. With the federal government's decision to pass the buck of social policy over to the localities, things are expected to get even worse. The localities are expected to take up social policies that they can afford. Needless to say, they can't afford very much.

Despair has already set in. Some women have been forced to give up their children for adoption because they can't afford to keep them. Others desert their babies near hospitals. In one tragic case described in a letter to the Bearr Trust (British Emergency Aid for Russia and the Republics), a 19-year-old single mother from Tambov was tried for murdering her baby and attempting suicide.

"She said in court that her son was constantly crying because he was hungry and she had nothing to feed him with and no way to clothe herself. She couldn't see any way out," says Megan Bick, of the Bearr Trust.

In Moscow, a group of single mothers have formed an organization called Only Mothers. One of their proposals is to start up a charity shop for single mothers stocked with used children's clothes donated by women in the West. But Moscow single mothers aren't flocking to join. This could be due to a lingering suspicion rooted in the days of socialism when most organizations were run and monitored by the state for purposes of propaganda.

Even on an individual basis, Russian single mothers don't seem to help each other very often. "We sometimes give each other advice if our children are sick, but there is no real cooperation," says Elena Prokoryeva, single mother of 11-year-old Ilyusha. They live in Tula, 100 kilometers south of Moscow. "You need the time to organize that kind of cooperation. After working, queuing, cooking and cleaning, women just don't have the energy."

Because it is based in Moscow, Bick believes that Only Mothers may get off the ground. "If they can attract the attention of the large foreign community of diplomats and journalists in Moscow I think the group may succeed. I'd be less optimistic if you told me about a group of single mothers in Siberia."

"It's all up to them," says Posadskaya. "They have to divide the labour and help themselves. But they need support as well," she adds. Otherwise, the single mothers who are simply scraping by today, will be starving tomorrow.