Perestroika-era Russian Women Speak to US Women

In 1986, a series of “US-Soviet Space Bridges,” also called “tele-bridges” or “summits between ordinary people,” took place under the auspices of Phil Donahue (1935-2024) on the American side, and Vladimir Pozner (1934-) on the Soviet one. Pozner was already known to American audiences as an invited guest, typically on news shows in need of Soviet spokespeople. His English was flawless, since he was born in Paris to an émigré father and a French mother in 1934, moved to the US at the start of the war, and stayed in New York City until 1948, only returning to Soviet Russia for university in 1952. With the Space Bridges, Pozner joined the team at the Molodezhka (Youth Desk) on Soviet Central Television, where producers like Vladimir Mukusev (1951-) had a long track record of making engaging, sharp-witted television, and who, for that reason, were especially ready to capitalize on glasnost-era opportunities.

The conversations that unfolded on the Space Bridges had a tendency to devolve into accusatory statements by both US and Soviet citizens, with each side rehearsing their states’ respective positions on recent events like nuclear disarmament talks, the Soviet war in Afghanistan, or the Soviet downing of Korean Air Flight 007. This dynamic becomes especially evident when a selection of ordinary Soviet and American women discuss the censorship of information about Soviet women’s life. Pozner, an old hand at peddling the official Soviet line, easily pivots from a Soviet audience member’s indignant response to the American’s prying questions about repressions into a rejoinder against American publishers, which are allegedly more interested in promoting mean-spirited disinformation about the USSR than in Soviet novels.

Despite these clashes, the Soviet participants are remarkably ready to meet their American counterparts on common ground when the conversation turns to anxieties around gender roles and feminism—here called “emancipation” in Russian. Both American and Soviet audience members worry about “infantile” men, just as they worry about having produced such men through the “modern woman’s” privileging of career over family. The conversation continues with a discussion of women’s “greatest virtue—weakness, femininity,” as the Soviet respondent calls it. Both sides are also equally opposed to pornography and the sexualization of women in the media, although, as one Soviet participant famously responded to a related question, “There is no sex [in the Soviet Union], and we’re categorically against it.” As scholars like Artemy Magun have claimed, the USSR would go through a sexual revolution as a result of perestroika and the early 1990s. Yet the social conservatism that appeals to Soviet women so much more than to the American ones is an early harbinger of the conservative turn that Russian politics would take in the 1990s and beyond.