Perestroika Women Speak to US Women

In 1986, a series of “US-Soviet Space Bridges” – or “tele-bridges” or “summits between ordinary people”– as they were called in the USSR, took place under the auspices of Phil Donohue on the American side and Vladimir Pozner on the Soviet one. Prior to this moment, Pozner was already known to American audiences as an invited guest, due to his flawless English (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 NYC until 1948, and only returned to Soviet Russia for university in 1952). With the Space Bridges, Pozner joined the team at the Youth Desk (Molodezhka) on Central Television (see artifacts #00003, #00030, #00050), where producers such as Vladimir Mukusev had a long track record of making engaging, sharp-witted television, and who for that reason were especially ready to capitalize on opportunities opened up by Gorbachev’s glasnost.

In general, the conversations that unfolded on the Space Bridges had a tendency to devolve into accusatory statements by the citizens of both sides, who typically reproduced in their own words their states’ respective consensus positions regarding recent events, such as nuclear disarmament talks, the Soviet war in Afghanistan, the Soviet downing of the Korean Air Flight 007, and so forth. This dynamic can be seen particularly well in the second fragment provided here, where they discuss the censure of honest information about Soviet women’s life. Note how easily Pozner, an old hand at peddling the Soviet official line, pivots from a Soviet audience member’s indignant response to the American prying questions about repressions, into a rejoinder against American publishers, who are supposedly more interested in publishing mean-spirited information about the USSR than they are in publishing Soviet novels.

At the same time, as can be seen in the first fragment, Soviet women are remarkably ready to meet American women on common ground when their conversation turns to anxieties about gender roles and feminism (“emancipation” is the commonly used Russian term). Both American and Soviet audience members worry about “infantile” men, just as they worry about having brought about such men as a result of modern women’s prioritizing of career over family. Just after this point, 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 sexualization of women in the media– though as one Soviet participant famously responds to such a question, ”we have no sex and we’re categorically against it.” As scholars like Artemy Magun have claimed, USSR would go through a sexual revolution as a result of Perestroika and the early 1990s. Nevertheless, the social conservatism that appeals so easily to Soviet women even more than to the Americans in Boston is, in my view, an early harbinger of the conservative turn that politics in Russia will take in the 1990s and beyond.