The collapse of social services and increased unemployment meant that all the benefits of the planned economy for women were systematically wiped out. The growth in unemployment sentenced many more people to poverty in Russia than in the West because many benefits had been provided directly by the workplace.
As The Economist (11/12/93) at the time pointed out:
Unemployment still carries a deep stigma in Russia. Only in 1991 did it cease to be a crime. For those without jobs, absolute poverty threatens. Unemployment benefits are linked to the minimum wage of 14,620 roubles a month, a third of the official subsistence level and about one-seventh of the average wage. The jobless are often even worse off than these figures imply because most of the basic social services – such as health, schools and transport are provided by companies rather than local government, and hence are only available to people in work.
The main victims were the women. They were the first to be sacked, in order to avoid paying social benefits, like child and maternity benefit. Given the fact that women made up 51 per cent of the Russian workforce a few years ago, and that 90 per cent of women worked, the growth of unemployment meant that an increasing number of women were excluded from the workforce.
Under the previous regime, women received 70 per cent of men’s wages. The figure in 1997 was 40 per cent. Keeping a family on one wage was difficult enough in the old USSR. Now, with the dramatic rise in poverty, it became virtually impossible. On 10 February 1993, the then labour minister, J. Melikyan announced the government’s solution to unemployment. In a language that would do credit to any right-wing bourgeois politician in the West, he said he saw no need for special programmes to help women return to work. “Why should we try to find jobs for women when men are idle and on unemployment benefits?” he asked. “Let men work and women take care of the homes and their children.”
Such language, which would have been unthinkable in the past, was now evidently regarded as something normal and acceptable. The government’s attempt to implement a ‘back to the home’ policy was reflected in several drafts of a new law that was under consideration. The first draft would potentially have nullified women’s right to abortion and banned women with children under 14 from working more than 35 hours a week. Following protests, the most controversial clauses were dropped. The law now did away with the obligation of the state to provide day-care for the children of working women. As compensation, women with three or more children were offered benefits to stay at home and look after them.
Prostitution increased enormously, as women tried to survive by selling their bodies to those with money to buy them – mainly the despicable ‘new rich’ and wealthy foreigners. Women from the former Soviet Union were exported to Western countries as prostitutes. In this humiliating slavery of women reduced to the status of commodities was encapsulated the humiliation of a land that was being compelled to submit to the yoke of exploitation in its most naked and shameless guise.
Here, more clearly than anywhere else, we see the real face of capitalist counter-revolution – crude, brutal and ignorant – a monstrous throwback to the days of tsarist slavery in which each slave was allowed to lord it over his wife and children in compensation for his own degrading condition. The position of women in Russia was thrown back more than seventy years.