Free Words Will Break Cement by Masha Gessen

of her breasts. Her
Get Off Your Horse and Drink Your Milk
showed the (nearly prostrate) Russian men in the audience a naked man, for a change, holding between his legs a milk bottle in place of a penis and two cookies in place of testicles. But pictures of Russian artist Elena Kovylina were even more shocking: using hypodermic needles, she had affixed to her naked body pictures of girls cut out of magazines—and demanded that people attending the show in Moscow remove the pinups while she sat impassively until the last of the images was gone. And as though that were not enough, Nadya and Kat followed up with images from more of Kovylina’s works: Kovylina boxing, in red; Kovylina naked, lying immobile atop a grand piano interminably, symbolizing woman as we are used to seeing her in art.
    After that, they headed back to the West and more theoretical work addressing obscure topics, which provided much-needed relief for the audience: the French performance artist Orlan’s work on plastic surgery and diatribes against stereotypes and fixed identities. To relax the viewers further, they introduced Marcel Duchamp’s gender-altered
Mona Lisa
, with the penciled-on mustache and beard, and Man Ray’s portrait of Duchamp as a female movie star. Duchamp’s urinal made it into the slide show too, possibly to provide the audience with at least one familiar image in addition to the
Mona Lisa
. Then there was Diane Arbus’s portrait of a transvestite, Yasumasa Morimura’s portrait of an Audrey Hepburn impersonator, and Morimura himself as the model in a Vermeer painting. And back to Russia, where the male artist Vladislav Mamyshev had made a career out of being Marilyn Monroe. Was that all that Russia had to offer to cap this tour of contemporary feminist art? A gay male artist who had risen to prominence twenty years earlier and had invented nothing new since?
    They had probably given the audience as good an introduction to feminist art as any undergraduate seminar in feminist art might offer in a country where such seminars are offered. But the last thing Nadya and Kat wanted to do was deliver what amounted to a lecture on how things were done “over there.” They were, after all, activist artists at an activist conference, and that kind of abstract presentation makes bad activism and bad art.
    The fact, though, was that feminism had never taken root in Russia. It had been part of Bolshevik ideology in the 1920s, when “revolutionary morality” replaced bourgeois morality, abolishing marriage and monogamy and introducing free love, communal children, and full gender equality. The USSR even introduced the world’s very first laws against sexual harassment in the workplace. But the egalitarian spirit did not last. Starting in the 1930s, laws against homosexual conduct were restored, as was marriage; abortion was banned (to be legalized a few decades later, and to become the country’s sole method of birth control); a child’s legitimacy once again became paramount in establishing social standing; and Communist Party organizations commenced close watch over the integrity and moral purity of families. “If he cheats on his wife, he will cheat on his country” became a catchphrase.
    Bourgeois morality was, in other words, fully restored, but in keeping with the principle of calling things by the names of their opposites, it was called “Soviet morality” while feminist thought was branded bourgeois. Virtually all Soviet women held two full-time jobs—one for pay and one, at home, for nothing but hardship, which, in light of constant food shortages, could be extreme—and this was called “full gender equality.” Even after the Soviet Union collapsed, the tradition of reviling and ridiculing feminism proved surprisingly resilient. A few feminist organizations that appeared in the late 1980s, on the glasnost-and-perestroika wave, either stayed small or disappeared. Feminism was an academic pursuit, and an unpopular one.