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At the end of 1803, the eminent Russian historian Nikolai Karamzin enunciated, in the then popular magazine Vestnik Evropy (Messenger of Europe), the hope that in the future there would be a scholar, "whose talented pen would write the gallery of portraits of the illustrious Russian women of history."1 During the following two cen- turies, a considerable body of scholarship has been produced on women in Russian history, both in Russia and abroad.2 By the end of the twentieth century, factual knowl- edge about the place of women in political, economic, cultural, and religious life has grown to the point of permitting conclusions and creating conceptual frameworks that explain both the common and the exceptional in the history of both illustrious and ordinary Russian women.
The birth of the new historical field of women's history coincided in Russia with the period of "perestroika," when Russian humanities and social sciences encountered and adopted a wide range of Western concepts. The intellectual products of West- ern scholars were not just stylish theories, but rather concepts that could inform the analysis of Russian realities. But even before the introduction of the concept of gender to cultural studies in Russia, a number of scholars within the humanities contested the Marxist dictum-spread by the dominant Soviet scholarship-that women in the pre-Soviet period were downtrodden and disenfranchised, passive, uneducated, and benighted.3 These historians included Grigorii Tishkin, Olga Hasbulatova, and myself. Even before there was official "permission" we demonstrated that women's history had a right to autonomous existence within the Russian scholarly context. In the early 1980s, we repeatedly came up against serious expressions of dissent on the part of those who established research priorities and who excluded women's history from the list of deserving topics. The Soviet ideologists who permitted and forbade the study of various topics based their determination not to allow the institutionalization of his- torical women's studies on the Marxist principle that everything "in the long past of humanity is the history of the worldwide historical suppression of the female sex," and there is nothing interesting in research except the history of the socialist solution of women's question during and after the revolution of 1917.4
Marxism itself, when seen from a feminist perspective, is just one more version...