In 1985, when Mikhail Gorbachev was selected by his colleagues on the Politburo to become general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, there was only one women's organization in Soviet Russia: the Soviet Women's Committee. It was a state-controlled organization, operating under the watchful eye of Communist Party apparatchiks. A decade later, there were hundreds of women's groups, clubs, initiatives, and projects officially registered and operating in Russia. Estimates put the number of unregistered groups at several thousand. Relative to the previous decades of Soviet rule, this increase represented a tremendous surge in civic action, spurred by the political and economic transitions that began in the late 1980s under Gorbachev and continued under Yeltsin's administration. Along with women's groups, a multitude of other “informal” organizations formed, including independent trade unions, a variety of noncommunist political groups, and environmentalist and antinuclear power movements. Emerging from decades of totalitarian control into a chaotic political and economic environment, Russian society was attempting to organize itself.

Women activists had their work cut out for them. And, as though making up for lost time, women began to protest against the economic and political discrimination that seemed to intensify as the transition period wore on. Within a few short years, the single-organization Soviet women's movement had been replaced by a multifaceted spectrum of women's activism.

A brief history of the contemporary Russian women's movement

Early Soviet history is hardly devoid of dedicated women activists.