Elizaveta Grishechkina is a doctoral candidate in Slavic Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. Her research focuses on feminist, dissident, and underground cultures in late-Soviet Russia.
This post won the Grand Prize in Culture Studies in the Jordan Center Blog's fifth annual Graduate Student Essay Competition.
In 1979, a samizdat almanac titled Woman and Russia appeared in Leningrad. A year later, its creators founded Maria, an independent women’s journal and Christian club that quickly became one of the most unusual dissident projects in late Soviet history. Though often dismissed as “quasi-feminist” or “religious propaganda,” Maria challenges our assumptions about what Soviet feminism looked like—and how it could coexist with Orthodox values.
At its heart, Maria was a radical rethinking of political resistance and womanhood. Its founders, Yulia Voznesenskaya, Natalia Malakhovskaya, and Tatyana Goricheva, rejected traditional hierarchies. As Voznesenskaya wrote in the first issue, Maria was “a network of friends and co-authors” without leaders. The journal nevertheless had a clear editorial vision: it centered the private lives of women as a site of political struggle, and it did so in a voice and form different from any other underground publication of the era.
Only six issues of Maria appeared between 1980 and 1982, before the KGB forced its editors into exile. While many copies were lost in raids, the first three issues were preserved through émigré reprints. In contrast to other Leningrad samizdat journals such as Chasy (The Clock) and 37, which privileged philosophical abstraction over daily concerns, Maria insisted on the emotional urgency of lived experience. “Women’s problems,” the editors wrote, “are too acute, too burning” for the usual underground discourse.
The journal was unapologetically domestic in focus and at the same time deeply political. Articles tackled a broad range of topics, from low wages and empty stores to sexualized violence and legal helplessness. One piece, “The Head of the Family” by Aya Lauwa, recounts court cases in which women defended husbands who had abused or killed their children. “I’ve already lost a child,” one woman pleads. “Do you want me to lose my husband, too?” Other articles documented the economic precarity of separation, including the difficulty of finding housing without a husband, the threat of homelessness, and the financial burden of single motherhood.
These stories painted a vivid picture of how Soviet systems invaded the most intimate spheres of life. In Maria, private life appeared as the first and fiercest front of struggle. Goricheva’s essay, “The Anti-Universe of the Soviet Family,” described the Soviet home as a “micro-GULAG”: a space of depersonalization and repression that mirrored the totalitarian state. To live freely, Maria argued, women had to reclaim themselves from both public and private tyranny.
Maria wasn’t only inward-looking. A section titled “Woman and the GULAG” called for international solidarity with imprisoned women dissidents, publishing appeals to figures like Margaret Thatcher and correspondence with feminist activists in Poland. In the second issue from 1981, Maria took on the Soviet-Afghan War. A section dedicated to the war, “Land on Fire,” offered a searing indictment: letters from witnesses and victims exposed looting, violence, and atrocities, especially against women and children.
Most striking was Maria’s rejection of the Soviet promise to “liberate” Afghan women. Soviet propaganda framed its intervention as a feminist mission, but Maria revealed its colonial underpinnings. “You cannot free a woman with a weapon in hand,” one contributor wrote. Another added bitterly: “For a communist, the concept of a free woman means an available woman—even against her will.”
Maria’s writers, persecuted by the state, turned to Christianity for strength and for an identity beyond Sovietness. In the eyes of Western feminists, this move appeared like a self-defeating replacement of one patriarchal system with another. But for the women of Maria, humility and faith were acts of resistance. This position involved rejecting the Soviet ideal of heroic masculinity. Alla Sariban wrote: “We were taught to be proud, strong, brave—to fight and transform the world. The idea of being meek and patient seemed humiliating.” As the myth of the Soviet hero collapsed, especially during the Afghan war, Christianity offered a different model: the humble subject who listens to her conscience rather than the Party.
From this perspective, Maria’s “Christian feminism” created a counter-ontology. If the Soviet state crushed individuality, while liberal feminism privileged autonomy, Maria imagined something else entirely: interdependence, solidarity, suffering shared. “The woman who has made the pain of the century her own,” one issue proclaimed, “knows how to make another’s suffering her destiny.”
Maria’s turn to Orthodoxy was a strategic realignment. Ideals of love, humility, and collective care stood in sharp opposition to both Soviet authoritarianism and post-Soviet individualism. It’s no surprise that the feminism of the late 1980s and 1990s—more Westernized, more liberal—quickly abandoned Maria’s legacy. Yet that legacy still matters. It reminds us that feminism has never been a single story and offers alternative strategies and languages for subversion, rooted in a reimagination of authority.
The voice of Maria reads like a call across time: “Woman of Russia! Within you lives the weapon capable of protecting humanity, now standing at the edge of destruction. And that weapon is Love.”
