Women to conquer Russian politics

Every Russian man tries to be a gentleman on March 8th, when the nation celebrates the Women's Day

Women have always had a very strong influence on politics, even in ancient times. The current political situation in Russia is not an exception. There are female deputies and governors in Russia, although their male colleagues do not act as gentlemen all the time. However, Russian men, including top politicians, try to pay as much attention to women as possible on the threshold of March 8th, which is celebrated across the nation as the “Women's Day.”

”Oil or gas is not the national wealth. Women are our national wealth,” the Russian Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov said. “Our women do not have any drawbacks, that is what we love them for,” communist Vasili Shandibin said. It is worth mentioning, however, that Shandibin used to accuse female deputy Lubov Sliska of having an intimate love affair with the Saratov region governor, Dmitry Ayatskov.

”I wish men thought more about their mothers, wives, girlfriends, female colleagues and acquaintances,” notorious Russian politician Vladimir Zhirinovsky said. However, Zhirinovsky publicly rejoiced about the fact that Japanese men receive higher wages than Japanese women, that women do not receive any medical services in Afghanistan. To crown it all, Vladimir Zhirinovsky had a big and shameful fight with female deputy Evgenia Tishkovskaya in the State Duma.

If a Russian man forgets to congratulate his women on March 8th, his friends and colleagues will publicly condemn and reproach him – even the men's solidarity will not work at this point.

Russia's central politician of the latest five years, Vladimir Putin, did not stay aside from such an important holiday. The Russian president expressed his congratulations to all Russian women many times. On 8 March 2000, when Putin was only an acting Russian President, he visited a weaving enterprise in the city of Ivanovo and congratulated the women's staff of the company. Putin was rather restrained in his congratulations: he only said trivial words about kindness, intuition and beauty of the opposite sex. In addition, the acting president told the Ivanovo weavers that he had four women in his life: his wife, two daughters and a dog, also a girl. Three years later, however, the Russian president said that legislative agencies could work efficiently only if there were 20 percent of women there.”

It is noteworthy that it was not the Russian president, who made up the 20-percent quantity of women working in governmental institutions. The law about 20 percent was introduced by UN experts, after they studied a lot of legislative systems in the world. Experts determined that a parliament hardly pays any attention to family and children's issues, if the number of women in that parliament is lower than one-fifth. Deputies of the Russian parliament have already tried to introduce a similar regulation in their law-making activity. The now-deceased female politician Galina Starovoitova (she was assassinated in 1998) thought, however, that such an approach was demeaning to women: sexual affiliation should not become a virtue, she thought.

Alexander Veshnyakov, the head of the Russian Central Election Committee, said that the law about women's political quotas would be put on the agenda of a session of the lower house of the State Duma in the near future.