This paper aims to provide an overview of post-socialist gender politics in Russia. Its main question is whether the state has a specific gender strategy to promote gender equality in different parts of social life. Despite a strong heritage to resolve gender inequality from the Soviet Union, the gender question has almost lost its priority on the political agenda. The lack of gender-promoting politics seems to exist in Russia under the rule of both Mikhail Gorbachev and Vladimir Putin. Behind the discourse of bringing the women back in home and that of working mother, there lays an essentialist approach treating women’s social position on the basis of natural differences. In order to clarify the state’s approach to promote gender equality, the topics of maternity capital, maternity leave, the lack of a national mechanism and the attempt for a gender law are selected for discussion. This study consists of two parts. In the first part, the Soviet gender politics, its definition of citizenship, and its ideological and political strategies are briefly overviewed. In the second part, post-socialist gender politics is examined by focusing on two main discourses put by Gorbachev and Putin. The specific focus is put on redefining the rights and duties, the category of citizenship, for women. This study is based on literature review, discourse analysis of political documents and fieldwork consisting of in-depth interviews that had been done with gender experts and academicians in Moscow and St.Petersburg. It is concluded that understanding and treating ‘woman’ after the collapse of the Soviet Union is shaped around traditional stereotypes that identify women as predominantly mothers and wives.
