Glasnost’ in Two Cultures
“Glasnost’ in Two Cultures” was an event that took place in New York in March of 1991, shortly before the collapse of the Soviet Union. It had the lengthy subtitle: “Soviet Russian and North American Women’s Writing Conference,” which itself reflected the frameworks and feminist critical approaches of the day. There were four major questions to be discussed: 1. The meaning of women’s writing; 2. The idea of literature as a paradigm of culture; 3. The relation of cultural pluralism to political freedom; and 4.the need for women in the United States and the Soviet Union to explore each other’s assumptions about the relation between gender, culture and a tradition of feminism that seeks to alter those assumptions. Participants belonged to one of three groups: a Soviet delegation, American feminist writers and academics and a group of Slavists who organized the panels and tried to find common ground. Despite at times fierce disagreements, the ongoing outcome of this event was a number of long-term joint programs and projects in academia as well as among social activists.
Carol Ueland, who was part of the organizational committee along with Cathy Nepomnyashchy, Nancy Condee, Helena Goscilo, and Marina Ledkovsky, will be joined by a prominent Russian journalist from the Soviet delegation who has collected the memoirs of this event’s participants. She has published a Russian version of “Glasnost’ in Two Cultures and hopes to expand it further in an English edition.
