Chapter 42: Women's Leadership in Eurasia

Sue Davis & Dawn Nowacki

Women's leadership in Eurasia In 1991, the Soviet Union broke up into 15 separate countries along the ethnic lines constructed and reified by the Soviet state over 74 years. The 15 countries can usefully be grouped by region and linguistic/historical commonalities: Russia/Ukraine/Belarus (predominantly Slavic and Eastern Orthodox); Armenia/Georgia/Azerbaijan (the Caucasus region, characterized by religious and linguistic diversity); Latvia/Lithuania/Estonia (the Baltic region, non-Slav, Catholic or Protestant); Kazakhstan/Turkmenistan/Uzbekistan/Tajikistan/Kyrgyzstan (Central Asia, predominantly Muslim and Turkic-speaking); and Moldova, consisting of territory that had previously belonged to Romania and ceded to the Soviets after World War II (Romanian speaking with a large Slavic minority). The Baltic states have emerged as full-fledged democracies, firmly oriented toward Europe. The status of women there more closely resembles that of the former communist countries of Central Europe than that of the former Soviet republics. Since this is the case, we do not address them in this chapter. The Slavic ...

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