Walking the Tightrope.
By Francine du Plessix Gray.
213 pp. New York: Doubleday. $19.95.
A well-worn Soviet propaganda boast is that Communism liberates women, whereas capitalism enslaves them. True, after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution the Soviet Government was the first in history to write female emancipation into its Constitution. In the brave new world, women would participate fully in the work force, receiving equal pay for equal work. Once capitalism was abolished, men's attitude toward women would change miraculously. According to Marxist psychologists, no innate gender differences exist between the sexes. Under the new regime, communal households would replace the nuclear family, thus liberating women from household burdens.
As Francine du Plessix Gray shows in her book, ''Soviet Women: Walking the Tightrope'' this dream of equality is as about as empty as the shelves in Soviet stores these days. After the recent dramatic changes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, it is becoming increasingly clear that Communism is a political aberration that has set economic and moral development back decades, if not centuries. And for no one is the betrayal of this dream more tragic than for women.
The statistics Ms. Gray quotes in ''Soviet Women'' speak for themselves. Over the last 10 years in the Soviet Union, the average female worker earned two-thirds of the average male income. Nearly half the female work force is employed in unskilled manual labor, much of it backbreaking. For example, two-thirds of highway construction crews and warehouse workers are women. And in instances where machines have replaced workers, the men, not the women, are the ones to operate them. In agriculture, 85 percent of the mechanized operations are run by men, leaving women with the dirty manual jobs. While a large proportion of women are represented in professions such as engineering and medicine, few of them reach the top.
As for the elimination of gender differences and the creation of a new Soviet person, the exact opposite occurred as the interests of women were subordinated to the industrialization of the state. Today, in panic over the disintegration of the family as well as a falling birthrate, particularly in the Slavic republics, the authorities are promoting the image of woman as homemaker. The so-called ''masculinized woman'' is taking the blame for many of society's current ills, including soaring divorce rates, abandoned children, juvenile delinquency, drugs and infant mortality.
Ms. Gray, whose previous work includes the novels ''Lovers and Tyrants'' and ''World Without End,'' spent several months traveling throughout the Soviet Union, interviewing women of all ages and walks of life. Thanks to glasnost, the women she met spoke openly, without fear of reprisal. The portraits are drawn with humor and warmth, interspersed with history and social observation.
As someone who has spent many years in the Soviet Union, I found Ms. Gray's observations right on target. Her obvious knowledge of Soviet conditions and a close affinity for the subject, based on her own Russian heritage, have produced some unusual insights. Russian women, she writes in the introduction, ''were my first loves and my first tyrants. Beneath their veneer of tenderness and Tolstoyan pacificism, the prim gentility of their White Russian provenance, there was a searing energy, an iron discipline, a formidable will to dominate, and it is in them that I first sensed the mysterious, unique power of Russian women.''
It is obvious from this book that the problems of Soviet women extend far beyond the fact that men refuse to shoulder household responsibilities, or that the health care system is so abysmal that the average woman undergoes more than seven abortions in a lifetime - five to eight abortions for every live birth nationwide. A fundamental impasse exists between the sexes, an impasse whose roots the author traces back to the Middle Ages, to the church, to the Mongol invasions, to geography. Today's relations with men are at an all-time low, she reports. Women have little use for them, other than to father children. The women are angry, overworked and unhappy - all of this against a background of worsening economic shortages.
''The man is the one we've been shopping, cooking, scrubbing, darning the socks for all week, so in our exhausted state we see him as the most immediate enemy, we start shouting, yelling,'' Olga Voronina, one of the few Soviet women specializing in women's issues, tells Ms. Gray.
Paradoxically, men discriminate against women in the Soviet Union, treating them in ways that would horrify their Western sisters. But they do not dominate them. Just the opposite. It is a matriarchy, says Ms. Gray, largely consisting of strong, self-sacrificing women and passive, emasculated men the women despise. When Soviet women look into the future, most envision it with their own mothers and daughters. The author likens the close bond to the Russian matryoshka doll that divides in the middle to reveal smaller versions of itself - ''parthenogenetic females fitting snugly into the next, generation after generation.''