Heroines Of Soviet Labor

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"I spend most of my time in the kitchen or shopping. I spend hours looking for clothes and food. There are no kitchen appliances -- mixers, graters, dishwashers, clothes dryers, appliances that make women's work easier. I get tired a lot. Really tired."

---A young Moscow woman

Life is tough for Soviet women. Really tough. Overworked and underappreciated, most of the Soviet Union's 149 million women fight an uphill battle simply to survive the daily grind -- an endless race against time in the effort to juggle job, housework and child care. The average Soviet woman has few modern conveniences, gets little sympathy from the boss and virtually no household help from her husband. She nurtures only limited hope that the situation will change anytime soon. "I have a great admiration for the women of the Soviet Union," President Reagan told Soviet reporters on the eve of his trip to Moscow for this week's superpower summit. "I just wonder if they're getting the credit within your country that I think they deserve."

Nominally, Soviet women enjoy the same rights as men. The Bolshevik Revolution promised political and social equality for the sexes, and the constitution guarantees it. But while women today are better educated, healthier and more fully represented in the professions and on local government councils than their mothers' generation was, they remain second- class citizens. At work -- women hold 51% of the jobs in the Soviet Union -- they find themselves confined to low-paying positions and are noticeably absent from management posts. In the Communist Party, they make up 29% of the membership, but no woman sits in the ruling 13-member Politburo and less than a dozen in the 307-member Central Committee. Almost 60 years ago, Lenin described the woman's lot as "barbarously unproductive, petty, nerve-racking, crushing drudgery." Not much has changed.

The gap between ideal and reality is once again visible, as the Soviet Union projects a fresh image to the world in the person of Raisa Gorbachev, the wife of General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev. Intelligent, urbane and outspoken, she leads a fast-paced, glamorous life that is as elusive to most Soviet women as the pomp of the royal family is to most Britons. Hailed abroad as the new Soviet woman, Mrs. Gorbachev is perceived as her country's first female superstar since the days of Alexandra Kollantai and Inessa Armand, both early feminists, and Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin's wife, more than a half- century ago.

Raisa Gorbachev enjoys opportunities that few Soviet women can imagine. She provides less a role model than a yardstick against which Soviet women measure their lives. "We envy her," says Rimma Raude, 37, an economist who emigrated from Kharkov to the U.S. a year ago. Mrs. Gorbachev's life-style serves both to highlight and deepen women's dissatisfaction, even as the rising expectations spawned by glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) have emboldened some women to speak out about their problems.