She studied Morse code, learned to fire a machine gun, and dreamed of being a ship captain. Still in school, she was the only girl who represented Moscow’s Young Pioneers in the delegation that signed a cooperation agreement with the Baltic Fleet on the eve of a Komsomol (Young Communist League) congress. This even hit the headlines in Pravda. Although a first-rate sniper, she did not happen to take part in hostilities. Yet, she donated blood throughout the World War II.
“The then young people were raised in a militarist spirit,” recalls Professor Olena Stezhenska, Doctor of Medicine and chief of the Volunteers Center at the Council of Ukrainian Veterans. “I and a friend, as thin as I, cherished the image of a woman captain. However, the draft board immediately clipped our wings: we did not fit in terms of size, for the Navy needed thickset and endurable women.”
Failure to enlist was a major tragedy for Prof. Stezhenska. On her way from Moscow to Kyiv, where her father had been teaching at the Tank Technical School for a year, she traveled with a group of Kyiv students in the same rail car. “When they saw me sobbing in front of the military school door, they rolled up slips of paper bearing the names of all Kyiv’s higher educational institutions and made me draw the lot,” she says. Thus she got into the medical institute. Studying there, she always comforted herself with the thought that the Navy also needs doctors.
It was perhaps not accidental that Prof. Stezhenska was drawn to a traditionally male occupation. Born to the family of a former political prisoner and a tobacco factory worker, she, her two brothers, and a sister were raised in the family of military officer Ivan Voronov after their father had been killed during a grain requisition campaign. The nomadic military life, which left its imprint above all on the girl’s childish dreams, also much good in terms of her education, for it shaped such personal qualities as leadership, ambition, and endurance.
In 1933, when the family moved to Moscow, where Olena’s father-in-law was doing a course to upgrade his skills, decent housing was out of the question. They stayed at a vast hall of the former Page Corps divided in half with columns, with the dining room on one side and a hostel on he other. “A very interesting layout: as many family members, so many straw mattresses on the floor. Then comes a tarpaulin screen and other so-called rooms,” Prof. Stezhenska reminisces.
After her father completed the course, they returned to Kyiv, only to be evacuated to Moscow again in 1941 as the Soviet phase of World War II broke out. Back in Moscow, Olena met a former classmate, an Automobile Transport Institute student, and eventually married him. Then followed another turning point in her life: Nikolai Semashko, a devout Leninist also known as founder of the Soviet public health system, advised Olena to apply to the university’s industrial hygiene department. When the war was over, she was offered a Ph.D. course. Then, after she won a top prize at the first postwar local talent show in Kyiv, she was invited to enter the conservatory. “But mother said to me, ‘Sing as much as you please, but take the doctoral course because it is more reliable’,” she recalls.
Then she was requested to go to Kryvy Rih. As the next Communist Party congress was around the corner, it was decided to set up an institute of labor hygiene and occupational diseases in the city. “That was the most interesting period in my life. I was in charge of organizing the construction and recruiting personnel. I had to fight for each and every worker, and I succeeded in this.” Olena once had to get into the CPSU Central Committee (CC) building in Moscow through the window because the functionaries refused to receive her when she sought to solve the problem of equipment and food supplies for the clinic.
By then, Prof. Stezhenska had been elected to the local legislature and appointed chairperson of the public health commission. Olena had to demonstrate her so-called extremism more than once. For example, Kryvorizhstal (Kryvy Rih steel mill) was going to open a new ore dressing shop, which had already been reported in Pravda. But there was no dust-removal equipment, and Prof. Stezhenska managed to persuade the government commission to suspend the commissioning. The irate industrialists first began to shower telegrams on the CC but then had to work out an industrial health plan and postpone the commissioning.
Later, when the Institute of Gerontology was being founded in Kyiv, Prof. Stezhenska was invited to the department of gerohygiene, labor hygiene for various age categories, where she worked until retirement. Looking back on her life, Prof. Stezhenska says she never worked halfheartedly, so there was no time for despair. She believes the majority of the women of her generation were just the same, purposeful and organized. “Besides, we had a very deep feeling of responsibility. I think I developed this trait when I was an eight-grader and traveled to Moscow region’s villages during my winter vacations to liquidate illiteracy among the elderly.”
Prof. Stezhenska managed to find time for all kinds of things. She was a donor, a choir singer, a competition winner, and a caring mother. She defended her dissertation well before her husband did. “My husband was, of course, jealous of my progress. When I had written my doctoral dissertation, he... hid it. Later, when my bosses wanted to rid me of my laboratory, he unearthed and helped me update my work.”
Prof. Stezhenska believes every woman must realize herself in anything she is interested in, including household chores: there must be search and creativity. Moreover, one ought to do some kind of community service. For when you stay at home, completely absorbed in making your face pretty and your house cozy, you not only wear yourself out but also limit the possibility of being appreciated by someone other than your husband. What’s the use of being beautiful and clever within four walls?
Olena thinks that today’s woman pays too much attention to seeking profit and striving to come at least a bit closer to the glitzy life that smiles temptingly from magazine covers and foreign television serials. At the same time, many women are unable to adapt to the new life and end up in squalor. Young girls are being brought up to pursue personal success the idea of which notably differs from the one that existed before. In pursuit of these ends, they often have to show envy and servility. Objectionable as it is, they have no scruples about things once thought of as nonsense...
Today, the 84-year-old Olena Stezhenska still displays enviable energy. She initiated a major volunteer movement in Ukraine, with cells in all the regional and district centers. “We have shown that the veterans’ organization, now embracing all pensioners, war, and labor veterans, has good prospects for development. Our aim is to draw as many pensioners as possible into active life, to distract them from hardships and loneliness.” What embarrasses Ms. Stezhenska most is the fact that a considerable number of the elderly are underprivileged and socially unprotected; in some cases their own families maltreat — even beat up — or try to evict them.
Prof. Stezhenska says she is a happy person — perhaps because she was born during a shootout, and her parents would place the basket with her on top of the cupboard so that a stray bullet did not hit her. Or perhaps because she gave birth to her first daughter also under bullets at a first-aid station in Kriukovo, where large military forces were concentrated. The young women bore the child and had to flee the place just two hours later because an aerial bombing was imminent. “The obstetrician swaddled my doll and told me to run away. I survived, but the house was soon hit by a bomb.” Prof. Stezhenska is also happy because she says she managed to make her way up without overexerting herself. She is also a very rich person because she has two children, four grandchildren, and, surprisingly enough, to look at her, three twenty-year-old great-grandchildren.
