The USSR may be remembered as a force of totalitarianism, yet the 50thanniversary of the first woman in space reminds us that this should not obscure another dimension: official gender equality. In June 1963, Valentina Tereshkova, an unknown Soviet worker, embarked on a three-day mission orbiting the Earth. Returning to business as usual, she was celebrated as Red royalty on stamps, in songs, Planetariums and museums. Of course, the ethereal, moon-like features, shining out from the stained-glassed windows, should not be taken at face value. Tereshkova was both liberated and consumed by the Communist regime. Married off to cosmonaut Andriyan Nikolayev by Khrushchev, before joining the Duma, she is no innocent women’s icon but an immortalised proletariat heroine of Cold War space-race propaganda. Even so, looking back to this golden era of pioneering super-women, elevated by communist states embracing gender equality, you cannot help but wonder: was the 1990’s collapse really a liberation or rather a step backwards for women?

In Russia, the fall of communism did not radically affect women’s position in society; yet this is because its ‘democratic’ successor continued and accelerated its policies in relatively smooth transition. The majority of Soviet women were never Valentinas:  despite official gender equality, the gap between image and reality meant that discrimination continued de facto. The 1920s saw the blossoming of free love under Lenin’s NEP, where accessible contraception, abortion and divorce gave women control over their bodies. Even Stalin’s ‘Great Retreat’ of the 1930s supported women’s work despite encouraging motherhood with anti-abortion law and divorce penalties. By the 1980s, 92% of women were employed, yet mentalities cannot be changed overnight: as in the West, women still suffered unequal pay and lower status jobs – a female engineer earned a third of male equivalents.

Still, soviet women had broadly benefited from an ideology where class, not gender, defined inclusion. Since this path had led them towards women’s rights similar to those in Western democracies, gender equality was easily accommodated into the 1991 regime change. Although workplace discrimination was exacerbated under the 1990’s economic pressures, where women made up 70% of the unemployed, advances have been made in politics. Despite strong traditionalist attitudes, for the first time, women could create their own parties and associations, such as Moscow’s punk-rock feminist ‘Pussy’ rioters, who only recently protested against Putin.

Communism’s demise may not be a dramatic casualty for Russian women, but this was not always the case. If the scale of the loss is determined by its replacement, then the fall of soviet Afghanistan to the Islamic State heralded not emancipation but a devastating end of protectionism. Popular ideas of Soviet repression in the Afghan war, 1979-89, should not mask the truth that for women, communist rule was an oasis of thirst-quenching liberty. Like the USSR, freedoms were incomplete, yet the rights to education, employment, healthcare, marriage, voting and associational life under the communist PDPA, 1978-92, stand out in brutal contrast to Taliban rule 1996-2001. Women were effectively put under house arrest. Education and work; leaving the house unaccompanied by male family or without a burqa; speaking aloud in public; appearances in the media and photographs; healthcare administered by male doctors – all was banned. Even high-heels were prohibited, with one woman having her thumb cut off in 1996 for wearing nail varnish. Opposition to patriarchal control was fatal: in 2009, Bibi Aisha was mutilated, her nose and ears cut off, for fleeing domestic violence.

The Taliban may have been overthrown, yet discrimination continues today under the Karzai administration, which reacted to the invitation of Sadaf Rahimi, the first female Afghan boxer, to the 2012 Olympics, as ‘shameful’. This is a far cry from the comparably utopian world of communism, where courageous Tereshkovas would be worshipped. Or is it? Afghan women may have lost out in the fall of communism, yet it has not seen the fighter’s sprit come tumbling down. In the words of Rahimi, ‘Afghan girls are not victims… I will be a symbol of courage as soon as I step into the ring’.

The struggle for women’s rights is by no means complete: examples of extreme repression should not blind us to the deep discrimination and traditionalism that still lurk within and outside our own society. We may enjoy freedoms today, but the sudden collapse of professed equality into persecution wrought by one regime change is a warning against complacency for tomorrow.  The fight for gender equality is not linear: for centuries, sexual identities have been and will continue to be manipulated for contemporary cultural purposes - just like the images of Tereshkova and Rahimi. We should not only be asking what the undoing of communism meant for women: it reminds us more harrowingly that all societies rise and fall. That nothing is certain.

Who can say what the future holds for the changing faces of women?