‘What sort of mother is that?’: Natalia Gorbanevskaia, the Soviet human rights movement, and contested notions of motherhood under late Soviet socialism

Natalia Gorbanevskaia was a leading figure in the early movement for human rights in the Soviet Union (1966–1973), who, like her colleagues, did not identify issues pertaining to women or mothers as part of her human rights agenda. A close analysis of her activism and writings, however, demonstrates that Gorbanevskaia practiced without theorising a resistant form of motherhood. She combined non-gendered human rights activism with her everyday maternal responsibilities as an unapologetic single mother of two young children. The KGB’s psychiatric repression of Gorbanevskaia, unlike other Soviet dissidents of this era, was thus predicated on contested notions of what it meant to be a good mother in late socialist society. Gorbanevskaia protested her diagnosis as a mentally ill, ‘unfit’ mother by composing several definitive writings that assumed a notably gendered focus that her human rights activism otherwise avoided. She specifically sought to prove that she was a loving, responsible mother who defined civic consciousness or speaking out against Soviet injustices as indispensable to motherhood.