During the 1990s, the romantic era of transnational advocacy, feminist activists from the United States and Western Europe arrived in Russia to promulgate newly emerging global norms on women's rights. Many of their activities were made possible by grants from governmental assistance agencies, private foundations, and other donors, who also supported advocates for other causes as part of a larger project to facilitate Russia's transition into the international community of market democracies. By the end of the decade, though, it became clear that things had not turned out as most had hoped and expected. Although the transnational feminists quickly found allies among Russia's intellectual elites and helped them build small, autonomous networks of their own, these local organizations became financially and programmatically dependent on their outside donors, and increasingly isolated from the rest of Russian society. When outside funding began to dry up in the early 2000s, the feminist networks in Russia (outside the academy) disappeared as well.
The ambivalences of transnational feminism have been the subject of many scholarly studies on Russia and elsewhere. Janet Elise Johnson, in Gender Violence in Russia, acknowledges these issues but chooses not to dwell on them. An unapologetic advocate of “global feminism,” Johnson moves beyond such critiques to ask a more practical question: Which strategies of transnational activism are most effective and why? She focuses particularly on three issues within the larger global campaign against violence against women: sexual assault, domestic violence, and the sexual trafficking of women. In each case, Johnson provides a clear and precise analysis of the local conditions and constraints, the strategies they employ, and the allies they find. In the campaign against sexual assault in Russia, for example, an alliance of local and transnational activists with relatively little financial support sought to blame and shame local authorities so that the issue would be taken more seriously, but they accomplished little besides a superficial and largely temporary change in public rhetoric. The campaign against the trafficking of women for sexual purposes, by contrast, enlisted the U.S. government and the European Union to engage Russian authorities with an assortment of carrots and sticks. Although this campaign had a more significant impact on Russian policy, the diplomatic negotiations ignored and preempted the concerns of feminist organizations, and ended up criminalizing the women in a way most feminists would not endorse. The most successful campaign, according to Johnson, was against domestic violence, in which Russian and transnational activists, substantially supported with moneys from democratic assistance programs, were able to construct a network of organizations across the country, enact real changes in federal legislation, and instruct local authorities in some regions about how to implement existing laws.
Johnson uses a prodigious amount of material collected over many trips to several regions in Russia. She has read widely in both English and Russian, taking care to address those interpretations that disagree with her own. Her conclusions, in general, are quite persuasive. In addition, her book is also one of very few accounts of transnational feminist advocacy in Russia that carries the story well into the 2000s, when Russian feminist organizations were scrambling to adjust to new funding constraints.
Still, this reviewer would have preferred if Johnson had strayed a little more frequently from the heroic narrative of global feminism to consider more closely the workings of politics and power within these advocacy networks. One wonders, for example, how the disparity of resources between the local and transnational feminists, who were themselves constrained by the priorities of donors, may have preempted more indigenous debates about Russian women's economic plight. It would also have been useful had she considered in more detail the tensions within the Russian network against domestic violence, between the organizations in Moscow and those in the regions, or between those funded by outside donors and others funded by the state. Again, Johnson recognizes these issues but dispatches them quickly, even though they may help explain why the movement collapsed so quickly when funding ceased.
In sum, Gender Violence in Russia provides an excellent account of the trials and tribulations of global feminism in Russia during this last, difficult decade. For a more fine-grained analysis of the intersections between transnational feminism and Russian society, though, one should supplement a reading of this book with recent work by Julie Hemment (Empowering Women in Russia: Activism, Aid and NGOs, 2007) and Suvi Salmenniemi (Democratization and Gender in Contemporary Russia, 2008).
