Veiled women assaulting defenseless civilians seemed to confirm the long-standing Russian belief that the male Chechen terrorists were savages and female terrorists their benighted dupes. Most Russians had not read Politkovskaia’s articles. They did not know that their army had committed war crimes against the Chechens, including the rape of children, which went unpunished. The shakhidki, inspired by the militant Islamism preached among Chechen guerillas and by the suicide bombers of the Palestinian Intifada, sought through terrorism to avenge their dead and draw attention to the crimes perpetrated against their people. Vengeance seemed the stronger of their motives, for the mass killing of civilians did nothing to inform Russians about the depredations of their own government.34
The New Activism
Some women responded to the freedoms and stresses of post-Soviet times by joining a wide variety of volunteer groups, the so-called “civic organizations.” In the early 2000s, 2 to 2.5 million people, the majority of them women, belonged to these groups in Russia alone. They joined for a variety of reasons. Some were attempting to help themselves by helping others. This was the case with the women who established an organization, Our House, to give aid to large families in Kyiv. Others, such as the midwives who did home-birthing in St. Petersburg, were applying their professional skills to volunteer work. Still others were continuing the projects begun during the Soviet period by the zhensovety. Many members of civic organizations believed that their work fostered the development of democratic politics; feminists also saw them as a way to organize women to achieve their emancipation. Activists and the public believed that civic organizations were suited to women because they were philanthropic and because they were independent of the government. Julie Hemment has written, “The market and formal politics were regarded as dirty, but also as masculine domains…. The non-governmental… sphere was seen to be decent, moral, and in this way peculiarly feminine.”35
Soviet women began organizing civic organizations to address issues of particular concern to women in the late 1980s, as we have seen. To establish connections between groups, hundreds of these activists met at Dubna, outside Moscow, in 1991 and again in 1992. Their networking led to the creation in 1994 of the Moscow Information Center of the Independent Women’s Forum, an umbrella organization that maintained communications between groups, distributed information, provided grants, and sponsored regional and national conferences. Meanwhile, in Ukraine, the Baltics, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, members of the women’s auxiliaries of the pre-1991 independence movements were creating civic organizations. They too coordinated their activities through national committees.36
Most of the women-centered civic organizations were small local groups set up to help women, including the volunteers themselves. The Ivanovo Committee of Single-Parent Families, led by single mothers, lobbied that city’s government to fund programs and organized support groups. In Kiev, For Life worked with pensioners. In Armenia, women’s civic organizations helped families of men killed in the war with Azerbaijan in the early 1990s.37
The number of professional organizations grew as well. Businesswomen in many cities, most in the European republics, set up clubs to share information about entrepreneurship. In Moscow, Tvorchestvo (Creative Work) did fund-raising, held job-training classes for unemployed artists, and, in a poignant echo of the 1860s, organized sewing workshops. Societies established by female academics sponsored conferences, published scholarly proceedings, and assisted their members in obtaining funding for research. Particularly influential was the Moscow Center for Gender Studies, organized in 1990 with the goal of “using the results of our own and foreign scholarship to overcome discrimination against women.” It and centers at universities in Kharkov, Minsk, St. Petersburg, Tver, and elsewhere promoted the development of gender studies and a lively critique of gender inequality.38
This activism was not confined to the European successor states. In the Caucasus, Baku once again became a center of female activism. Women there established civic organizations to support female entrepreneurs and assist the poor and victims of domestic violence. In 2002, female academics set up the Azerbaijan Gender Information Center to serve as “the first informational, analytical, bibliographical, and documentary center of the women’s movement in the territory of the South Caucasus.” The organization’s website published articles on international activism and on the history of Azeri women. It publicized conferences, government programs, and sources of information on legal and psychological counseling and medical care.
Some women-centered civic organizations undertook public advocacy. Many lobbied local, regional, and national governments for supportive legislation and increases in benefits. Sappho-Petersburg published a newsletter for lesbians and held educational meetings to counter homophobia. Sestri (Sisters) ran a domestic-violence hotline and held workshops on sexual violence for the general public as well as for safety forces. In the late 1990s its leaders worked with female attorneys and counselors across Russia to establish the Russian Association of Crisis Centers for Women, which acted as an informational clearinghouse for people helping victims of rape and domestic violence.39
Women worked as well in civic organizations advocating for environmental conservation and human rights. Of the latter groups, one of the largest was the Union of Committees of Soldiers’ Mothers; it was also the largest women’s civic organization. Founded in 1989 to protest the brutal treatment of draftees in the Soviet army, it grew into a network of committees spread across Russia and Ukraine and coordinated by a national board headquartered in Moscow. “They [the local committees] were born of maternal love,” the committee declared on its website, “of a refusal to accept violence, and of a strong sense of civic responsibility.” The soldiers’ mothers lobbied the government for army reforms, advised parents of draftees on their legal rights, and even, on occasion, sheltered AWOL soldiers. They set up a website that published investigations of beatings and other abuse. The committees protested the war in Chechnya and publicized the war’s horrors. They helped the mothers of soldiers who were imprisoned in Chechnya to travel to the area to plead for their sons’ release. All this activism earned the committees widespread public support in Russia and Ukraine and inspired the formation of other groups, including the Mothers of Beslan, which sought to uncover the truth about the botched attempt to free the hostages taken by Chechen terrorists in the school siege of September 2004.40
Most human-rights organizations were led by men, but there was one important exception: Helsinki Watch Moscow, set up by dissidents in the 1970s. In 1996, it invited Liudmila Alexeeva, one of its founders, to become its head. Two years later she was elected president of the International Helsinki Federation on Human Rights. Famous among the intelligentsia as a “legendary dissident and human-rights defender,” Alexeeva proved to be a forceful critic of the government. She spoke up against the repression and the brutality of the Chechen war. She scorned Yeltsin as “Bloody Boris,” and was just as critical of Putin. At a demonstration on the first anniversary of Anna Politkovskaia’s assassination, Alexeeva declared, “They murdered her because she was fearless. She was fighting against lawlessness, against violence, and against lies.” The octogenarian scoffed at the dangers of being so blunt. “If I were to be killed, no one would say, ‘Oh, what a tragedy, she was cut down so young,’” she told an interviewer in 2007. “But I also think it’s better to go [on] doing what you want.”41