For Gender Equality? the Transnational Politics of Women’S Rights and Northwest Russia: the Case of Nordic-Russian Cooperation

chapter 5 Russia – A “Difficult Case” for Gender Equality? The Transnational Politics of Women’s Rights and Northwest Russia: The Case of Nordic-Russian Cooperation

Yulia Gradskova

This chapter1 deals with Russia, where several independent women’s as- sociations appeared in the early 1990s after the collapse of state socialism opened up the country to international cooperation on different levels. Fol- lowing more than 20 years of intensive cooperation programs and although many transnational organizations defending women’s rights had been actively working there since the 1990s, however, 2010 shadow reports to the un on the Russian Federation’s fulfillment of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (cedaw) noted, in addition to the absence of any national machinery for the defense of women’s rights, wide- spread discrimination in employment, a great deal of domestic and sexual violence, and discrimination on the grounds of sexual orientation.2 Nevertheless, for 20 years gender inequalities were at the periphery of public discussions: it was not until the February 2012 artistic performance by four young women in the Moscow Cathedral that the Russian media were finally forced to start noticing the existence of feminism in Russia and begin discussing problems of gender inequality.3 How did it happen that the results of more than 20 years

1 I am very grateful to Julie Hemment for comments on the earlier version of this chapter. 2 Alternativnyi doklad. Vypolnenie Konventsii oon o likvidatsii vsekh form diskriminatsii v ot- noshenii zhenschin v Rossiskoi Federatsii (Kontsortsium zhenskikh nepravitelstvennykh obedinenii, 2010) http://www.wcons.org.ru Accessed 2.02.2013; Discrimination and violence against lesbian and bysexual women and transgender people in Rusia (report by the Inter- Regional Social Movement “Russian lgbt Network,” 2010); http://www2.ohchr.org/english/ bodies/cedaw/docs/ngos/LGBTNetwork_RussianFederation46.pdf; Violence against Women in the Russian Federation (anna report 2010) Accessed 2.02.2013 http://www2.ohchr.org/english/bodies/cedaw/docs/ngos/ANNANCPV_RussianFederation46.pdf. Accessed 2.02.2013. 3 See Yulia Gradskova, Irina Sandomirskaja & Nadezda Petrusenko. “Pussy Riot: Reflections on Reception.” Baltic Worlds, 2013. http://balticworlds.com/reflections-on-receptions/ accessed 6 June 2015.

240 Gradskova of campaigning for women’s rights in cooperation with Western partners and local women activists became “invisible” in Russia? This question cannot be answered fully here, of course, not least because Russia is a very big country with a lot of differences with respect to economic development, the composition of women’s organizations, and cooperation partners. This chapter, therefore, deals mainly with one of the eights Federal Districts in the Russian Federation: Northwest Russia, which in turn comprises 11 subregions, most of which are called oblasti4). It is the only Russian region with an extensive border with the European Union. At the same time, documents issued by the Nordic cooperation partners not infrequently interpret “Northwest Russia” more narrowly as referring mainly to Russian territories along this border. The principal aim of the present chapter is to study the reception of the international gender equality agenda in post-Soviet Russia (with a focus on the Northwest) and the role that cooperation with the Nordic countries has played in institutionalizing gender equality and the protection of women’s rights in this region over the past 25 years. How did the different participants of cooperation interpret the transnational agenda on “gender equality” and its place in the process of institutional change in Russia? What was done to achieve it? What political struggles and power dynamics became visible over time, and why did the Russian case become so “difficult”? Answers to these questions will help us to understand the new challenges that appeared in the institutionalization of gender equality in a political, social and cultural context that differs from the environment where it was initially elaborated and institutionalized. It will also show what role transnational (in my case Nordic) ideas and actors can play in this process. My study is based on a variety of sources – policy documents, pamphlets and other publications by local governments and women’s organizations in Russia, cooperation documents (seminar programs, announcements, and short reports), internet sites of Nordic and Russian organizations dealing with

4 The Russian Federation consisted (before March 2014) of 83 subregions, most of which are called oblasti, but it also includes other kinds of administrative divisions, among them 21 autonomous republics and two federal cities – Moscow and St. Petersburg. The Northwestern Federal District (Severo-Zapadnyi federalnyi okrug), or Northwest Russia, as we shall refer to it here, is one of the federal districts. It consists of eleven upper-level territorial units known as “subjects” of the Russian Federation: the city of Saint Petersburg, the regions of Lenin- grad, Murmansk, Arkhangelsk, Vologda, Kaliningrad, Novgorod and Pskov, the two autonomous republics of Komi and Karelia, and the Nenets Autonomous Okrug. For the purpose of this chapter I will use subregion as a common name for different territorial units within the region.