The soviet legacy

As these changes were underway among transnational women’s activists and around the global conception of the issue of gender violence, Russia was also un­dergoing a huge transformation. For some seven decades in the twentieth cen­tury, Russia had been the leading republic in the Soviet Union. This multiethnic empire was marked by the Communist Party that controlled policymaking and a command economy, in which government planners, not the market, dictated what to produce and how to produce. This Soviet system also produced a particu­lar approach to gender violence, promoting women’s status, and gender.