The most stable base for feminist women’s crisis centers is probably affiliation with public universities. Such support had long been a part of the crisis centers’ resources as many of the founders were academics.60 Some crisis centers, such as Moscow-based Yaroslavna, had been built within universities, while others, such in Tver, seemed to be moving in that direction (Hemment 2007, 147). With some subsidy of space and faculty’s time, crisis centers could exist on relatively little other financial support.
In the fall of 2005, one surviving crisis center built within a university was Bridges of Mercy in the far northern city of Arkhangelsk. Founded in 1999 using a borrowed phone line, the organization was formally registered when a senior professor at the local university used her influence to obtain an office at the university61 With this base of support, they were able to secure some funding from USAID and more through Nordic sources and the Nordic-Russian NCRB. Bridges of Mercy was also lucky to partner with an American shelter that ran a small fundraiser to fund the necessary renovations to their very cold room. This partnership had emerged serendipitously through the Russian American Rule of Law Consortium, which happened to bring to the region American legal officials who were also domestic violence activists.
In 2005, when Nordic funding was halted—the NCRB project ended in 2005 and Nordic officials decided that Arkhangelsk would no longer be included in future Barents Region projects—Bridges of Mercy had no financial resources. Led by the three founder-professors, they were surviving because the university was continuing to allow them use of the office and to pay for the phone line. They reciprocated by providing work experience for university social work and psychology students. Because of the involvement of the Russian American Rule of Law Consortium, they were also beginning to collaborate with the university’s new free legal clinic (which itself had received external grants through long-term United States—Russia cooperation).
Although such university affiliation may be the best long-term tactic, the Arkhangelsk case illustrates that this option represents a scaled-down feminist mobilization. Without additional funding, the crisis center is limited to providing crisis counseling without much advocacy. The feminist leaders were exhausted, and most of the volunteers I met in the fall of 2005 saw their work as practical, a step toward acquiring necessary job experience.62 They described their varying hotline strategies, most often trying to reveal or create more options for the woman living with violence. In some cases, the hotline counselors were able to arrange for temporary shelter at a local homeless shelter or help the victim trade apartments in order not to live with her abuser. But only one of the three felt that raising awareness was central to their work. Without this additional component, hotline counseling runs the risk of reinforcing the neotraditional gender roles, where women are responsible for peace in their families.
By the middle of the decade, the women’s crisis center movement was embattled. There was some expansion in the number of organizations. In 2004, the RACCW had expanded to some 47 organizations as more NGOs and state hybrids found out about RACCW and filled out the necessary paperwork, but in the fall of 2005, it seemed the network and at least some members would soon cease to exist. By 2004, ANNA had created its own overlapping loose network of 121 organizations in Russia with whom they had trained or collaborated (Amnesty International 2005, 2). In 2004, at what may be the high point of the movement and including all antitrafficking organizations, the movement included 229 distinct organizations addressing violence against women and/or trafficking in women, covering sixty-one out of the eighty-nine regions63
However, these increased numbers of organizations are undermined by the increased fragmentation in the movement and the tenuousness of the existence of most of the feminist crisis centers. Only thirty-eight of these organizations had proven longevity by lasting more than a couple of years. Even among the relatively well-founded northwestern crisis centers (through 2005), one center had ceased focusing on gender violence and there had been high staff turnovers because of low salaries: 50 percent of the centers paid their staff at or below the official minimal “living wage” (approximately $i08/month in Arkhangelsk in 2005), and an additional 40 percent of the crisis centers in the region had no paid staff (Liapounova and Dracheva 2005). In 2007, activist leaders found only nineteen NGO women’s crisis centers remaining (Open Society Institute 2007, 33). These included all the centers listed on the map as active centers (map i), except Nizhny Tagil, which closed in 2005, as well as seven other centers, including ones in the
Siberian republic of Buriatiia and far eastern Vladivostok. The decrease was perceivable to the population beyond its direct impact. Russians in 2006 were much less likely to recognize that their city had a shelter, crisis center, or trust line than five years earlier (Zabelina et al. 2007, 86).