Just as the movement was set to take off, international donors began to shift gears. Following the September 11, 2001, attacks on the United States, many donors, who had already grown weary of funding postcommunist civil society, redirected funds toward new hotspots. In 2002, USAID, which had been such a boon to the crisis centers, suddenly stopped funding them.31 Other donors, hoping to wean postcommunist recipients, began focusing on teaching fundraising and on the elusive goal of “sustainability.” By 2003, across the world, donors became less interested in funding women’s rights, although more funding was allocated to Central and Eastern Europe and the issue of gender violence than other issues in other places (Clark et al. 2006, 11—12). Without international support, in most Russian regions, the only domestic source of wealth is the state. Charitable donations from Russian business or the “new Russians” were highly improbable, especially following the 2003 imprisonment of oil baron turned philanthropist Mikhail Khodorkovsky.32
Of the previous commitments to supporting autonomous crisis center mobilization, only two main sources of funding remained. The first were EU-funded projects, such as AIDOS-Focus and the Nordic NCRB for northwestern Russian centers, which required European partners, who often received a large part of the grant, and most of the attention was turned to the East and Central European societies that would become EU members in 2004. The second was the Ford Foundation, but only for Moscow-based center ANNA. The disappearance of many funding sources left most crisis centers, at the height of the movement’s mobilization, scrambling for other sources of and methods for securing the minimal funding for existence. The global alliance between transnational feminists and democracy assistance donors to fund domestic and gender violence was over.