Though some local activism fizzled and some “parachute feminist” projects failed to thrive, the surviving centers grew with global feminist ideas and transnational feminist networking. The first centers in Moscow and St. Petersburg were created by gender studies centers already engaging in global feminism. New TFNs, such as the sister-to-sister feminist organization Network of East-West Women (NEWW), founded in 1991, helped facilitate their participation in global feminism through exchanges and the creation of bi-regional network. The joint venture Consortium of Women’s Nongovernment Associations (formerly NIS-US Women’s Consortium), founded to build a network between American and postSoviet women’s organizations, provided start-up resources.12 The creation of the consortium also brought transnational feminist and human rights entrepreneur Martina Vandenberg, who had an interest in violence against women, as the American coordinator. Vandenberg would become an important advocate for the crisis centers, both establishing more of them and writing about their work in English-language Russian and American newspapers. Other transnational feminists helped found specific women’s crisis centers, such as British-American scholar-activist Julie Hemment working in Tver (Hemment 2007, ch. 4).
The movement’s activists and scholars acknowledge the importance of global feminism and transnational feminist networking. For example, Albina Pashina, scholar-founder of the third Moscow-based women’s crisis center, Yaroslavna, in her chronicle of the founding of the women’s movement (2004), argues that gender violence activism emerged from Western feminism and global women’s meetings, leading to the raising of the issue at the 1991 watershed event of the Russian women’s movement, the Independent Women’s Forum (Pashina 2004). She further asserts that the “main figures behind the. . . [expansion] to the regions were the representatives of the Western feminist movements. They initiated trips for the already functioning crisis centres’ leaders to small peripheral towns arranging training sessions for local activists there” (25).
External feminist influence also helped imagine the crisis center as the movement’s model. Russian activists unabashedly appropriated their ideas about the proper response to violence against women mostly from North American insti — tutions.13 Many crisis center leaders met with Western counterparts or even traveled to observe North American or European shelters. One activist involved in the founding a St. Petersburg crisis center and then a municipal shelter explained that she decided to head the initiative to organize the shelter because she “had been to America and knew that a shelter needed to be founded.”!4 To foster the appropriation of the model, Russian activists (literally) translated a Western feminist text, How to Start a Crisis Center for Women (Kak sozdat’ krizisnyi tsentr dlia zhenshchin) (Israelian and Zabelina 1995).
Russian activists then adapted the internationally available model to the Russian context. As the post-Soviet context made Western-style shelters unlikely, activists founded independent crisis centers and some government-supported (albeit short-term) shelters. Whereas early North American activists prided themselves on providing sister-to-sister advice rather than professional psychological services, most Russian crisis centers began to rely on professional psychologists, scholars, and lawyers. These educated women tended to be un — or underemployed and were more likely to have the ability to understand Western theory and practice. Without widespread grassroots feminism, activists had little local feminist activism to build on, but instead found a way to package the crisis center as a response to the widespread crisis that most Russians, living through dramatic inflation and infrastructural collapse, felt (Hemment 2007, 101). They addressed not just gender violence, but broader needs such as alcoholism, poverty, and depression. In an artistically skilled society, they used new approaches, such as art therapy, to address gender violence.
As anthropologist Julie Hemment (1999) argued, they “helped themselves to liberal feminist discourse” but translated the global repertoire for action into a Russian crisis center, a new social service at the collapse of state social services. While building upon neotraditional gender assumptions of women as caregivers, they also helped women take radical steps not legitimated by neotraditionalism, such as leaving abusive partners and prosecuting rape. They accomplished a successful transplantation, adjusting the crisis center to fit the context even as the model continues to challenge the social order (Merry 2006a).
Almost all of the activists I interviewed spoke very positively of these kinds of transnational feminist interventions, even when they included ideas of “international solidarity” and assumptions of universalism. For many Russian feminists, transnational feminist networking was the best hope in this neotraditional society, a new kind of leverage against a still undemocratic state (Keck and Sik — kink 2000). Almost all embraced the global feminist language of “women’s rights are human rights” and expressed enjoyment of transnational feminist meetings and exchanges. Other observers of the Russian women’s movement found more criticism of the pervasive influence of Americans, but they also found that these comments came from those activists outside the crisis center movement and in response to witnessing the infusion of cash into the women’s crisis center movement (Sperling, Ferree, and Risman 2001).