Especially in a country as large as Russia, some competition between organizations may be healthy for civil society, but the emergence of the Angel Coalition and, more significantly, the Bush administration response gave transnational, institutional, and ideological dimensions to the movement’s personality conflicts and competition for scarce resources. In the fall of 2002, an ally of the Angel Coalition, American professor Donna Hughes, accused the U. S. government, because of its support through USAID of women’s crisis centers such as Syostri, of a covert policy to secure the continued provision of prostitutes (Hughes 2002). Hughes expressed her claims in an online version of the neoconservative American magazine the National Review, describing a “pro-prostitution mafia: the U. S. State Department, U. S.- and Dutch-funded nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), and a Russian political party—the Union of Right Forces.” 43 She argued that these pro-prostitution views and coalitions explained why the Angel Coalition, after securing funding in the first few years of their activities, had their applications rejected by USAID. The MiraMed director echoed these claims in one of the key online news sources for observers of Russia.44 These accusations rallied supporters, many of them evangelical Christians, to send letters to U. S. Congress members, and the U. S. Embassy in Moscow was repeatedly called on to explain its actions.45
Things got so heated that then U. S. ambassador to Russia, Alexander Versh — bow, tussled with Hughes in the Washington Times, accusing “Miss Hughes” of “slander,” “libel,” and “innuendo” and defending both the U. S. embassy and USAID.46 But the G/TIP office had more influence with the Bush administration. In January 2003, the U. S. secretary of state sent out a memo to field missions of the USAID that said that no more antitrafficking funds would go to “organizations advocating prostitution as an employment choice or which advocate or support the legalization of prostitution.’47 The memo further announced that funding would be cut for all projects construed as supporting “trafficking of women and girls, legalization of drugs, injecting drug use, and abortion.” Rearticulated as a requirement that all recipients of USAID vow their opposition to prostitution, this antiprostitution pledge was inscribed in U. S. law in 2003d8 The Bush administration also came out in explicit support of the Angel Coalition, inviting them to a Washington, D. C., conference on trafficking49 and singling them out for support in a speech by the secretary of state in June of 2004: “The State Department supports the Angel Coalition.”50
The foundation of the allegations was that the women’s crisis centers, especially Syostri, had advocated the legalization of prostitution in Russia, but there is no evidence that any of the women’s crisis centers, USAID, or USAID-funded intermediaries actually did thisd1 They had been open to discussing this option, and they were more committed to a comprehensive feminism. In contrast, MiraMed, with its programs to assist young single mothers through a partnership with a local Russian Orthodox Church, has transmitted the view that motherhood and marriage should be women’s preeminent goals, suggesting little challenge to the dominant sex-gender order.
This controversy left the women’s crisis centers, especially Syostri, to defend themselves to both their American funders and Russian supporters. It created a painful rift, both institutional and ideological, between many women’s crisis center leaders and the MiraMed/Angel Coalition. In the next round of U. S. antitrafficking funding (2004), the Angel Coalition scored a grant of almost half a million dollars (to develop more shelters), while only one women’s crisis center— affiliated with RACCW, in Siberia—received anything: $6,060.52 The American antitrafficking politics left the Russian president of the Angel Coalition, a longtime women’s crisis center advocate, critical of these ways that transnational feminist antitrafficking organizations “subordinate the Eastern organizations. . . to their standards and frameworks,” making funding dependent upon ideological agreement (Khodyreva 2004, 245). Because of the lines that were drawn, the conflict led to the closing off of most long-term, feminist women’s crisis centers from U. S. funds.