In contrast to this global feminist call for the systematic response to violence against women as a violation of women’s human rights, the Soviet response to various forms of gender violence was haphazard. For instance, before 1991, domestic violence was intermittently regulated under the rubric of “hooliganism” (Sperling 1990, 19). Not explicitly about violence between intimate partners, hooliganism was a crime: “the flagrant violation of public order expressed by a clear disrespect for society” that accompanies violence against a person and her or his property (e. g., Art. 206 i960 Russian Soviet Federated Socialist Republic Criminal Code, hereafter RSFSR CrC). As many Russians were forced to live in shared state-owned apartments, the public included a lot of homes and relationships. According to some estimates, domestic violence constituted up to 40 percent of crimes charged under hooliganism (Shelley 1987). Periodically, there were other avenues, such as through official state or party organs that would reprimand members for violating “socialist morality” (Attwood 1997, 102). Some women even received assistance from women’s magazines, which could shame offenders. Socialist commitments to women’s employment, equal pay, daycare, and universal healthcare—although not fully met—also lessened women’s economic dependence on their husbands, creating exit options that many women in places with limited welfare states, such as the United States, do not have.
Paradoxically, Soviet police also often ignored violence between intimate partners as outside their jurisdiction. If extreme, such violence might be seen as a “family scandal” but not as an injustice, and the goal of police intervention was reconciliation. This was the case even though the rates of spousal homicide were particularly high. In the 1980s, women in Russia were almost three times more likely to be murdered by their current or former intimate partner than women in the United States, where the rates were also comparatively high (Gondolf and Shestakov 1997). The Soviet housing system, regulated through a system of residential permits (propiski) instead of property ownership, and chronically short of apartments, created additional problems. Divorced women were frequently obligated to live in the same apartment with their abusive ex-husbands, who retained a residential permit. The residential permit system meant that women could even be forced to share a communal apartment with violent men with whom they had no current or previous personal relationship (Attwood 1997, 102).
Similarly, Soviet authorities erratically attended to other forms of gender violence. Some high-profile rapes, especially gang rapes, received substantial attention and resulted in serious punishment, while others, such as marital or acquaintance rapes, were mostly ignored despite the absence of any explicit wife exemption for rape in the criminal codes (Johnson 2004).5 Quid pro quo sexual harassment, in which an employer required sex in exchange for employment, was criminalized as “sexual compulsion” (ponuzhdenie) in 1923, decades before it became an issue in the West, but was never prosecuted (Juviler 1977, 245; Suchland 2005).6 Various Communist Party and labor boards sometimes allowed women to lodge complaints about the “rude,” “base,” and “disparaging treatment” they received from the men in their workplaces, giving some recourse for the hostile environment form of sexual harassment (Granik 1997). The Soviet government also took a stand against trafficking in women with the ratification of the 1949 U. N. Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Persons and of the Exploitation of the Prostitution of Others, but added the proviso that “in the Soviet Union the social conditions which spawned prostitution have been removed” (Tiuriukanova 2006, 11).
In essence, in contrast to the concerted and woman-focused global feminist approach, gender violence was sometimes regulated as a by-product of other concerns during the Soviet period. The system was totalitarian in that it left little of life outside state or Communist Party control. Sometimes such violence was regulated as part of the state’s coercive involvement in intimate and family life. Sometimes violence was regulated as part of anti-alcohol campaigns, because alcoholism was portrayed as the root of wife battery. And yet other times, such as in serial rape-murders, gender violence was regulated as it might be in more democratic societies, because mass public attention to these extraordinary, horrific crimes help maintain a sense of community, making sense of right and wrong, innocence and guilt (Johnson 2004).
Nevertheless, there was no consensus that gender violence was a distinct and structural problem that impacted women collectively, nor much cultural critique (Zabelina 1995). No statistics were collected on the extent of gender violence (Israelian and Zabelina 1995, 19); there was not even an agreed-upon term designating gender violence. Soviet ideology highlighted class violence, not gendered violence, never countering myths about women’s culpability in their own violation, leading “several generations of people [to] not think about violence as violations of their rights” (Zabelina 2002, 6). The Soviet discipline of victimologiia even focused on women’s provocation—a vague collection of behaviors seen as non-womanly—as explaining violence against women. Despite some radical ideas and initiatives in the early years of the regime, Soviet leaders did little to challenge general skepticism about most forms of violence against women.