After receiving distress calls from women, by the mid 1990s Russian women’s movement scholars and activists also grew concerned with the issue of sexual harassment (e. g., Khodyreva 1996; Pisklakova 1996). For example, at a 1993 seminar on women’s unemployment at the Moscow Center for Gender Studies (MCGS), one attendee publicly requested consideration of the problem she and her friend had faced in a one-factory town where the manager would hire only women who would have sex with him (Khotkina 1996, 19—20). But these movement participants were not the only ones interested in collectively responding to the problem. In Moscow, a husband-and-wife team not connected to the women’s movement founded the first organization, Diana, to address sexual harassment (Khotkina 1996, 16—17). Valerii Vikulov, working at a popular newspaper, had been confronted by the problem when women began to arrive in his office to complain that want ads he published had led them to jobs for which sexual, not professional, services had been required. In addition to helping some one hundred women find suitable jobs, Diana began lists of “moral” and “immoral” private firms.
This Russian problem encountered U. S. approaches at a 1995 MCGS seminar on sexual harassment, the first such event held in Russia; it was funded by American organizations, the ABA-CEELI and the NIS-US Women’s Consortium (Khotkina 1996). The American participants named the problem as sexual harassment, but as was true even in Western Europe (Zippel 2006), translating Ameri — can/global norms into the Russian experience was difficult. The obstacle was more than just a linguistic problem (although that too was a problem).11 On the one hand, because the closest piece of Russian law to sexual harassment is a criminal article on “sexual compulsion” (seksual’noe ponuzhdenie), it was easy for the Russians to imagine sexual harassment as a form of gender violence with perceivable bodily harm, the way that global norms framed the problem. Under the Soviet version in effect until 1997, this article “exclusively protected women in cases where they were compelled into sexual relations for fear of losing property or work related possessions [i. e., losing their job, not being hired]” (Suchland 2005, 151—52). On the other hand, most of the foreign attention to sexual harassment in Russia was coming from the United States, where sexual harassment is framed as discrimination, and the phenomena brought to the activists’ attention more closely resembled a form of economic discrimination in which only women who were willing to provide sex were hired. As argued by Jennifer Suchland (2005), this kind of sexual harassment would be more effectively regulated through a legal mechanism that recognizes the economic consequences, such as through labor law. Trying to incorporate all approaches to sexual harassment, the conference volume editor begins with the definition established by American feminist legal theorist Catharine MacKinnon, links this kind of discrimination with the criminal article on sexual compulsion, and then blames the overall gender system (Khotkina 1996, 14, 20).
Following this conference, for Russian activists and scholars sexual harassment uncomfortably blends what Americans might call sexual violence with economic discrimination, leading to some frustrating results from the perspective of global feminists (Suchland 2005). For example, a sociologist with the Russian Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg in what was the next major work on sexual harassment also begins with the MacKinnon definition of sexual harassment (8), but at the same time manages to blame women for often provoking the sexual harassment used against them (Kletsin I998).i2 Similarly, the one crisis center (in Tula) that published a booklet on how to defend oneself from sexual harassment also simultaneously blames women for provoking harassment, such as by flicking their hair.13 The failure to successfully translate the global norm against sexual harassment into the Russian vernacular helps explain why here was much less Russian activism against sexual harassment than rape despite the salience to many women’s lives of widespread sexual harassment.