Up through 2001, the crisis center network RACCW and the Moscow crisis cen­ter ANNA were intermingled, with overlapping leadership and shared resources, but after criticism from USAID about this organizational structure, the organiza­tions were severed. This change meant that RACCW would have to support itself without the Ford Foundation and the very effective fundraising of […]

By 2005, the national government was supporting some twenty-two women’s cri­sis centers (Zabelina et al. 2007, 21, 103), but prospects were bleak for most auton­omous women’s crisis centers, especially those committed to comprehensive femi­nist goals (see Hemment 2007). By year’s end, some eighteen had closed (Open Society Institute 2007, 32). One movement leader acknowledged that […]

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 […]

As democracy assistance disappeared, possibilities appeared for antitrafficking grants. In the earlier stages of the Russian women’s crisis center movement, with little funding available for antitrafficking efforts, very few crisis centers had taken on the issue of trafficking in women even though the high point of the problems appears to have been in the late […]

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, […]

As earlier, transnational feminist networking was necessary to this stage in the women’s crisis center movement development, though the source of attention shifted toward Europe with the creation of the Vienna-based Women against Vio­lence Europe (WAVE, www. wave-network. org). After receiving start-up funding in 1997, WAVE has linked activists, policymakers, and others with an interest […]

Crisis Center Proliferation In the late 1990s, most women’s crisis centers expanded their activities. In 1998, Moscow-based ANNA was a thriving crisis center with twelve staff members and dozens of volunteers providing hotline and some group consultations, helping over two hundred women a month (Henderson 2001). By 2001, ANNA’s leaders had become national advocates, having […]

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 […]

In the three following years, the already existing crisis centers expanded their ser­vices and began larger campaigns to raise national attention regarding the issue of violence against women. By 1997, ANNA had conducted a pilot research proj­ect, had launched a (relatively unsuccessful) “Men’s Solidarity project” loosely modeled on U. S. batterer treatment programs, and had […]

Though some had been informally helping women since the late 1980s, Russian activists founded the first women’s organizations dedicated to addressing vio­lence against women between 1993 and 1995 in Moscow and St. Petersburg, Rus­sia’s two major cities. Moscow-based ANNA (an acronym for the No to Violence Association) began informally in 1993 as a one-person hotline, […]