Officially, the problems associated with trafficking in women—the exploitation of prostitution or coercive labor—did not exist until Gorbachev’s perestroika. Prostitution was neither legal nor criminalized, but penalized with a small fine.24 As coercion declined, prostitution was brought to the public consciousness by the 1986 publication of Yevgeny Dodolev’s Interdevochka (a book later made into a popular film), which glorified the lives of prostitutes working the hotels housing the businessmen flocking into Russia (Kon 1995, 223). Many young women, while perhaps uncomfortable with the morality, came to see hard-currency prostitution as the only avenue to the glamorous life available in the West, a source of important dollars as the Russian ruble’s value dropped precipitously. A 1989 survey found that high school women saw such work as a prestigious profession. But the reality for most prostitutes was much grimmer, working for rubles from poor Russian men, perhaps at railroad and subway stations; as the Soviet economy disintegrated, many women saw no other options for making money. As the markets became legal, prostitution burst out into the open, advertised as massage or escort services in newspapers, especially English-language ones. By the early 2000s, some 15,000 women were prostitutes in Moscow, four out of five of these were street prostitutes (Mukhin 2002, 55-57). According to the preeminent Russian sexologist (Kon 1995, 226), the selling of Russian women abroad began in the 1980s for pornography, but then expanded in the 1990s as the borders opened and organized crime and corruption became rampant.
Labor markets, on the other hand, were allowed to exist during Soviet rule; people, in general, could choose their jobs. But until Soviet collapse, the freedom of movement was limited by the registration permit system and the closed borders. Starting in the early 1990s, Russia became a major hub for labor immigration, both into and out of Russia, to the tune of some five million workers entering Russia per year and some million leaving Russia to work abroad (Tiu — riukanova 2006, 33). The failures of the official Soviet economy also led to the growth of a substantial underground economy, constituting some one-quarter to one-half of GDP in Russia (compared to 5—10% in developed countries), where labor exploitation is more common (55). These exploitative sectors include construction, commerce, catering, car repair, tourism, entertainment, and construction. Women are relegated to the most unskilled and uncontrollable sectors, such as market trading, entertainment, and domestic services. For example, in the large Moscow market Luzhniki, immigrant women work for a hierarchy of bosses who sometimes keep them in debt bondage and sometimes require sexual services.25 In her review of the existing studies of trafficking for the United Nations and the International Organization for Migration, trafficking expert Elena Tiuriukanova (2006, 35) found that “[t]rafficking for labour exploitation is the most common type of human trafficking in the Russian Federation,” although women were more likely to be sexually exploited.
By the new millennium, the region of Central and Eastern Europe and Eurasia became the second largest source (after Southeast Asia) for the trafficking of women globally. Some estimates are that some 175,000 women are trafficked per year, of which one-fifth to one-third are estimated to come from Russia (see Tiuriukanova 2006, 13). According to one Russian expert, “Russian (rossiiskii) women are engaged in prostitution in more than 50 countries. . . [i]n several of which. . . the import of women from Russia and from the other Soviet Republics is so great that prostitutes there are called ‘Natashas’” (Erokhina 2002).
The main routes are through the Baltics or through Poland or the Czech Republic to Northern and Western Europe or the United States, the main destinations for trafficked women (Tiuriukanova 2006, 23—24). Other women are trafficked through the Caucasus (such as Georgia) into Turkey, Greece, and the Mediterranean region. Others are sent through Egypt and into Israel or other Middle Eastern countries such as the United Arab Emirates. And still others are sent to or through China to Japan or South Korea. Trafficking for labor exploitation has been discovered in Germany, Turkey, and Portugal. At the same time, Russia is also a destination for trafficking from the poor formerly Soviet states, such as Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, Armenia, Moldova, and Ukraine. For some women, Russia is a transit country through which they are trafficked from other post-Soviet states to the Gulf states.26
Officials are more directly and actively culpable for the problem of trafficking than for other forms of gender violence. Border or immigration officials forge signatures, exact bribes, and accept fraudulent migration documents (Tiuriu- kanova 2006, 58—59). Employers and organized criminals collude with law enforcement authorities, sometimes even “returning” trafficked women who have come to them for help to their captors. ECPAT International (End Child Prostitution, Child Pornography and Trafficking of Children for Sexual Purposes) estimates that pimps in Moscow spend 4.5 million U. S. dollars a month in bribes to law enforcement and public officials. Other authorities are lax in monitoring companies that illegally sell registration and migration permits, while police routinely demand bribes for improper or missing documents. Activist-scholars found that there are no government organs that help control prostitution, even teenage prostitution (Zabelina 2002, 10).
As with other forms of gender violence, the official response at least partially reflects the legal thinking on the problem. Without a critique of gender as socially constructed, criminologists view prostitution as mostly an individualistic problem of sex-crazed women (Kon 1995). While Soviet theorists might also raise concern about bourgeois conditions of poverty leading to prostitution (at least in other places), post-Soviet thinking focused on physiological proclivities (of women). This logic was extended to sex trafficking, especially for those women who they assumed went abroad thinking of the possibility of working in the sex industry. These women, the legal thinking goes, should have known better (Duban 2006, 49). They are held accountable regardless of the violations of their rights that follow, creating a classification, much like for rape, where only a very small number of cases are seen as real trafficking. Labor trafficking, in the 1990s, was barely on the radar of legal thinkers.
In sum, in contrast to the global feminist appeal for gender violence to be seen as a problem of public concern, the disintegration of the Soviet system in the early 1990s meant the privatization of much gender violence, even more so than under communism. The creation of a private sphere outside state penetration—in the market, civil society, and personal and family life—was desired by reformers from Russia and the West as the antidote to totalitarianism. But, as in Western liberal democracies, this new private sphere reflected men’s interests more than women’s interests (Watson 1993). While men (even when violent) gained protection from state intervention into their domestic and sexual relationships with women, women lost previous avenues for holding men accountable and for attending to some of the medical and psychological consequences of violence. As markets expanded, women’s bodies were commodified—advertised and sold domestically and internationally—mostly benefiting the male buyers and the pimps and traffickers as well as the organized crime syndicates and law enforcement officers who provided “protection” to these businesses.