Empowering Women in Russia: Activism, Aid, and NGOs (review)

Abstract

Julie Hemment, Empowering Women in Russia: Activism, Aid, and NGOs. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, March 2007,208 pp. Julie Hemment's Empowering Women in Russia is a patient and deeply embodied tale of one anthropologist's commitment to conduct Participatory Action Research (PAR) with women activists as they move to concretely address issues of gender, power and empowerment in post-Soviet Russia. Part critique of theorizing and strategizing of international aid in post-Soviet transition, and part collaborative ethnography, book's main goal is to both translate, and enable, women's navigation of local contradictions that shape post-Soviet feminisms, citizenships and activisms amidst faltering market reforms, a reliably absent Russian state, and an initially promising emerging largely comprised of non-government organizations (NGOs) since mid1990s. The book begins with Hemment's first meetings with informal women's groups in Tver, a provincial city outside Moscow. It then traces her collaboration with one such group (Zhenskii Svet) in its goals to enter third sector by formalizing itself via state recognition and international funding, and group's partially successful management of a Women's Crisis Center and a Center for Women's History and Gender Studies. The story is enhanced by Hemment's commitment to intellectual partnerships with women throughout process and her close treatment of stories of two interlocutors and Zhenskii Svet collaborators, Valentina and Oktobriana: former, a history professor and founder of Zhenskii Svet who senses some opportunity for advancement of Russian women through perestroika-era style discussion groups and temporary gendered coalitions that promote localized strategies to meet broader transformational goals; latter, an unpretentious, enthusiastic healthcare worker literally bankrupted by transition and thus heartened by promises and practice of Western aid institutions. The women act as two archetypical activists in a historical moment in Russia where grassroots optimisms and economic survival operate to compel women into third sector. As book unfolds, we find that while women's engagements with, and within, third sector provide valuable economic, political and personal opportunities for gendered community that did not exist for them before, such global interventions are stymied by unrealistic political demands and cultural incompetence on part of NGO's to satisfy Valentina and Oktobriana's larger political hopes for women's equality, as well as those of other women with which Hemment collaborates. At same time that Valentina's Center for History of Women's History and Gender Studies flourishes with grants from such organizations as Ford Foundation, her dreams of an organically-led, practice-oriented, local women's movement are precluded by NGO's demands for hierarchy, a preoccupation with vanguardism, and dualistic thought. And despite her best efforts, Oktobriana cannot keep a Women's Crisis Center afloat because her lack of connections and access to Soviet-era patronage systems result in discrepancies between Center's economic circumstances and professionalism required of an NGO affiliate. Ultimately, Hemment argues, despite skills, energy and vision of women activists, future of NGOization in Russia as a vehicle for empowering women is uncertain because, the third sector does not deliver what it promises: rather than allowing a grassroots to flourish, [it] provides a structural and symbolic framework for reproduction of former elites of Soviet regime (144). Hemment's initial chapters focus on clarifying history and various positionings of feminism in Russia in relation to contemporary Russian women's activism. Post-Soviet women's search for cultural and political meaning as feminists began over one hundred years ago, when perevolutionary suffragettes, socialist women, radical feminists and Christian feminists were active, sometimes uniquely and sometimes in unison, in project of improving women's status in realms of family, work, and/or state. …