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Locating Women's Human Rights inPost-Soviet Provincial RussiaVikki Turbine aa University of GlasgowPublished online: 25 Jul 2012.
To cite this article: Vikki Turbine (2012) Locating Women's Human Rights in Post-Soviet ProvincialRussia, Europe-Asia Studies, 64:10, 1847-1869, DOI: 10.1080/09668136.2012.681245
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Locating Women’s Human Rights in
Post-Soviet Provincial Russia
VIKKI TURBINE
Abstract
This essay provides insights into studies on citizens’ engagement with human rights in Russia through
its focus on a relatively under-researched area, namely, the ways in which women perceive the role of
human rights in daily life contexts. This essay argues for the importance of analysing how women’s
perceptions of human rights are formed in situ in order to understand the ways in which location and
gender create particular constraints for women in terms of their perceived and actual access to rights
protection and ability to use rights to resolve their problems. Drawing on data generated during in-
depth interviews conducted with women living in the provincial Russian city of Ul’yanovsk in 2005,
this essay reveals women’s complex engagements with the meaning and role of human rights in their
daily lives. In particular, this analysis shows how women’s perceptions of their positionalities in a post-
Soviet provincial city informs how they think about where, when and why human rights apply to
women.
THE CONCEPT OF WOMEN’S HUMAN RIGHTS arguably achieved international
prominence and recognition in the 1990s as a result of feminist transnational
campaigning that transformed the jurisdiction of human rights.1 This campaigning
highlighted the failures of ‘mainstream’ human rights agendas to protect women and
brought women’s experiences in the private sphere under the remit of international
human rights law.2 While these campaigns have brought about clear successes, for
1The protection of women has been part of the remit of human rights law and practice since their
inception as illustrated in the provisions of equality in the United Nations’ Universal Declaration of
Human Rights (United Nations 1948). In addition, The Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of
Discrimination Against Women (United Nations 1979) is viewed as the fullest statement on women’s
equal status within international human rights law (Tang & Cheung 2000). However, it was not until
the 1990s that international prominence was given to the concept of ‘women’s human rights’ that
sought to move beyond commitments to women’s equality with men to a fuller appreciation of the
impact of gender on women’s experiences of human rights protection and human rights violations.
This approach of ‘gendering’ the human rights agenda can be seen in the development of the United
Nations Beijing Declaration (1995).2The main critique from the movement was that ‘mainstream’ human rights agendas had failed to
adequately take into account the way in which a woman’s gender impacts on human rights protection
(Friedman 2003). It was argued that the focus on the protection of individuals from the state implicitly
prioritised particular kinds of human rights violations and mainly those occurring in the public sphere,
which had been coded as ‘masculine’ (Charlesworth 1994). This ignored violations occurring in the
EUROPE-ASIA STUDIES
Vol. 64, No. 10, December 2012, 1847–1869
ISSN 0966-8136 print; ISSN 1465-3427 online/12/101847-23 ª 2012 University of Glasgow
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09668136.2012.681245
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example in the recognition of domestic violence as a human rights violation,3 it is less
clear whether internationally defined agendas have translated meaningfully into
women’s everyday lives. Indeed, research on women’s position globally points to a
widespread lack of protection of women’s human rights and the worsening position of
women in spite of the ongoing proliferation of international campaigns aimed at
enhancing women’s access to human rights protection (Molyneux & Razavi 2005).
Much of the existing research on the reasons for this lack of protection of women’s
human rights focuses on how context, expressed in terms of local power structures,
gender norms or ‘culture’, shapes whether and when states uphold their commitment
to women’s human rights and how rights agendas that fail to consider these wider
contextual structures are often ‘less straightforwardly progressive’ for women
(Cornwall & Molyneux 2006, pp. 1175–76). It is therefore necessary to consider not
only how women experience human rights, but also to uncover women’s own
understandings, experiences and claims for human rights to address how wider
structural constraints are negotiated (Merry 2003; Merry & Stern 2005).
This essay contributes to this area of research. Firstly, in taking a micro-level
approach to analysis of women’s perceptions of human rights in a provincial city in
post-Soviet Russia, the essay highlights the role of context in mediating how
international human rights agendas are translated into women’s everyday lives. I argue
that the unique social, economic and political transformations taking place in the post-
Soviet period have presented both opportunities and barriers to the diffusion and
acceptance of women’s human rights norms and provisions. Secondly, the essay seeks
to move away from only discussing human rights in Russia in terms of women as
victims of particular forms of human rights violations. This is not to diminish the
hugely important contributions of such research, but rather to highlight women’s
agency in the processes of meaning-making they undertake when considering the role
and relevance of human rights in their everyday lives, and to highlight how the ways in
which women understand and talk about rights reflect particular constraints on
women’s agency. Through this approach and analysis, the essay also adds to
understandings of the reasons why engagement with human rights discourse in this
particular context may also lead women to reject their relevance as a tool for use in
everyday life.
Women and human rights in contemporary Russia
There has been much attention paid to human rights in Russia in the post-Soviet
period. However, this research has tended to focus on examples of particular human
rights violations (Weiler 2004), or on citizens’ lack of engagement with human rights
(Gerber & Mendelson 2002). This research also reveals that assumptions made after
‘private sphere’ that were mainly perpetrated by individuals and it was argued that these
disproportionately impacted on women due to their positioning in private spaces. This obscured
gendered forms of violence, such as domestic violence against women, that could be understood as
human rights violations, for example in terms of the rights to life, to freedom from torture and to
bodily integrity (Bunch 1990).3For example, the United Nations’ Declaration on the Elimination of Violence Against Women
(United Nations 1993).
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the end of the Soviet Union in 1991 about an expected transition to democracy,
realisation of human rights, and particularly of civil and political freedoms, were
unfounded. Theories suggesting such a transition were quickly discredited as it became
clear that the realisation of human rights was impeded by a range of protracted and
complex social, economic and cultural transformations (Burawoy & Verdery 1999).
Rather than witnessing the increasing protection of and access to human rights, the
post-Soviet period has more often seen the loss, not only of previously held social and
economic rights (Henry 2009), but also the curtailment of civil and political rights as a
result of the development of Russia’s ‘managed’ democracy (Balzer 2003). This sense
of loss of rights is supported by survey data that indicate that, when asked about
which human rights are most important, citizens have tended to rank those rights
associated with social and economic welfare higher than civil and political freedoms
(VTsIOM 2004; Turbine 2007a).
Interpretations of why citizens prioritise these rights have varied. On the one hand,
levels of apathy have been linked to the continuing resonance of the Soviet social
contract whereby the state was viewed as responsible for guaranteeing social and
economic rights. It has been argued that Soviet understandings of human rights
remain resonant not only because of increased levels of inequality and economic
dislocation, but also because of their symbolic value as a just exchange for past labour
and losses (Henry 2009). On the other hand, it has been argued that the prioritisation
of social and economic rights can be viewed as a reaction against, and form of
resistance to, the post-Soviet transition period, and demonstrative of the widespread
disillusionment among the population towards the perceived failures of democracy
and the market to offer more opportunities to citizens, or to provide minimal levels of
security in controlling corruption and implementing the rule of law.
More recently, however, citizens’ perceptions of human rights have been explored in a
more nuanced manner in response to clear evidence that citizens are using human rights
explicitly, for example in lodging claims in the European Court of Human Rights
(ECtHR) (Trochev 2008), or indirectly in mobilising the law to claim rights in
interpersonal matters (Hendley 2010).4 While this research has made important
contributions to our understandings of how citizens perceive human rights, and has
highlighted a range of human rights violations in Russia, it has not focused on the role
that human rights may play in women’s lives or considered how the gendered nature of
human rights discourses and practices may interact with local gendered and socio-
economic positionalities to inform when and why women engage with human rights.
In spite of this relative dearth of research on women’s perceptions of human rights
in Russia, there are valuable contributions to be found on how human rights agendas
have been interpreted as applying to women in post-Soviet Russia in the existing
research on women’s organisations. Of the high numbers of women’s organisations to
emerge during the 1990s in Russia (Sperling 1999; Kay 2000), some engaged directly
4Trochev (2008) highlights the high number of cases (around 28% of all pending applications in
2008) from Russian citizens to the ECtHR, but also the problems of accessing these mechanisms and
ensuring justice as a result. My current research on women’s access to legal advice and claims as a
means of ensuring welfare rights protection also shows the complex nature of engagement with legal
processes for women in Russia (see Turbine 2012).
WOMEN’S HUMAN RIGHTS IN PROVINCIAL RUSSIA 1849
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with international discourses of human rights with notable successes in transforming
domestic politics, for example the umbrella organisation of the Committee of Soldiers’
Mothers (McIntosh-Sundstrom 2002). There is also evidence of engagement with
women’s human rights agendas more specifically, with important gains made
domestically, for example in campaigning and awareness-raising around violence
against women and domestic violence in particular (Hemment 2004; Johnson 2009).
Yet, these scholars also acknowledge that this engagement has not always enhanced
the protection of women’s rights in Russia more broadly, suggesting problems with
access, and also questioning whether and why international agendas for women’s
human rights resonate with women’s daily concerns (Rivkin-Fish 2004; Hemment
2007). While this research usefully highlights these issues, it does not tend to explicitly
explore women’s everyday engagement with human rights due to its focus on activism,
particularly activism in relation to specific examples of gendered human rights
violations. To only consider how the victims of particular human rights violations
experience a lack of protection can obscure women’s agency (Redhead 2007). It also
belies the complexity of women’s engagement with human rights discourses and
practices in their daily lives, particularly among women who do not self-identify as
‘victims’ of particular gendered violations.
The following discussion and analysis of women’s perceptions of human rights in
everyday life seeks to address this lacuna in existing research. The following sections
show women’s relatively sophisticated understandings of human rights alongside their
rationales for when and why to employ or reject human rights in their everyday lives.
While this seeks to show women’s agency in these processes of meaning making, the
essay also highlights how women’s understandings and engagements with human
rights are also constrained by their location, which is understood in this essay in a
multifaceted way and as reflecting perceived and actual temporal, geographical and
gendered positionalities.
The study and methodology
The empirical data presented in this essay were generated during a six-month period of
fieldwork conducted in the provincial Russian city of Ul’yanovsk in 2005 as part of
research for a doctoral thesis exploring women’s perceptions of human rights and
rights-based approaches in everyday life in provincial Russia (Turbine 2007b). The aims
of the research were to analyse the extent to which international agendas promoting
women’s human rights and rights-based approaches as a means of women’s
empowerment resonated with women’s everyday experiences and how an analysis of
women’s perceptions and experiences in situ, informed by an understanding of the local
context and women’s daily experiences, would provide critical insights to debates about
the potential of human rights to empower women. The methodology combined an
ethnographic approach to fieldwork, using observations of everyday interactions over a
six-month period, with a number of qualitative data collection and analysis techniques.5
5These included, in-depth interviews with 49 women; seven interviews with key informants from the
state, NGO and grassroots sectors working on the establishment of a human rights commission; use of
open-ended questionnaires as well as a content and discourse analysis of discussions about rights and
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The data presented in this essay are taken from the 49 in-depth interviews with
women. Women participating in these interviews were aged between 18 and 65 years of
age and from a variety of backgrounds, although many had, or were in the process of
attaining higher education at the time of the interviews in 2005. Of these women, high
proportions worked as or were trained as librarians, teachers or doctors. While this
could identify many of the women as part of a middle class of urban professionals, any
relative security in standard of living, social position and privilege that may have been
attached to these professions during the Soviet period had not necessarily translated to
the post-Soviet period for many of these women (White 2004). Indeed, women who
were able to had taken on alternative forms of employment due to the lack of
economic security in these jobs in the post-Soviet period. Within the sample women
were also employed in the media industry, in the private sector in marketing, sales and
retail, or were self-employed, for example as private English-language tutors. The
ability to make these changes and to benefit from them was also limited by the lack of
economic and job security for women in the private sector. This was attributed to both
the unregulated practices, for example in not having an official contract of
employment, and also to discriminatory practices based on gender and age, which
resulted in either non-employment or in the non-payment of maternity benefits or
granting entitlement to leave (Turbine & Riach 2012). Some women were also
unemployed at the time of the interview or on extended leaves of absence (for example
maternity or sickness). In addition, a few women had officially reached retirement age
(55 years) but continued to work in a variety of jobs because of a desire to continue
working, and also because it was impossible to support themselves on their official
pension. Most of the women in the sample also had to balance paid employment (and
retirement) with significant caring responsibilities, mainly relating to childcare, but
also to the care of elderly parents and in some cases also caring for family members
with chronic health problems and disabilities.
The interviews focused on asking women about their perceptions of various
categories of rights, including human rights, women’s rights, rights and entitlements,
and their relevance in women’s everyday lives. For the purposes of the project, my
understanding of women’s human rights was informed by United Nations declarations
and my understanding of rights and entitlements as those enshrined in the
Constitution of the Russian Federation with a particular reference to Chapter 2.6
However, the aim of the project was not to assess or establish women’s level of
knowledge of these legal entitlements, but rather to uncover how women engaged with
these concepts of rights in a process of meaning making about their lives. This
approach enabled me to reveal whether and why rights were used as discursive
resources, viewed as legal entitlements or viewed as tools to mobilise claims. This
approach is particularly important when considering women’s perceptions of human
rights in Russia where citizens are still negotiating a shift from Soviet norms and
letters to legal advice pages in several press sources. The press sources analysed over the period 2003–
2006 included, The Current Digest of the post-Soviet Press, a local newspaper Simbirskii kur’er and the
magazine Sel’skaya nov. For a full discussion see Turbine (2007b, pp. 20–45).6Constitution of the Russian Federation, 1993, available at: http://www.constitution.ru/en/
10003000-03.htm (last accessed 5 January 2012).
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practices around guaranteed state provision of certain social and economic rights to
the post-Soviet context where the emphasis is on individual responsibility for rights
protection.
The rationale for this layered approach to the discussion of human rights was also
informed in part by the existing research noted above that highlighted how Russian
citizens interpreted and understood human rights in terms of distinctions between
Soviet and post-Soviet provisions and between social and economic and civil and
political rights. In addition, research in other contexts has shown that human rights
can be viewed as ‘too grand a concept’ (Ernst 2007, p. 96) for describing and naming
women’s everyday concerns.7 A wealth of existing research also addresses the complex
engagement with the concepts of women’s human rights and women’s rights in post-
Soviet Russia that are arguably specific in relation to a backlash against both Soviet
models of gender equality and Western feminist agendas, which is discussed in more
detail in the following section.8 It was therefore considered necessary to avoid only
asking about women’s human rights for fear of omitting some of the complexities or
reasons for engagement with rights. Moreover, by asking women about differing
categories of rights, I was attempting to reveal the ‘universal, local and contested’
nature of women’s human rights (Ackerley 2008, p. 1), and to gain deeper insights into
how and why women engaged with or rejected particular rights discourses and
practices.
As this project employed an ethnographically informed approach to sampling (via
snowballing) and a feminist approach to the interviews, i.e. allowing women to direct
the discussions around key themes, not all women were asked all of the same questions
in interviews. Conducting interviews in this way enabled a deeper understanding of the
complexities of women’s engagements with rights discourses as well as the differences
between women. However, in order to enable comparative analysis of women’s
narratives on these differing categories of rights across the data set, all women were
asked about the various categories of rights outlined above. The main questions
addressed in each interview included what issues were viewed as most important in
women’s everyday lives; whether women felt their rights were protected or violated;
how women engaged with the various categories of rights outlined above and whether
human rights were viewed as significant in women’s daily lives.
What and where are women’s human rights in provincial Russia?
In spite of the relative dearth of literature focusing on how women’s human rights are
perceived and accessed in Russia, a wealth of research documents the ways in which
7For example, Ernst (2007), writing on the use of rights language by female welfare activists in the
United States, argues that women’s claims are often viewed as lesser concerns to gross human rights
violations even when they could be considered as commensurate with international human rights
priorities for women, for example in the right to social and economic development, protection from
discrimination and also issues of gendered violence.8In discussions with a Russian sociologist colleague about my project, it was suggested that asking
only about women’s human rights might lack resonance with women as existing research in the city
had shown that women perceived rights violations as relating to social and economic rights that were
framed with reference to constitutional rather than human rights (see also Korolev 2003).
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post-Soviet political, economic and social transformations have impacted on women
in terms of a loss of rights. Women have experienced lower levels of representation in
politics, and a loss of state welfare protection, as well as facing increasing levels of
discrimination on the grounds of gender and age in employment and society. In
addition, women have experienced a lack of rights protection in the private sphere. All
of this suggests that women have been disproportionately negatively affected by the
consequences of these changes (Bridger et al. 1996; Bridger & Pine 1998; Kuehnast &
Nechemias 2004; Ashwin 2006; Johnson & Robinson 2007; Racioppi & O’Sullivan
See 2009).9 Although women’s rights therefore seem to be less protected in the
contemporary period than during the Soviet period, women have generally not chosen
to adopt human rights as a means of articulating or resolving their claims.10 If we are
to understand why women do not use rights in the face of increasing levels of women’s
human rights violations, it is necessary to consider the so-called ‘backlash’ against
both Soviet constructions of women’s rights and feminist perspectives on rights in the
post-Soviet period.
Soviet ideological commitments to gender equality between men and women as
workers in the public sphere resulted in a raft of special protection for women in
relation to their additional reproductive role as seen in the provision of extensive
childcare and maternity rights (Chandler 2008; Suchland 2008). In addition,
commitment to women’s human rights within the Soviet Union was also evidenced
in the ratification of The Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination
Against Women (United Nations 1979). Reference to the allegedly superior status of
women’s human rights and equality in the USSR compared to the West also
contributed to the ideological battle between the USSR and the US during the Cold
War. Here the failure of the US to ratify and offer women equal opportunities was
contrasted with the Soviet Union’s long-standing official commitment to gender
equality (Turbine 2007b, p. 86; Hawkesworth 1980). However, it has been well
documented that this official ideological commitment to women’s equality did little to
alter or tackle the lived inequalities of the Soviet Union. Soviet policy has been
criticised as offering little beyond state provision of work-related welfare entitlements
for women and children to enable their labour-force participation, rather than
addressing the ways in which socially constructed differences between men and women
perpetuated inequalities in pay and share of domestic labour (Turbine 2007b, pp. 72–
76; Suchland 2008).
These lived inequalities were not addressed following the end of Soviet rule either.
The late Soviet period saw the differences between men and women reinscribed in
9This body of research has equally highlighted women’s agency in response to these post-Soviet
transformations highlighting women’s active and often innovative strategies for sustaining family and
daily lives, particularly in the face of challenges to economic and material welfare as a result of
marketisation (see for example, Bridger et al. 1996; Buckley 1997a; Bridger & Pine 1998; Kuehnast &
Nechemias 2004; Ashwin 2006; Johnson & Robinson 2007).10The existing literature on women’s responses to the negative consequences of post-Soviet transition
has tended to focus on women’s use of informal strategies and avoidance of formal or state structures.
There is thus a lack of explicit or systematic consideration of women’s perceptions of human rights in
daily life or the differences in women’s use of rights-based approaches, which this essay seeks to
address.
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public discourses where discussions of women’s position in society were framed with
reference to the need to return to ‘natural’ roles for men and women to address the
deformities of past policy (Kay 2002). In the post-Soviet period essentialist narratives
about women’s and men’s ‘appropriate roles’ have re-emerged, but have also been
framed as reflecting women’s choices to return to a ‘natural role’ (Turbine & Riach
2012). This has to some extent served to reinforce ideal models of male breadwinner
and female carer that are not necessarily realisable or desirable for the exercise of
women’s rights in practice. However the extent to which such discourses have an
impact in women’s lives can be debated. It has been argued in relation to Western
liberal market democracies that the twentieth century has in fact witnessed a
detraditionalisation of gender roles due to women’s engagement in the public sphere
and high levels of participation in the labour force, and that these processes have
disrupted traditional gender roles.11 In post-Soviet Russia, women have not ‘returned
to the home’ in large numbers and several studies have shown that women have
neither wanted to give up employment and lose the status this affords nor are many
women able to give up paid employment even where desirable because of lack of
economic means (Ashwin & Bowers 1997; Ashwin 2006; Rands-Lyon 2007; Turbine &
Riach 2012).
However, as Adkins (2003) has shown in her analyses of ethnographic studies of
gender in the workplace, it is not necessarily the case that these changes have resulted
in a detraditionalisation of gender roles. Adkins argues that what we have seen is a
reordering of gender that allows women to use gender norms in new ways, but that
nonetheless reinforce gender as one marker of inequality. Adkins’ interpretation of
gender reordering certainly resonates with the post-Soviet experience. Despite women
having more freedoms and choices to participate in public and private roles, women
have experienced new forms of discrimination that are based on gender and
assumptions about gendered roles in employment as well as being confronted with
the need to use or perform gender in order to get on. A raft of studies therefore show
the largely paradoxical effects of gender for women’s rights, particularly when a degree
of internalisation by women has taken place even in the face of acknowledged
discriminatory practices (American Bar Association 2006) and even where women’s
choices and lives do not map onto this ‘housewife fantasy’ (Rands-Lyon 2007;
Remmenick 2007, p. 326).
Indeed, my research with women on their perceptions and experiences of human
rights in post-Soviet Russia showed the resonance of public discourses around the
need to reject Soviet models of gender equality and Western feminist models. In
particular, the argument that this had not emancipated women, but in fact also
ignored women’s choices and the ‘natural differences’ between men and women’s
characters and roles, was particularly strongly endorsed. This was expressed by
women who claimed to have overtly ‘negative associations with feminism’ (Turbine
2007b, p. 118) and in the level of acceptance that ‘male breadwinner’ and ‘female
carer’ models represented the ideal and a new form of choice for women. A retired
teacher in her mid-sixties argued ‘Many women want to simply be a ‘‘woman’’. This is
11It is suggested that women are no longer only carers in the private sphere and thus have the
potential to free women from the constraints of gender. See Adkins (2003) for further discussion.
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not that society is pushing it upon them; they want to be a good wife, to look after the
home and children; . . . many of our women are aiming for this role’.12
Patico (2009, p. 316), in her study of the way women mix ‘strategy and sentiment’ in
pursuing a ‘normal family life’ through the international matchmaking industry, has
also discussed the ways in which ascribed gender roles have been internalised in the
post-Soviet period, and how this has created a norm of ‘heightened forms of
femininity’. She argues that women’s acceptance of these essentialist norms can be
interpreted as ‘an act of rebellion against enforced drudgery and homogeneity’ that
was seen to characterise the Soviet period despite the obvious potentially negative
consequences. As Salmenniemi (2005, p. 749) notes ‘essentialism as a strategy is,
however, ambivalent, as it tends both to ignore differences among women and men
and to solidify differences between women and men, and thus to reinforce the very
same gender hierarchy it tries to overcome in the first place’. Moreover, in a discussion
of women’s experiences of marginalisation after the end of socialism in the German
Democratic Republic, Horschelmann and van Hoven (2003, p. 742) discuss how
constructions of femininity often go hand in hand with neo-liberal discourses. They
argue that this has led women to internalise responsibility for their lack of protection
and frame it in terms of their own ‘perceived personal shortcomings’. These insights
are very useful when thinking about how this wider context might inform whether
women view their problems as human rights violations, instances of discrimination or
personal problems resulting from ‘failure’ to adapt to new conditions. As a part-time
researcher in her late thirties argued:
Of course rights are accorded differently—rights are applied in one way to men and in
another to women; of course that is different. It’s another matter, however, whether I would
come out and say it, or start to think ‘‘aha’’ my rights as a woman are being violated.13
How then did these perceptions translate into women’s perceptions of women’s
human rights? A backlash against ‘women’s rights’ was evident; partly as a result of the
negative associations of women’s rights with Soviet equality agendas that were
perceived to have undermined women’s choices (Turbine & Riach 2012), but also in the
rejection of the need for ‘special’ categories of rights for women outside maternity
rights in the post-Soviet period. For example, when asked whether women’s rights and
human rights held the same meaning, a journalist on maternity leave, aged 25, argued,
Well, women are also people—how can you make such distinctions? What does it mean—that
there should be separate rights only for women? That’s too much—how can we be different if
we are all human?14
Hemment (2007) has argued that this rejection of special protection is not only
about a rejection of Soviet models of equality, but also a result of the way in which the
legal equality between men and women has been enshrined in the post-Soviet period as
12Interview with author (22 June 2005).13Interview with author (6 October 2005).14Interview with author (26 August 2005).
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‘gender-neutral’. Hemment (2007) and Suchland (2008) both argue that this has
resulted in the adoption of a gender-blind approach to equality that ignores the real
and pervasive impact that gender and constructions of gendered roles have for women.
It therefore undermines the likelihood that rights, defined as legal entitlements in this
case, can be used by women, particularly where they are experiencing discrimination
and rights violations due to gender-based forms of discrimination (ABA 2006;
Suchland 2008; Hemment 2007).
While the above extract highlights a preference for gender-neutrality in rights
protection, the impact of perceived ‘natural’ and constructed differences between
women was acknowledged. A librarian in her mid-twenties argued, however, that
while women’s position in society was perhaps different to the position of men because
of the influence of ascribed gender roles and stereotypes, there should not be any
distinction made in terms of rights:
Well, a woman is a person, so there shouldn’t be distinct rights for men and rights for women.
So women’s rights are also the same as human rights, but related to this topic is the fact that
women have a somewhat different position to men in society, somewhat lower than men. And
this is getting worse. So I can see how people take different approaches to their
understandings of rights, but in principle they should be one and the same.15
Nonetheless, several women also discussed how gender ‘stereotyping’ and the norms
of hyper-femininity were highly problematic and acted as a barrier to women’s rights.
Whilst buying into such norms in terms of representing choice, the explicit
acknowledgement of the restrictions that they created for women’s ability for self-
expression, career advancement and overall welfare was clear. Indeed, women were
well aware of how they had experienced a regulation of access to the public sphere and
paid employment, which was viewed as ‘the most important human right’ and also the
key to all other rights.16 Metcalfe and Afanassieva (2005) noted similar findings in
their study of women in management positions in Russia where women’s success, both
in employment, and in their private lives, was perceived to be dependent on the
performance of expected gender stereotypes and displays of appropriate models of
femininity.
In my study, a single-parent lawyer in her late thirties with one child argued that
these expectations created a local gender climate that compounded women’s already
limited agency due to the relative lack of material resources and job opportunities in
provincial towns and cities. As a result, the importance of performance of expected
gendered traits was viewed as necessary to gain access to these resources:
Russian women’s rights are very limited, especially in the provinces. They are limited in terms
of your looks. Young women are more advanced in these terms; they have not yet been
pressured by the need to put on make-up, to have cosmetic procedures. I think though for
older women, their rights are violated because [in order to realise rights to employment] they
15Interview with author, 23 June 2005.16See Turbine (2007a, pp. 172–73) and Turbine and Riach (2012, p. 170–173) for a fuller discussion
of this point.
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have to always have a nice figure and hair and make-up done . . . but again, how is this
possible without money?17
Although this respondent felt that these pressures did not impact on younger women,
a student in her late teens told me that she felt unable to go out in public without
make-up and a hyper-feminine style of dress; otherwise she would be treated as
‘persona non grata’ among her peers and wider society.18 In spite of the acknowl-
edgement of the negative impacts of the normative pressure of performing ascribed
gender roles and modes of femininity, few women in the study articulated this in terms
of human rights violations.
The American Bar Association (2006) noted, in their assessment of the
implementation of The Convention for the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination
Against Women in Russia, that discrimination was perhaps understood differently in
the post-Soviet context due to these essentialist discourses. My study showed,
however, that it was not necessarily the case that women did not understand the
impacts of gender discrimination, as shown above, but that women felt that expressing
their discomfort and problems in terms of rights would not necessarily resolve the
problem, but might make it worse (Turbine 2007a, p. 172). An administrative assistant
in her early thirties who was working part time in one of the city’s universities in order
to balance childcare responsibilities for her two school-age sons argued that if she
started talking about human rights and her own human rights in particular, her age,
gender and position as a mother of young children meant that people would dismiss
her claims:
If we take your theme of human rights, then of course this is a common human question.
It is not simply affected by whether a person lives in one place or another, or village or
town; they [human rights] are always present. However, the actual living conditions of a
person, good or bad, is dependent on whether people know one another, whether there is
some kind of mutual relationships with people—people might react a little differently to
one another in other places. But here, if you have some kind of acquaintances, if you
have some possibilities for creating some kind of social status, if you can present yourself
correctly, then you can look after yourself and rely on your people. But if, I, for example,
if I, well as a 30-something year old, working as a librarian’s assistant, went out to
everyone and said ‘come on girls let’s go get our human rights’, then I wouldn’t get
anywhere because this requires authority, which is based on what kind of resources
[sobstvennosti] you have.19
This quotation not only reveals how gender norms impacted on women’s status,
but also whether human rights were viewed as a legitimate vehicle for women to
express their concerns; the next section of this essay explores why this may have
been the case.
17Interview with author, 3 October 2005.18Interview with author, 30 September 2005. See also White (2005) on female students’ perceptions
of gender roles in provincial Russia.19Interview with author, 13 September 2005.
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Locating human rights: are they important only to other people in other places, or to
women in general in their everyday lives?
The previous section has shown why concepts of women’s human rights and women’s
rights may not have resonated with women and this section considers whether
concepts of human rights resonated more as a result of their gender-neutral framing. It
has been argued in existing research that human rights may be more effective, not only
in avoiding some of the negative connotations of women’s rights outlined above
(Turbine 2007a, p. 167), but also because this taps into wider perceptions that
everyone, both men and women, have been affected by post-Soviet transformations in
similar ways as a result of social and economic displacement and inequality (Pickup &
White 2003; Shevchenko 2009). This has led some activists to remove overt references
to women’s rights in the presentation of their work to ‘local’ audiences, even where
this is the main remit, for example in advocating for reproductive rights or in
campaigning against domestic violence. As Rivkin-Fish (2004) has argued, this can
have a depoliticising effect. In the discussion that follows, I argue that women’s
engagement with human rights follows some of these patterns. However, women’s
level of engagement was not necessarily about a lack of information or understanding
of human rights; rather it was about how location in a provincial post-Soviet city
informed the ways in which women negotiated and articulated why human rights did
or did not resonate with their daily lives.
When asked ‘what does the concept of human rights mean to you’ the women
interviewed, perhaps owing to their high levels of education, were generally well
informed about human rights and demonstrated a sophisticated level of understanding
of human rights in terms of legal entitlements enshrined in international commitments,
such as The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and in terms of
constitutional rights. In addition, the value of human rights as an internationally
accepted moral standard was noted. The part-time administrative assistant cited above
exemplified these perceptions in response to a question about whether human rights
had any significance in her everyday life:
Naturally they are important—how can they not be significant? If we think about human
rights as the basis of our lives, for example like the right to life—for me, how can that not be
significant? Also the right to vote and choose what I believe in—that is very significant. Of
course. They are the basis; human rights are the fundamental basis of my life. If they are there
then I can survive; if they are not observed, or they are violated there is already some kind of
extreme violation [perekos]. But they are not always violated all at once or so quickly [that
this right to life is removed], therefore it is possible to survive with some kinds of violations as
long as some rights are there.20
While human rights were viewed as significant on this level, when asked about the
applicability of human rights in practice, women responded quite differently. On the
one hand, when asked ‘which human rights were most important in their everyday
lives’, women responded by discussing a wide range of issues and categories of rights.
The majority of women argued that the right to work was most important because it
20Interview with author, 13 September 2005.
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guaranteed women choices for self-realisation and access to other rights (Turbine &
Riach 2012). In addition, a range of social and economic rights, such as health care,
emerged as top priorities as did rights that particularly affected women, such as
reproductive health and childcare. In terms of civil and political freedoms, the right to
travel and economic opportunity in choosing a profession also ranked highly. On the
other hand, women tended to dissociate human rights as relevant to their daily lives in
a variety of ways.
Women most often dissociated human rights from their daily lives owing to the
influence of discourses about what were viewed as legitimate human rights concerns.
This revealed the internalisation of distinctions made between ‘human rights’ and
‘women’s issues’ along public–private and male–female lines that have been heavily
criticised by feminists for obscuring women’s human rights concerns (Charlesworth
1994). A history lecturer in her late forties was one of many respondents who argued
that cultural stereotypes influenced whether human rights were viewed by women as
legitimately relating to their everyday concerns:
It’s not only about human rights being realised, but it is also about the kinds of expectations
you have. Women have slightly different expectations. Men are generally more interested in
the realisation of their rights as a professional, as a politically mature person, and women
worry more about looking after their own family. Therefore, women’s rights and human
rights are not different rights, but different aspects. Human rights is a huge field, and each
person takes what they want from it . . .. Women always have their own outlook, so it’s not
different rights, but a different outlook.21
This tendency to dissociate human rights from women’s everyday experiences was
also a result of an association of human rights in practice with instances of particular
kinds of gross violations. A 27-year-old design assistant explained that she had not
considered the relevance of human rights to her everyday life as they had not
experienced ‘specific’ human rights violations:
‘Human rights’ is an extremely important concept, but I don’t feel that these rights are being
violated. That’s to say, I’m not experiencing some kind of crisis where I would say my rights
are not being observed, or someone is violating them. If you were homeless for instance, then
of course you would have a sense of this. But if you are just a normal person then your human
rights will hardly ever be violated.22
Yet a narrative of everyday rights violations emerged, suggesting that women’s
perceptions of human rights were complex, and women’s decisions about when and
why to talk in terms of human rights revealed much about whether women perceived
their problems to be a result of wider structural issues. As I have argued elsewhere
(Turbine 2007b, p. 93), women’s rights talk can also be interpreted as a discursive
resource used to express frustration over the perceived ‘loss’ of rights due to the
changing role of the state in the post-Soviet period. A part-time nursery assistant used
human rights to express her desires concerning which rights should be protected: ‘I
think my human rights ought to be protected—if I need kindergarten places then I
21Interview with author, 23 September 2005.22Interview with author, 25 September 2005.
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should get them. If I need to study, then it should be free; or other benefits should be
provided to assist with the costs. There should be fewer problems with accessing
housing’.
Whilst the focus on social and economic rights could be interpreted as a legacy of
Soviet understandings of state responsibility to protect these rights, women’s focus on
social and economic rights could also be linked to their present caring responsibilities.
Here, the ‘new’ post-Soviet context was perceived as creating particular difficulties in
individualising and monetising responsibility for caring, for example in the loss of
accessible and affordable childcare. This in turn created a need for women to find new
pathways to access these rights. A librarian in her mid-twenties also argued that it was
impossible to think about women’s everyday experiences of rights violations without
reflecting on how women’s responsibility to provide care resulted in rights being of
more concern to women:
Of course rights are of general concern, but perhaps women are closer to them. It’s clearer for
men—they have to get a job and earn the money, but then they go home and the family looks
after them as long as they bring home the money. But for women, it’s not so clear-cut,
because they encounter more everyday problems than men.23
In addition to the impact of gendered associations of human rights and of human
rights with particular instances of violations that distanced women from human rights,
there was also a sense that women’s physical geographical location in a provincial city
contributed to the sense of distance from international agendas and arenas for
claiming rights. However, women’s discussions of the most important human rights
and most pressing everyday problems were largely congruent. Initial discussions of
everyday problems highlighted the same concerns over access to social and economic
security, both through access to employment and welfare benefits and concerns over
the high cost of living in terms of food, housing, childcare and of communal services.
Thus, women’s perceptions of their location created complex interactions with human
rights as either a symbolic discourse or a tool for claims. This use of human rights
discourses to express dissatisfaction with the loss of rights as a result of post-Soviet
transformations was important, but women also referred to their particular
geographic location in a provincial city as creating further barriers and distance from
the potential to use human rights.
Throughout the interviews women expressed the view that Ul’yanovsk was less
economically developed than other surrounding cities and regions, such as Samara,
Saratov and Kazan’, and this created particular difficulties in these areas.24 A 25-year-
old local television news reporter, who had given up her previous job as a teacher due
23Interview with author, 23 June 2005.24The point here is not whether in objective terms this was the case. Ul’yanovsk does not seem to fare
particularly worse in macro-economic development terms that other provincial cities of a similar size
and industrial and agricultural make-up. However, this perception had a strong influence on how
women viewed their position, opportunities and ability to access and use rights to resolve everyday
problems. Moreover, macro-economic indicators often do not reveal how other sources of
marginalisation, such as gender and class, might impact on perceptions and experiences.
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to lack of ability ‘to earn a living wage’ in that post, expressed this sentiment most
succinctly:
We are in the Volga federal region, which includes all the regions that lie along the river
Volga. In general ranking of those regions, this town, well we occupy the last place. That
means out of 14 regions, we are the fourteenth. In short, we live the worst of the lot.
Asked if she could elaborate as to why she felt the region was ‘worst’, she suggested
that this was a result of previous policies of the local administration during the
immediate post-Soviet period.25 The perception that Ul’yanovsk was kept behind as ‘a
little island of communism’ for the majority of the 1990s while the rest of the country
as well as other surrounding regions were undergoing the processes of economic and
political development was also expressed by an editor of a local magazine in her late
forties. She argued that while this had had some short-term advantages in terms of
keeping the standard of living for residents of Ul’yanovsk stable in comparison to the
rest of the country during the marketisation of the 1990s, this had in the longer run
kept Ul’yanovsk underdeveloped. These past policies were viewed as having a longer
term detrimental effect, as Ul’yanovsk attempted to privatise and modernise whilst
other regions had already completed this difficult process giving them a comparative
advantage. This sentiment was echoed by a history lecturer, also in her late forties,
who felt that while there were now clear attempts to modernise the city, the
‘cacophony of unchecked privatisation’ hampered this and the only real improvement
had been in the relatively minor achievements of ‘cleaner streets and some flowers
being planted in the town centre’.26
These negative perceptions of the provincial location also led a librarian in her
thirties to argue:
We encounter violations of human rights. Look at medical care or to public transport, or
even the low level of culture and behaviour of people in our society. We encounter violations
of our rights at every step.27
This discussion of location revealed that, for the women in this study, negotiating
the norms and practices of the Soviet past with the post-Soviet present remained a key
issue that they also linked to their geographical location.
A major concern for women was a lack of employment opportunities, not only for
self-realisation, but also for securing welfare because, in the post-Soviet period,
individual responsibility for welfare meant that lacking well-paid employment
presented a host of problems. The women in this study also felt that they were at a
further disadvantage in this respect because they lived in a provincial city which had
fewer job opportunities in general. A woman in her early twenties who was in the
course of completing her degree studies and working part time at the time of the
interview argued that:
25Interview with author, 11 August 2005.26Interview with author, 23 September 2005.27Interview with author (8th June 2005).
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There are problems with getting a job; those are really severe in this region so it is not really
possible to have a good job if you also want to live here. These are the issues that affect the
majority of the population.28
A psychology graduate in her mid-twenties who had recently married and was
unemployed at the time of the interview also reflected on how perceived and actual
local economic conditions impacted on her standard of living, which ultimately
informed her perceptions of which rights were most important. She argued that:
I think, in Ul’yanovsk there are many problems [laughs] and we have already discussed this in
depth. In the surrounding larger towns and cities, like Kazan’, Tol’yatti, Samara, young
families have the opportunity to take out a loan [vzyat kredit] to get a flat. In Ul’yanovsk this
has not yet been possible. If in other towns there are other initiatives promoting [economic]
development, and in these other places they [opportunities] even exist, there are no such
‘bonuses’ here. It seems to me it is possible for a young couple to have a baby in a place like
Kazan’. If you have a baby here you are just creating a lot of material problems, for example
in terms of finding a flat and paying for it. For that reason people here are afraid to have
children and in my opinion this is one of the problems specific to Ul’yanovsk—there are
others but I would have to think about it a little more.29
It could be argued that these concerns are not particular to young women in
Russia.30 However, it is possible to argue that young women living in provincial
Russia do face particular constraints. Walker (2009) has discussed the problems facing
young people entering the job market resulting from a lack of access to education fit
for employment in the new post-Soviet market service driven economy.
This section has discussed women’s complex interactions with the role of human
rights in their everyday life; simultaneously viewed as significant as a basic guarantee
of security, and as remote through their association with particular violations that
delegitimise the potential for women’s everyday problems to be viewed as human
rights claims. Yet, women also talked in terms of violations of their human rights,
which were linked to their location in a post-Soviet provincial Russian city. While this
shows that women were informed about rights and willing to use rights talk to
articulate problems, it does not show how women might mobilise rights as claims or
how a mismatch in expectations about what should be provided with what women are
actually entitled to may impact on women’s ability to use rights claims. The final
28Interview with author ( 30th September 2005).29Interview with author, 9 September 2005. There has been widespread concern in Russia over the
low birth rate, and this has resulted in incentives, such as ‘maternity capital’ in an attempt to boost the
birth rate (Osipova 2005). Ul’yanovsk responded to this concern in a particular manner, when in 2005
a competition entitled ‘Give birth to a patriot’ was launched with prizes for couples who managed to
conceive and to give birth on 12 June the following year (see Henry 2009, p. 54; Weaver 2007).30For example I had spent several months socialising and forming a friendship with this woman
before conducting the interview and during this time we had many conversations about similar
concerns for young women in the UK, particularly in relation to maternity leave and pay, the gendered
pay gap and the longer term impacts of having a family on career development and longer term
financial security.
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section of the essay considers how women perceived their ability to access rights and
whether women’s claims were legitimate for the post-Soviet period.
Far from a ‘civilised’ society? Women’s perceptions of the prospects for
access to human rights
This essay has thus far focused on how women used rights talk as a symbolic resource
to express dissatisfaction with perceived and actual violations of rights in everyday life.
However, if human rights are to empower women, women need to be able to mobilise
them in claims. In this final section of the essay I analyse women’s discussions that
revealed various structural barriers to women’s rights protection and to their use of
rights as a tool. Existing research on the use of rights claims in Russia has revealed the
lack of effective redress domestically (Trochev 2008). Indeed most of my respondents
argued that ‘rights only exist on paper’ and a PhD student in her mid-twenties argued
that while it was clear that many everyday problems could be described as rights
violations, it was unlikely that rights were a meaningful tool for their resolution:
In actual fact, rights are violated every day—it happens to us pretty often. But it’s a different
issue whether everyone feels, not that rights are not violated, but if it is worth attempting to
prove it. Experience has shown it to be pointless.31
The women in this study gave a range of reasons as to why it would be pointless to
attempt to use rights, which centred on the need to engage with processes for claiming
rights. This involved either engagement with the state and local welfare office or in
making an individual legal claim, both of which have been described as highly
problematic processes in contemporary Russia. The lack of the local administration’s
capacity or will to ensure payment of welfare or investigate a claim was a common
theme in interviews as a single mother of two children who was a regional manager of
a market research company in her late thirties explained:
If you appeal to the local administration, or to the city mayor, then you have to compose a
formal appeal; after that you have to wait for a reply, and that could take a month or two;
only after that can you really start the appeal. And of course, they could refuse your request. I
saw something about this on television this morning.32
In addition, there was the perception that the local administration was not concerned
with an individual’s problems, even when they might have a legitimate claim. The PhD
student in hermid-twenties cited above argued: ‘themain problem for themost part with
the administration is their unhelpfulness; if you go there to appeal for help, they mostly
just start shouting at you’.33 The tiring and unpleasant nature of interaction with the
administration was also discussed in an interview with a geography teacher in her late
forties who argued that it was not only the rudeness of the staff that was off-putting, but
also the process of doing even basic administrative tasks, for example renewing a
31Interview with author, 6 September 2005.32Interview with author, 17 September 2005.33Interview with author, 6 September 2005.
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passport, involved a great deal of time and effort—‘it’s one paper for this, then another,
then a third, and still you are nowhere’—and that this process would be even more
stressful if attempting to prove entitlement to rights.34
The difficulty in proving entitlements to rights was also complicated by the fact that
manywomen perceived that there should be automatic entitlement to certain rights. The
following excerpt fromawidowed singlemother in her early thirties whowasworking on
a part-time, casual market research contract illustrates the ways in which women’s
negotiations of their positionality in post-Soviet Russia might also inform such
perceptions.While she acknowledged a transforming landscape of legal entitlements, she
also argued that women’s needs had not necessarily changed, which fed into perceptions
that rights were empty of meaning for women as they failed to address key concerns:
You’re asking about rights? Well, they are fully enshrined in the constitution, but there is no
possibility to exercise them. For example, the constitution guarantees the rights to housing, to
free medical care, to education—they are all enshrined there as basic rights that cannot be
revoked. But in actual fact, there is no possibility of using these rights. Well that’s the
situation we are in now in Russia. But when we were the Soviet Union—well, I have a friend
who raised her son by herself during this time. So, she was in a similar situation to me as a
single mother. However, she had the opportunity to go on holiday with her son and so on.
Nothing in her life was limited by the fact she was a single mum. Of course, it is very different
now.35
This indicates that the shift to individual responsibility to prove eligibility to
entitlement to these benefits and the need to take individual responsibility for their
welfare was particularly difficult for women.36 As the part-time administrative assistant
in her early thirties cited earlier in the essay argued: ‘it is not normal that people are
pushed into these situations [of claiming entitlement], that people have to degrade
themselves in order to have their own rights. It is a terrible situation to be in’.37
Another way in which women talked about rights as a tool was in their association
with individual legal claims, which were also viewed as highly problematic. I have
argued elsewhere that this may be due to the increasing framing of the individual as
responsible for claiming rights and the law being promoted as the appropriate means
for seeking redress in the post-Soviet period (Turbine 2007a, p. 174). However, most
of the existing research on the legal system in Russia highlights the persistence of
corruption and lack of justice (Ledeneva 2008), as well as the time-consuming and
financially and emotionally costly nature of legal claims in Russia (Turbine 2007a, pp.
174–76). Indeed, the single parent in her mid-thirties who had been practising as a
family lawyer for the past few years cited earlier in this essay argued that ‘there is a
widespread perception that the courts are for sale’. She also argued that even though
she was a lawyer, and tried to convince clients that the law would resolve their
34Interview with author, 25 September 2005.35Interview with author, 16 September 2005.36In a follow up interview conducted with this women in 2009 for a study exploring women’s use of
legal claims, this respondent had undertaken a number of legal claims, including one in order to gain
access to free child school meals. See Turbine (forthcoming) for further discussion.37Interview with author, 13 September 2005.
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problems, there was in fact ‘an illness among lawyers; we know all of our rights, but
when we think about how we might realise these rights, we often give up on the legal
route because this is such a long-drawn-out process’.38
This rejection of the possibility that rights could be exercised as a tool suggested that
the use of informal and family networks as discussed in the literature on women’s agency
earlier in this essay would be deemed more effective. Many respondents did argue their
preference for using family and friends as this approach enabled women to avoid the
stresses and costs associated with the process of rights claims (Turbine 2007a, pp. 178–
79). Whilst similar findings have emerged in relation to women’s perceptions and
experiences of the legal process in other contexts (Merry & Stern 2005), this study
highlighted the importance of considering the particular contextual factors that shape
perceptions. This was particularly important as women in this study also acknowledged
that in some cases it would be necessary to engage with the processes of claiming rights,
for example in claiming welfare entitlement or in the case of family breakdown as I have
discussed in depth elsewhere (Turbine 2007a, pp. 174–76, 2007b, pp. 203–7, forth-
coming). Here, perceptions that living in post-Soviet provincial Russia acted as a major
constraint on agency emerged again, prompting a research assistant in her early twenties
to argue that Russia was ‘far from a civilised society’ and a self-employed matrioshka
artist in her mid-thirties who was living with her retired mother to reflect:
It wouldn’t be so bad if we could exercise our rights. But in America they shout about their
rights at every opportunity. We don’t have that. They go to court for the smallest thing, and I
don’t know whether that is necessarily a good thing. On the one hand, it seems that they are
more protected, but they can go over the top about things. But they are more protected than us.
Someone could be stabbed in the middle of the street here, and I doubt anyone would do
anything about it.39
It was clear then that there was little optimism among women that rights could
be exercised within Russia and existing literature has argued that this can result in
Russian citizens seeking redress externally, for example the high numbers of claims
made by Russian citizens to the ECtHR against the state in a variety of cases,
ranging from gross violations of bodily integrity to claims for ‘500 rubles family
allowance’ (Trochev 2008, p. 146). However, the women in this study who did
mention the ECtHR, or the ‘Strasbourg Court’ as it is often referred to in Russia,
felt that women could not or should not attempt to seek redress at this level. The
PhD student in her mid-twenties cited above argued:
The certainty that you will win your battle is really low. Even in court, there is no guarantee. Many
people therefore just don’t appeal because they know that they will not be able to use [their rights],
or that the situation will even become worse . . .. Often Russians will appeal to the European
Court because our courts can’t resolve the problem. You can use this because all are united—for
example we see this from the Soldiers’ Mothers—they resolved a lot of problems because they
united. To do it alone is really difficult and therefore people don’t appeal individually.40
38Interview with author, 3 October 2005.39Interview with author, 29 September 2005.40Interview with author, 6 September 2005.
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These excerpts from interviews reveal that women feel they have limited access to
the processes of claiming rights, which are also viewed as problematic due to the
costly, time-consuming and uncertain nature of the process. This fed into
perceptions that only certain rights claims are worth pursuing, which tended to be
associated with gross violations or collective action. This, however, raised the
problematic question of what happens to women who have no option but to engage
with these processes.
Conclusions: negotiating the multiple locations of women’s human rights
This essay has shown on the one hand that women’s ongoing negotiation of Soviet and
post-Soviet norms and understandings of rights has led to a prioritisation of concerns
with social and economic welfare. Thus, talking about human rights was viewed as a
symbolic resource to express dissatisfaction with a lack of protection of social and
economic rights. While it could be interpreted that this revealed the continuing
resonance of Soviet understandings of rights for some women, it was also clear that
women used this to reflect on the difficulties of negotiating the post-Soviet period; in
expressing disappointment not only with the loss of previously held entitlements, but
also with the failure of the promised opportunities of employment and economic
freedom of the post-Soviet political and economic transformations to materialise for
women, presenting challenges to their ability to secure their welfare. In addition,
perceptions of geographical positionality informed whether rights could be used as a
tool to address these challenges. Women’s perceptions that Russia as a whole lacked
the rule of law resulted in the perception that rights existed only ‘on paper’. Moreover,
perceptions that living in a provincial Russian city created particular socioeconomic
problems led to a sense that women were far removed from the international arenas
where human rights were located.
This analysis of women’s perceptions of human rights has also highlighted the
continued gendered nature of human rights discourses and practices as well as the
ways in which local gender climates, such as post-Soviet articulations of appropriate
gendered roles and responsibilities, interact to delegitimise women’s concerns as
human rights claims. While the negative impact of gendered norms that resulted in
discriminatory practices and women’s continued responsibility for care work were
acknowledged, few women felt that it would be worthwhile thinking of human rights
as tools to mobilise rights claims, even though claims may be increasingly important
due to the shifting of responsibility for welfare from the state to the individual in the
post-Soviet period.
I do not conclude, however, that these findings suggest that women will continue to
favour using informal approaches over rights-based approaches. While not the main
focus of this essay, my wider research has shown that rights claims may become
increasingly important for women, particularly those without access to informal
approaches. Furthermore, this research has shown this to be the case in relation to
women’s use of rights claims as care work whereby mobilising rights is essential to
receive welfare entitlements and in invoking rights as legal entitlements and entering
into legal claims processes in interpersonal disputes, particularly in cases of family
breakdown (Turbine forthcoming). As such, this essay reveals the ‘double-edged’
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nature of human rights for women in post-Soviet provincial Russia; it may offer an
emancipatory rhetoric and approach, but it can only empower women to resolve their
problems where access to justice and supporting mechanisms are present. This
indicates a need for further research that takes into account the ways in which gender
and location inform women’s lived experiences and in turn their perceptions of human
rights if we are to improve women’s access to justice.
University of Glasgow
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