When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, the Feminist Antiwar Resistance quickly formed and became one of the loudest protest movements in the country. More than 100 of its activists have faced various forms of persecution, the organization says. In one of the most high-profile cases, the artist Alexandra Skochilenko was recently sentenced to seven years in prison for swapping price tags in a St. Petersburg supermarket with statements highlighting civilian deaths in the conflict. Other political and social women’s initiatives have gained momentum since then, including mothers worrying about their sons being sent to war.
This summer, Russia’s health minister, Mikhail Murashko, criticized women putting their education and careers ahead of having children as “improper” and announced a national initiative to control the circulation of abortion-inducing drugs in pharmacies. At least two Russian regions have already outlawed “coercing” women into abortion, and in two other places, annexed Crimea and Kursk, private clinics have nearly stopped providing abortions altogether. Women nationwide have been panic-buying emergency contraception pills amid fears of a national ban.
Until now, the Russian state has typically opposed women’s groups by blocking their efforts to change laws or by issuing “black marks,” such as the foreign agent designation, designed to complicate lives bureaucratically. But a month before Ms. Berkovich and Ms. Petriychuk were arrested, a Russian lawmaker, Oleg Matveychev, claimed he had drafted a bill recognizing feminism as “an extremist ideology.” The bill has not advanced in the Duma.
Officially, the pair have been accused of violating a Russian law that forbids “public calls for terrorist activities, public justification of terrorism or propaganda of terrorism,” an offense punishable by up to seven years in prison. The state’s case against them is based on a document whose authors include the historian Roman Silantiev. He and his co-authors wrote that the play contained “signs of ISIS ideology” and “radical feminist ideology”; the document was presented as evidence the play supported terrorism.
Konstantin Dobrynin, a Russian lawyer based in Britain, said that under that law, it is possible that an official charge of radical feminism might stick, given “the darkest times we live in today.” If that happens, he said, it could very likely lead to the criminalization of feminism as an ideology in Russia. It would be, he said, “a witch hunt and the Holy Inquisition in the most literal form.”
