The INGO crisis centre in St. Petersburg is situated on the Fontanka canal. It was founded by Natalya Khodyreva, an activist for women’s rights and professor of gender studies. I imagined that a crisis centre led by such a person in Russia’s second major city might have better experiences serving women in unfortunate circumstances than the crisis centre on the outskirts of Krasnoyarsk, in Siberia.
The centre is small and dingy. There is a room to the left full of bikes, a small office with a little kitchen nook, and a doorway leading to the hotline room, which is currently quiet.
Natalya is not there when I arrive. Instead, her 23-year-old daughter, Asya, greets me. She wears a plain brown dress and has big frizzy hair. Asya used to work officially in the centre, but right now they can’t afford to pay her, so she is a volunteer. It’s kind of a funny situation since, in a sense, she grew up here. Or, as she says, “I have always been working here.”
Asya did her sociology thesis on the prostitutes of St. Petersburg. She spent months talking to the girls, hanging around in the most dangerous parts of town, handing out HIV/AIDS information and condoms, asking them to take surveys, and spreading the word about the INGO hotline. She would go with them to detox because, she says, “It’s important to have someone with you when you’re trying to change your life.”
But right now she is adrift. She’s unemployed and living off her boyfriend, a fact that mortifies her mother. Asya shrugs it off. Her focus isn’t on making it, on career, on how to better her life materially. I can tell instantly she is torn. She wants to be doing something important, but she also wants to be a 23-year-old girl. And she seems not to know quite in which direction to move.
We sit down for tea and Yelena, INGO’s 27-year-old executive director, joins us. Yelena has long blond hair and wears stylish orange glasses, a tight half shirt, and a short skirt.
She starts by rattling off statistics. According to a 2004 sociological study in Moscow, a city in which there is not a single women’s crisis centre, 18 percent of women are beaten regularly, and in more than 40 percent of families a husband has hit his wife at least once. Forty-eight percent of men admitted to having beaten a woman severely and 54 percent of women were subject to economic violence, such as being required to hand over their earnings or being prohibited from working altogether.
She tells me there are three major problems facing women in Russia with regard to violence and justice. The biggest of these is that there is no existing legislation against domestic or family violence. Any potential prosecution has to be run through a combination of criminal, civil, and family courts. Meanwhile, because of living conditions in Russia, very often the abuser lives with the abused during the proceedings.
One story highlights both of these problems. A man was regularly beating his wife and fourteen-year-old son. He strangled the boy viciously. The mother came to INGO and with their help launched a case against him. The case took two and a half years to wind its way through the courts. One of the issues prolonging it was the father’s countersuit alleging that his wife was beating him regularly. During this time, the whole family lived together in two rooms in a communal apartment. In the end, his punishment was a small fine.
“The fine goes not to the woman but to the state,” Yelena says. “He’ll only be imprisoned when he murders her or throws her out of a window, or when she really suffers such physical assault that she, for example, cannot work any longer. Unfortunately, our laws are for those who commit violence rather than those who suffer from it. Right now they are still living together.”
The third major problem is the general social attitude, which constitutes a roadblock at every turn, Yelena says.
“In one district in the city,” she tells me, “the police wouldn’t take the claim of one woman because, they said, ‘We don’t want to spoil our statistics.’ The same thing happens when victims come to doctors. ‘You were raped? Maybe you wore a too-short skirt?’ Like this.” Yelena stands and points to her skirt.
She tells me the story of another woman who was raped. At first the lead investigator wouldn’t take her case. But the woman kept visiting him. She found out he had a daughter and asked him to imagine that his own daughter was raped. She brought him gifts, and after a month he took on the case.
“It worked?” I ask.
“In this specific case. There are so many cases in which nothing works.”
At one time INGO had a shelter, a modest one, with four or five rooms. Asya used to work there when she was a teenager. But it was routinely audited by health services, and renovations required to bring it up to code were too costly, so they shut it down.
Asya tells me to imagine a woman who is beaten and kicked out into the street in her slippers in winter. “She really has nowhere to go,” she says. The few shelters available can only house her for a month or two, maximum. She has to return to the same flat with the same partner.
There is a buzz at the door and Natalya Khodyreva, the founder, comes in. She and Asya have the same brown, frizzy hair. She sits down across from me and looks nervous. “We are trying to survive,” she says. “We will serve our fellow women, but we don’t know how to work without money.”
I ask her how times have changed since the days when she founded the centre, in the early nineties. “Now the situation is much worse than during Yeltsin’s time,” she says. “Then we worked without any fear. Now there’s high pressure from the conservative government. Very discriminating ideas about women.” As quickly as she came in, she leaves. She has another appointment. She welcomes me to talk further with Asya and Yelena. And so I do. They try to leaven all the terrible stories they have to tell me. They laugh when they talk about rape and abuse, and it’s pretty clear this is how they deal with it. “Tragically funny” is their favourite phrase. The abuse, the authorities’ reaction to the abuse, all of it—tragically funny. It cracks them up.
So far this year, the INGO crisis centre has taken more than 2,500 calls.
“Now,” Yelena says, “the major idea of our state is to preserve the family, even if he’s violent, even if he’s an alcoholic. The state’s major task is not to serve the woman but above all to preserve the family.”
“Happy Year of the Family,” I say to them.
“Happy Year of the Family to you,” Yelena says. “Government crisis centres operate like other government organizations. Their policy is preservation of the family and victimization of the woman. Even if the father is beating children—because violence is a chain—preserve the family.”
Times have changed not only in the sense of policy but in how criticism is handled as well.
“Now, we’re really careful about our public criticism,” Yelena says. “A few years ago, we could write and say this or that structure is working ineffectively. Now, we can’t really write that. Can’t really openly call upon women to go somewhere and complain or something. We can’t really say this particular law enforcement agency in a particular district is not doing its job. We can’t say publicly a certain region’s resources are lacking and incite women to protest, because then the next day there can be a fire inspector at the door and we may be shut down or fined.”
I ask Yelena how she got into this kind of work, and she tells me that she was studying psychology and wanted to do something practical rather than theoretical. So she started working on a general hotline in the small city she was living in. She worked there for two years and realized that 80 percent of the calls were from women suffering from domestic violence. Now she is completing a study analyzing models of effectiveness in treatment of victims of rape. I ask her what, in her opinion, are the most effective treatments.
“In our case,” she says, “any method is effective as long as it is a method that exists.”
The meeting winds down. The two of them have impressed the hell out of me. “Both of you are so young and doing such important work,” I say.
They laugh. “Yes,” Asya says. “If in the past we had some future prospects, now we can only console ourselves with the fact that we are doing something positive.”
Asya and I make plans to meet later in the week. I am intrigued by her, a girl who has grown up in the early days of a new country in an über-macho culture raised by an activist, feminist intellectual. Someone who’s spent most of her young life working in a women’s crisis centre and studying the oppressed.
I ask Asya to take me to some of the locations where she interviewed the prostitutes. But she says she doesn’t want to return to those places. They brings back too dark memories. So we meet at Noodles, a nice light place on Liteiny Prospekt. She tells me she is a vegetarian, but she eats fish and eggs. I tell her about my friend’s philosophy that he won’t eat anything with a face.
“This is a real vegetarian,” she says.
I tell her I was vegetarian for about five years but Russia cured me of it. She nods.
“When I moved in with my boyfriend, all my friends told me, ‘You must start cooking meat or he will leave you.’ But he eats during the day at the company. All they serve is meat. So he is happy to come home and have a salad.”
Her boyfriend is an economist by day for Lipton, and at night he plays in a surf-rock band called the King-Kongs. They play at hip underground clubs around the city.
She wears a striped sweater with sleeves that just cover her shoulders, loose blue jeans, and sport sandals. Her frizzy hair is held back with a yellow elastic. She has big brown eyes. Her fingernails are manicured and hot pink. There are already a few strands of grey in her kinky hair.
We sit on barstools facing the window. When a group of girls done up in prom dresses with sashes over their shoulders walk by, she scoffs.
She has been out of work for six months. She’s been having fun. When not on volunteer duty at INGO, she went beer tasting in Vilnius. Took her mother to a Morrissey concert. And camped last weekend with friends on Lake Ladoga.
She is in a kind of existential crisis herself. She’s sent her resumé to human resources agents who keep calling and offering her menial jobs that pay barely twelve thousand rubles, around four hundred dollars, per month. She jokes that if she takes one of these jobs, she’ll spend her entire salary on the lunches she’ll have to buy.
It sounds remarkably like something Igor would say.
“One of my friends told me that I just don’t want to work,” she says. “Maybe he’s right, and I am just lazy.”
Her academic record is good but not excellent. She thinks she waited too long for graduate school and now, at twenty-three, she’s too old.
She is thinking she might study languages and is brushing up on her French now on her own.
“I don’t know what to do,” she says. “It was an awful situation when we were in the forest.” One of her friends had invited some of his friends from school—two guys and two girls from Primorskoye, one of the working-class suburbs of St. Petersburg.
One of the couples was married; the other couple was engaged to be married in a few weeks. “We were all very drunk. I was swimming in the rain. Then I noticed that the girl, the fiancée, was crying on the shore. I came to talk to her and learned that her future husband had just kicked her in the face. I was furious, but I understood that if I will say something, he will kick me too. I knew the guys also didn’t want to discuss it with him. They didn’t want to deal with it.”
Everyone went to bed after that. It rained like a monsoon that night. When she woke up, water had come through the tent. Her cellphone had drowned. And the couple about to be married?
“In the morning, everything was okay again between them. The other girl said it’s the fiancée’s fault because she doesn’t leave him. It’s not the first time. This is a self-estimation problem of the girl. It is awful.
“Of course, I am against violence in general, but when I talked to the guys, I said that if they deal with him, maybe sometime they’ll change his mind. When it was the first time, the guys said something to him, but they see her returning to him again and again. The guys said that he was in the army and when he is drinking he is without any head at all. I remember when school friends went to army. Army takes an important period of a boy’s life. If you are taught that way, it’s like in the jungle … the mightiest survive. Kick anyone weaker than you.”
Our food comes. A large salmon, olive, and onion pizza with mayonnaise where the tomato sauce should be—her choice—and two garden salads with oil and balsamic vinaigrette. She bites into a slice.
I tell her that one thing that surprises me when I hear these stories is that Russian women seem to me incredibly emotionally strong, especially those old enough to have lived during Soviet times.
She agrees that women are very strong here, her mother one of them. “You have to sacrifice something for that. My mother sacrificed family building. I was with Grandma all the time. There were times I didn’t see Mom for months. She was just working. Now our relationship is very good.”
“Wait a minute. Did you say your mom went with you to Morrissey?”
“Yes, I bought her a ticket. Last year, she went to see Radiohead in Amsterdam by herself. She is going to Nepal next year.”
“Is she Buddhist?”
“No, she is realist. She is feminist. In Nepal she is hoping to ride a moped.”
“What do you think your mom thinks about your current situation?”
She thinks for a moment. “Maybe she is upset that I am living with my boyfriend and waiting for him to come home with the salary. I don’t know. Mainly she tells me, ‘Stop partying all the time!’“
“What did she think of Morrissey?”
“She liked the music but said he is old and fat.”
We leave Noodles and she stops off at a store to buy a pack of Parliaments and a lighter.
“I didn’t know you smoked,” I say.
“I smoke in the alcoholic perspective.”
The woman behind the counter tries to talk me into buying a pizza. Indicating Asya, the woman says to me, “She’s so skinny, buy her a pizza.”
“What, are you on a diet? Everyone in St. Petersburg is on a diet. Eat some pizza.”
“We just ate pizza,” Asya says. But the woman doesn’t seem to hear her.
When we come out of the store, I start to say something, but Asya shushes me. She stands behind a woman punching in a code to enter a courtyard. The lock clicks, the woman opens the gate, and we follow her in.
In the courtyard, Asya lights up. “I have to meet my father soon.”
“How is your relationship with him?”
“I met him for the first time when I was seventeen. Does that answer your question?”
He has a daughter with his new wife, who kept him from meeting Asya for many years. And when they did meet, he would show up drunk. Now he’s seriously ill, an invalid at forty-nine.
“He is depressed. He is disappointed. He is poor. When I was a child, I was a daughter without a father, and I felt very vulnerable.”
It’s a very nice courtyard, very green, home to some office buildings and some kind of music school. We find a mother cat with two kittens rolling around under the poplar puffs. Asya doesn’t like cats.
I ask her about the challenges INGO faces working with women of her generation. She says there are two. The first has to do with the fact that they don’t understand the role of a place like INGO in society and in their lives.
“When a person applies for our services, they sometimes think it means that some specialist will solve your problems. This is the view. We are not solving problems. We can only help empower her to solve her problem. There are real problems in trying to understand how to use the crisis centre.
“I know a lot of people don’t like what we are saying. Clients sometimes think maybe we are just dangerous women with nothing to do.”
The second challenge is that those girls who aren’t in trouble, or who aren’t in trouble yet, look down on their work.
“They are all superwomen now, when everything is good. And the image of feminism is so awful. Very unpopular. It’s so unpopular, people get aggressive about it. Men should be masculine! This is taught in school or university or army, everywhere, and we’re getting more and more conservative and the image of feminism is getting worse. I can’t really tell why. But I can’t be pessimistic. I am drinking with friends and hanging around all day at home waiting for an HR recruiter to call and offer me a job for twelve thousand rubles per month.”
One morning a couple of days before we leave for Siberia, Igor calls me and invites me for brunch. “What you want? Borscht or potato with chicken hearts? Mom’s cooking.”
“Borscht,” I say.
“What, you don’t like potato with chicken hearts?”
“No, man. I can’t eat that.” I pause. “Especially not in the morning.”
“What? It’s my favourite meal anytime.”
There is something indescribable about homemade borscht, and Igor’s mom’s borscht is no slouch. The meat is supposedly chicken but seems too dark for chicken. I suspect chicken hearts may have been slipped into my borscht.
“Last night, on City Bandits, I bought the yacht,” Igor says.
“Cool,” I say. “What can you do with it?”
“Now I can rob another yacht. I can go on the sea and rob another yacht.”
“Man, are these chicken hearts?”
“No.” He smiles. “You said you didn’t want them, but they are very good for you.” He pounds his chest.
So maybe I have eaten chicken hearts and maybe I haven’t.
Afterward, we aim to finally finish tiling the ceiling, but we measured all wrong. The tiles are not square on a single edge, some of them are falling off, and there are spaces between them. Igor and his mom argue. She is kind of drunk already and it’s still morning.
I tell Igor about my meeting with Asya and INGO. I can see that it triggers bad memories of his own youth, this talk of men beating women.
“Well, man,” he says, “this is all terrible.” But as with many of these uncomfortable subjects, he doesn’t care to elaborate much.
The next day, we take care of some shopping for Siberia. We end up in a pharmacy for last-minute supplies. We buy tick repellent, and when we come to the soap aisle, we stand dumbfounded before a wall of different varieties of soap. Igor picks up one bottle of nuclear-green liquid manufactured by AXE. “Look,” he says, holding it out to me. The bottle reads Anti-Hangover Axe Body Wash.
“I guess we better get that, then,” I say.
He suggests that we spend an extra day in Baikal rather than going to Irkutsk.
“I thought you wanted to see your brother and sister?”
“Fuck it.”
“I discussed it with Mom and she half decided, now I half decided. They never congratulated me on the birthdays, all this shit. Why I need them?”
In a short period of time, he has changed his mind about meeting all his relatives there. I’ll never fully understand why he made this decision—or why he decided it with such finality—but it clearly has something to do with loyalty and respect. Those he loved and those he wanted to spend time with were those who respected him and were loyal, even if that loyalty expressed itself in the slightest of ways—a phone call on a birthday.
The next night, Igor’s mother is still amped up about her trip to Abkhazia. She shows us two glossy magazines she picked up there. She flips through them and points out all the officials in the magazines. The first president of Abkhazia is featured on the cover. “He’s a very good man,” she says.
Then she pulls out some classifieds. She dreams of retiring there.
Working for the state for twenty years guarantees her a pension at least double the average Russian salary. She has an old aunt and uncle there. She is excited about the warm weather and about having a flower garden. Before she left, she planted a jasmine tree in the yard outside the balcony. It’s pathetic-looking now, after being attacked with a weed whacker by the guy who cuts the lawn. I imagine her vain hopes for it: someday, when she visits Igor, it will shade the balcony of his family.
She is forty-nine. Female retirement age is fifty-five. She doesn’t want to wait that long.
She is not very forthcoming with me, because, as Igor has told me, she suspects I am a spy. I try to behave as unspylike around her as I possibly can, and ask few questions.
She tells me that St. Petersburg is very unhealthy. “All of this,” she says, waving her hand in front of the window. I know what she means about city life, but outside, in the cemetery region, everything seems green and healthy.
“It’s pretty, but it needs to be excavated and replaced,” she says. “The ecology here is horrible, the water, air, all of it, so unhealthy.”
She heaps dinner onto our plates. A couple of Abkhazian recipes—some eggplant and vegetable mixture and a kind of spicy bean paste with parsley—one incredibly tough piece of indeterminate meat, and a plate of special smoked Abkhazian cheese.
With dinner, Igor has a mug of chainiy grib. He offers it to me. It tastes sweet and weak. There is another jar of kombucha fermenting on the table now, this one for his mom to drink after we’re gone.
Later, his mother changes out of her colourful nightgown and puts on a nice shirt and slacks and lipstick to go downstairs to the store. While she’s gone, Igor tells me that he has been saving money to buy her a place in Abkhazia, and, assuming he gets a new job in the near future, in a few years he will have enough. She will leave the apartment to him. And he will visit her in the summers there, the way he used to visit his grandparents there when he was a child.
When she comes back, she’s brought beer for us, a bottle of cognac for her, and a handful of the monthly bills. She and Igor open them and pass them around. The year’s property taxes for the apartment, in Igor’s name, come to 743 rubles, about twenty-two dollars. The gas bill is 53 rubles, less than two dollars for the month. The phone bill is around 400 rubles.
We go to a student barbershop near Igor’s place and have our hair cut by two ditzy apprentices. The salon is a room with a stairwell leading up to another family’s apartment. The barber chairs are the cheapest generic office chairs one can buy. Igor’s hair is pretty simple, a quick clipper job. Mine is slightly more complex but still requires nothing beyond basic scissors work. Neither of us constitutes the hairdressing equivalent of rocket science.
While the hairdresser is cutting my hair, hardly even looking at it, she explains the difficulty she is having transferring photos to her cellphone. She wants to have photos on her cellphone but can’t figure out how to get them off the camera to there.
I have a knack for getting shitty haircuts. I have gotten shitty haircuts all over the world. But this one is ridiculous. These two recent graduates who clearly bought their way through the lowest-rent beauty school around have even managed to fuck up Igor’s crewcut. It’s different lengths all around. Mine presents as bangs running diagonally from the left side to the right in a crooked line.
Igor negotiates them down to 100 rubles for his and 150 for mine because they’re so bad. The girls look embarrassed. I remember the barber from Gogol’s story “The Nose.” The whole story was like a dream from the subconscious of a barber with a reputation for pulling too hard on his clients’ noses while shaving them. I can only imagine the horror show this place would be were these trainees given straight razors.
Igor’s mom takes one look at us as we come in and says, “What the fuck happened to your heads?” I look around the apartment, which we were supposed to renovate and which is more crooked and disheveled than our haircuts. It was kind of Igor’s mother not to ask, “What the fuck happened to the apartment?”
A month after I left Russia in January 2009, Igor and I talked on Skype.
“I quitted the job!” he said. “I quitted the Atrium!”
“Wait a second, dude,” I said. “The country—the world—is in crisis. Everyone is looking for a job. And you quit?”
“Fuck it. There is no profit for me to work over there. No customers. It will die in March, and right now I am just having some fun, sitting without any job, some sort of rest or vacation or whatever.”
“What did Anya say?” I asked.
“Welcome to duality, man,” he said. “When I was writing this special resignation paper, she was on phone saying, ‘Don’t quit! Don’t do it! Everything will change! I will never call you again!’ I said, ‘I am writing. It means it’s my decision. Fuck off.’ She said, ‘New job, new girl, huh?’ Then she said another day, ‘Well, Igor, I am happy that you quitted.’“
“That sounds like progress to me.”
“From one hand yes, from the other hand it’s the same shit. Anyway, I want to work in IT.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. It’s with computers, always sitting doing nothing. Good job. My leg is paining sometime. Soon I will have pain in the ass and then I need to get job when I am lying another ten years.”
He had only one regret about leaving the Atrium: no more freebies left by tourists. Yes, he was the barman whom you returned to talk to after you lost your high-end camera or umbrella, and who looked into your eyes consolingly while saying that he was sorry but no one turned in a high-end camera or umbrella today …
I listened as he plotted out a hopeful future while the rest of Russia, for the second time in his life, seemed to be falling apart. “I think I am going to learn some courses,” he said. “I don’t want to work as manager or bartender in restaurant and all this shit. Ten years is enough to understand that I was an idiot. Programmers, they’re always needing them.” I couldn’t tell if he was being naive or optimistic, or if he was intentionally deluding himself.
Just a few weeks later, we Skyped again: “About IT school, I was talking to this one guy. He wasn’t too crazy about it.” And, he told me, the IT schools are too expensive.
Weeks passed. He sat in his apartment. Anya worked her two jobs and then went to her family’s apartment and the two of them played dice games together online.
Then: “Tomorrow probably I will get information on being general manager at some restaurant or hotel. If it’s okay, then okay, if not, then I am still on vacation. You will never see Atrium again. Soon it’s going to be closed … Three floors of business centre is gone. No more free Wi-Fi. They are gone. Probably I will get some beer for the dinner, eat, then sleep.”
Throughout the spring, he downloaded movies and TV shows from the private servers networked around St. Pete. Shopaholic. Underworld III. He became a fan of Big Bang Theory, and I couldn’t help but notice that Anya looked a lot like Penny.
After another month, he was bored by TV. He started planning a trip with Anya to Egypt, their favourite vacation destination, where he would scuba dive and play beach volleyball and she would lie out in the sun.
“And you know,” he said, “my best thing when I am in Egypt is to sing ‘Strangers in the Night’ in the hotel bar. There is one man with piano. I am getting applause.”
“Say hi to the pyramids for me,” I said.
“No. Pyramids are too far. I will say hi to fish for you.”
He started studying Arabic on his own. “I already know all the important words,” he said. “‘Bitch’ is going to be sharmuta. Hasis like an asshole, and if you are going to say you are the only asshole in all of Egypt, it’s going to be excellent.”
I first realized something was wrong after three months, when there was still no work and even paintball bored him. “I am taking a break from paintball also,” he said. “With Straightline barrel, it’s too easy, not so interesting for me. The guys with regular barrel and non-electric are showing me all the hits from my paint.”
Then the beginning of the end with Anya. The trip to Egypt was shelved. The marriage proposal was shelved, if not forgotten about altogether. While Igor sat at home with the cats, sending out queries for jobs, watching TV, and studying swear words in Arabic, Anna worked every day. She was the only St. Petersburg employee kept on by the Finnish company during the crisis, and she still picked up shifts whenever possible at the struggling but still-open Atrium.
“Basically, it was problem with Anya again today and all these callings,” he said. “I was sleeping. She was calling once on cellphone, once on home phone, then cellphone, then home phone. I was like hearing it but wasn’t going to answer. I know this is Anya. Fuck off. I am sleeping. What the fuck you want from me? Finally I answered phone. She said, ‘I have very important thing to tell you.’ I said, ‘What is the important thing you have to tell me?’ She doesn’t like how I say this. She says, ‘Doesn’t matter.’ ‘You are waking me up and saying it doesn’t matter?’ Fucking duality, man.”
“What did she want to say?”
“Basically, she wanted to say she is still at Atrium on day offs. Every time I am saying that I don’t give a shit on this shit really, and I don’t want to discuss it really, and she is still fucking my brain. While we had conversation, four times she said we must break up. And I am stopping her.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know. Still loving her. But soon, I am going to be tired about it.”