Behind Russia’s Ongoing Domestic Violence
Perhaps you already know of Russia’s major domestic violence problem. What you might not know is how drastic the problem really is. Over 600 Russian women are found dead in their own homes every month. That’s upwards of 7,200 female lives lost to domestic abuse per year, though some surveys estimate that the real number is closer to 12,000. According to a 2017 Human Rights Watch report, up to 36,000 women and 26,000 children suffer violence in their homes on a daily basis. Meanwhile, President Putin has not once used his platform to condemn the rampant brutality, nor has he passed any laws to curb its escalation. Instead, Putin recently passed a bill that, critics say, allows perpetrators of violence to continue perpetrating violence, with practically no repercussions whatsoever. Specifically, the law states that first-time offenders will not face criminal charges. In addition, ever since the law was signed on January 27th, 2017, few repeat-offenders have been prosecuted and jail time is a rarity.
The Internet is littered with anonymous accounts from Russia’s domestic abuse survivors, and the stories are harrowing. They tell of smashed feet, smashed ribs, strangulation, and far, far, worse. Still, the Russian government maintains its stance: the overwhelming evidence is that officials simply do not care. The government has turned its back on the victims and because of the inherent flaws in the recent legislation, their voices will continue to go unheard.
It’s often unfair to criticize other cultures by the standards of one’s own, to make claims of superiority or inferiority.
I had a sense of all this before I arrived to Russia, but I did not expect that I would witness such violence firsthand. About halfway through my 11-week trip, I was walking down a busy street in St. Petersburg, struggling to sustain the weight of two large bags of laundry. Suddenly, I heard a commotion, and found myself witnessing to a disturbing scene transpiring just outside of a bodega. A woman’s body lay in a crumpled heap on the concrete. A man towered over her, tirelessly tugging at the hood of her sweatshirt, her hair, her arms… anything he could grasp in an effort to yank her up off the ground. I wanted to believe that the woman had fainted, and that the man, in a panic, was trying to revive her. But as I got closer, I realized that the scene was all but benevolent.
He was screaming at her. Her face was puffy and purple. Her eyes had been reduced to slits. No, she had not fainted. He had beaten her comatose. He was violent, not frantic. I was horrified. My Russian vocabulary was limited, but I understood that, in between the nasty names he spat in her face, he was telling her to get up, to finish the fight. The words were slurred. He seemed drunk.
I wanted to help, but my arms were full. Given my small stature and broken Russian, I would have been at a severe disadvantage regardless. I looked around, hoping that someone more qualified would intervene. But nobody did. This was no drunken night brawl. This was domestic abuse at the most fundamental level, and it was happening in plain-daylight. And yet, dozens of able-bodied, native Russians registered what was going on, and proceeded to sail right on by. They didn’t even call the police; brutality was the norm.
Once I had recovered from the initial shock, I wondered, “Was the violence so prevalent because the laws were so lenient? Or was there another reason?”
Over the course of my stay, I read countless headlines about the persecution of gay individuals in Chechnya. I listened to a podcast about the hate crimes and targeted attacks against gay people throughout the rest of Russia, too, and learned of Putin’s mission to use them as scapegoats. I heard my host-mother praise her twelve-year-old grandson for his athletic accomplishments, but chastise him bitterly when he cried or showed signs of fragility. I watched Russia’s famous weekly, political, debate-style talk show, where only one of twelve guests was female. I watched music videos by Russia’s most popular rock-band, “Leningrad,” some of which might as well have been ads for alcoholism. I observed hordes of people flooding into the bars on my street, even on weeknights, and came to embrace the ensuing brawls as “the Russian way.” So by the time I got back to the US, I was prepared to put forth a different theory: the violence problem is rooted in a culture of hypermasculinity and binge-drinking.
Just look at the president. Putin has invested endless amounts of energy into cultivating an image of machismo: Putin, bare-chested atop a horse. Putin, bare-chested, fishing. Putin, bare-chested, hunting, armed with a large tranquilizer rifle. Putin (fully clothed), in the cockpit of a fighter jet. He is also the man who said, “I am not a woman, so I don’t have bad days.”
Russian men face constant pressure to mimic Putin’s hypermasculine template. They struggle to preserve an outer semblance of silent strength, steadfastness, and power, constantly working to conceal negative emotions. Of course, those negative emotions don’t just go away. I imagine that most of Russia’s male population go about their daily lives, accumulating deep reservoirs of undetonated fury. Then, fueled by alcohol, a number of these men inevitably explode.
I am fully aware of Russia’s surplus of human rights offenses. But I loved St. Petersburg, so much so that when I arrived home to New York City, everything seemed dull and soporific by comparison. I had spent my stay in a constant state of awe––marveling at the old architecture, the monochromatic bridges, and the glass domes on rooftops. I had gone to the Russian Museum and found myself lost in the massive Aivazovsky murals of turbulent seas and maritime adventures gone wrong. I had walked the streets for hours at night, so entranced by the lights and their reflections in the water that I lost my balance and tripped over the cobblestones beneath my feet. I had anticipated that the Russians I encountered would be taciturn and guarded, but instead I found myself in the company of some of the most lovely, generous, and boisterous people I had ever met.
It’s often unfair to criticize other cultures by the standards of one’s own, to make claims of superiority or inferiority. America itself is far from an equitable society, as the latest prairie fire of high-profile sexual abuse allegations clearly attest. And yet, Russia somehow manages to lag far further behind in its treatment of women. In Russia, the women, no matter how strong-willed and independent they present in public, hold a deeply subordinate position to the men, a fact that most clearly manifests in the attitudes towards domestic violence.
The prevalence of domestic violence in Russia certainly owes to Putin’s gross decriminalization of the horrid act. But the problem runs deeper. If the country’s overwhelming reaction towards male displays of sadness, weakness and sensitivity were not one of disapproval and deprecation, and if the average Russian man’s response to the emergence of such emotions were not to deaden their effect by drowning them in vodka, then Russia would not be in such dire need of stricter anti-violence laws to begin with.