Gaining Voice: Feminist and Women’s Grassroots Organizing in Putin’s Russia

In the last decade, numerous feminist and women’s mobilizations have become visible and recognizable in the public discourse around the globe. While the Western feminist movements successfully pushed towards political changes in their home countries, the situation was quite different for similar movements in non-democratic political settings. This article focuses on the opportunity structures and threats and understands their role in the feminist and women’s grassroots organizing in Russia from 2000 to 2021. Applying the existing theories of opportunity structures (political, digital, or discursive) and the theory of threats, this paper aims to empirically contribute to the study of a rarely examined case – feminist and women’s grassroots organizing in a non-democratic post-Soviet setting. Based on the multiple semi-structured interviews with the activists, online ethnography of social media communities, and publicly available data on women’s rights in Russia, it argues that within the context of increasing threats of various nature, the emergence of digital opportunity structures and their availability to the activist groups have compensated for the lack of political and discursive ones. The digital opportunity structure has become a new politicized discursive arena for activists’ deliberation and organizing and contributed to the visibility and recognizability of feminist groups and their claims in the public discourse. The paper offers a new perspective on the interplay of different opportunity structures and threats and their perceptions by vulnerable groups in a hostile political environment.