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CHAPTER 11 Welfare Crisis and Crisis Centers in Russia Today ——————————————————————————————————— Aino Saarinen1 Introduction The “shock therapy” implemented in Russia in the early 1990s and the economic decline of the late 1990s led to a tenfold increase in poverty at the same time as social rights as a whole were badly eroded. Women in particular —both as paid employees and recipients of various benefits and services— suffered from the disintegration of the state welfare system (UNICEF, 1999, pp. 1–21). Today there is at last some good news about Russia. By the mid1990s , the UNDP Human Development Report (HDR) ranked Russia seventy -second among the countries of “medium human development.” In 2007 it ranked sixty-seventh and was in the top category, which, for instance, includes all the EU-15 countries and a few post-socialist countries such as the Baltic states (UNDP, 1990, p. 127; 1998, p. 127; 2007/08, p. 229). The HDR has been published annually since 1990 and uses a set of indexes that capture several aspects of welfare development, including gender equality. These indexes are the human development index (HDI), the gender-related development index (GDI), and the gender empowerment index (GEM).2 The first two indexes suggest that women are doing as well (or badly) as men: the absolute GDI value (0.801) is at the same level as the HDI value (0.802) (UNDP, 2007/08, p. 331). When measuring women’s parliamentary representation, the GEM scored Russia well below the median of the EU-15 states (8 percent versus 27 percent) and placed the country 144th out of 172 states around the world (UNDP, 2006a, pp. 367–370). The global UNDP team (Human Development Reports) stressed that the indicators do not capture many important dimensions of discrimination, such as private childcare provision and violence against women (Saarinen, 2007, p. 280; UNDP, 2006a). This brings up the question of whether such aggregated measures are properly scaled and unbiased, which opens up an opportunity for further, more qualitative analysis of welfare policies in Russia. During the two terms of Vladimir Putin’s presidency (2000–2004 and 2004–2008), several social policy reforms and reallocations of resources took place, including salary increases for public employees and the abol- ishment of arrears in payments. In 2008, when Dmitry Medvedev took office, the government assured the people that an increasing share of the Federal Stability Funds, which are derived from the oil and energy surplus, would be used for pensions (President of Russia, 2008). Both changes benefit women, who constitute the majority of public employees and retired people (see World Bank, 2003, pp. 65–68). Presently, about 10 percent of the Russian federal revenues are directed to the National Priority Programs (President of Russia, 2006), which, according to Cook (2011) and Kulmala (2008), will benefit a large portion of the population in the future. The question addressed by this chapter is whether these changes indicate a move toward social justice and gender equality. Recent analyses suggest that the policies of the first decade of the twenty -first century were characterized by a shift back toward statism (Cook, 2007). The state has become more interventionist and taken more responsibility for the welfare of the population. This development, along with continuing policies of state paternalism, does not benefit women. It is therefore the task of this chapter to turn to the years 2000–2009 to analyze the instruments for federal policy-making: how welfare crises are defined and especially how the much-discussed mortality crisis related to men is approached and how it is intertwined with the fertility crisis related to women. More specifically, in the search for any real solutions to the demographic crisis, the whole problematic of both reproduction and gendered violence must be included in order to redefine welfare and stress the importance of personal integrity and sexual-reproductive issues. All these issues relate to the institution of the family, which has never been questioned with respect to gender equality—either in the Soviet Union or in today’s Russia—by seriously challenging men’s private power and privileges. In this context, the aforementioned indexes, which were reanalyzed in Russia and “adapted” to local conditions (The Millennium Report [UNDP, 2005b, p. 19], the Equality Report [UNDP, 2005a, p. 6], and the National Projects Report [UNDP, 2006b, p. 2]), as well as the Replies to the UN (United Nations, 2004) on gender policies in the same years, illustrate the sort...

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