“I’m here to disturb the status quo,” says Martina Vandenberg, a maverick American feminist who came to Moscow three years ago, at the age of 24, to start Russia’s first rape crisis center.
“Russia is an incredibly rape-prone society because of the high level of alcoholism and the low status of women,” Vandenberg says. “But the problem is hidden from public view.
“Women are required to keep men’s secrets. If you are raped, the standard reaction is to go home and scrub your body and stay in bed until you get over it. Most women don’t tell anyone. That sort of conspiracy of silence is exactly what I’m trying to break.”
That is no easy task in a country in which many people still subscribe to the myth that rape is a crime of passion and that women provoke rapists by dressing or behaving seductively.
When Vandenberg tried to open the center in a hospital, she couldn’t find a doctor who would help her.
“They said, `Why should we do that? It’s their own fault.’ They felt that this was not a serious issue.”
But Vandenberg, who says that she expected to face opposition, is a woman not easily dissuaded.
“I’m an activist and an idealist. I really believe that you can change the world, and I think that the world changes one person at a time; attitudes change one person at a time. I think the one impact that I have had is that a lot of women here now know that they’re not alone.”
Five years ago, Vandenberg, a Rhodes scholar from Gilroy, Calif., was pursuing a master’s degree in Russian/East European studies at Oxford University when a need to do research brought her to Moscow.
Unable to afford a two-week stay in a hotel, Vandenberg decided to stay with a Russian family.
One evening, Volodya, a friend of the family, told her that his girlfriend had been raped by a neighbor and seemed to be on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The young man said that he wanted to help her but had no idea what to do.
A few days later, Vandenberg met the young woman, an architecture student. After listening to her tearful account of how the rape had changed her life, Vandenberg asked if she had received any professional help. The young woman replied that such problems were not discussed in Russia.
“When I explained that in the West we have hot lines for women who have been raped and that I worked on one, she and her boyfriend were really surprised that such a thing existed.
“There was this feeling of total helplessness. There was nothing I could do. When I asked some of my Russian friends if there was anyone doing that kind of work, they told me that I must be crazy.”
Vandenberg finished her research and went back to Oxford but found that she could not forget the young woman. Two years later, she says, “I still kept thinking about her and trying to figure out what I could do.”
Vandenberg decided to give up her scholarship and forget about pursuing her doctorate to go to Moscow to start a rape crisis center.
“After meeting her, I really felt that this was something that needed to happen in Russia and the more I thought about it, the stronger that conviction became. I was the only person I knew of who had worked on a hot line and who spoke Russian. Those were my only qualifications, but I was committed and I wanted to do it.
“I remember telling my father, `I’m going to Russia to start a rape crisis center.’ He looked at me in complete shock and asked, `You’re serious about this?’ and I said, `Yeah, I am.’ We didn’t really talk about it after that. I was afraid that he would forbid it, and I think that he sensed that the more he tried to talk me out of it, the more I would want to do it.”
Vandenberg took a three-month job at the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Washington and spent every spare moment writing to “every foundation you can think of,” hoping to get a $50,000 grant to start the center.
They all turned her down, but Vandenberg remained undaunted.
“I decided that I was going to fly to Russia and just do it.”
As it turned out, through “a true stroke of luck,” she landed a job at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow.
Vandenberg spent the next year planning with a small group of Russian women who met at her apartment for dinner every night.
“I was living a double life. During the day I was a bureaucrat, and in the evening I was doing what I love to do: being active and political and trying to motivate other women.
“It was exciting and chaotic. At one point, we had 50 people coming to meetings. All of the excitement and interest and all the emotional investment that so many different women, both Russian and American, put in was fantastic. There was such a momentum.”
That group of women eventually created the Moscow Sexual Assault Recovery Center, which celebrated its first anniversary in April.
“I think that what makes me the happiest when I wake up in the morning is that the center actually exists,” says Vandenberg. “This is something that I set as a goal, and it’s something that happened. I did what I said I was going to do. And I didn’t let myself down by quitting when things got hard, and it got incredibly hard.”
Quitting her job at the embassy to work as a full-time volunteer at the center in February 1994 “was the scariest thing I’ve ever done,” says Vandenberg.
“All I had to live on was savings with no guarantee that anything would work. There was no guarantee that we would get any funding, which we needed desperately — since I no longer had a job, I couldn’t finance it anymore — and even if we did get money, there was no guarantee that anybody would would want to work at the center.”
Her frenetic lifestyle took its toll.
“When you feel like your job is 24 hours a day and everything is your responsibility, it’s enormously difficult to make time for human relationships. I felt really lonely. I didn’t have any money so I was bouncing from apartment to apartment, living with friends. My whole life was temporary. Nothing was firm. Nothing was familiar. It was like living on shifting sands.
“I felt like I was in the middle of the hardest battle that I was ever going to have to fight. The only thing that kept me going was the idea that, at some point, women who had been raped would have a place to call.
“It’s depressing work,” Vandenberg admits. “In the United States you can send someone to a hospital and know that they will get fairly sensitive treatment. Here that is absolutely not the case. We sent a 15-year-old girl who got pregnant after she was raped to a hospital for an abortion. The doctor who performed the procedure told her that she was a slut.”
But ideas about rape are slowly changing.
“The expertise is growing. Four years ago you could probably count the number of people who knew what to say to a rape victim — in the sense that we, as feminist counselors, think of how we need to talk to a rape victim — on your fingers and toes. Now there is a cadre of 50 women who have gotten training and are sensitive to these issues.”
Vandenberg insists that she was not the driving force behind the center.
“The Russian women who wanted to do this were trememdous. That’s where the real leadership came from. These women are visionaries. I consider myself lucky. I get to work with the Gloria Steinems and the Betty Friedans of Russia.
“All I did was come here and plant seeds. I provide a little bit of guidance and a little moral support, but mostly what I do is watch everything grow.”
Vandenberg, who now runs a small grants program for women’s organizations under the auspices of the NIS-US Women’s Consortium (NIS stands for Newly Independent States), an arm of the Winrock International Institute for Agricultural Development, based in Arlington, Va., no longer takes part in the day-to-day operations of the center, although she is on the board of directors and is still consulted regularly.
When she is not busy organizing grants competitions, she is traveling around the country conducting “empowerment” seminars for women in small towns where the first stirrings of a feminist movement are beginning to be heard.
Her goal, she says, is to “extend women’s vision of what’s possible.
“So many things that women say are impossible are actually possible. So many women told me, `You can’t start a rape crisis center. It’s impossible.’ But the reality is that when women work together, the impossible suddenly becomes more possible. Part of my job is to empower women to believe that.
“I’m also here to let women know that women’s rights are worth spending time on. There has been such a demonization of the women’s movement here. My role is to show that women who are involved in the women’s movement are not wild people dancing down the street naked, that it’s possible to be politically active and still be a human being.”
In spite of her youth, Vandenberg has a commanding presence that often surprises those who are meeting her for the first time.
She is clearly a driven woman. Part of what drives her, she says, is “channeled anger.”
A self-described “type A quadruple plus” personality, she says that she is “finally learning to slow down.
“Being in a hurry all the time, you get a lot done, but you also end up hurting people’s feelings along the way. I’m very demanding of myself and of the people around me. I want things done yesterday. It’s something that I can’t help in myself, but it’s something that I really want to change.
“When things go wrong, I don’t take the time or have the patience to slow down and take care of the people around me. I think that’s a real problem and that’s part of the reason that I’m trying to slow down.”
Coming to Russia has changed her ideas about “what really matters in life,” Vandenberg says.
“Coming out of Oxford, there’s a sense that the most important things are academic success and publishing your dissertation. But what’s important to me now is working with these fantastic women. I feel like I’m cheering the birth of a movement.
“I think that you always have to sit back and wonder why you’re doing something. I think that, to some extent, I decided that I didn’t need to prove myself anymore.
“The Rhodes Scholarship is a wonderful opportunity, especially for women, but it has a tendency to obscure you. I feel like during these last three years I’ve reclaimed myself, and that’s been important for me.
“Coming here enabled me to build an identity outside of the scholarship and all of the expections that other people had for me, which was to finish my doctorate and end up on Capitol Hill. I got off the beaten path. I did something that was important to me, and I did something that took courage.”
