Is Russian misogyny enabling sexual violence in Ukraine? Yes, argues a bestselling author
- Written by Iva Glisic, Honorary Research Fellow, School of Humanities, The University of Western Australia
Sofi Oksanen has a penchant for difficult subjects. The Finnish-Estonian author established her international reputation with her 2008 novel Purge, which examined sexual violence against women and legacies of the Soviet regime in Estonia. The subjugation of women as part of the complex history of Eastern Europe has been a central theme in her six novels.
Her latest work, Same River, Twice: Putin’s War on Women, is a book-length essay that evolved from a speech delivered to the Swedish Academy in March 2023. Its primary concern is the deterioration of women’s rights under the regime of Russian president Vladimir Putin.
Review: Same River, Twice: Putin’s War on Women – Sofia Oksanen (HarperCollins)
Oksanen weaves together three narrative threads: the story of her own family, the historical trajectory of post-Soviet Russia, and the ongoing conflict in Ukraine.
Her speech examined the link between the general erosion of women’s rights in Russia and conflict-related sexual violence. The essay is significantly longer, punctuated by digressions into parallel topics. This transformation is not seamless. Much of the additional subject matter – such as the status of women in the Soviet Union, or the history of state propaganda in Russia – is given only cursory treatment.
But the book makes an important statement about the weaponisation of violence against women in Russia. As a political and (arguably) a military strategy, this violence has far-reaching implications.
Oksanen argues that, over the past two decades, the status of women in Russia has been deliberately repositioned to align with the state’s promotion of “traditional values” (however vaguely defined). In 2023, Russian politician Oleg Matveychev drafted a proposed law for the State Duma, Russia’s lower house of Parliament, describing feminism as “extremist” and feminists as “agents of the West”.
In 2017, Oksanen points out, certain forms of domestic violence were decriminalised in Russia. The Guardian reported:
The changes mean violence against a spouse or children that results in bruising or bleeding but not broken bones is punishable by 15 days in prison or a fine of 30,000 roubles (£380) if they do not happen more than once a year. Previously, these offences carried a maximum jail sentence of two years.
Under Putin, few women are in positions of influence. Those in prominent roles, Oksanen writes, are typically vocal supporters of state-sponsored conservative initiatives affecting women. For example, former State Duma member Yelena Mizulina actively campaigned to restrict abortion rights.
The systemic mistreatment of women in Russia has directly enabled and perpetuated violence against women in the Ukraine conflict, Okansen argues.
‘Russia is up to its old tricks’
Oksanen asserts in the book’s opening pages that, for many Estonians, “the war in Ukraine feels like a rehash of the 1940s, as if someone insists on pressing the replay button, because Russia is up to its old tricks”.
The title evokes this sentiment. It inverts ancient Greek philosopher Heraclitus’ quote: “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.”
Reflecting on the situation in Ukraine, Oksanen recalls the Soviet past her family witnessed in Estonia – and its silent victims across generations. While historians will point out that history does not simply repeat itself, the Ukraine war has awakened troubled memories and renewed fears of armed conflict across Russia’s neighbouring countries.
A seemingly ordinary photograph is Oksanen’s entry point into her family history: a portrait of her great-aunt, who lost her ability to speak after enduring interrogation (and, in all likelihood, assault) by Soviet officials in Estonia in the early 1940s. This family story, at once known and unknown to Oksanen as a child, had an enduring impact. It has served as a compass, silently orienting her creative work.
The complexities of 20th-century Baltic and Finnish history – and the long shadow of the Soviet regime across this region – are reflected in the stories of Oksanen’s relatives and their negotiation of familial, national and Soviet allegiances. These were manifested in the languages they spoke (Estonian or Russian), the holidays they celebrated, and the family mementos they preserved.
Women’s rights under Putin
Intersecting with Oksanen’s family narrative, which spans the interwar years to the late Soviet period, is an account of Russia’s post-Soviet transformation under presidents Boris Yeltsin and Vladimir Putin.
The 1990s are depicted as a time when newfound political freedoms were juxtaposed with devastating economic crisis. “Twenty years of freedom had not transformed any villages or towns of Russia into a Vienna or a Paris, and no one’s galoshes had turned into glass slippers,” Oksanen observes.
According to international development expert Adrian Campbell, the 1990s saw life expectancy fall and birth rates collapse in Russia. There was widespread crime and trafficking. And in 1991-94 and 1998-99, he writes, there were periods of economic crisis.
These were the years when Putin’s regime was progressively consolidated. Oksanen addresses familiar themes: rapid enrichment of elites, impoverishment of the general population, social disintegration.
Unfortunately, the complexity of these events is undermined by imprecise and at times inelegant prose. Oksanen’s account is highly fragmented: complex historical phenomena are flattened into facile parallels. For example, she compares the fearful response of Russia’s imperial elites to the French Revolution with Putin’s efforts to prevent pro-democratic protests (or “colour revolutions”) that emerged across post-socialist countries in the 2000s and 2010s.
More compelling are Oksanen’s reflections on the erosion of women’s rights under Putin. Misogyny, she notes, has become a significant Russian export that, packaged as a restoration of traditional values, has successfully recruited supporters all over the world.
She writes that researchers who analysed 7,506 tweets from a troll factory linked to Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin found the factory (and Russia’s military intelligence agency specifically) incited conflict in discussions related to feminism and women’s rights. “Russia got involved in no less than a third of Twitter discussions on those topics.”
A former employee of the factory called feminism “an obvious target for internet trolls because it was seen as an enemy of the traditional values represented by Russia and as a Western plot”.
Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner Group was found to have incited conflict in discussions related to feminism and women’s rights.
AAP
The third and central thread of Oksanen’s examination is the ongoing war in Ukraine, particularly the extreme violence inflicted on civilians. Drawing on media reports of intimidation (including online harassment), torture and kidnapping, Oksanen depicts the Russian army’s use of sexual violence as a deliberate military strategy.
Between February 24 2022 and August 31 2024, the UN Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine documented 376 cases of conflict-related sexual violence against men, women and children.
Of course, instances of sexual violence are likely underreported due to the profound stigma surrounding such crimes, which can deter survivors from seeking help or reporting their experiences.
The brutality of the examples Oksanen cites is confronting. The courage of victims who chose to speak about their experiences – such as filmmaker Alisa Kovalenko, the first Ukrainian to detail sexual violence by Russian soldiers in Donbas, in 2014 – is nothing short of remarkable.
These accounts underpin a clear and incontestable argument that sexual violence must be prosecuted as a war crime, not treated as an inevitable aspect of conflict.
Progress has been made, as Okansen acknowledges, through cases at the International Criminal Court in the Hague on sexual violence during the wars in the former Yugoslavia and the Rwandan genocide. Notably, the first convictions for rape as an act of genocide were made by the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in 1998 – more than a quarter of a century ago.
Okansen calls for heightened attention to sexual violence as a war crime and recognition of victims – who, as she poignantly observes, often remain invisible and unrecognised. In our societies, there are indeed
no statues and no postage stamps for victims of sexual crimes. No streets named in their honour, no days of remembrance. No flag is raised in their memory.
Ackowledging past atrocities
Same River, Twice argues that recognising the historical experience of Eastern Europe and the colonial legacy of the Soviet Union is critical for understanding and addressing present-day atrocities.
Oksanen overstates a supposed lack of research on this history. Notable works include those by Aleksandr Etkin, Adeeb Khalid, Valerie A. Kivelson, Ronald Grigor Suny and Madina Tlostanova.
But there is certainly something to her argument about international indifference towards eastern Europe as a colonised space, historically and in the context of Russia’s current military operations.
Oksanen attributes Western indifference in part to economic interests: a willingness to overlook crime in favour of business gains. Against the forces of amnesia and economic opportunism, her book reminds us that acknowledging past atrocities is a crucial act of courage – and necessary to face what historian Mark Edele recently called today’s “age of strategic chaos”.
Authors: Iva Glisic, Honorary Research Fellow, School of Humanities, The University of Western Australia
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