EDITOR’S INTRODUCTION

This issue of the magazine has been rather long in the making. From the start we decided it would focus on global problems, especially since women’s organizations in many countries were just then gearing up to participate in AWID’s (The association of Women in Development) ninth world forum in Guadalahara, on the problems of globalization. We in Russia did not realize how close to us these world problems would turn out to be. The tragic events in Moscow that took the lives of over a hundred men, women and children [the terrorist attack on the Moscow theater] demonstrated how fragile our security is. We compared these events with the one that staggered America on September 11, 2001. True, the Russian newspapers did not publish brief profiles of each of the dead in Moscow, as The New York Times did after 9/11, and the pressure exerted on our independent press was much stronger than in the USA, and nearly led to the introduction of official censorship.

Will we learn to value more highly our freedom and our lives, will we be able to overcome our disconnections, our controversies, and will we try as one world to counter the destructive forces of evil? Over the past months we have thought a lot about this and discussed it with our journalist colleagues and with the leaders of civic organizations. We the citizens of Russia and other countries that once made up a single large empire that was labeled ”the empire of evil” (can there be an “empire of good”?), got accustomed to feeling like inhabitants of a separate continent not affected by the rules and regularities of the rest of the world. For a closed society, it is an understandable feeling. But the world is developing in such a way that there cannot be any more closed societies. It is time to begin thinking of ourselves as part of a very large diverse world, and from the standpoint – for each of us – of can we together try to make this world a better place.
This issue of the magazine presents articles and discussions about global problems as seen through the eyes of women.

Nadezhda Azhgikhina