‘Saving some women while destroying others’

Anna Rivina was the face of Russia’s fight against domestic violence. Former employees are accusing her of emotional abuse.

Domestic violence was rampant in Russia even before Vladimir Putin signed a law decriminalizing it in 2017. Left unable to press criminal charges against their abusers, the aid group Nasiliu.net became a lifeline for thousands of victims. The organization’s founder, Anna Rivina, was regarded as a hero within Russia’s human rights community. But after Nasiliu.net announced its closure in October 2025, succumbing to years of government pressure, several former employees publicly accused Rivina of abusive behavior. Rivina denies the allegations, saying Nasiliu.net operated under “difficult and restrictive conditions” and claiming that it wasn’t always possible to maintain a “stable and comfortable working environment” for staff. To understand what unfolded inside Russia’s most prominent anti-domestic violence organization, Meduza spoke with 10 former Nasiliu.net employees — and Rivina herself.

Founded in 2015, Nasiliu.net (“No to Violence”) operated for a decade, becoming one of Russia’s most prominent human rights initiatives and playing a key role in bringing domestic violence into the public conversation. According to its founder, Anna Rivina, more than 10,000 women received assistance through the center’s programs.

After the Russian authorities designated Nasiliu.net a “foreign agent” in 2020, it continued operating under the new restrictions. The organization announced its closure only in late October 2025, when Rivina said her team was no longer able to overcome funding difficulties caused by tightened regulations. Soon afterward, several former employees came forward, saying that for years they had helped victims of domestic violence while working under constant pressure from Rivina. As Nasiliu.net wound down its operations, they publicly accused its founder of emotional abuse.

Tears and trembling hands

“I really wanted a law against domestic violence to get passed in this country,” said Diana Anishchenko. “My father beat my mother. Then he started beating the cat, and then me. The police didn’t help — they laughed at us and shamed me for filing a complaint against my own father.”

Anishchenko joined Nasiliu.net in 2020. She worked in fundraising, liaising with donors and sponsors. For the first few weeks, she was “over the moon,” she recalled. “It felt like I had finally found a place where I could actually be useful,” Anishchenko told Meduza. Before long, however, she began noticing her colleagues’ hands trembling. “Someone was always crying in the office,” Anishchenko said. Four of the 10 former Nasiliu.net employees interviewed by Meduza corroborated this account, saying the tears were in response to Rivina publicly humiliating staff members.

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Several former employees said they worked in a constant state of anxiety, anticipating what one of them described as Rivina’s “nasty public dressing-downs.” Two other sources gave similar accounts: Nadezhda, who worked on emergency shelter placements and asked Meduza not to publish her last name, and the organization’s former PR director, who lives in Russia and spoke on condition of anonymity fearing punishment for “cooperating” with an “undesirable organization.”

In the words of the former PR director:

Any time you were tagged in a work chat, you would reach for the Corvalol [a sedative medication]. Anna would single out one person and just grind them into the pavement — dressing them down over and over, until they apologized 25 times for some minor thing, like forgetting to add bullet points to a post on the project’s social media [page]. And then, suddenly, she’d switch to someone else. Watching someone get publicly smeared like that on a regular basis was shocking and disgusting — especially given that our organization was called Nasiliu.net [“No to Violence”].

Anishchenko said her first assignment was sending brochures to the printer. The run was rejected because of a mistake. “It really was my fault,” she told Meduza.

I should have checked the template that had been laid out before I even started in the office. But then the bullying started. Anna constantly brought up those 60,000 rubles ($780) we lost on the cost of printing — in the chat, in private messages, in meetings. Every time I tried to propose something, she shut me down and reminded me of that first mistake.

According to Anishchenko, this kind of emotional pressure was routine. “Anna stormed into the main office shouting, and we tried to figure out what was wrong. It turned out the office administrator had thrown some pencils in the bathroom trash. But the yelling was as if she’d committed murder in there,” she recalled. “Any mistake, any interaction with volunteers she didn’t like, and everything would devolve into shouting. Staff would end up crying and apologizing without fully understanding why.”

A former coordinator described a similar pattern of behavior:

When you fell out of favor with Rivina, she would nitpick every little thing — even things she had ignored before. Everything you’d done before that moment was erased. She would humiliate you with cutting remarks and public attacks during calls. […] For new employees, she would start friendly: “I’m so glad you’re with us now!” Later, it would turn into: “Volunteers could do your work for free. Keeping you on staff is charity.”

Anishchenko, Nadezhda, and two other former employees said the stress caused them health problems, and they shared medical records with Meduza that correspond to the period they worked at Nasiliu.net. One former employee said that “many colleagues were just terrified.” Anishchenko described working at the center as “a nightmare.”

“I feel so, so sad that Rivina was saving some women while destroying others,” Anishchenko told Meduza. “Can this really be called human rights work? Charity?”

Rivina told Meduza that she “never allowed public humiliation of staff.” She said that throughout Nasiliu.net’s 10-year existence, the center’s work “took place under conditions of intense emotional and operational strain,” which “inevitably affected the dynamics within the team.” In her words,

During more difficult periods, my tone could be more demanding or harsher than in calmer circumstances — especially when it came to mistakes that put the center’s work, its reputation, and its ability to support survivors of violence at risk.

Rivina also said that the “public humiliations” former employees have accused her of contradict her “understanding of management and professional ethics.”

“I regret that our work unfolded under such difficult and constrained conditions, and that it wasn’t always possible to create a more stable and comfortable working environment for the team,” she told Meduza.

‘There shouldn’t have been any burnout’

Several former employees said they learned to anticipate Rivina’s wishes in an effort to avoid conflict. “You’re constantly thinking, ‘How am I supposed to act? How do I guess what’s in her head?’” said the center’s former PR director. “Should we be consulting her over every comma? But then she would turn around and say we’re incompetent and incapable of working independently.” At the same time, she added, “those who tried to stand up for themselves got slammed hard.”

Nadezhda, who worked at Nasiliu.net from 2021 to 2023, said that by the summer of 2023, the center’s emergency housing coordinators were “completely burned out” due to overwork and low pay. According to her, the coordinators were paid “first 20,000 ($260), then 30,000 rubles ($390) for ten 24-hour shifts.”

We slept badly and felt terrible; people were having nervous breakdowns. At the time, I mistakenly thought Anna simply didn’t realize how hard things were for us. I wrote to her about it and asked either for a raise or for one more person to be hired. The response I got was very cold: that we weren’t working properly and were ourselves to blame for burning out.

According to screenshots of messages shared with Meduza, Rivina replied that she had deliberately hired three employees so that they could work on a “one day on, two days off” schedule. “With that setup, there shouldn’t have been any burnout,” Rivina wrote. “You decided to change it — and that’s why you burned out.”

In practice, Nadezhda said, the schedule was impossible to maintain. The pay was too low, and coordinators — herself included — had to take on other jobs, frequently working during what were supposed to be their days off.

The work itself was punishing. During the 24-hour shifts, SOS housing coordinators had to urgently place victims in hostels, arrange their transportation, and walk them through basic safety procedures. Calls could come in at any hour, leaving little opportunity to sleep.

“You had to quickly get your bearings and understand how much danger the person was in, how many children there were, and how to get them out of Moscow or the Moscow region,” Nadezhda recalled. “It was brutal. At some point, we just started feeling really bad. There were too many survivors in far too extreme situations.”

Rivina told Meduza that salaries at Nasiliu.net were raised on a regular basis. She stressed that increases were made “within the limits of the center’s very constrained resources,” noting that its budget depended on donations.

Over the years, Rivina said, many employees passed through the organization and their expectations varied. Some staff members saw their pay “increase significantly as their areas of responsibility expanded,” she said, while in other roles “raises were objectively impossible.”

According to Rivina, decisions about compensation took into account employees’ workload, contribution, and skills, as well as the center’s financial obligations. Early on, she said, the organization’s total monthly budget for the entire team was around 500,000 rubles ($6,500); in recent years, it reached 2–3 million rubles ($26,000–$39,000). That growth, she added, reflected not only an expanded staff but also higher salaries.

The ‘face’ of the center

Several former employees told Meduza that Rivina treated Nasiliu.net as a personal brand rather than a collective project. “In interviews, Anna always voiced nothing but lovely, ‘correct’ thoughts. That only made it funnier for us,” recalled the center’s former PR director. “At some point I started cracking these uncontrollable jokes about how Rivina is against men abusing women because she wants to be the one abusing women herself.”

According to the same source, the center’s social media functioned as Rivina’s “personal platform,” and staff were expected to protect her public image at all costs. “If someone — God forbid — wrote a harsh comment on our Telegram [channel], we were expected to react almost in the middle of the night,” she said. “Sometimes it felt like literal paranoia: her crystal-clear reputation as a benefactress and super-liberal mattered that much to her.”

Another former employee, who asked to remain anonymous, said Rivina often emphasized her sole authority over the organization. “She would explicitly write in the chat that this was her center, that she was in charge, and that only she would make decisions,” the source told Meduza. “It looked somewhat unhinged.” Rivina did not respond to Meduza’s questions on this subject.

Former housing coordinator Nadezhda recalled that Rivina frequently framed operational risks as personal threats to her reputation. “When evacuating women and placing them in hostels, we had to maintain secrecy so their partners wouldn’t be able to find them,” she said. If something went wrong and staff had to involve the police, “Anna would say that she was the face of the center, and that we were ‘setting her up.’” While staff were “worried about the women who had survived violence,” Nadezhda said, “Anna was worried about her reputation.”

Anishchenko told Meduza that Rivina also took credit for her subordinates’ work. In the fall of 2020, Nasiliu.net-sponsored information stands and billboards featuring information about domestic violence appeared across Moscow. “It was entirely my idea,” Anishchenko said. “I proposed it at a staff meeting, submitted the application and the mock-ups, handled the communication — and we were approved for seven billboards and about 20 ads at bus stops.”

According to Anishchenko, Rivina was initially indifferent, but later organized a photo shoot in front of the billboards without inviting her. “Our visibility went up, donations increased, but Anna never thanked me once,” Anishchenko said. When questioned, Rivina told Anishchenko that “donations didn’t increase because the posters are up, but because I do media appearances. There’s no credit to you here.”

Tensions escalated the following year, when Anishchenko handled the application for the Headliner of the Year award on behalf of Nasiliu.net. Rivina ended up winning not the main prize but a 200,000-ruble ($2,600) prize in the “Civic Engagement and Social Projects” category — and proceeded to transfer the money to her personal account, Anishchenko said. “For the center, that’s several staff salaries, several projects funded, many psychological consultations,” she said. “And it wasn’t just Anna who did the work — it was the whole team.”

Rivina told Meduza that this was a “personal award” for her professional work, and that transferring the funds to her personal account was therefore appropriate. Two members of the award’s expert council and a source close to its organizers confirmed to Meduza that the prize was awarded to an individual, not an organization. “We nominated Anna, not the organization,” one source said, adding that transferring the funds to her personal account was “entirely ethical.”

After the award incident, Anishchenko quit. She believes Rivina was “building a cult of her own personality inside the center.” “At times it felt like the organization existed to exalt Rivina as its benefactress,” she said. “She showed her real self only to us.”

Asked to comment on Anishchenko’s statements, Rivina told Meduza that she and her family “have supported the center over the years with personal donations totaling more than half a million rubles [$6,500].” She added: “Moreover, during the first three years of Nasiliu.net’s existence, I developed the organization at my own expense and did not receive any compensation for my work.”

Rivina declined to provide detailed comments on the billboard campaign and her alleged use of the center’s social media for personal promotion. In an email to Meduza, she dismissed these questions as “gossip, retellings, and personal conversations between staff,” adding that they reflected “a complete misunderstanding […] of what was actually happening, raising concerns about the quality of your sourcing and editorial standards.”

“I’m very proud of what the center has done throughout its existence,” Rivina wrote, “and I’m proud of the team, even if some of its members disappointed me or were disappointed in me.”

* * *

Even though the posts by former Nasiliu.net employees sparked widespread discussion in Russian human rights circles, Meduza was unable to find any social media posts defending Rivina written by people who had worked for the organization.

Key experts from the sector also refrained from commenting publicly, with the exception of Mitya Aleshkovsky, co-founder of the Nuzhna Pomoshch foundation and founder of the outlet Takie Dela. Under one former employee’s post about working with Rivina, he noted that not all of the criticisms aimed at the Nasiliu.net founder seemed justified to him. “The post seems to express more personal pain and hurt than clear, actionable criticisms — the kind you could discuss, use to improve practices, or learn from for the future,” Aleshkovsky wrote.

In addition to the 10 former Nasiliu.net employees who agreed to speak to Meduza, the outlet reached out to five more of Rivina’s former subordinates. None of them disputed their colleagues’ statements.

“It’s no surprise that everyone you spoke to was unhappy with Anna. It would be surprising if you found someone who spoke positively about working with her. I don’t know anyone who would,” said one former employee. “I guess that says a lot.”

Meduza