"I hate March 8!"

In St. Petersburg, a rally under the slogan "Freedom, equality, nursing!"

On March 8, on International Women's Day, St. Petersburg activists of various feminist movements held a women's rights rally on the Marse Field. The action was under the slogan "Freedom, equality, nursing!"

According to the organizers, the rally on the Marse Field was called to remind that historically the day of March 8 is very far from the traditional Soviet "female holiday", that its sources are in the struggle of women for their rights and that this struggle did not lose relevance. The number and variety of home -made posters with which people stood in puddles on the Marse Field in Watching Rain, in itself, eloquently demonstrates that the rally participants see a lot of acute problems around the “female question”.

• Tatyana Voltskaya

In St. Petersburg, on March 8, a rally under the slogan "Freedom, equality, sisterhood!"

The authors of the action believe that there are a lot of reasons for rally. Some of the most important are the often sounding proposal to exclude free abortions from compulsory medical insurance, as well as an urgent need to adopt a law to counteract domestic violence. One of the organizers of the rally , Irina Nakulkina, believes that Russian women are practically not protected from partner or sexual violence, that there are no mechanisms for prevention and counteracting violence in the country, and the police still refuse to intervene in such matters and accept statements by the victims:

- We still have no mechanisms for protecting a woman from a wide variety of forms of violence that she is subjected to. I’m not talking about sexual violence, which a woman can experience both a stranger and in her own family, but there is also partnerships when a woman has a good relationship with work partners, sometimes they go into friendship, and this seems to be the basis for these partners to claim her and sexually. Home violence is a separate topic, and how important it is, statistics show: in Russia about 40 percent of women are subjected to domestic violence. It can be anything: beating, humiliation of human dignity, and a ban on learning or working, and even restriction of freedom. We very often encounter such phenomena when a woman cannot leave her husband, because she takes all money, clothes and so on from her. And since our legislation does not protect the woman from the rapist, we believe that the law on countering domestic violence should be adopted as soon as possible.

About 40 percent of women is subjected to domestic violence in Russia

An equally important reason for protest, Irina Nakulkina considers attempts to exclude abortion from the list of services provided by compulsory medical insurance:

- This is not just a “ban on murder”, as supporters of this idea say, this is primarily discrimination of a woman who wants to prohibit their own body and their own fate. I’m not at all for us to have a lot of abortions, no, I consider an abortion by an extreme measure, the last way out of a difficult situation, but a woman should have this way out. After all, there are different circumstances. For example, her partner asks the child, and as soon as she became pregnant, he says: "Well, goodbye, dear!" Very often, women who already have one, two, three children, and they simply can’t raise it to abortion. In addition, we practically do not have sex education in schools, young men and girls do not very well imagine what sex is, many people think that interrupted sexual intercourse guarantees from pregnancy, but this is not so. Look at those countries where sex education is well delivered. There are units of random pregnancies, but we have Orthodox activists all the time shout that sexual education is debauchery, and thereby only increase the number of abortions.

A rally for women's rights was decided to support activists of the St. Petersburg branch of the Party of Progress:

“We wrote off with the organizers of this action and realized that we can support all their requirements,” says the party representative Fedor Grudin . - In addition, we go to oppose such a phenomenon that we observe today, when the state masks the social problems with the propaganda of the so -called “spirituality”, which actually turns out to be obscurantism, or Islamic, or the house -building, “sweetishness”. And because of this, women's rights are often infringed: for example, in the North Caucasus, girls at school are forced to wear hijabs, and we have one official to the question of low salaries in the field of education replied that a woman does not need a high salary, she needs to look for a man who will provide a family, and not complain about her salary. Such a patriarchy is trying to disguise real social problems with us, so we decided to support this rally. Among his requirements, there is a requirement not to remove abortion from compulsory medical insurance. After all, they are removed again because of the sequestra of the healthcare budget, but hide behind the fact that abortion is not spiritually, not Orthodox and not at all. And the whole thing is corny in money. We also support the requirement to include in the Criminal Code an article for domestic violence and the requirement that the time for rape is necessarily real, so that it is impossible to get rid of conditional punishment or even a fine - this is how officials or children of high -ranking persons evolve. It seems very important to us the requirement to create in various cities of Russia rehabilitation centers for women undergoing violence.

We are trying to disguise real social problems with patriarchate

But the problem of abortion and domestic violence are, of course, not the only areas in which women are ready to protect their rights. Head of the Department of Law of the Petersburg Humanitarian University of Trade Unions, Professor Diana Balibalova , who is also the activist of the Voice of Women, specializes in the field of labor law, and she is very disturbed by the number of violations of women's rights in this area:

- Take at least dismissal from work: first of all, those women who have children who are on vacation on caring for a child are fired. Another problem is the low legal culture of our women, many of them are settled down without concluding an employment contract. And now, when enterprises experience difficulties in connection with the crisis, the employer very often uses this. The woman will work for a month, two, three, and then she is fired, but since she has no documents, she cannot even go to court. There is no agreement, they paid a salary to anyone, and to whom nothing is at all, that is, some kind of complete lack of rights turns out, and this is in the 21st century. They turn to our public organization for the protection of labor rights "St. Petersburg Ais", to the State Labor Inspectorate, but how will they help them when they do not have documents confirming that they worked? They recall that once there was a Labor Code-the Code of Laws on the Labor of the Soviet Union, which was in force until 2000, but now new labor codes are already in force, and they do not know anything, yes, according to my impressions, and do not really seek to find out, and the real legal lawlessness is obtained. It seems to me that the state in this situation should still meet women, because the woman has another important function - motherhood, and she simply does not have enough time for all this. Previously, we still had a legal general education - in production, on radio, on television, and now everything is left to themselves, so violation of women's rights in the labor sector is a common occurrence. As for all other violations, they are not so painful for women, because women are rights or, as Kollontai said, the “female question” is a piece of bread, and these violations disturb me the most.

First of all, those women who have children who are on parental leave are fired.

Natalia came to the rally, because, although she was the mother of four children, she was outraged by talking about the need to ban abortion: she does not welcome them, but believes that a woman needs to leave such an opportunity. But there is another reason why it is an hour and a half voluntarily mole in the rain in the Marse Field:

- I hate March 8! I hate this day! From school age. So here I heard that on March 8 we get a double portion of sexism, and I am glad that what is formulated here that is so outraged by me. I remember that one of my close friends on this day returned home in tears: she was driving in a trolleybus, it was crowded, a place was released, and some man invited her to sit down, but she refused. Then he said: "Sit down, bitch, this is your day!" I remembered it for life. I do not understand why we have a women's day. I understand - Mother's Day, Father's Day, Grandma's Day - that would be very good, but not a holiday on a gender basis.

LGBT activists also took part in the rally.

And when it ended, another action began on Nevsky Prospekt - a flash mob in support of the Ukrainian military personnel of Nadezhda Savchenko, who for more than 80 days holding a hunger strike in the Moscow pre -trial detention center in protest against her arrest and accusations, which she considers unfair. The people who came to Nevsky Prospekt, and formed a long chain with her, and formed a long chain-about 150 people with yellow-blue flowers and ribbons lined up along the Gostiny Dvor.

Five of them are the activists of the Coalition "Democratic Petersburg" Vsevolod Nevlaev, Daria Pilipchuk, Tatyana Baburina, Daniil Theodori and Elena Tedeeevskaya launched posters and Ukrainian flags. They were detained and taken to the 78th police department. They are accused of participating in an unauthorized public event. It was the final action of the 4-day campaign “Do not let the hope be died!” Organized by “Democratic Petersburg”.