“It would be better for me to be scared now than ten times more scared later”: Monologue of a femactivist from Chelyabinsk, detained after a single picket

I turned to feminism because at a certain point my entire environment seemed to me to be terribly intolerant and intolerant towards women.

To feel at least some comfort and safety, I started looking for friendly communities on the Internet. After several years of studying various public sites, I came to the conclusion that I was really ready to participate in something personally, not only online, but also offline. If someone engages in activism on the Internet, then, as a rule, it happens among a loyal audience. And it is very important for me that the actions are aimed at the broad masses of people, or rather, first of all, of course, people who can really, perhaps having never really heard about feminism, become interested in such issues after seeing, for example, my picket on Kirov street.

It seems to me that these are also more visible actions for the authorities. We mainly carry out our actions because we do not agree with certain bills that some people want to promote very, very quietly, carefully, pretending that in fact no one cares or is interested in this.

At the end of spring of this year, I discovered the Ural Feminist Initiative (UFI), and since then I have been a member there and try to contribute to the common cause as much as possible.

UFI is a feminist organization in Chelyabinsk, Yekaterinburg and other cities of the Urals, which adheres to the positions of radical feminism. We are engaged in posting leaflets related to women's issues, distributing petitions (for example, on the adoption of a law on domestic violence), holding individual and mass pickets - we always coordinate mass pickets with the city administration, since we try to act exclusively within the legal framework.