Aino Saarinen works on Russian and Eastern European issues at the Aleksanteri Institute at the University of Helsinki, Finland.

Kirsti Ekonen is researching in Russian Studies at the Department of World Cultures at the University of Helsinki, Finland.

Valentina Uspenskaia is Professor of Women's History and Gender Studies at the Tver State University, Russia.

This book looks at Russian women's mobilization and agency during the two periods of transformation, the turn of the 19th-20th century and the 20th-21st century. Bringing together the parallels between the two great transformations, it focuses on both the continuities and breaks and importantly, it shows them from the grassroots point of view, emphasizing the local factor.

1. Breaks and Continuities of Two 'Great Transformations' Part 1 2. First-Wave Women's Movement: Result and Factor of Civil Society Formation in Russia 3. The Art of Change: Modernist Women Writers' Feminist Thinking 4. Integration or Exploitation? Party Political Mobilization of Women in Early Twentieth Century Russia 5. Working for Women's Liberation in a Radical Fashion: Family Life in the Emancipatory Project of Aleksandra Kollontai 6. 'Solving' the 'Woman Question': The Case of Zhenotdels in Tver Province Part 2 7. Perestroika and Feminist Critique 8. Gender Mainstreaming and the NGO-ization of Russian Women's Activism 9. Russian Public Sphere from a Gender Perspective: The Arkhangelsk Region Case 10. Karelian Women's Network: A (Feminist) Women's Movement? 11. Revisiting a Transborder Network Project: Combating Gender Violence in the Barents Region 12. Sex Trafficking, Women's Activism in Russia, and the US Intervention