Kritika is “a leading journal of Russian and Eurasian history and culture, Kritika is dedicated to internationalizing the field and making it relevant to a broad interdisciplinary audience,” and this particular issue features many voices of women who have contributed to Russian feminist criticism.

Of particular interest are personal essays by Natalia Pushkareva, Barbara Engel, Eve Levin, David L. Ransel, and Christine D. Worobec.

From the introduction to this section of the issue:

Russian women’s history—and we use the qualifier “Russian” advisedly, as focused analysis of the intersection of gender with imperial contexts and identities mainly began in the 1990s—formed in dialogue with these broader developments, drawing many of its inspirations and models from non-Russian fields.⁵ At the same time, it also evolved within the particular context of the Cold War—which had both practical ramifications, such as limited access to archival sources, and more complex political and ideological ones. In the Soviet Union, the “woman question” had long been relegated to a secondary status before class and social structure, which helped marginalize the history of women institutionally and as a topic of study. Early contributions to the field in the United States, such as Richard Stites’s important monograph on what he called “the women’s liberation movement,” tended to focus on activists and elites; the sources were more readily available, as was an abiding interest in radical politics, if told here with an original focus on women that included the powerful movement of so-called “bourgeois” feminism.⁶ Although Cold War politics and ideological differences helped shape distinctive academic cultures between east and west, scholarly exchange and travel also began to break down some of these barriers during the 1970s, a process that accelerated in the 1980s and after.

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