Interview: Sasha Shevchenko from Femen
Have you ever been given an opportunity that seems to just fall into your lap? That’s what happened to me when we started this project back in August. Yasmine and I found the amazing artist that did our logo via Instagram. Her name is Anna Gorvits and I definitely recommend you visit her page with all of her beautiful work. She works with ink and...coffee! That’s right: Anna has taken most people’s favorite beverage and created art with it. Yeah. Check out her work.
I met up with Anna to meet in-real-life, and to share more about our project with her, and, of course, to grab some coffee. She immediately told me, “You need to talk to my best friend, Sasha.” It turns out that Anna’s friend Sasha is one of the original founders of the Femen movement.
Femen is a radical feminist group that was created in Ukraine in 2008. The group today describes itself as "fighting patriarchy in its three manifestations – sexual exploitation of women, dictatorship and religion." You probably recognize them as the topless protesters that have no qualms in approaching misogynist leaders such as Vladimir Putin.
Sasha was deeply involved in the movement until recently. Sometimes, within the feminist movement as a whole, people can forget the entire premise behind feminism: women helping women.
I sat down with Sasha to talk more about Femen’s origins, and how it has changed since she helped found the organization. Brace yourselves for this story of betrayal within this major feminist movement.
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Molli: Thanks so much for meeting with me to tell me more about your story, Sasha. Can you tell me a little bit more about why you got started? Why did you want to start Femen?
Sasha: So we actually started in 2006. We started to talk about feminism with girls that were in a school organization. And we quickly understood that young girls didn’t know anything about feminism. Most of them had never even heard the word! If they had heard of feminists before they just thought it was a group of crazy women that wanted to kill men!
M: Wow! Really?
S: Yes! Only really educated women in Ukraine knew what feminism actually was. So the more that we started learning about real feminism and feminists, we had this feeling like our eyes had been opened! It was really inspiring and we felt like we had found something very new and fresh. We knew our lives would never be the same. We were immediately so excited that we went into the city and we started stopping girls on the street to tell them more about feminism.
M: So you had never really thought about feminism before then?
S: No, never! I mean, I definitely thought about justice for everyone, but I never really connected it to the idea that there needed to be equality between women and men. But no, I had never heard about feminism and no one had ever talked to me about it. And at the time I was 18 years old! I was not a young girl.
M: I know what you mean. I never really thought about feminism either when I was younger! I can definitely recognize that I have a lot of privilege in my life, being a straight white woman. I actually didn’t even really become interested in feminism until I started my Masters degree, which was very women focused, and really centered around the struggles that women were facing in the 18th and 18th centuries.
S: I think this is so important to mention. Just because you don’t see a problem with your own eyes, or feel that it affects you, it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist! This can apply to women’s issues, racism, antisemitism, anything like that.
M: Exactly.
S: So this was one of the reasons that spreading the word about feminism was so important to me. I wanted to give the knowledge that I had received to other girls. So, this is why we decided to create Femen.
M: Where did you get started?
S: So we started to plan small events, little meetings where we would talk to girls to show them that there is a problem, and we can solve it, or we can at least talk about it. We HAVE to talk about it, actually.
M: How old were the girls you were speaking to?
S: Oh, they were all around my age. 18, or in their 20s. All fairly young. It’s important to remember that Ukraine isn’t like other countries like the United States or France. Our mothers weren’t feminists, our grandmothers weren’t feminists. And they didn’t want to be! After we started planning events and getting girls together, we decided to look for other feminist groups to join up with. In all of Ukraine, we only found about 10! And each of the groups had maybe 3 members. Plus, all of the women involved were very educated, which in of itself is very rare in Ukraine. And, most of the women were also involved with other international groups. The only reason why they were able to say that they were feminist is because they had learned about it through these groups. Basically, this was feminism for privileged women only. So yes, we could see there was really a need for a more accessible feminist group in Ukraine.
M: What were your next steps?
S: So we tried a few different ways. After 2 years, in 2008 we finally decided that we wanted to create Femen. We knew that we really needed to be bright, media oriented, we needed to be connected with pop culture. We wanted to create a more “understandable” feminism. We used simple slogans, and we didn’t want to alienate certain women and girls by using complicated terminology.
M: That’s so true. Some feminist literature can be so wordy and complicated. It can be a real turn off for some people.
S: Yes! It can be so hard to understand, and can even result in being turned off from feminism completely. And we didn’t want that. We wanted to build a community of women who supported other women.
S: So, we started Femen in 2008 in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine. We [the founders] moved from our hometowns to Kiev. And we started to do some protests. And after each protest, we would analyze how it went. Did it go well? What did we do right? What did we do wrong? How is the media presenting us? We were constantly trying to improve.
M: When did you start topless protesting?
S: We started topless protesting in 2010. In the first 2 years we really had this evolution, you know, going from pink, bright and protesting in the main square in Kiev, to a new strategy that we called “sextremism.” This involved going topless, and going to places where we weren’t allowed to be: as women, as protesters and as feminists. For example, we started going places where we knew there would be different Ukrainian politicians, and the Russian president Putin, people like that. We would sneak in by pretending we were journalists, and then we would take off our clothes and start to protest. We needed to be more aggressive and radical to get the attention we needed to make a difference.
M: And did you see a difference in the attention you were getting?
S: Definitely. We also experienced a sort of divide within the Femen movement as well. Not everyone felt comfortable going topless, which is understandable. But we also knew that the only way to get the attention of the media and the journalists was to continue with the topless protests.
M: What happened next?
S: So we decided to stick with the topless protesting, and going into places where we weren’t allowed to be. We really wanted to attack the faces of patriarchy. Corrupt leaders, that kind of thing.
M: And, when did you decide to move to France? Did something happen in Ukraine?
S: So, in 2011, we came to France for the first time, but it was just to do a protest, we didn’t plan on staying. We ended up doing a “euro-tour,” because there were some documentaries being made about us and a filmmaker invited us to different places around Europe so that we could do protests there. We went to Paris, Rome and Zurich. So, we came to Paris to do a protest against Dominique Strauss-Kahn, a French politician who was involved in some sex scandals. We were actually only in Paris for 24 hours, but a lot of French activists noticed us. We ended up getting invited back to Paris 6 months later to participate in another protest.
S: So in 2012 we came back to Paris and stayed here for about a week to protest and meet with other French feminists. It was really great, and even after we went back to Ukraine we were in touch with the girls we met. They reached out and said that they wanted to create a branch of Femen, here in France. Then, they started protesting in Paris and in London.
M: So, at this point they were calling themselves Femen too?
S: Yes. Then, they invited us back to Paris in July 2013 to talk more about the branch of Femen in here. They showed us a building where we could create the Femen headquarters and where we could live. So, a group of us decided to move to Paris and help to build Femen in France.
M: Who were the women that decided to move to Paris?
S: Me, Inna Shevchenko and Oksana Shachko. So, we were preparing to all come to Paris, and that’s when things began to change with Inna. After a protest in Ukraine, she created this fake story that she was being followed by the KGB and that people were trying to kill her. Which was just crazy because we had all been followed, all of us, but it wasn’t anything extreme at this point.
M: Wow, so what happened then?
S: Inna escaped Ukraine and was granted asylum in France. She didn’t even tell us! We thought that someone had killed her or something! Then, when she got to France she finally called us and told us. We were so confused, because we were being followed by people too, but we weren’t that scared yet. We thought that maybe she truly was scared that she was going to be killed and that’s why she fled without telling us. It was hard because we really trusted her, and we thought we were all going to move to Paris together.
M: So, she was lying?
S: Well, I think she was being followed, but I think she blew things out of proportion so that she could come to Paris by herself. Because after she came to Paris and started working with Femen, she began to kick some French activists out of the group without consulting anyone first. I think she felt threatened by other women that she considered as “competitors.” So some girls in Femen start calling us to ask what was going on! They said she was starting to get crazy, like she really let the power get to her head or something. But, at the time, we took Inna’s side. She was our friend and we trusted her. Then, she started to tell us that it wasn’t necessary to come to Paris, that she could handle Femen there. So I decided to go to Germany to start Femen there.
M: And you still trusted Inna at this point?
S: Yes. I thought that if she said that everything was fine in Paris, then I should go somewhere else in Europe to start the movement. We were still focused on spreading the word about feminism so I trusted that Inna could handle things in France.
M: But, things didn’t work out that way did they?
S: No. Well, so I went to Germany, and there I did a protest against Putin. And I mean I was really in his face, I was the closest to him.
M: Wow, that must have been so intense.
S: Yes! It was. And once I went back to Ukraine, I started to be followed by the Ukraine police and the KGB, but it was definitely more extreme than before. Putin was personally offended by Femen, and he started getting crazy. We started to get a little scared. Then, there was supposed to be this meeting between Putin, the president of Ukraine, the president of Belarus, and the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church. We had originally planned to try to get close to them, but ultimately we just planned a protest in Kiev.
M: I can understand why you would be scared, that sounds terrifying.
S: Well, then it got worse. One of our friends [a man] was badly beaten, as a way to threaten and scare us. We still wanted to continue anyways. The police must have been listening in on our phones because they knew that we wanted to move forward with the protest. Then they beat up one of our other friends, a girl this time. It wasn’t as bad as our other friend, but they did steal her dog, and she never saw the dog again.
M: Wow.
S: But we still wanted to move forward. So we prepared for the protest in Kiev, and we’re on our way to the place, when suddenly we are attacked by the police. They were screaming at us, telling us to get down on the ground, and they arrested us. They took us back with them to the police station to interrogate us, and they kept us there for 24 hours. They made us go on trial on a Sunday which actually wasn’t allowed [legally]. But, we were lucky in the end because we had a journalist with us when we got arrested who was working with the New York Times, so that got us a lot of attention. We noticed that a lawyer was brought in, he must of heard that our journalist friend was there too and he defended us. We admitted to being “guilty” and our punishment was to spend 1 day in jail, which we already had, so we were free to go.
M: So you left and went home?
S: We did. But, when we got there we saw that our house was completely surrounded by cars with men that were put there to watch us. That’s when we knew we weren’t safe.
M: Is that when you decided to move to France for good?
S: So after we were arrested we decided to go to Odessa just to relax with friends before we left. After a few days we were found by the police and we were attacked for no reason. It was like a warning, basically letting us know that we couldn’t have a normal life if we stayed in Ukraine. So we went back to Kiev to get our visas and buy our tickets to get to Europe.
M: Did everything go as planned?
S: Well, not really. We had everything ready to go, we started to pack up our office and we were actually preparing to have a going away party that we wanted to have with some friends and some journalists to tell them that we were leaving. As we were packing, the police showed up and said that they had gotten a call that we had some explosives and guns in our office, which of course we didn’t. The police ended up planting evidence right in front of our eyes, and they arrested us again. They did this in front of us and journalists! It was crazy. They charged us with terrorism, and told us that we had to go to a prison for the night to await trial.
M: What happened next?
S: We spent the day in the police station, and around midnight, a man from the station came to speak with us. He said that he knew we had visas for France but, “don’t go there.” It was strange, because he was telling us not to go, but he was nodding his head at us as if we should. I think that he wanted to help us but was afraid someone was listening in on our conversation.
M: So he was trying to help you?
S: Exactly. Then he let us go, and told us that we “needed to come back tomorrow,” but all the while trying to urge us to leave Ukraine. We left the station and we knew that we needed to try to escape.
M: Were you scared that you were being followed?
S: Yes. It was pretty complicated. We changed cars a bunch of times to try to get to the airport. We were scared, and we knew we didn’t have enough money to get tickets so last minute. We finally did get the money together, and we made it to Paris.
M: What happened next?
S: We got to Paris and Inna and some other French activists met me. They weren’t very welcoming, even after everything I had just gone through in Ukraine. They told me that I shouldn’t be here in Paris, that I should have gone somewhere else in Europe, that I was their competitor now. This is crazy! I helped Inna found the Femen movement, and I helped her get things started in Paris. Now, I’m here, scared and alone and she completely rejected me. It was surreal.
M: It’s kind of like the ultimate betrayal, isn’t it?
S: Yes. And so we tried to convince Inna that we weren’t there to compete with her, we were there to help her! That’s what the Femen movement is all about, and we wanted to continue to work with the organization. We escaped Ukraine and came to France...not to eat croissants here! We escaped because we had been threatened, and we feared for our lives! It was just so crazy that Inna was rejecting us in this way.
M: That doesn’t sound very feminist at all.
S: It wasn’t. We tried to show her that we weren’t here to take her “fame” away, we just wanted to help her. But, in the end it didn’t work. I think for Inna, she can’t to be partners with other women. Now, she’s very famous in France, she’s an advisor to Macron about feminist issues, she’s made a career out of feminism. But, for me, she has completely forgotten the principles behind feminism.
S: The world knows her as a feminist, as someone who protects women and women’s rights, but in real life, she made my life, our friend Oksana Shachko and the lives of other feminists in France miserable. She did everything to expel these women from Femen. Oksana actually went on to commit suicide after this rejection. How can Inna call herself a feminist after everything she has done? I mean, you hear stories about things like this happening in other political groups, there are always these battles for power. But I just never thought this would happen within Femen with other feminists.
M: It’s so sad to learn that this kind of betrayal happened to you.
S: We felt a lot of shame and guilt right after it happened. Like, how could we let her get away with this? How could we let her take everything that we built? But, I think we were just exhausted. And Inna really had power over the French press and other French feminists. It just seemed impossible.
M: What happened next?
S: Well we all suffered. We all became really depressed, and I already mentioned what happened to Oksana. It really turned us all off of feminism, too. I haven’t been involved with feminism since. It’s just crazy that Inna is now the face of feminism in France. It’s hypocritical.
M: I can totally understand why.
S: One of the reasons that I wanted to get involved in feminism in the first place was that I realized, wow. I can be friends with women, it doesn’t have to be a competition, we can work together. And then this situation with Inna happened. I didn’t even want to think about feminism or Femen, so honestly for a few years I didn’t at all. I’m only recently becoming interested in it again.
M: What changed? Why have you become interested again?
S: Well, during those few years I really focused on being a wife, and I became a mom. And I just tried to shield myself from the pain I felt anytime I thought about what happened with Femen. But, after some time of doing this, I realized...no, I am a feminist! I miss being involved! And then I was approached by some journalists that wanted to write a book about my story. So I started talking about it again. And, it feels good to talk about it.
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And I feel so lucky that Sasha wanted to talk to me about her experiences. It’s such a heartbreaking story of betrayal within the feminist community, and unfortunately these types of situations happen often, but are hardly spoken about.
I can’t help but be reminded of circumstances in which White feminists don’t want to work with Black feminists, or straight feminists that don’t want to work with women in the LGBTQ community. Why? Why aren’t we all working together for the greater good? If women want any sort of chance at fighting misogyny and patriarchy, it is essential that we put our egos aside and work together.
If you want to learn more about Femen and Sasha, make sure you check out the book Femen - Histoire d’un Trahison, and keep your eye out for a new Netflix series that will be based on the book.