On March 28, according to Russian press reports,19-year-old Polina Dvorkina shot and killed her father at their home in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia, then headed to a nearby kindergarten intending to kill as many boys as she could.
Thankfully, three teachers at the school, all of them women, wrestled her to the floor and confiscated her gun before she got a single shot off. She was arrested shortly afterwards, allegedly confessing to the murder of her father and outlining her plans to massacre boys at the kindergarten. She is still being held.
Right now the story is only being reported in the Russian press, and I’m doing my best to assemble an accurate account of Dvorkina’s attempted mass killing based on Google-translated news articles from possibly unreliable sources — and discussion of the events on Reddit, where antifeminists have seized on the story as evidence that feminists want to kill men.
In all that follows, please attach an “allegedly” to pretty much every detail I give because it’s not always clear from the press accounts where the information is coming from; it seems to mostly come from anonymous police sources and the three teachers who stopped the attack before it started.
Here’s some of what I’ve found in the press coverage:
- Several days before the attempted massacre, Dvorkina applied for a job at the kindergarten but was rejected, which she blamed on discrimination against her as a woman. Apparently she was not really interested in a job but used the visit to scope out the layout of the school in preparation for her planned attack.
- “Dvorkina” was not the teenager’s birth name. Evidently estranged from her parents, she changed her name from Sofia Kechina to Dvorkina, a sort of homage to radical feminist Andrea Dworkin (though Dworkin, of course, never advocated violence against men or boys). Dvorkina reportedly sees herself as a feminist who believes that men, unjustly, “have all the power.”
- Dvorkina was armed with a shotgun and several dozen rounds of ammo. It’s not completely clear how she managed to get her hands on the gun as she is too young to legally own one. She reportedly had been planning the attack for two months.
- Dvorkina’s mother, Natalia Kechina, is a local TV journalist.
There has been little discussion of this story on the English-speaking internet. But you don’t need a translator to understand the message of this thumbnail for a Russian-language video on YouTube.
Over on the Antifeminist subreddit, one of the few English-language forums discussing the case, the regulars fantasize about the authorities roughing up Dvorkina.
“In Russia they treat feminists harshly,” Optimal_Wendigo_4333 writes. “I hope they facilitate her the same way.”
“Torture her,” added tylcolisse.
Radiant_Original6968, meanwhile, reports that comments elsewhere on Reddit
are full of people making excuses for her and claiming she’s not a feminist but feminism is where these ideas to kill men sprouted in her head. They always claim people like this aren’t feminist despite the movement producing so many people that act this way.
But that’s the point: there aren’t “so many” feminists behaving like this. This is the first one I’ve seen since Valerie Solanas shot Andy Warhol more than half a century ago; by contrast, mass shootings by incels and other antifeminists are so common its hard to keep up with all of them. And of course the incel killers areall lionized not only by other incels but also by more than a few antifeminist ideologues.
Though Dvorkina does seem to consider herself a feminist of some sort — changing her name to the Russian version of “Dworkin” is a pretty clear sign of this — it’s not clear who or what radicalized her to the extent that she was ready to kill very young boys. We can fairly safely assume that Dworkin’s writings increased or at least reflected her anger towards men — but of course Dworkin, however angry her writings often were, never argued for violence against men.
Indeed, I would argue that Dvorkina, and any other self-proclaimed feminists who support or engage in this sort of violence is not actually a feminist at all. As Wikipedia notes, feminism “is a range of socio-political movements and ideologies that aim to define and establish the political, economic, personal, and social equality of the sexes.” Obviously no vision of true equality includes the desire to kill men; the hashtag #KillAllMen is a not-so-great joke, not a statement of intent. And Dvorkina is a monster, not a feminist.
Note: If any of you know Russian, please take a look at the various Russian sources for this post to see if I’m accurately reporting what they say. If you don’t speak Russian, you can do a search for “Полина Дворкина” and use Google translate to get rough English versions of the articles you find.
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Ten’ll get you one that she’s a TERF. And that Solanas would have been one, had the idea existed yet then.
Respectfully, I can absolutely see how radical feminism led her down this path. You’re right that it almost never manifests as actual murder, but there are many layers of violence towards men that it does manifest as, which are ignored or downplayed.
I’m a trans man, and radical feminists love doing violence to us. They correctively rape us and brag about “fucking the man out of [us]” and “turning [us] back into lesbians”. They threaten to cut us out of our support networks if we come out as men or try to transition, and often go on to do so if we don’t back down. They emotionally and psychologically abuse us through techniques like telling us that our desire to be men is born from internalised misogyny and pushing us into conversion therapy that will “help us overcome our internalised misogyny”. They argue that becoming men makes us incapable of being feminist, and that even simply being a man is an anti-feminist decision, because men are the Oppressor Gender and we’re “joining the enemy”.
This kind of extremism has been present in radical feminist thought since its transphobic heyday in the 70s and 80s, and many of the authors who drove it are still publishing today. Janice Raymond had a new anti-trans book out just last year where she accuses trans people of propagating “doublethink”! Historically this extremeism manifested as trying to totally segregate cis women from cis men, with all the problems that entails for trans people, but there was non-ironic talk of killing men even if it didn’t reach the point of inciting real murder. Transphobic radical feminists have also been making concerted efforts to recruit, and to spread the central concepts of their ideology, on social media (primarily twitter and tumblr) since at least 2015, so there are several entry points that this person could have been recruited through and then heavily radicalised.
I disagree with calling these people unfeminist or “straw feminist”, because imo that’s a refusal to reckon with the effects of them on broader feminist politics (especially online), which is especially harmful to me as a trans man because non-radfem feminists will often parrot radfem rhetoric about us without realising that they’re doing so. Radical feminist gender essentialism about men being inherently evil, violent, predatory and abusive is frequently taken up by non-radfem feminists in an uncritical way, and it has the effect of keeping trans men in the closet, because we believe that if we come out we’ll automatically become evil — a belief that is then reinforced by radfem attacks like cutting us out of support communities when we do come out.
I’d also note that I’m deliberately calling this “radfem” instead of “terf” ideology because “trans-inclusive” radical feminist ideology has all of the same problems as the trans-exclusive version, it just puts trans men in the position of being inherently evil, violent, predatory, and abusive rather than trans women. If you’re interested in learning more about this, an acquaintance of mine recently published a deep dive into a “trans-inclusive” radical feminist ideology that was popular on Tumblr in the early 2010s.
Glad those women managed to stop her.
Treat Russian press with a relatively high suspicion index right now though. I don’t think there’s much value in making stuff like this up, so it may be close enough to true?
But I’ve seen a depressing number of folks whose families in Russia still believe Ukraine is being liberated from Nazism, and Ukraine is just attacking themselves for false flag reasons, so…
I’m not super into trusting Russian news right now.
But yeah, if true, I am very very very grateful to the women who stopped her, because killing kids is one of the most evil things a person can do.
I think some people just want to cause harm. They want to cause pain. They want to see blood. They look for an excuse to put that darkness inside them towards. It’s not that they are radicalize, that darkness was already there. This woman was one of those people.
Several days before the attempted massacre, Dvorkina applied for a job at the kindergarten but was rejected, which she blamed on discrimination against her as a woman.
…So are we supposed to understand that kindergarten teaching is a male-dominated thing in Russia? Especially given that the teachers who thwarted Dvorkina were all women? Whether it’s the narrative, Dvorkina’s motives, or both, something just isn’t adding up here.
That’s an extremely terrible situation, and I’m so glad the teachers were able to subdue this young women. That said, I’m with contrapangloss: I’m not super trusting of Russian media. And Russian society is notoriously sexist.
I did click through on the link in Cyrllic but so far haven’t investigated any further. I did see an ad, next to the article in question, for what I assume is a TV show. We see the picture of a young blonde woman, pretty and smiling — whose face then turns into a skull.
@Sage
I read the link. But it doesn’t provide enough evidence that radical feminism is inherently misandrist.
@Sage
I’m no expert on the people who currently call themselves radical feminists. But to say that other feminists frequently assert that men are inherently evil, etc., is just flat-out wrong. Personally, if I thought that men were inherently evil, I wouldn’t bother criticizing their behavior. It’s because I know they can do better that I criticize their sexist behavior.
@Sage: Will read the link later today. As for radical feminists, this is the first I’ve personally heard of ‘trans-inclusionary radical feminists’ but suffice to say that makes me suspicious as the foundations of radical feminism seem inherently at odds with the notion of trans issues.
I agree with previous posters that it is probably wise to be skeptical of everything currently broadcasted in Russian press. I think Russian politics can be very anti-feminist and inventing a feminist terrorist and calling her “Dvorkina” would be an easy thing.
Also, did Solanas kill Andy Warhol because she was a feminist? I always thought she killed him because of some personal issues between them, and that she was a very disturbed person?
@Gatecrasher: Shot, not killed. He was badly injured but survived almost 20 years after the attack.
@Sage
Thank you for posting this. And sympathies. TBH, as a trans woman who’s historically identified a lot with radical feminism (including its gender essentialism), I’m gonna have to sit with this a while.
Edit: re the OP. Wouldn’t surprise me if it’s propaganda, Russian media cannot be trusted at all right now… Or ever really, the country is a fascist dictatorship. But it also wouldn’t surprise me if it’s real. Any ideology can be a weapon if you’re looking for an excuse to cause harm – I think most of us who’ve been in any kind of activism have seen that in our personal lives, TBH.
(I’m not really a fan of Contrapoints, but I’m remembering her line about why you wouldn’t want leftist Twitter to have a guillotine.)
The one thing that rings reasonably true for me is the parallel with mass shootings by men. No one got killed outside the home this time, but the usual follow up statement about a male mass shooter is that a partner/ family member/ flatmate had been killed at home, before the wouldbe mass shooter left to go to the school, church, workplace, shopping centre for the main event.
So, if true, she did achieve her prime objective in killing her father, but was prevented from completing chapter two of this all too common family drama
(Failed attempt at translating a press article. Please ignore.)
@Sage
I’m sorry you’ve dealt with so much of that garbage.
I personally try to leave room for “not trans exclusionary” rad fems existing, because I absolutely leaned gender critical/rad fem when I was in my early 20’s, because I couldn’t relate to femininity at all… and if gender was fake then I wouldn’t be the weird one, right? The closet was strong with this one.
I don’t know for sure whether that stint helped or hurt me in the “finally figuring my relationship to my gender” out: I think it helped, though.
Where I grew up, being a tinge radfem was understandable (but not laudable), but I didn’t meet an out trans or enby person until senior year of college 2000+ miles from home, so literally all my exposure to what I actually was during my teen years came from conservative newscasters and commentators calling Caitlyn Jenner or Chelsea Manning mentally disturbed and talking about how medical transition was mutilation.
Being trans was not an option. If I wanted to exist, I could NOT let myself think about it, because if I did I was all the terrible things. Yay internalized transphobia.
And all the discussion of gender by non rad fems was conservative women’s groups talking about how femininity was a gift and going on about all women’s natural talents and inclinations that I didn’t possess, or well meaning people trying to reassure me that I WAS those things despite me not being comfortable with them.
It was isolating as heck.
The rad fems were the only group in my space who allowed for me being able to exist as a human outside gender roles and DISCUSS externally how I didn’t fit, even though they also did do the “but that doesn’t mean you aren’t xx”. It felt validating enough for that time.
If gender critical rad fems didn’t exist, and I didn’t have that one ‘acceptable’ space to question/know other people questioned the conservative social construct of gender I was surrounded by, I’m not sure I’d have made it long enough to figure out I was trans.
It does suck to know that some of the folks who helped me would be furious if they knew what they’d helped me figure, though. That hurts.
And there’s absolutely been a swing from “gender isn’t really real, but sex is and the patriarchal framework of society absolutely is” to “and gender is sex and the sexes are THIS rigid thing, and yes patriarchy is everywhere” at least in a lot of online places, which is a shame. Because what helped me was the reduction in rigidity as a contrast to complementarian bs. I don’t think it would have helped as much if I was a teen now.
Also:
Just because it helped me (probably) doesn’t mitigate the harm it did to you. I’m glad you shared the article, and your experience.
Thanks. Seriously.
@contrapangloss
Agan, so much sympathies.
And yeah, my own experience with feminism has been very different, but also… there are parallels? Because in my early to mid 20s there seemed to be only two kinds of feminism – the liberal/complementarian kind that was basically just giving patriarchy a spit-and-polish with emphasis on men protecting women, vs. the academic radfem kind that hated trans people, porn, and sex work, but also hated the idea that women need and should depend on men. So it was predictable that I gravitated towards the second kind.
In retrospect a lot of my relationship with TERFism was a form of self-harm. But it was also a weird sort of anchor against complementarian gaslighting, because I could look at the the stuff radical feminists were saying and think: “These are real, scholarly, brilliant people who see the same things I do. It’s not just that I’m mentally ill/autistic/evil, there’s actually something deeply wrong with society that most people (and especially most men) have been conditioned not to notice.”
@Full Metal Ox:
The culture is toxic masculinity on steroids. Men are absolutely worshipped in Russian culture. I know patriarchy is bad in the United States and the rest of the western world but what is going on in Russia is beyond anything going on here.
There are women who are teachers there but it is a lot more male dominated than in the west.
I couldn’t edit, so I’ll add this because I forgot to say it before.
I am American but I have Russian heritage and was with a Russian man for 13 years, I speak the language and I lived there for a short time.
That meme up there says “feminist Polina Dvorkina went to kill little boys.”
@ Sage
I had never heard of Baeddels before, but when I started reading your link I thought “Wow. This sounds like an echo chamber or cult.” That was unfortunately confirmed a few paragraphs later.
Any group peddling or weaponizing hate with the view that everyone needs to conform to face the ultimate enemy and the group can do no wrong… well, the political jokes aside, are suspicious at best.
I found this definition of Baeddels on Reddit. A poster asked the question, what are Baeddels? This is one response, from someone called [deleted]:
*Here’s my question: If this is largely online, how do we know that these posters are trans women? Saying it doesn’t make it true.
I’m not going to trust any Russian media as far as I can throw them. Especially about something regarding a woman.
Wouldn’t be surprised if her father was abusive in one or more ways, which would of course color her attitude towards males. Which we’ll never know from the Russian press, of course.
But good for those teachers.
@Kat
I don’t think there’s much reason to doubt that they’re really trans women. Marginalization doesn’t make people better human beings, trans intracommunity politics can be nasty, and unfortunately some trans people are just that fucked up… Just like some cis people are.
And I should know; I’ve fairly often been abused by such people within the community.
True social justice requires seeing us as individuals, same as cis people, including our capacity for evil.
@Sage:
I’m sorry you have had such a horrible experience with feminists. My experience isn’t exactly like yours but as some others have said, it has some parallels.
I am a bisexual woman with disabilities. I had a really hard time calling myself a feminist because while I support the ideals of feminism, I encountered a huge amount of ableism in the movement.
Whenever I would try to address these issues, I just got a lot of ableist push back and “why are so obsessed with disabled people*”. Even though I had told people I am a person with disabilities. And I know this is a society-issue and doesn’t apply just to feminism but also most of the rest of society. But it wasn’t something I encountered among my male friends with disabilities and so that was incredibly confusing for me.
The women in my life are different now and much more accepting, like this site. But it took coming here to finally be comfortable calling myself a feminist.
@ yutolia
I’m sorry you had to go through all that experience.
One thing that surprised me though, and I hope you don’t mind me bringing it up, is what you say about the stereotyping. Particularly the erotomania/violence things.
They’re just not stereotypes I’ve ever encountered in relation to people with disabilities.
Not that I’m doubting what you say of course. Just that the stereotypes I’ve come across were more the other way. The idea that people with disabilities are passive and helpless.
There’s a saying here that sort of encapsulates that. “Does he take sugar?”
But just goes to show what one can misunderstand about people’s experiences. One of the many things I like about this site is that I get educated on stuff like this. So thank you for raising my awareness a bit.
@Alan:
Yeah, that might be an American thing. For the longest time we carted all people with diagnosable disabilities off to facilities where they didn’t have contact with the rest of society. That was until Reagan. Reagan closed all those places because most were abusive hellholes BUT he never put a program in place to replace them. He just turned a ton of people with disabilities out on the street with no recourse and nowhere to go.