Tuesday night (May 6), at the PEN American Center Literary Gala, former members Masha Alyokhina and Nadya Tolokonnikova spoke about feminism in Russia and the United States.

"In such a patriarchal country as Russia, it sort of determines the whole movement is quite different than the way it is in the United States," Alyokhina said, according to New York Magazine. "So you don't have an equally wide and encompassing and powerful movement as in the United States. There is more of a community of feminists and people who dedicate themselves to feminist issues that stage various events."

Tolokonnikova then explained that while many Russian women are feminists they don't necessarily identify as feminists. "We had a very strong tradition [of feminism] during our revolution in 1917, and after that we had a really strong feminist movement, but it was crushed by Stalin, and after that there is no feminist theory in Russia," she said.