Some things seem simply to fall into our lives at right moments, and when they do we feel we have been given a gift, a task to do, perhaps a specific challenge. This project was one of those things for me. Now at its completion, I feel an overwhelming sense of privilege to have been given the opportunity to work with these five co-authors and outstanding scholars to produce a study of marital relationships and gender issues in contemporary Russia.

At the invitation of Barbara Risman, professor of Sociology, North Carolina State University, I joined a group of women sociologists traveling to Moscow in the summer of 1994 to meet with professional counterparts there to develop shared research projects focusing on women's lives in post-Soviet Russia. the meeting was sponsored by the MacArthur Foundation and the National Science Foundation. the first day of the meeting Natalia Rimashevskaya, director of the Institute for Socio-economic Problems of Population within the Russian Academy of Science, Marina Malysheva, senior research associate at the Center for Gender Studies within the Institute, and I discovered our similar research interests and motivations. With little shared language, we began to sort out a research design focusing on gender and marital relationships. One day at our meeting we were joined by Marina Pisklakova, a post-graduate student at the Institute and director of the new Crisis Center for Women initiated within the Institute. From that point forward, we all agreed that this project should also include issues of domestic violence. We left the meeting as new friends and colleagues with . . .