Masthead of Gul, a new St. Petersburg-based magazine written by and for female migrants from Central Asia. Illustration by Sufi Nazar Guli, courtesy of Fergana News. Some rights reserved.This article by Ekaterina Ivashchenko originally appeared in Russian at the Fergana.News information agency, a leading source of information on Central Asia. We are grateful for their permission to translate and republish it here.The first issue of Gul was published in St Petersburg in mid-December 2016. The newspaper, whose name translates as “flower”, isn’t just for women from central Asia — it’s produced by them, too. All of the publication’s founders are current or former labour migrants from the region, who are well versed in the problems faced by central Asian women arriving in Russia to work. In their words, these women face double the discrimination, due to both gender and legal status. Their need for help is twice as great.
That’s where Gul comes in, offering female migrants from Central Asia assistance, solidarity — and the opportunity to voice their own concerns and their own stories. As the publication’s readers are mostly from Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, Gul is a multilingual newspaper — each issue features articles in Kyrgyz, Tajik, Uzbek as well as Russian. Below, the editors of Gul discuss their project and their own experiences as migrants.
Two times a stranger
Not only are the Gul team all women; they’re young women. Some of them aren’t yet 20. The initiator of the project, Petersburg resident Yulia Alimova, has been dealing with labour migration for several years.
