The article presents the case of non-governmental elderly care provision in St Petersburg, Russia. In an attempt to fill the gap in existing care research, it discusses the objectification of care receivers and the inequalities between caregivers and care receivers in the case of caregiving under circumstances of non-governmental sector professionalisation. The empirical part of the article is based on fieldwork carried out in 2014-2015 in St Petersburg, consisting of 48 interviews, numerous observations and document analysis.OBJECTIFICATION-THE CREATION OF 'DEPENDENCE UPON OTHERS FOR care and [the loss of] autonomy over areas of life where one had previously been in control' (MacQuarrie 2005)-and depersonalisation (of a patient) (Timmermans & Almeling 2009) are crucial concepts in the sociology of medicine. Feminist scholars have often criticised the process of objectification, seeing it as the source of inefficiency and moral dilemmas in care work (Gilligan 1982;Tronto 1993), and have proposed a philosophical concept of care as an alternative to the 'cold' and 'professionalised' labour associated with objectification (Hochschild 1995;Moser & Pols 2009). Care theorists have largely seen dependency as resulting from economic and societal gender inequalities that female caregivers face in their work (Kittay & Feder 2003, pp. 257-77). The central figure of these studies was usually a socially disadvantaged female caregiver (Sevenhuijsen 2000;Chernova 2011;Lewis & West 2014). At the same time, the vulnerabilities of those receiving care were often overlooked.I find this interpretation to be problematic for several reasons. Firstly, intersectionality theory has shown the importance of examining various dimensions of inequalities, such as race (Lykke 2010) and age (Calasanti & Slevin 2013), rather than focusing solely on gender. Secondly, the female caregiver still typically holds the power in the relationship with the care receiver, who often has even less capacity for agency (Tronto 2002, p. 40). After all, care, being an umbrella term for a wide variety of social services and other interactions aimed at improving the lives of 'socially disadvantaged' citizens, presumes a receiver as being in need (Barnes et al. 2012, p. 151). Thirdly, the few studies that problematise care receiver vulnerabilities (Bruckner 2012;Park & Schumacher 2014;