2024-01-10 16:46:09
Right to abortion threatened, repression of LGBTQI+ people, power in Russia is taking an ever more marked conservative turn. The year 2024 was declared by Vladimir Putin as the “year of the family”. Recently, an evening in a Moscow nightclub where celebrities attended barely dressed sparked indignation and disapproval from the authorities.
At the end of November, the Russian president encouraged Russian women to give birth to seven or eight children. Conservative rhetoric set to intensify during this electoral campaign period, with a view to the presidential election next March. But this ideology around “traditional values” has not been a constant for Vladimir Putin since he came to power. It was especially during his third term, from 2012, that this conservative turn took place.
During the mandate of Dmitri Medvedev (2008-2012), there had already been a certain rapprochement between the Church and power, in areas such as education or the army. But before that, the Russian state had other priorities: “Until 2007-2008, the Russian authorities were primarily concerned with economic stability. Then Vladimir Putin began to say that Russia had finally emerged from the economic abyss in which she found herself during the transition period of the 90s and that she had solved the problems of basic well-being”, notes historian Marina Simakova in the RTS program Tout un monde.
Cultural sovereignty
It is also for geopolitical reasons that the Kremlin is investing in this question of values. On a global scale, Russian power no longer wanted to appear only as a state exporting raw materials, but also to have influence at other levels. “For this, he had to find a language that would be his own […] An objective that I call “cultural sovereignty”: a search for identity, different from global culture,” specifies the historian.
For many years, Russian authorities have used the term “traditional values” without precisely defining it. It was only in the fall of 2022 that President Vladimir Putin published a decree on this subject, where he listed a whole series of values: life, dignity, patriotism and even a strong family.
“One of the most interesting points in this list is the idea of the priority of the spiritual over the material. This is the central value around which this entire ideology revolves,” continues Marina Simakova. This marks a continuity with the last decades of the USSR, where the idea of a secular spirituality taking precedence over material questions was very present despite the fact that it was an atheist state.
Fight once morest a “decadent” West
Alexander Solzhenitsyn is one of the personalities who would have greatly influenced Vladimir Putin: “We see it in the sympathy that Putin showed towards the writer. He sometimes directly borrows his ideas, these are the ideas of Solzhenitsyn at the end of his life , when he returned to Russia following years of exile in the United States and began to criticize the West and its consumer culture, and placed himself as a defender of a spirituality specific Russian”, also details Marina Simakova.
The current war that Russia is waging in Ukraine – and by extension once morest the West – is also being fought on the terrain of values, it is no longer just a political or economic confrontation. Against a West described as “decadent”, Moscow says it is waging a defensive war.
>> Read also: Russia “mobilizes the population around an ideological message”
Positioning itself as a guarantor of traditional values also gives Moscow a power of attraction among populations of what we call the “global South”, in Africa, Latin America or Asia. Recently, Russia announced that it wanted to create an alternative to the Eurovision contest, which would be held with countries “sharing Russia’s moral values”.
Calls to restrict the right to abortion
This conservative discourse from the Russian authorities has direct consequences for the population. For several months, for example, public figures have questioned women’s reproductive freedom. Maria Vedunova, a doctor of biology, said in an interview that humanity had made a “huge mistake” in giving women the opportunity to receive an education.
“When we give women education, we introduce a new point of view on the world, new opportunities, a multitude of tasks and that takes her away from the family. Who will then give birth to children and take care of them? […] It’s the death of our culture, of our civilization,” she said.
Words that contrast with reality. In 1920, the USSR was the first country in the world to authorize abortion, a right that would later be withdrawn for around twenty years. Until 2012, Russia had one of the most liberal laws in this area, although following pressure from anti-abortion movements, two restrictions were included in the law that same year.
“This concerns the right of the doctor to refuse to perform an abortion if this is contrary to his convictions as well as the introduction of a reflection period for the patient. It is no longer possible to have an abortion on the same day as we go to the doctor,” explains Liubov Erofeeva, a gynecologist in Moscow and expert in public and reproductive health.
>> Listen once more to the RTSreligion topic on Russian Patriarch Kirill and abortion: RTSreligion – Russian Patriarch Cyrille wants to ban abortions / La Matinale / 2 min. / December 21, 2023
Abortions more carried out in the private sector
But representatives of the conservative movement in Russia want to go much further: the husband’s consent to have an abortion, the obligation to listen to the heartbeat of the fetus, or even a ban on “incitement to abortion”, as advocated by Patriarch Kirill. .
>> Read also: In Russia, converging links between power and the Orthodox Church
MPs also want to ban abortions in private clinics. Some clinics, visibly frightened, have taken the lead and given up on carrying out pregnancy terminations. Liubov Erofeeva confirms that this was particularly the case for four clinics on the Crimean peninsula.
In a Russia which is losing inhabitants every year, “pro-life” activists brandish demographic arguments. However, studies show that banning abortion does not generally encourage women to have more children, explains Liubov Erofeeva. “Today, Russian women are free spirits. The idea of having many children is wonderful, especially when the man in the family is an oligarch or a very rich person. But when it comes to ‘an ordinary family, in a small apartment which will not increase with the number of children, is different.’
The impact of the war in Ukraine
In the context of war, certain clichés are making a comeback, notably the idea that men must go to the front to defend the homeland and that the main task of women would be to give birth to future soldiers. In Russian cities, posters once morest abortion show a photo of a fetus next to that of a man in soldier’s uniform, with the following words: “Defend me today and I can defend you tomorrow.” .
An anti-abortion poster from the Russian “For Life” movement.
At the end of December, an evening of the Moscow jet set, with barely dressed participants broadcasting images of the party on social networks, aroused the disapproval of part of public opinion and the authorities. The evening had the motto “almost naked”. “Organizing such an evening is cynical at a time when our men are dying on the front,” said Ekaterina Mizulina, daughter of an MP and a public figure very active in denouncing anyone opposed to the war in Ukraine.
>> Read regarding it: ‘Nearly naked’ celebrity party in Moscow sparks outrage in Russia
The organizer of the evening, a former television presenter widely followed on social networks, and participants published apology videos following this evening deemed “amoral”. Some of them were canceled from state television where they were to perform on the occasion of the New Year. Russian rapper Vasio, wearing only a sock during this evening, was sentenced to 15 days of detention for “homosexual propaganda” and “hooliganism”. The owner of the nightclub where the event took place, for his part, rushed, on the occasion of Orthodox Christmas on January 7, to show his respect for the Church.
Isabelle Cornaz
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