OPINION
On Nov. 19, Russia's Federation Council approved a law banning “childfree propaganda.” Putin's regime makes a point of advertising “traditional” values, but the mainstream ideology stands in stark contrast to the country's record-low birth rate, rampant divorce statistics, and soaring death rates. In reality, the government is pursuing completely different goals while peddling these values, argues Orthodox archpriest Andrei Kordochkin. In the third year of a grinding war, public frustration needs to be redirected against an internal enemy, and the regime increasingly needs to sanctify and legitimize its grip on power. Paradoxically, the most sincere motivation for the push to have more children has been supplied by the Orthodox Christian church: these children are not supposed to live; they are supposed to die defending the “Russian world.”
One does not need a degree in psychology to see through a manipulator. A manipulative demand always contains a component you cannot disagree with — compelling agreement with the disingenuous rest. “Do you love me? If you do, you will do X and Y.” What could be wrong with family values and wanting to see more children born — and to push birth rates above death rates?
First of all, it is important to understand not only the message, but also its author and, just as importantly, their agenda.
Over Putin's two decades in power, the share of single parents in Russia has almost doubled, from 21% in 2002 to 38.5% in 2021, and one child in three lives in what Father Andrey Kuraev aptly called a “same-sex family” — consisting of their mother and grandmother. A priest from Moscow explains why he has trouble conveying the meaning of the prodigal son parable to modern children: “As I enter the classroom, I understand that almost everyone in it does not live with their dad — they have no idea what a normal father is.”
There is no official information about Putin's family, except that he is divorced. Criticize the U.S. political system all you like, but the Americans will never elect a president whose family life is shrouded in mystery. This is only possible in a society that has completely devalued the institution of the family.
I'll venture to assume that the contrast between the glum figure of a lonesome, aging dictator and Alexei Navalny's youthful, wholesome family could have been even more dangerous than the late opposition figure’s anti-corruption efforts. The Navalnys embodied genuine family values, which could not but have gotten on Putin's nerves. Cain killed Abel out of jealousy.
The contrast between the glum figure of a lonesome, aging dictator and Alexei Navalny's youthful, wholesome family was even more dangerous than his anti-corruption efforts
Canceling history
When I hear talk about the “traditional values” that Russia has ostensibly preserved but Europe has not, I always wonder: if life expectancy in Russia is lower, not higher than in the West, what “traditional values” are these that seemingly cause people to live shorter, not longer lives? Why do the champions of “family values” have more, not fewer, divorces?
Still, it would be too simplistic to declare that “traditional values” have been deployed only to mask inconvenient statistics — the expression is a denial of morality and reality itself. By using the infamous question — “Where have you been for eight years?” — Kremlin propaganda has striven to create the false impression that its war in Ukraine is not an act of aggression, but rather an intervention undertaken to stop the alleged Ukrainian massacre of the Russian-speaking population in the Donbas. This approach does not appeal to human logic. After all, the very same people who coined this question were the ones who kicked off these “eight years” of conflict with the seizure of Crimea, the war in Donbas, and the Kremlin-sponsored “Russian spring.” This question is a way to switch off empathy and compassion, to justify all evil of any scale.
Good and evil have been abolished. The Russian state pays a fortune for contract military service — an amount one can never hope to earn by doing conscious labor — and people are ready to kill Ukrainians on Ukrainian soil for this money. This situation signals not just poverty and hopelessness, but a moral degradation as deep as the Mariana Trench.
Before abolishing good and evil, one has to abolish history. It is commonly believed that the diversity of historical figures and events allows for multiple interpretations. However, what we have today is the negation of history as such. There was never a Soviet-Nazi pre-WWII pact on the partition of Poland, no Katyn massacre of Polish officers, no Holodomor famine in Ukraine — none of these happened, full stop. If Moscow closes down what remains of its Gulag Museum, it would only mean one thing: there were never any Gulag camps.
Self-proclaimed historian and former Minister of Culture Vladimir Medinsky once said that “history is politics directed into the past.” Denying the past, we deny the present. This is why it was impossible to start the war without first destroying Memorial, a human rights group dedicated to the remembrance of Stalin’s Great Terror victims. Alexei Navalny was never poisoned in Tomsk, was never prosecuted, was never murdered in jail, and there was no CCTV footage of him dying. There is also no war with Ukraine — even the word “war” no longer exists.
“We never attacked Ukraine,” Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov says. “The Russian military command has given assurances that the country's civilian population is not in any danger,” state-owned news agency Interfax says in its disclaimer to all news about the “special military operation.” The ruins of cities and millions of refugees are not our doing. “Wallet, wallet... What wallet?” asks the thief nicknamed Brick in a Soviet-era cult classic movie.
In answering the question of who these crooks are and why they hide their true intentions behind the fake facade of “family values,” I would offer several considerations.
Our enemies
In the third year of the full-scale war, the possibility that Russia will meet its stated objectives and win a convincing victory remains extremely slim. Therefore, public discontent must be redirected against an internal enemy — one that might as well be completely fictitious. If there are “family values,” they must have opponents: the “childfree ideology” (paradoxically institutionalized in the Orthodox Christian monasticism), quadrobers (had anyone heard this word before?), and, of course, homosexuals. Surely the rise in single-parent families is their work, coordinated directly from the Pentagon. After all, it's not Putin's fault that the birth rate has plummeted to its lowest point in 25 years, is it? The regime needs to find other culprits.
“Our enemies want to destroy our families and take away traditional values!” declared patriotic oligarch Konstantin Malofeev, one of the masterminds behind the doctrine of the “Russian world” as the guardian of “family values.” But what nefarious foreign enemy was it that destroyed Malofeev’s family by forcing him to marry Maria Lvova-Belova, the wife of a priest and mother of 10 children? I'm not a fan of commenting on other people's private lives. Marriage and divorce are matters of free personal choice. But how can we not recall the joke about the boy who peeks at his parents through the bedroom door keyhole and thinks, “And these people forbid me to pick my nose!”
Legislative initiatives to raise the birth rate cannot have any real-world result other than repression. You cannot use the force of law to compel living things to reproduce — especially in captivity.
You cannot use the force of law to compel living things to reproduce — especially in captivity
The hungry cockroach
Perhaps the most cynical phrase used by “family values” preachers is “preserving the nation.” Since Feb. 24, 2022, about one million people have left the country — most of them bright, intelligent, talented individuals. The war is claiming the lives of Russian career officers, contract and mobilized soldiers, and civilians living in areas bordering Ukraine. Officials openly say that many of them have “no other use.” Information about war losses is carefully concealed because these figures look least of all like “preserving the nation.” The nation is being “preserved” with such fervor that Russia is faced with a shortage of cemeteries and crematoriums. A more fitting phrase would be “Women can always have more children.”
Why do they want children at all?
The clergy offers the most honest answer to this question. Children are not supposed to live, but to die. A heroic death is the best thing that can happen to them. A priest from Moscow argues that Russian girls should give birth before adulthood because “early marriages rid the country of an unnecessarily huge contingent with higher education,” and the country needs soldiers. He goes on to explain: “First, no one in the world loves us — and never will. And second, no one will go to war with us, for everyone is terribly afraid of us.” As another holy father wonders, “Who will fight, who will even stand up for our Russian world if there are no births?” The more children, the easier it is to receive death notices from the front, a now-deceased colleague of theirs said.
“Bring your little ones to me. I shall take them with my tea!” says Cock-the-Roach from Korney Chukovsky's children's verse. The insatiable cockroach is extremely interested in a high birth rate. It even likes children — in a sense.
A time for heroes
Describing the 14 markers of a fascist society, Umberto Eco speaks of the transfer of the desire for power to the sexual sphere. This lays the groundwork for the cult of masculinity in fascism and the ruthless eradication of any non-conforming sexual habits, from homosexuality to chastity. But the cult of masculinity, the “real man,” and the correlation between Putin's war and his idea of God is a theme for a separate discussion.
Obsession with the masculinity of “our side” inevitably leads to the emasculation of the enemy. “We have up to 7,000 Ukro-warriors in captivity. What if we chop off all their privates and send this army of castrati home?” Archpriest Andrei Tkachev suggested.
The fight against the enemies of “family values” forms part of the effort to reorient society — Putin's most ambitious project and a major goal of his “special military operation.” By freeing and arming people guilty of violent crimes, Putin has opened the doors of hell. This was done deliberately and almost irreversibly. The men that you should not approach from behind are being lauded as the new elite. They give pep talks in schools and serve as role models for the younger generation. If you get on their wrong side, you'll get a taste of their patriotism as well.
By freeing and arming people guilty of violent crimes, Putin has opened the doors of hell
A holy war
In the absence of real political competition, the authorities' claim to legitimacy needs justification. Having proclaimed itself the guardian of the “Russian world” and “traditional values,” — which it has invented — the government declares its legitimacy. But it's not enough. Power must be presented not just as legitimate, but as sacred.
“Traditional values” are eternal values laid down by God in the very nature of man, Patriarch Kirill says. At the same time, not all powers that be are sacred — only Russian ones are. Therefore, God acts through Putin, and his war is not just any war, but a sacred one: “Russia is an alternative view of the world, of God, of man. It does not fit into the framework of the programmed system that excludes God from people's lives. ... And that is why today our special prayer is for our authorities, for our army, and for our president.” It's a simple design. But when has Thimbles ever been a complex game?
The Orthodox clergy may appear to be concerned solely with ensuring the supply of essential foodstuffs for the hungry cockroach. But there is more to it.
Indeed, even before the war one could often hear in Orthodox circles that “a woman is saved by childbearing,” “people should have as many children as God gives,” and so on. As surprising as it may seem, these slogans are a bug, not a feature: by no means are they reflective of the Orthodox doctrine. Children in marriage are a priceless gift, but the spiritual dimension of the marital relationship is not characterized by numbers.
So, if all the talk about “traditional family values” is a smokescreen, what is actually a value today?
If I were to look back on what has happened over the past two and a half years and pick out the most vivid incident, the symbol of the age of Putin's special military operation, I would say: salt. Twenty kilograms of salt, sent by a patriotic citizen to political prisoner Nadezhda Buyanova, an elderly pediatrician surviving the harsh conditions of a pre-trial detention center, in order to exhaust her monthly quota of food parcels.
Salt is an evocative gospel image. We are the custodians of “traditional values,” the salt of the earth, once again ahead of the planet. However, as is asked in the Gospel, “If salt loses its strength, with what shall it be salted? It will no longer do for anything but to be thrown out and trodden underfoot by men.” Boris Grebenshchikov brings the thought to a conclusion: “When salt loses its strength, it becomes poison.”