In the wake of draconian laws against ‘LGBT Propaganda’ introduced in Russia at the end of last year – namely, speaking with anything but flagrant condemnation about LGBT matters in public – Russia’s politicians seem to have sunk to a new low: feminism could soon be reclassified as an ‘extremist’ activity.
A draft law setting out this crackdown has been put together by Oleg Matveychev, member of United Russia, Putin-supporter and deputy chairman of a state Duma committee. It’s currently being chewed over by the ‘Commission for Investigation of Foreign Interference in Russia’s Internal Affairs’ and, if judged a runner, will then pass to the state Duma for ratification.
In an interview last Tuesday, Matveychev gave his reasoning as follows:
Feminists in the West are all against Putin, against Russia and for the war… Our feminists are simply agents of the West. They are engaged in the destruction of traditional values, their activities are contrary to the presidential decree on the support of traditional values. They are for divorce, for childlessness, for abortion. They are acting against the demographic policy of the Russian Federation.
Matveychev has chosen a shrewd moment for his attack. Emotions against feminism are, among a section of the population, running high. Feminism was already in bad odour with the Kremlin after the Feminist Anti-War Resistance (FAR) organised an anti-war protest involving people from 112 cities across Russia soon after Putin’s invasion last February.
Now Daria Trepova, the 26-year-old woman arrested for carrying the bomb killing pro-war blogger Vladlen Tatarsky last Sunday, stands accused of this secondary outrage against Russian norms. Having been described in the Russian press as a ‘vegetarian’, ‘bi-sexual’, ‘eco-activist’ and a known Navalny-supporting participant in anti-war rallies, she’s also charged, inevitably, with being a ‘radical feminist’. In other words, Trepova is the quintessence of everything the government despises, her belief in women’s rights merely the centrepiece around which a host of other unsavoury, ‘Western’ qualities cluster.
For anti-feminists, Tatarsky’s death is thus a Reichstag-burning moment, ripe for seizing and exploiting. For years, the Orthodox Church, among others, has set itself against feminism, its Patriarch Kirill fulminating in 2013 that it was a ‘very dangerous phenomenon’. He said it proclaimed a ‘pseudo-freedom’:
Man turns his sight outwards. He should work, make money, while a woman is always focused inwards towards her children, her home. If this exceptionally important role of a woman is destroyed, everything will be destroyed as a consequence – family and, if you wish, the homeland.
Under Putin, the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), in return for its allegiance, has had a field day of support in return. Competing forms of Christianity have been more or less banned, 25,000 churches have been restored or rebuilt since the 1990s; the new anti-LGBT law introduced last year was cheered on by the ROC. Should this criminalisation of feminism be passed into law, it will be another coup for Patriarch Kirill and his ‘family values’.
But what does ‘extremist’ actually mean under the Putin government? Apart from the danger of being labelled as such, no one’s completely sure. Anti-extremism laws were introduced in 2002 to deal with opponents of the government and have been tightened up repeatedly since. As with so many categories in Russian legislation, ‘extremism’ is a term elastic enough to mean whatever the authorities wish. It’s a convenient, catch-all category to jail anyone who displeases the Man Upstairs.
If the anti-extremism laws are, in Winston Churchill’s phrase, ‘a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma’, so is the field of Russian sexual politics. These would seem at first glance to be straightforwardly chauvinist, weighted heavily in favour of men. Around 14,000 women on average are killed a year in Russia; in 2017, domestic violence – provided it was first-time and no one got hospitalised – was downgraded from a crime to an administrative offence, carrying a fine as low as 5,000 rubles (about £50).
The saying ‘If he beats you, it means he loves you’ is still in currency. Meanwhile an organisation called ‘Nasiliu Net’ (‘No to violence’), set up to help battered women, was, in 2020, declared a ‘foreign agent’ and the following year kicked out of their Moscow premises.
Russian women are expected to marry early or will receive an intrusive spate of comments – often kindly meant – from relatives and family friends. ‘If you are not married, there is no real point to you,’ a 30-year-old, unwed Russian friend was told by her father. She now lives abroad. ‘I just want a choice,’ she explained. ‘Too many women in Russia are told from childhood that any man is better than no man at all.’
And yet as anyone who has spent time in Russia knows, the picture is much more nuanced. Though the facts above may be brutal, Russian women themselves often seem anything but bowed by them. ‘A Russian woman,’ as the saying goes, ‘can stop a running horse and enter a burning house.’ ‘Women do everything,’ goes another, ‘And men do all the rest.’ In a Russian home, mothers and grandmothers are supreme – usually unchallenged – lawmakers, men the most shadowy of presences.
As the writer Tatiana Tolstaya put it:
Russian women often exude such a strong, psychologically overpowering aura that men, floundering helplessly like moths in the wind, are only to be pitied. A Russian woman is most definitely mistress of her household; the children belong to her and to her alone; the family often doesn’t even ask for male advice, or only consults men to clarify a situation: women will do things their way in any event.
Outside the home, Russian old ladies (babushkas) seem not only to rule the daytime streets, but to act as though their legislative limits extend even further. I well remember an aged neighbour who pressganged her way into my flat and told me to turn my kitchen light off: I was wasting good Russian electricity. They are also ruthless dispensers of frank advice. The writer Charlotte Hobson, embarking on an affair with a boy in Voronezh in the 1990s, was warned by a babushka to ‘look after yourself…Russian men need Russian girls to manage them. You’ll see what I mean.’
As for those Russian girls and their management techniques, Tolstaya has this to say. Presenting as a typical situation a Russian male office-worker surrounded by female colleagues, such a man, Tolstaya says, ‘is usually spoiled’ and ‘receives a great deal of attention’:
Women try to dress up for him… they like to bring him homemade meat pies and salads, they even pretend they are happy to submit. But if he should try to boss them around – woe to him. If women aren’t the death of him, then at least they are always capable of arranging some quiet, legally unassailable sabotage.
Anyone who has lived for long periods in Russia knows the truth of these words. ‘Legally unassailable’ such manoeuvres may not be much longer, but one wishes the women of FAR and their ilk the best of British luck in whatever act of quiet sabotage they are currently planning for Oleg Matveychev and his dismal new draft law.
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