In the European Union anti-gender mobilizations work against gender equality and LGBT rights. Usually they are aimed at changing secular state policies, but they also target gender studies programmes at universities. In Russia the picture is very different, since the “traditional values” endorsed by those who oppose gender equality, LGBT rights, abortion and reproductive rights and sex education are fully and openly embraced by the state, by the Russian Orthodox Church, and even by state universities and the Russian Academy of Sciences. Within Russia those who support gender equality and LGBT rights are completely marginalized. Instead of defending gender, the educational establishment at places like the Sociology Faculty at Moscow State University produces anti-gender discourse, and not a single state university in Russia has a gender studies department (Sozaev 2012, 9).
Since at least the middle of the 2000s, “traditional values” have become the national idea of Russia, deployed internally as a populist ideology to unify Russia, and externally as a kind of exceptionalist-messianic pose to present Russia as the saviour of Europe and the leading defender of true European values (defined through the traditional heteronormative family). “Traditional values” is a vague term that usually means opposition to same-sex marriage, abortion and sex education in schools. Thus the anti-gender position is at the heart of Russia’s self-identification in opposition to the decadent West as well as at the heart of Russia’s geopolitical strategy to unite like-minded traditionalist forces behind Russia (thereby both gaining international status as a world leader and destabilizing the EU by supporting right-wing dissenting factions in Europe).
This chapter will describe the context that has led to the special role of “traditional values” in Russia internally and for Russia on the world stage. It will then look at what Russian actors – politicians, media figures, activists, clerics and academics – produce anti-gender discourse and how they recycle anti-gender discourse from the West and deploy it to promote Russia’s role as a defender of “true” European values. Particular attention will be paid to academics, since their prominence in the anti-gender crusade is unique to Russia, to the World Congress of Families and to the Russian media, which has produced propaganda for use both internally and externally.
Unlike most countries in this book, the influence of the Roman Catholic Church in Russia is virtually non-existent, as Catholics account for only around 0.1% of the population, and the dominant Russian Orthodox Church has often considered Catholicism heretical. This context complicates the reception of anti-gender strategies from Europe in Russia. For example reports about Polish anti-gender activist Dariusz Oko may be available to Russian readers through sites like katolik.ru or translations of Polonia Christiana in inosmi.ru, the foreign press aggregator; similarly Russians can find translations of the work of the German anti-gender sociologist Gabriele Kuby (via a Romanian Orthodox website), yet they do not affect how Russians themselves address issues of sexuality (Kuby 2010, 2011; Oko 2013). Instead they are read as descriptions of decadence found safely outside of Russia. They become part of what I refer to as Russia’s Occidentalist discourse about Europe, projection onto Europe of negative fantasies as a way of defining Russian culture as Europe’s mirror image.
The Russian context also differs significantly from that of EU countries, even those that also experienced significant changes after the collapse of socialist states. Russia/the USSR went from being a major player on the world stage and the major counterbalance to the United States to being a much smaller and less-powerful country. Many Russians associated the decrease in world prominence with the opening up and liberalization of the 1990s, when Soviet constraints on sexuality were also lifted. Since Putin’s rise to power, Russians have seen the society and the economy stabilize. Putin’s authority has grown even more since his return to the presidency in 2012. On the world stage Russia has lamented the unipolar power imbalance (with the United States leading without opposition) and has been eager to re-establish a bipolar balance, playing a more prominent role. Though Putin’s party, United Russia, originally had no particular ideology associated with it beyond loyalty to Putin, since 2011–2012 the party has increasingly identified itself with Russian Orthodoxy and with “traditional values”. Russia can thus distinguish itself from the United States, the EU and the West as the leader of cultures/societies around the globe that are more conservative and oppose gay rights, sexual liberation, abortion, surrogacy and so on (Baunov 2013; Long 2013; Gessen 2014). In Europe, these are the conservative and Far-Right parties that Eszter Kováts and Maari Põim describe as using gender as symbolic glue (Kováts and Põim 2015).
Several scholars have described the centrality of sex and sexuality to Russia’s self-definition and geopolitical ambitions. Cai Wilkinson writes about the role of political homophobia in Russia’s “moral sovereignty”, while Alexander Baunov refers to “sexual sovereignty as the new foreign policy” of Russia (Baunov 2013; Wilkinson 2014). Chris Stroop traces Russia’s messianic ambitions back to the Slavophiles and suggests that “moral exceptionalism” allows Russia to claim leadership of the right-wing international (Stroop 2016). Francesca Stella and Nadya Nartova place restrictions of sexuality alongside restrictions on women’s reproductive rights to show how “the meaning of Russian ‘traditional values’ is constructed in opposition to European ‘sexual democracy’ ” (Stella and Nartova 2015). Masha Gessen points out that gay people are a perfect symbolic target to be exploited by the government, because gay-identified people really did not exist in Russia until the 1990s. There were people who had sex with same-sex partners, but they were invisible. So the appearance of self-identified gay people coincided with what Russians saw as a failed experiment to adopt Western values and systems of government and economics, which were forced on Russia by the West (Gessen, Mayerchyk, Pető and Verloo 2015).
Several events demonstrate how Russia’s anti-gay and anti-Western policies developed hand in hand. In February 2012, the feminist punk rock group Pussy Riot staged a protest in Cathedral of Christ Saviour, which included language about gay Russians: “Гей-прайд отправлен в Сибирь в кандалах (Gay pride is exiled to Siberia in chains).” They were protesting the close ties between Putin and the church, and they were prosecuted in a widely publicized trial for hooliganism and sentenced to two years of prison under a law against inciting hatred based on religion. Another move that garnered the attention of both Russians and the rest of the world was the ban on “propaganda of non-traditional relations” (i.e. information about homosexuality) to minors adopted in 2013. Human rights activists confronted Russians on the eve of the Olympics at Sochi, which were meant to be a show of Russia’s renewed prominence in the world. That same year demonstrations in neighbouring Ukraine came to a head as well over President Yanukovich’s decision to delay entry into an agreement with the European Union, while flirting with increased ties with Russia. Ukraine’s population was confronted with the choice: Europe or Russia? Russian propaganda – even on the main Russian TV channels – consistently described decadent Europe throughout this crisis as “Gayropa” and played on the punning rhyme that the way to Europe was through the ass (“v Evropu cherez zhopu”). The text was used – with rainbow flags – in an anti-Ukraine roundup on Dmitry Kiselev’s News of the Week. Kiselev, no marginal figure, was soon named the head of all Russian media when it was consolidated into one organization. Another peak moment of gender-related hostility towards Europe came with Eurovision 2014, when the Russian Tolmachev sisters, presented as pure and innocent young Russian girls from the provinces, lost to Conchita Wurst, the Austrian singer who performed bearded and wearing a dress. Live TV coverage in Russia expressed the official shock of all, with the MC remarking: “This win is a diagnosis. It’s the funeral of the EU, a requiem for Europe” (Fomenko 2014). The word “apocalypse” was used frequently. In all these cases, gender-related anxieties are projected onto Europe, while Russia supposedly remains both heterosexual and normatively gendered (Healey 2001).
Discourse emanating from the government and the ruling United Russia party reiterates the distinction between Russia and Europe in terms of sexuality. Under the rubric on “Principles” on the website of Project Network, the successor of the pro-Putin Nashi youth movement, the first principle, the Moral Principle, begins with the words: “We are against same-sex marriages. Single-sex families produce single-sex children” (Project Network 2014). Leaving aside the curious logic of that term, why should it be that this is the first principle and the first line to define Russian morality? Russian morality is defined in terms of what it is not, and that is Europe. This is a typical Occidentalist self-definition through projection onto the Occidental other.
Similarly, the Ministry of Culture sums up its definition of Russia as follows: “Russia must be viewed as a unique and distinctive civilization that cannot be reduced to either ‘the West’ (Europe) or ‘the East.’ The short form of this position is the thesis ‘Russia is not Europe’ ” (Ministry of Culture 2014). Among the distinguishing features between Europe and Russia are two that are linked to gender and sexuality: The West values “aggressive” individualism (with people demanding rights for whatever the individual wants or chooses, including sexuality), while Russia relies on collective identity. The West promotes multiculturalism and tolerance, while Russia sees these as foreign and hostile to Russian culture, where moral values are based on the common values of the majority. Hence Russia’s claim to “sexual sovereignty” (Baunov 2013) or “moral sovereignty” (Wilkinson 2014).
Western multiculturalism and tolerance (sometimes rendered as tolerasty, to rhyme with pederasty) are also deplored most when they refer to sexual morality. The Ministry of Culture proposal advises rejection of the principles of multiculturalism and tolerance, citing a speech in which Putin refers to Russia’s long tradition of collective organic life with other cultures, as opposed to “so-called tolerance, sexless and infertile” (Ministry of Culture 2014). Racial, national and religious intolerance are deplored, but there is no problem with “intolerance of social phenomena that are alien and dangerous to Russian society and its values”. Though sexual orientation and homosexuality are never mentioned explicitly, it is quite clear what Putin and others mean by “sexless and infertile tolerance of phenomena alien and dangerous to Russian society” (Ministry of Culture 2014).
Given the official state position described earlier, it is not surprising that those who might defend gender equality or LGBT rights are increasingly marginalized and othered as alien to Russia’s “traditional values” at best, and foreign agents or a fifth column at worst. A Google search of “gender ideology” or “ideology of gender” in Russian turns up very little until recently, and the terms are almost always found in descriptions of European, rather than Russian society. Yet the relatively new (since 2012) importance of sex and gender in Russia’s definition of itself as the champion of “traditional values” and the leader of an alternative to Western and European liberal democracies on the world stage means that Russia is increasingly speaking to like-minded traditionalists in Europe (both Catholic and Orthodox) in the language of “gender ideology”, those who use gender as “symbolic glue”. Unlike many Catholics, though, Russian actors are completely open about their opposition to “gender ideology” in the name of the values of the Russian Orthodox Church.
In Europe, the phrase “gender ideology” is used primarily by anti-gender forces as a scare-tactic. Russia may be one of the few places where the phrase “gender ideology” has been used neutrally by actual scholars of gender, particularly in the early days of gender studies, which for Russians meant the 1990s and early 2000s. A textbook called Introduction to Gender Studies published in 2000 contains an entire chapter on “Gender Ideology in Soviet Russia” (Kostikova 2000). A Russian-speaking gender scholar in Kharkov wrote an entry on “Gender Ideology” for the 2002 Dictionary of Gender Terms (Khrisanova 2002). In books on the UN and the Beijing conference, she puts a positive spin on “gender ideology”: “Book 1: The UN and the Sources of the Birth of Gender Principles. The book reveals the positive role of the UN in the process of forming modern gender ideology.” “Book 2: The 4th Peking Conference and Gender Ideology exposes the social role and significance of the Fourth World Conference on Women (Beijing, 1995) in the birth of the modern gender idea and gender ideology” (Khrisanova 2001a, 2001b). As recently as 2006, two prominent gender scholars at the European University of St. Petersburg analysed the different “gender ideologies” behind the family policies of Mikhail Gorbachev and Vladimir Putin (Rotkirch, Temkina and Zdravomyslova 2006).
In the last few years, however, “gender ideology” (гендерная идеология) has appeared in Russian discourse to describe the problems of the decadent West. In their Occidentalizing campaign to distinguish Russia’s “traditional values” from those of Europe, Russian actors have found common cause with those who decry “gender ideology” in Europe. Journalists, politicians, activists and scholars describe the threat of “gender ideology” – but only as a symptom of the decline of Europe, not as something dangerous for Russia, save perhaps for a small percentage of the population: gays and the political opposition.
The mobilization of these discourses circulates through various channels: theoretical discussions, particularly at the Sociology Faculty of Moscow State University, in politics, with actors in the Russian Duma and Petersburg’s Legislative Assembly, as well as official organizations like the Institute of Democracy and Cooperation, based in Paris, which represents the interests of Russia in Europe. Journalists in Russia, particularly television journalists, specialize in portraying Europe in chaos and decline. Sometimes the mobilization is channelled through organizations, the largest and most influential of which is the World Congress of Families. These are supported by the state and by the Orthodox Church, but they are funded by oligarchs close to Putin’s circle. The interconnections between these actors and organizations are complex, and they also interact with Western conservative actors, who are invited to conferences in Russia or in Europe to network with Russians and each other or are featured in Russian-made propaganda about gender-related issues in Europe.
Unlike in Europe, where universities and gender studies programmes defend themselves against attacks on “gender ideology”, in Russia the academic establishment is a primary source of anti-gender discourse. Journals of the Russian Academy of Sciences have published several articles by academicians in support of Russian state homophobia (Bozhkov and Protasenko 2012; D’iachenko and Pozdniakova 2013; Shchelkin 2013). Moscow State University’s Faculty of Sociology is home to several prominent pro-“traditional family” scholars, and its psychologists have helped define “propaganda of non-traditional sexuality” (Queerussia 2014). One of the chief ideologues of the Russian attempt to re-establish a bipolar world is Alexander Dugin, who was described at the time of the invasion of Crimea as “Putin’s Brain” (Barbashin and Thoburn 2014). Dugin promotes neo-Eurasianism: Eurasian civilization is land-based and collectively traditional, as opposed to the Atlantic maritime civilization that stresses individual rights and freedoms, including capitalism (Tolstoy and McCaffery 2015). Dugin was Head of the Department of Sociology of International Relations at the Sociology Faculty of Moscow State University until he was relieved of his position for saying that the way to deal with Ukraine was to “kill, kill, kill” (Newsru.com 2014). But at the Sociology Faculty (which is known for its social conservatism), he gave a course of lectures in the fall semester of 2013 on the Sociology of Gender (Dugin 2013). He begins the course by saying that gender is the centre of attention in today’s society and political debates and gives the example of France, where he says many millions came out against homosexual marriage, and people carried banners saying “nous connaissons le sexe, mais nous ne connaissons pas le genre” (“We know sex, but we don’t know gender.” The documented slogan was “On veut du sexe, pas du genre” – “We want sex, not gender”.) Much of the course is standard sociology, but Dugin highlights the differences between pre-modern (archaic and traditional), modern (enlightenment Europe) and post-modern societies. He claims post-modern is an invention of sociologists, a project of liberation that aims to replace the real with the virtual, loss of the unity of identity, fragmentation and changing identities (such as changing one’s sex) over time.
The final lecture in the course delves into the issue of “gender ideology”. It is titled “The deconstruction and reconstruction of gender. The difference between accepting the concept of gender (neutrally) and its ideological utilization (left liberalism)” (Dugin 2013, Lecture 14). “That gender is a social construct,” says Dugin, “is a fact.” And it is upon this that claims to rights for gay and trans people are based in modern, liberal societies. Naïve opponents of such rights in the West, such as the millions who supported the Manif pour Tous, claim that gender is natural and real, but they’re scientifically wrong. Dugin’s argument here is that gender is indeed a social construct, and there is a move in the West from holistic denial of individual LGBT or gender rights towards a liberal granting of rights based on individualism. Yet we do not, Dugin says, have to value that movement from holism to individualism with a plus sign – we do not have to call this movement morally good – that would be a value judgment, not science. From the point of view of traditional values, of religion, of pre-modern societies, this shift can be viewed as motion into the abyss. We can acknowledge this liberal ideology without accepting the moral or ethical value of it. But Dugin says you cannot have it both ways: Once you accept arguments based on granting individual rights as good, you have to accept everything that comes with that, including trans rights and adoption by gay couples.
According to Dugin, to oppose LGBT (he just uses the acronym), you cannot remain within the framework of Western liberalism, you have to have an anti-West, anti-liberal, anti-progressist, anti-modernist revolution. You have to cross out the modern altogether. This will be very hard to accomplish in the West, where we are now seeing Western humanity rotting and disappearing before our eyes. But it’s either this or LGBT. It will be easier for us (in Russia) because the modern liberal system is very shallow here. There is no critical mass – only a thin slice in the media, in the educational system, certainly not in the government. We just have to pull out by the roots this anti-Russian, anti-nationalist, anti-Russia elite and assert our own social identity. But it’s hard, because the idea of progress has taken root. Progress can only be towards adoption (by same-sex couples) and LGBT. We have to revise our principles and return to the pre-modern, to Orthodox norms. Dugin’s argument assumes that the entire audience of students agrees with his position, and perhaps they do. He never has to explain why exactly adoption by same-sex couples is so horrific; he just uses it as code for the worst imaginable future. The same holds for the undefined LGBT.
The Sociology Faculty at Moscow State University, where Dugin lectured, has sponsored various homophobic events. In 2008 the Department of the History and Theory of Sociology hosted a roundtable on “Social Norms or Social Anomalies”, at which the honoured guest was Paul Cameron, who spoke on “Homosexuality and Demographic Problems”. Cameron is completely discredited in the United States, expelled from the APA and censured by the American Sociological Association. But he was invited by Moscow State University and fêted as an expert.1 Also on the panel was Anatoly Antonov, Chair of the Department of Sociology of the Family at the same University. Antonov (2008) is known for his demographic work on Russian families, and it was he who co-founded the World Congress of Families with the American Allan Carlson in 1995.
Another major ideologist who connects the World Congress of Families with the Sociology Faculty of Moscow State University is Aleksei Komov. Komov describes himself as the Ambassador of the World Congress of Families to the UN, and he is writing a dissertation under Antonov’s supervision. It was Komov who promoted the Eighth World Congress of Families, which was scheduled to meet in Moscow in September 2014. As the most visible Russian face of the Congress outside of Russia, Komov often appears in Europe, where he meets with anti-gender and anti-LGBT activists and attacks “gender ideology”. At the 2013 Congress of Lega Nord in Torino, for example, Komov explained to the cheering hall that Russians are against same-sex marriage and had just enacted the law against “propaganda of homosexuality”. He invited everyone to the 2014 Congress in the Kremlin for people who share our values that every child has the right to have a father and a mother (huge cheers) (Lega Nord 2013). In March 2015 Komov was in Sicily for two conferences and explained in Italian why Russians are uniquely positioned to fight “gender ideology”: “We who lived through Communism endured 70 years of persecution, and today we want to help our brothers and sisters in the West to defend traditional family values. This spiritual battle is important for the future of humanity” (PAlingenesi 2015). Komov clearly wants to link “gender ideology” with Communism as a totalitarian ideological system with dangerous consequences, and who better than a Russian to explain these dangers to the West?
Komov spells out this theory in greater detail in an interview for the Orthodox website pravoslavie.ru titled “World Elites, Neomarxism, and Gender Ideology” (Komov 2013). Once the cold war ended, the world elites were free to expand their agenda throughout the world. Various revolutionary ideas have neo-Marxist roots that can be traced to the Frankfurt School (Marcuse, Adorno, Horkheimer, Fromm), which united Marx with Freud and produced the psychedelic and sexual revolutions of the 60s. According to György Lukács, the easiest way to destroy the bourgeois order was to introduce sex education in schools. Instead of fighting in the streets, following Gramsci, they take the long march through institutions, taking over hegemonic institutions like cinema, TV, the media and universities to spread their ideas and destroy bourgeois morality and Christian norms.
If “gender ideology” is used by conservative forces to oppose LGBT rights and abortion in Europe, for Komov, from the Russian perspective, it has an even more important role as a stand-in for Western geopolitical strategy, primarily against Russia. Komov’s speech to the World Russian People’s Council (Всемирный Русский Народный Собор) was titled “Gender Ideology as an Instrument of Geopolitics” (Komov 2014). Though “gender ideology” figures in the title, Komov does not say the phrase in his short talk. Instead he mentions the Manif pour Tous, Prop. 8, financial elites, mass-media blackouts of traditional points of view, the Frankfurt School, Gramsci, sex education and U.S.-backed popular uprisings using social media in Serbia, Ukraine, Georgia and the Arab Spring. At the same time he talks about networking with like-minded groups in the West and touts the film Sodom, which he says has been translated into 10 languages and will get wide distribution throughout the world. Sodom is a perfect propaganda tool for geopolitics and “symbolic glue”. Komov found his calling via the Russian Orthodox Church, through connections with Archpriests Dimitry Smirnov and Maxim Obukhov, with whom he serves in the Patriarchal Commission on Family. He is studying at Moscow State University under Antonov, and like Antonov he is intimately connected with the World Congress of Families.
The World Congress of Families is “the largest and most influential organization involved in anti-LGBT policies worldwide” (HRC 2014). The Human Rights Campaign (HRC) in its report calls it an “American organization exporting hate”, but it was co-founded by Americans and Russians, and while it continues to have U.S. participants and institutional connections to Focus on the Family, Alliance Defending Freedom, the American Family Association and the Family Research Council, the Russian branch has become particularly active in the last five years with support from the Russian Orthodox Church and Putin’s regime. Two reports have exposed the vast interconnected network of politicians, funders and activists behind this new resurgence: Hannah Levintova’s “World Congress of Families’ Russian Network” in Mother Jones, and the HRC report Exposed: The World Congress of Families, An American Organization Exporting Hate (HRC 2014; Levintova 2014). Much planning went into hosting the 8th World Congress, which was scheduled to take place in Moscow in September 2014. The annexation of Crimea, war in Eastern Ukraine and Western sanctions against some of the oligarchs backing the conference led some Western participants to pull out, and the Congress was officially cancelled. But Komov himself admits that the conference that did take place, The International Forum on Large Families and the Future of Humanity, was effectively the 8th World Congress of Families: “Officially it isn’t the World Congress of Families, but in reality all the same people who wanted to come came to it” (Komov 2015). The forum took place partly inside the Kremlin and partly at the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, with the clear support of both Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church. Sponsors included Vladimir Yakunin, the CEO of Russian railways, who was prominent in the Sochi building projects and runs the Center for National Glory (Центр национальной славы) and the Andrey the First-Called Foundation (Фонд Андрея Первозванного). Yakunin’s wife, Natalia Yakunina, is the head of a charity organization called the Sanctity of Motherhood (Святость материнства). Another oligarch-sponsor was Konstantin Malofeev, who founded several investment funds, is on the board of the “Safe Internet League” and runs the St. Basil the Great Charitable Foundation (Благотворительный фонд Святителя Василия Великого). Yakunin and Malofeev are both on Western sanctions lists.
Invitees to the conference included not only U.S. anti-LGBT activists like Brian Brown of NOM and Scott Lively, who is widely thought to be behind Uganda’s anti-gay legislation, but also many of the activists in the anti-gender ideology movement in Europe. The Russian Internet organization Shaltai-boltai leaked some documents associated with the conference, including a list of invited guests and who was paying their way (Feder and Armitage 2014; Shaltai-boltai 2014). The list includes representatives from Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Moldova, Montenegro, Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Spain and Ukraine, just to list the European countries. Names known to be connected to the “anti-gender ideology” movement include Aymeric Chauprade of the National Front, Elias Kuby (Gabriele Kuby’s son) and Marijo Živković from Croatia.
The document adopted at the end of the conference, “An Urgent Appeal to the Nations of the World”, does not mention “gender ideology”, though the Russian version does denounce the “ideologized, state-supported interference in the private lives of people in the attempt to force on the majority the specific sexual preferences of the minority” (World Congress of Families 2014). Instead, the appeal criticizes a closely related phenomenon that gets more attention in the Russian projection of Europe’s demise: post-modernism. “We regretfully observe the systemic policy pursued by the ruling elite in the developed countries of the world in order to implement the ‘theory of the post-modern society’ – in essence, a ‘society of unrestrained consumerism’, a policy of creating a society of individuals who are absolutely unconcerned about the future and who are focused only on satisfying their selfish desires of the moment.” This standard Occidentalist language sounds a lot like Dugin.
Yet another connection between the Forum and the European attacks on “gender ideology” can be found in a slickly made propaganda film that premiered at the conference: Sodom (Mamontov 2014). Hosted by Arkady Mamontov, one of Russian TV’s most homophobic anchors, who had previously made a “documentary” to smear Pussy Riot, the film describes the horrors of gay life in the United States, Europe and elsewhere, where pro-gay policies wreak havoc. European participants include Italians Luca di Tolve, who claims to have been cured of both AIDS and his homosexuality by prayer, and Barbara Bianchi, who says her child’s school sent her forms with “parent 1” and “parent 2” instead of mother and father; Evgenii Martens, who was imprisoned in Germany because he refused to let his daughter take sex education in school; and Gabrielle Kuby herself. Kuby criticizes Hillary Clinton’s declaration that gay rights are human rights and the U.S. promotion of gay rights abroad, which Kuby claims is supported by billionaire elites. Kuby is well-known to the “traditional family” supporters in Russia. In fact, the top hit on “gender ideology” in Russian is a translation of her 2008 article, “Gender Mainstreaming – The Secret Revolution” (Kuby 2011).
A second “documentary” featuring Komov appeared in June 2015, this time focused on Europe: Gender Politics/Policies in Europe, Only the Facts. A Documentary Film (Гендерная политика в Европе, только факты. Документальный фильм) (Prokopenko 2015). Most of the focus in this Occidentalizing “documentary” is on gender and sexuality and the horrors Europe’s gender policies wreak on straight citizens. Across Europe children are given books that include same-sex parents. This, says Komov, is a plot to disorient people and make them isolated, the better to control them. Children are raised not as male or female, but as neuter. It all began with “gender theory” from the United States, which holds that sex depends not on how you are born, but how you are raised. The problems began with the Beijing Conference in 1995. Komov brings up his favourite point that there is no democracy in Europe, which was demonstrated when millions went out into the streets for the Manif pour Tous against marriage and adoption by same-sex couples, but their wishes were ignored by the government. This second documentary, though it focuses on Europe and uses the title “Gender Politics/Gender Policy”, appears to be aimed at a Russian audience only. It interweaves material of specifically Russian concern (juvenile justice, orphanages, inferiority complexes vis-à-vis Europe) and is not translated or promoted to an international audience. Yet it does demonstrate how the Occidentalist vision of the spectre of “gender theory” and its excesses in Europe can be used to gin up support for Russia and work against Europe.
Anti-gender and anti-LGBT ideology is not restricted to academia, media propaganda and Occidentalizing projections abroad. Politicians have enacted laws restricting the rights of queer people in Russia, and state homophobia is presumed to promote social homophobia and violence. The best-known promoter of homophobic Russian laws is Vitaly Milonov, member of the Legislative Assembly of Saint Petersburg. He spearheaded the adoption of the anti-propaganda law in Petersburg. It had been adopted in several Russian cities before then, but the campaign to introduce the law in Russia’s second capital from November 2011 to March 2012 attracted the most international outcry. That law banned “propaganda of sodomy, lesbianism, bisexualism, and transgenderness among minors”. Milonov has also threatened to file lawsuits against Madonna and Lady Gaga, among other publicity stunts.
At the federal level the law against “homosexual propaganda” was sponsored by Elena Mizulina, Chair of the Duma Committee on Family, Women and Children’s Affairs. The federal law, as adopted in June 2013, was more vaguely worded than the first draft. It banned “Propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations”. Mizulina’s colleague, Olga Batalina, introduced the “Law of Bastards” or the “Dima Yakovlev Law”, which restricted adoption of Russian orphans in countries that allow marriage for same-sex couples. (This law was created in response to the U.S. Magnitsky List, which sanctioned a small number of Russian politicians, though it’s hard to see the connection.)
In June 2013 Mizulina invited five Catholic activists from France, to explain the dangers of gay marriage in the Duma.2 Their visit was funded by Konstantin Malofeev’s St. Basil the Great Foundation. Aymeric Chauprade praised the Patriarch for having been moved by LMPT, and Fabrice Sorlin hoped that “Russia, which had saved Europe from being destroyed at various times in the past, would be able to save European civilization from ‘suicide’ ” (Sokolova 2013). In July of the same year, Mizulina and Batalina went to Paris to the Institute of Democracy and Cooperation, run by Natalia Narochnitskaya, to attend a conference on “La défense de la famille et des droits de l’enfant: une lutte commune en Russie et en Europe” (Defense of the family and the rights of children: a common struggle in Russia and Europe) (Institute of Democracy and Cooperation 2013). Apparently some supporters of the Manif pour Tous asked Russia to save French democracy: demonstrators stood in front of the Russian Embassy in Paris with Manif pour Tous flags and a sign that read, “S.O.S. Russie: la démocratie française est en danger!” (Help, Russia: French democracy is in danger!)” (Gofman 2013).
Narochnitskaya, Mizulina and Batalina later appeared at a meeting in Leipzig in November 2013. It was sponsored by Jürgen Elsässer’s right-wing Compact Magazine, which was created “to counter anti-Russia, anti-Putin propaganda” (Compact Magazine 2014). The meeting’s title: “For the future of the family: Are the European nations under threat of disappearing?” (Lichert 2013). Der Spiegel called it a “German jamboree for homophobes and populists” (Langer 2013). Various Far-Right figures attended, and a robust group of protesters, mostly anti-Fascist Germans, disrupted the meeting. In Russia they were all branded as violent LGBT activists. Wanja Kilber, a gay Russian who lives in Berlin, did interrupt Mizulina with a rainbow flag and red paint on his hands, saying she has the blood of LGBT victims on her hands, but he was taken out and she kept speaking. Nevertheless, Narochnitskaya lamented the violence of the aggressive and violent political gays of the West (gay.ru 2013).
Another meeting, this one kept secret, was held in Vienna in June 2014 and funded by Konstantin Malofeev (Odehnal 2014). Right-wing politicians from Europe like HC Strache (Austria’s Far-Right FPÖ) and Marion Marechal-Le Pen (France’s Front National) were feted in Vienna’s Palais Liechtenstein, where special guests included Ilya Glazunov and Alexander Dugin. The gay lobby and the dangers of European liberalism were discussed.
More French activists and politicians visited Russia. Marine le Pen was in Russia in 2013 and gave a talk at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations in which she discussed “gender theory” (le Pen 2013). According to her, the EU is “forcing gender theory on us, forcing same sex marriage and adoption”. “Gender theory” came to Europe from the United States, and now we have to explain to children that they have no sex, everything is unisex, and father may wear a dress. A year after the 2013 delegation of French visited the Duma, a second delegation of French Catholics associated with LMPT were invited to Moscow by the Patriarchate of the Russian Orthodox Church (Poujol 2014). Russian coverage pointed out that the delegates consider Russia “one of the few countries in the Christian world which has at the state and societal level announced that it will defend the natural laws of development of human personality” (Riabykh 2014).
Not just people, but information and symbols circulate back to Russia as well, as two incidents in the summer of 2015 show. After the U.S. Supreme Court struck down bans on same-sex marriage and Facebook was awash in rainbow flags, a Russian graphic designer created a tool to allow Russians to overlay their profile pictures with the Russian flag instead (Seddon 2015). That same summer, Russians in Putin’s United Russia party decided to stage a celebration of straight marriage with a march of heterosexuals on a day of traditional family celebrations, August 8. The Moscow leader of United Russia, Alexei Lisovenko, claimed LMPT had granted them permission to use the flag, to which they added one child and the hashtag #НастоящаяСемья (RealFamily). Lisovenko explained the action this way: “This is our answer to same sex marriage, to this mockery of the concept of family. We have to be aware of the gay-fever in our country and support traditional values” (Ivushkina 2015). Buzzfeed discovered that there was no such permission granted. A spokesman for LMPT claimed that they would never agree to partner with a political party and “we disagree with the way they use our flag” (Armitage and Senecot 2015).
Though there have been ostensibly secular and politically motivated opponents of gender and LGBT rights in Russia, most active promoters of anti-gender and anti-LGBT ideology have been directly connected to the Russian Orthodox Church. The ROC has increasingly lobbied on the international stage and increasingly cooperated with the Vatican against LGBT rights. After meeting with the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity in 2011, Patriarch Kirill stated that “the Russian Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church already now can closely interact in the areas where their positions coincide, such as the protection of traditional Christian values in Europe … [which] can provide a basis for further development of cooperation using the platforms provided by international organizations: the United Nations, the OSCE, the EU bodies” (Sozaev 2012, 11). The ROC successfully lobbied to have “traditional values” included in discussions of human rights at the UN Human Rights Council (Sozaev 2012, 12). Patriarch Kirill has even gone so far as to accuse human rights defenders of “the global heresy of anthropolatry” (человекопоклонничество), since they put human rights above God’s will (Interfax 2016). Cooperation between the ROC and the Vatican led to the meeting in Havana between Patriarch Kirill and Pope Francis in February 2016 and their adoption of a joint resolution, one of the main points of which was a defence of marriage against comparison with same-sex unions (Vatican Radio 2016).
In Russia, the government, the ruling party, the oligarchs, the state church, the state educational and scholarly establishment and the media all speak with one voice. There is no dialogue, and there is no attempt to hide the sources of anti-gender ideology. Russian activists recycle anti-gender propaganda from Europe and find common ground with the Vatican and right-wing parties and activists in the EU and the United States. The law against propaganda of non-traditional sexuality muzzles Russian pro-equality and pro-LGBT voices, and Russia presents itself as the defender of European values, including democracy, by marginalizing human rights claims and challenging them at the UN. Anti-gender forces in Europe and the United States cheer Russia’s position as the saviour of European civilization from suicide.3 The anti-gender position dovetails all too well with Russian Occidentalism, Russian exceptionalism and Russia’s geopolitical ambitions to be the world leader in “traditional values”. Any opposition to “traditional values” within Russia can be labelled as anti-Russian, and any support for those labeled “non-traditional” will also be seen as meddling in Russian affairs and attempting to undermine Russia’s sexual sovereignty.4 This situation is not likely to change soon, and Russia’s global influence will continue to include support for anti-gender activism – moral, political and financial – in Europe and elsewhere.
1.The appearance of a discredited American “expert” is reminiscent of Judith Reisman’s visit to Croatia to speak against sex education (see the chapter on Croatia in this volume). Cameron also visited Croatia at the invitation of the Baptist Church to speak against gay rights on the eve of the referendum against marriage (Komanović 2013).
2.François Legrier (Mouvement Catholique des Familles), Hugues Revel (Catholiques en Campagne), Odile Tequi (Alliance Vita), Fabrice Sorlin (Dies Irae) and Aymeric Chauprade (then of the Front National).
3.US conservatives who have praised Russia’s anti-propaganda law include Alan Keyes, Scott Lively, Brian Brown, Larry Jacobs, Bryan Fischer, Franklin Graham and Patrick Buchanan.
4.Several NGOs promoting LGBT rights in Russia have been forced to register as “foreign agents”. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs criticized the British Embassy for its support of an LGBT film festival, calling it “an attempt to break down Russia’s traditional, moral and family values” (Moscow Times 2016).
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