Russia’s War on Woke

Mikhail Zygar

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In March of this year, Russia will hold presidential elections. The contest, like ones past, will be highly choreographed, and its outcome is preordained. President Vladimir Putin, who has ruled Russia for more than 23 years, will dominate the race from the beginning. Every media outlet in Russia will promote his candidacy and praise his performance. His nominal opponents will, in fact, be government loyalists lined up to make the contest appear competitive. When all the ballots are counted, he will easily win.

Yet even though the election will be a farce, it is worth watching. That is because it is an opportunity for Putin to signal his plans for the next six years and, relatedly, to test different messaging strategies. Analysts can therefore expect him to do two main things. One is to play up Russia’s struggle against the West. But the other is something that Westerners will find familiar from domestic politics: decrying socially liberal, or “woke,” policies. Putin will, for example, talk a lot about family values, arguing that Russians should have traditional two-parent households with lots of children. He will denounce the so-called “LGBT movement” as a foreign campaign to undermine Russian life. And he will rail against abortions, even though most Russians support the right to have them.

The parallels with the American right are not coincidental. Putin and his advisers have adopted the views and rhetoric of conservative American firebrands, such as anchors on the Fox News channel. The Kremlin has done so because, by embracing the culture wars, it believes it can win over support from populist politicians in Washington and elsewhere. In fact, Russia has already won international right-wing fans. Conservative leaders across the United States and Europe, including former U.S. President Donald Trump, have praised Putin. Some of them have suggested they are happy to compromise over Ukraine’s future.

Putin’s far-right rhetoric and policies are thus a form of statecraft. By championing such causes, the president appears to believe he can undermine Western societies from within. He likely thinks he can thereby tear down the rules-based international order. And he probably hopes he can replace it with a new, conservative global system with the Kremlin at its center.

THE POWER OF HATE

When Putin first came to power, he was not a culture warrior. In fact, until 2012, the Kremlin was driven by a moderate agenda. Under his first deputy chief of staff, Vladislav Surkov, Putin focused on economic development. Although Surkov was an apologist for Putin’s authoritarian system, he did not despise queer people, immigrants, or women. Instead, he believed that the best base of support for Putin would be cosmopolitan middle-class voters, who tend to be relatively socially liberal.

But Surkov’s theory was incorrect. Russia’s middle class may have supported Putin at first, but as his rule dragged on and became increasingly autocratic, this demographic became critical of the president. During his run for a third presidential term in 2012, hundreds of thousands of middle-class Russians even took to the streets in protest.

Putin won nonetheless. But the demonstrations were a turning point in how he thought about power. He felt betrayed, so he sidelined Surkov. His new chief political strategist, Vyacheslav Volodin, was a conservative ideologue who prompted Putin to focus on enlisting the support of Russia’s poor and its working class, who were considered more religious and conservative. As a result, Putin’s rhetoric and policies began to shift away from the economy and the middle class and toward cultural issues, playing up so-called traditional values and skewering a supposedly decadent West.

One of the first symbols of this reversal was a 2013 law, passed and signed at Volodin’s suggestion, that banned LGBTQ “propaganda." In effect, the bill made it illegal for the media to describe non-traditional relationships in a positive fashion, and it banned gay characters from appearing in movies or television shows that might be viewed by anyone under 18. The law was not the only way Putin’s new regime worked to stigmatize the queer community. Kremlin-controlled media outlets also began branding LGBTQ people as both dangerous to society and inherently sinful. In August 2013, for example, Dmitry Kiselyov, the host of Russian state television’s evening news show, demanded that the government ban heart transplants from gay men killed in accidents. Instead, he said, their hearts should be burned.

Putin and his advisers have adopted the views and rhetoric of conservative American firebrands.

At the time, such vitriol was still unusual in Russia, so Kiselyov’s statements created a scandal. But Putin seemed happy. In December 2013, he created a new state-owned news agency and named Kiselyov its head. Kiselyov’s promotion helped symbolize the changing nature of Russia’s media outlets. Before Putin’s third term, state television was dull and sedate. In 2012, however, state broadcasters began behaving as if they were on Fox News, the right-wing U.S. television channel known for drumming up outrage. According to a senior former official in Russian state television, who asked to remain anonymous out of concern about his safety, journalists were told to watch and mimic what they saw on the channel. Kiselyov, for his part, started acting like the Fox News star Bill O’Reilly, who was famous for his angry diatribes. That O’Reilly was no fan of Putin—he once called Russia’s president "the devil"—was of no concern to Russian anchors. What mattered, as the former official told me, was that O’Reilly had "the flames of hatred bursting from his eyes": his news programs were exciting, with fury, fights and shouting. Now, so were Kiselyov’s.

The state broadcaster wasn’t the only Russian outlet to borrow from Fox News. At the end of 2013, Jack Hanick, a long-time Fox News producer, came to Russia to help the businessman Konstantin Malofeev launch Tsargrad TV, a private far-right channel with ties to the Russian Orthodox Church. In the spring of 2014, Malofeev funded Igor Girkin, then a Russian military commander, as Girkin helped lead Russia’s invasion of eastern Ukraine.

Ironically, and much like many conservative politicians in the United States, Russia’s leaders are hardly paragons of right-wing principles. Putin, for instance, divorced his wife in 2014. Putin has not remarried, but he appears to have been involved with Alina Kabaeva, the former Olympic rhythmic gymnastics champion, since at least 2008. They are widely thought to have children together.

Many of Putin's cronies are also divorced. Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin divorced his first wife in 2011 and his second in 2017. Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin divorced in 2014. Arkady Rotenberg, Putin's close friend and a major Russian businessman, divorced in 2013. If these were Soviet times, the separations would have damaged these men’s careers; the Soviet Communist Party was ardently against divorce. But today, separations do not matter at all. Russia has, for many years, been among the world champions in divorce. Its current rate—3.9 divorces per 1,000 inhabitants—is one of the highest in the world, well above the global average of 1.8. (The rate in the United States is 2.5.)

FEAR AND LOATHING

Putin’s culture war has not stopped at Russia’s borders. Beginning in the 2010s, for example, Russian politicians and propagandists began to bemoan the influx of migrants and refugees into Europe, declaring that the continent had lost its identity, culture, and spirituality to people from Africa and the Middle East. “Many Euro-Atlantic countries have actually gone down the path of abandoning their roots, including Christian values that form the basis of Western civilization,” Putin declared in a 2013 speech. Europeans, he said, have been “unable to ensure the integration of foreign languages and foreign cultural elements into their societies.”

Moscow has also waded into U.S. politics. When the Black Lives Matter movement took off in 2020, the Kremlin said the cause was a catastrophe for the United States. "American elites themselves undermine the statehood of their country,” Nikolai Patrushev, the secretary of Russia’s security council, said in an article. "They use street movements in their own interests. They flirt with marginalized people who rob stores under noble slogans." Patrushev even suggested that there were places in the United States "where whites are forbidden to enter, and local gangs will take over the police functions.” Such remarks could easily have been written by the right-wing media personality and former Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson.

Moscow’s anti-woke diatribes have, of course, come to feature Ukraine. In a 2022 speech celebrating Russia’s illegal annexation of four Ukrainian regions, Putin avowed that his country was fighting to protect “our children and our grandchildren” from “sexual deviation” and “satanism.” In this view, Kyiv is now a vehicle for the West, spreading its corrupt liberal values into Russia’s rightful sphere of influence, and Moscow’s aggression is actually a defense of tradition. It is a way to make sure that every Russian child would have a “mom and dad,” not "parent number one, parent number two, and parent number three,” as Putin put it in September 2022.

In the Kremlin’s view, trans people—the supposed “parent number one, parent number two, and parent number three”—are especially threatening. As a result, they are now the target of extremely repressive legislation. In July, Russia passed a hastily drafted bill that banned hormone therapy and gender reassignment surgery. It also prohibited people from changing their gender identification on passports, annulled any marriage in which one person has changed gender, and deprived transgender adults of the right to adopt children.

At a Russian Supreme Court hearing on whether to designate the “LGBT movement” as extremist, Moscow, November 2023Maxim Shemetov / Reuters

Gay cisgender Russians have not been quite so marginalized. But they have faced heavy repression, as well. In November, the Russian Ministry of Justice pronounced the "international LGBT social movement" to be an "extremist organization" and banned it. This law might seem to be of little consequence, given that there is no such formal movement. But in practice, the move has criminalized any show of support for gay rights and the very act of being gay in public. Today, any outward display of queer behavior in Russia can lead to a prison sentence of at least five years.

Moscow’s new right-wing measures are not just targeted at LGBTQ Russians. The Kremlin has also launched attacks on women, in part by promoting restrictions on abortion. At a recent public event, both Putin and Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, criticized abortion, arguing that the country needed more native-born Russians to prevent the country from being overrun by migrants. At the end of the event, both leaders listened as a mother of ten made an orchestrated call to ban the procedure.

So far, no one has drafted a bill outlawing abortion, and the speaker of the Russian Senate, Valentina Matvienko, has promised that the country will not totally ban the right to choose. But regional governments have started prohibiting private clinics from offering abortions. Such restrictions on private clinics might expand in the years ahead.

FAR-RIGHT INTERNATIONAL

Putin’s right-wing policies may play well at home, helping to justify his continued rule and the invasion of Ukraine. But domestic politics alone cannot explain his war on woke—and not just because it includes attacks on European immigration and the racial justice movement in the United States. Contrary to what Putin suggests, Russia is not a fundamentally conservative society. According to surveys by the Levada Center, for example, only one percent of Russians attend church weekly, and more than 65 percent of Russians say that religion does not play a significant role in their lives. According to other Levada surveys, roughly 65 percent of Russians support the right to abortion. Transgender people, meanwhile, make up only a tiny fraction of the country’s populace. Before Putin launched his attacks, they attracted almost no public attention.

Instead, Putin’s rants appear to be aimed less at a domestic audience and more at right-wingers abroad. They seem to be targeted at Europe and North America in particular, the two places where Moscow has lost the most support over Putin’s last decade in power. In both regions, mainstream leaders who have isolated Moscow are struggling to fight off insurgent right-wing politicians who support ostensibly Christian values. Increasingly, these populist conservatives are winning. And by embracing their rhetoric, Putin believes he can gain their support and, with it, find a way to improve Russia’s international position.

It is easy to see why the Kremlin believes such an approach is necessary—and why it will succeed. After Russia occupied Crimea in 2014, the West slapped sanctions on the country, and Putin found it harder (although not impossible) to do business with his usual partners in Europe. But the continent’s far right remained receptive. The French right-wing leader Marine le Pen, for example, praised the annexation. She has also asserted that Putin is “looking after the interests of his own country and defending its identity.” Russian banks, perhaps not coincidentally, have provided loans to her party. It has proved to be a smart investment: In 2017 and 2022, Le Pen was the runner-up in France’s presidential elections.

Putin’s rants appear to be aimed less at a domestic audience and more at right-wingers abroad.

Le Pen is hardly the only conservative Western politician who developed a loose alliance with the Kremlin. The surging far-right party Alternative for Germany has also been warmly received by the Kremlin, and many of that party’s senior officials have spoken fondly of Moscow. One regional leader, for instance, described Putin as an “authentic guy, a real man with a healthy framework of values.” Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who likes to rail against “woke” policies and the LGBTQ community, has become a committed Putin partner. Orban even blocked European Union aid to Kyiv, aiding Moscow’s war efforts.

But none of these parties or politicians is as valuable to Putin as former U.S. President Donald Trump. As a candidate and as president, Trump repeatedly complemented Putin, and should Trump win power again in 2024, he has suggested he might stop aiding Ukraine. Trump himself has never cited Putin’s policies as the reason he likes Russia’s president—instead, he has pointed to Putin’s supposed strength—but Trump’s advisers have. Steve Bannon, Trump’s onetime chief strategist, praised Russia’s president for being “anti-woke.” Carlson, perhaps Trump’s foremost media booster, delivered a speech in Budapest in which he said that U.S. elites hate Russia “because it is a Christian country.”

For Putin, then, far-right policies and rhetoric are an effective means of building international support. He is, in essence, forming a kind of Far-Right International, similar to the Communist International, which promoted the Soviet revolution in the first half of the twentieth century. As with the Soviet Union, which never practiced communism’s philosophical tenets, it does not matter that Putin and his entourage violate their espoused principles. What matters is that those principles help him gain friends and undermine the liberal order.

Even if Putin’s vision does not come to full fruition, a “far-right international” would help strengthen his hand. He hopes that it might prompt Western states to weaken sanctions, for example, or to cut back on support for Kyiv. The result might be a more durable Kremlin regime. And for Putin, that in itself would be a win.