Putin’s “Year of the Family”

According to Russian sociologists, the “demographic crisis” that has haunted Russia since its colossal losses in World War II^[6] reached the level of a “demographic Chernobyl” after the Soviet Union’s collapse.^[7] From 1993 to 2023, Russia’s population has, in fact, declined by over 4,000,000 people.^[8] Exacerbated by emigration trends, war efforts, and declining birth rates, Russia’s current population decline indicates, from the Kremlin’s standpoint, a crisis of the nation and threatens Russia’s position as a global superpower.^[9] In this context, Putin’s rallying cry of traditional family values is not surprising at all. In fact, it is so familiar and self-explanatory to most Russian audiences that it does not have to be stated explicitly. But make no mistake. Although the word “tradition” was absent from Putin’s 2023 New Year’s Eve address, advancing traditional family values lies at the core of his current political agenda. 

Using a strategically vague and slippery framing of “tradition” allows Putin’s administration to appeal to domestic and transnational conservative movements alike. During the All-Russian Family Forum’s Year of the Family launch in January 2024, for example, Putin defined “traditional family values” as “strong and reliable ties between generations, respect for parents, care for elders, and our grandparents’ love” and the continuation of “simply normal human values.”^[10] In his New Year’s Eve speech a few weeks earlier, Putin spoke of “a true big family,” “faith of our fathers,” and “one big family” as a metaphor for “the Motherland” and its “national interests…freedom and security.”^[11] Analyzing these rhetorical shifts in context reveals that Putin’s “traditional family values,” at its core, refers to an ethnically pure, heteronormative family structure defined by a strict division of labor, an alignment with Christian views on marriage, and a focus on childbearing. As such, it “does not simply refresh [Russian] pre-revolutionary values,”^[12] but rather strategically blends the state’s ideological discourse with contemporary teachings of the Russian Orthodox Church and the far-right rhetoric of the global pro-family movement,^[13] while evoking and reversing an American Cold War rhetoric of containment culture.    

Originally used to describe U.S. foreign policy in the 1940s through the 1980s, containment became a powerful metaphor for cultural narratives that, as Alan Nadel writes, “equated containment of communism with containment of atomic secrets, of sexual license, of gender rules, of nuclear energy, and of artistic expression.”^[14] As such, the image of an Anglo-Saxon, God-fearing, nuclear family happily raising their children in the suburbs and adhering to traditional gender roles also became a symbol of American exceptionalism, a standard to which other nations should aspire, and a weapon in the U.S.-Soviet competition for global influence. Today, the same weaponization of family values that was once used by the United States to sustain Christian anti-Communist attitudes underlies Putin’s war on the “woke” West.^[15]

The question is not how this happened. We know how. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, U.S. evangelicals flooded Russia just as the country was rebuilding its economy and culture and as the ties between Russian political and religious institutions were, once again, growing stronger. This ideological exchange marked a new stage in Orthodox Christianity characterized by close ties between U.S. evangelicals and Russian conservatives.^[16] The question we should ask instead is what Putin’s celebration of family values tells us about where Russian national and international politics are heading.

Encompassing a wide range of global trends, from anti-LGBT legislation to a growing anti-abortion agenda to the rise of ethnic nationalism, Putin’s “war on woke” positions the liberal democratic West as the major threat to Russia’s traditional family order.^[17] This ideological agenda advances the myth of Russian civilizational exceptionalism by positioning ethno-cultural Russians as God’s chosen people destined to revive traditional family values and save the world from the cultural and spiritual decline ushered in by liberal multicultural elites.^[18] This growing emphasis on the centrality of Russian culture, language, and a nationalist version of history, is what Helge Blakkisrud terms Putin’s redefinition of national identity “from a predominantly civic understanding based on citizenship and identification with the state, to a more ethnic one focused on Russian language and culture, one in which the ethnic Russians take centre stage.”^[19] Used to justify Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, this reframing of Russian identity and mission also finds sympathetic ears in the West.^[20] Putin’s disdain for liberal democracies, coupled with his emphasis on traditional family values and restoring Russia’s “historical unity,” resonates with the U.S. Far Right’s mission to bring about a White ethnostate. ^[21]

Putin’s revival and reversal of right-wing U.S. Cold War rhetoric demonstrates that he is aware of the double advantage that evoking familiar yet broad concepts—such as “tradition,” “Russian,” and “the West”—can grant in today’s political context, 30 years after the end of Soviet Communism and amid growing authoritarianism worldwide. References to the West are kept purposefully vague so that the Kremlin’s “pro-family” battle aligns with U.S. conservatives and White nationalists’ own culture war against “woke elites,”^[22] rather than treating them as anti-Russian threats to be countered. For instance, at the 2024 Year of the Family launch, Putin positioned Russia in opposition to other countries that he claimed were destroying family values without making any specific references: “As you know, today some countries are cynically destroying the institution of the family and common, simply normal human values are cynically broken down and replaced by false ones. Traditional family values drop out of favour in these countries. But we, on the contrary, will preserve, strengthen, and pass them on to future generations.”^[23] Putin’s rhetoric paints the dangerous West in deliberately broad strokes to elicit strong emotional response from his Russian supporters and attract support from those religious and political agents in the West who share his far-right views.^[24]

In this way, Putin’s positioning of the traditional family as the basis of Russia’s national security and economic development taps into a White supremacist rhetoric of family values and demographic decline that has come to define the Global Right’s war on reproductive rights.^[25] The parallels are not coincidental. Since the establishment of the World Congress of Families (WCF) in 1997,^[26] the U.S. Christian Right has worked closely with Russian Orthodox leaders, politicians, and conservative oligarchs to export the idea of “the natural family”—a White, Christian, heteronormative two-parent household with children—across Eastern Europe and the West through a series of international and regional conferences.^[27] Russia’s pronatalist policies of the last two decades are a testament to the success of this cooperation.^[28]

Since the first Year of the Family in 2008,^[29] the Kremlin’s focus has shifted from raising the overall quality of family life through social projects in health care, education, and housing to encouraging women to bear more children by offering monetary incentives in the form of maternity capital and by restricting access to reproductive services.^[30] Russian “crisis pregnancy centers” with biased counseling, mandatory waiting periods, and restrictions on late-term abortions bear, as Carol Mason notes, the unmistakable signs of “US antiabortion tactics and rhetoric” in an attempt “to thwart abortion as a supposed cause of demographic demise.”^[31] Russia’s “traditional family values” rhetoric is further aided by an ideological and institutional alliance between the Kremlin and the Russian Orthodox Church. Although abortion is still legal in Russia, Putin’s New Year’s Eve speech—which came mere days after the Holy Synod called upon Russian law to protect life from the moment of conception, citing the legislation of “многих стран” (“many countries”) in another purposefully vague reference^[32]—indicates that this might not be the case for long. With Putin emphasizing how “important [it is] for us to have more large families,”^[33] the Kremlin will likely continue to try to use incentivized or forced population growth to resolve Russia’s demographic and international concerns.

In light of his recent victory in Russia’s March 2024 presidential elections, Putin’s New Year’s Eve declaration speaks volumes about his ongoing national and international political agenda. With the Russian Orthodox Church advocating for a complete abortion ban and some regional attempts to ban abortions in local private clinics,^[34] Putin’s statement that “a true big family is of course a family with children” indicates that the state’s attack on reproductive rights, including access to abortion, birth control, and family planning services, is likely to intensify in the coming year.^[35] Of course, the speech contains some obligatory nods towards the country’s ethnic diversity: “We, the multinational people of Russia, shape its future.”^[36]

But with Russia’s war on Ukraine entering its third year, troubling trends in the 2021 Russian census,^[37] and the ongoing “Russification” of the nation’s civic identity since the Second Chechen War,^[38] the President’s words about the equality of all Russian citizens, irrespective of their ethnicities and nationalities, ring hollow. Rather, Putin’s current emphasis on Russian historical unity and adhering to traditional values suggests that the Kremlin’s long-term project is that of cultural imperialism: “We are one country, one big family.”^[39] With the ethnic Russian population declining faster than that of Russian minorities,^[40] “one family” evokes the image of an ethnically pure Russian traditional family with “with three or more children.”^[41]

As Russia’s geopolitical borders and national identity continue to shift, Putin’s choice to center traditional family values in his 2024 campaign is telling and alarming. In the Kremlin’s rhetoric, the “traditional” family—that is, a heteronormative, Christian, Russian family with three or more children—is a defining feature of Russian exceptionalism that also becomes the solution to Russia’s demographic decline. While vague and slippery at first, Putin’s revival and reversal of right-wing U.S. Cold War rhetoric, in fact, relies on a purposefully ambiguous articulation of “tradition,” “the West,” and “Russian.” This calculated blurring of terms allows Putin to rally support for his regime from within Russia while attracting the backing of various conservative agents around the world—most visibly, the U.S. Christian Right, White nationalists, and the global “pro-family” movement.