Like Islamic Jihad or Al Qaeda, the “international LGBT civil movement” – although non-existent as a legal entity in the country – has just been judged an “extremist organization” in Russia. Legally speaking, homosexuals and transgender people are now liable to 10 years of imprisonment if they loudly assert their identity. In ideological terms, this judgment by the Russian Supreme Court illustrates – a little more – the shift towards “healthy conservatism” praised by Vladimir Putin.
Spearhead of its ideology since the annexation of Crimea in 2014, the Russian regime integrated in November 2022 the defense of its “traditional Russian spiritual and moral values” in its national defense doctrine. This fight actually finds its roots in its fight against a fantasized Western enemy, erected as a new national narrative after the ideological nothingness left by the collapse of the USSR. To legitimize its war in Ukraine, “the authorities need a narrative on Russian identity, which distances it ever further from the hostile West, allowing the confrontation with the West to be portrayed as a battle of civilizations,” writes political scientist Tatiana Stanovaya in the last bulletin of his think tank R. Politik.
To break with the West, the Russian regime is working hard, as shown by the current debates around the ban on abortion, which is very dear to Russians (the Soviet Union was the first state to recognize this right , from 1920). Already, eight regions have banned abortion in private clinics since this summer – illustration of a renewed influence of the Orthodox Church on Russian regional institutions, but also of the authorities’ aspiration for an even more traditionalist model of society. Moreover, 2024 has been dedicated “the year of the family”…
But the defense of these Russian “values” is only a vast staging, and a pretext to justify the ever-increasing pressure on NGOs, qualified as “foreign agents” and, indirectly, enemies of Russia. ‘State. It allows the suppression of political opposition; the destruction of independent journalism; repeated violations of human rights and democracy; political assassinations… While Russian society is, let us remember, neither predominantly conservative nor religious. “1 in 2 Russian marriages end in divorce; the amount of alimony that is not paid by fathers is estimated at more than 40 million euros; and only 4 to 8% of the Russian population attends Orthodox churches. This moral Russia is totally fantasized!”, recently affirmed to The Express Vera Grantseva, political scientist and teacher at Sciences po Paris. In reality, the population shows itself especially concerned by inflation, the consequences of Western sanctions, corruption, the increase in the retirement age and poverty… And clearly does not have an existential need to claim identity.
But Vladimir Putin, who will be elected in March 2024 for seven more years as head of the Russian state, needed a “narrative”; being a bulwark against “Western decadence” is undoubtedly more within his purview than fighting corruption.