Is Putin lining up with ultraconservatives? We’re not so sure.

Is Putin lining up with ultraconservatives? We’re not so sure.

Janet Elise Johnson, Alexandra Novitskaya, Valerie Sperling, Lisa McIntosh Sundstrom — Read time: 3 minutes

Is Putin lining up with ultraconservatives? We’re not so sure.

His hard line on gender and sexuality leaves him room to tack to the middle again

February 11, 2022 at 6:00 a.m. EST

Last month, as Vladimir Putin was gathering troops around Ukraine, Russia’s Ministry of Culture proposed a law “on preservation and reinforcement of traditional moral and spiritual values.” The law, designed to promote “a strong family,” aims also to counter “activities of extremist and terrorist organizations, as well as activities of the U.S. and its allies” that threaten Russia’s traditional values. Some observers interpret the proposal as signaling a shift in which elites surround Putin, and they link this social ultraconservatism with the hard-liners pushing for war against Ukraine.

But a close look at the Russian president’s policies and language about gender and sexuality reveals a more complex picture. Putin’s messaging shows that he is not simply in the sway of ultraconservatives, but that he continues to find ways to balance competing elite interests while maintaining mass support.

Gender and sexuality are central aspects of leaders’ political signaling, especially in Russia

Leaders use norms about gender and sexuality to legitimize their regimes, whether through appeals to liberals who generally support gender equality and LGBT rights or to conservatives who reject such views. Gender has played a particularly important role in political ideologies in Russia; the Soviet Union made women’s emancipation, or at least the appearance of it, into a political project. Since 2013, when Russia passed a “gay propaganda” ban arguing that promotion of LGBT rights was harmful to children, the Kremlin has used statements about sexuality to signal that it’s aligned with conservatives promoting a particular worldview of Russia as distinct from and better than the West.

Putin has been mixing these signals to balance competing interests since he rose to power

After widespread protests over electoral fraud started in 2011, Putin returned to the presidency and replaced this more progressive language with echoes of old Soviet approaches to gender, which combine conservative and progressive values. Putin most often mentioned the “maternity capital” program that rewarded women who had more than one child. Programs like this, modeled on Soviet policies to encourage reproduction, signaled support for Soviet-trained elites who were socialized to believe that men and women were equal, while being essentially biologically different. As revealed in survey data, this take on gender is also that of the average Russian who leans conservative on women’s responsibilities as mothers but accepts divorce and supports women’s equal right to work even when jobs are scarce.

In fact, we found that from 2011 to 2020, Putin made only two gender-related comments in his major domestic speeches that would resonate with the kinds of conservative ideologues who have been pushing for Russia to invade Ukraine. The first was a dismissal of “the rights of sexual minorities” and conflation of homosexuality with “pedophilia.” The second was mild support for repealing what conservatives had labeled “the slapping law” that had criminalized domestic violence for the first time in post-Soviet history.

There is some evidence that Putin is swinging conservative

In addition to extending Putin’s right to rule, Russia’s 2020 constitutional changes included an amendment defining marriage as exclusively between a man and a woman, a provision that boosted turnout. In October 2021, Putin restated his commitment to traditional values, asserting that Russians “must rely on [their] own spiritual values [and] historical tradition.” He also made, for the first time, explicitly transphobic statements, saying that it was “truly monstrous … when children are taught from an early age that a boy can easily become a girl and vice versa.” And at his major annual news conference in December, Putin declared, “I uphold the traditional approach that a woman is a woman, a man is a man, a mother is a mother, and a father is a father.”

However, these recent moves do not necessarily suggest that Putin has sided with this one set of elites. While doling out occasional signals to highly conservative elites and popular constituencies, two decades of evidence suggests that Putin knows his strength lies in his appeal to the broad middle and his ability to manage elites across the spectrum. However pointedly he may signal to conservatives, he still has to manage many different elites and mobilize the appearance of mass support to retain his power.

Alexandra Novitskaya is a PhD candidate in women’s, gender and sexuality studies at Stony Brook University.

Valerie Sperling is a professor of political science at Clark University in Worcester, Mass.