From Nezavisimaya gazeta, Oct. 25, 2024, p. 1. Complete text:
Back in February 2013, St. Petersburg prosecutors asked the social network VKontakte to shut down an online community promoting a childfree lifestyle, putting them on the same plane with extremists and claiming they incite hatred of family values. Some experts think the move backfired, with the increased media attention causing new childfree communities to spring up all over the Internet. Yet there were not enough of them for the general public in Russia to learn more about this exotic concept, or understand its goals and objectives.
So, the authorities decided to give it another go in 2024, only on a much bigger scale. What happened 11 years ago was a trial balloon; today, we are witnessing an all-out attack. Back in 2013, it was a local initiative by prosecutors in a specific province; today, the attack is being led by the State Duma, supported by the government [see Vol. 76, No. 42, pp. 7‑11]. As an illustration of how important this issue is [to the Kremlin], [Duma speaker] Vyacheslav Volodin made an unprecedented remark before putting a bill banning childfree advocacy up for a vote on first reading. In a thinly veiled threat, he told deputies that their chances for reelection depend on how they vote in this instance: “This vote will decide your future – whether you get to keep your seat or not.”
A similar campaign has been launched against quadrobics. There seem to be a whole slew of pollsters sniffing around for a new reason to stun Russians with shocking revelations of how the West is out to corrupt them through their “agents of influence.”
As I ask myself why the authorities are launching such massive campaigns against these little-known communities, I cannot help but wonder if they are looking for a scapegoat. They need someone they can pin the blame on for their failures – in this particular instance, the failure of their demographic policy. But having given it some thought, I came up with a different explanation that seems more likely. I think all these attacks are part of the general effort to produce a state ideology for Russia, and Volodin clearly wants to be appointed its chief architect.
The strategic goal is apparently to transform Russia into a traditionalist society that would be based, accordingly, on traditional values. The authorities want the Russian people to forget all about the information age, with its pervasive “Western influence” and “alien values” –which make people reluctant to have more children – and go back in time. The authorities envisage this time machine’s first stop as the Industrial Age. Just recently, the Duma speaker said it was necessary to “help young people realize that a blue-collar job is a solid career choice.” He thinks that high school graduates should first receive professional training for a blue-collar job, and even if they go to college later, once they get their degree they should still be required to spend some time working in a blue-collar job. When visiting his hometown of Saratov, Volodin called for its [long-shuttered] factories to reopen. It is pretty obvious where priorities lie for the third most powerful person in Russia – and making Russia competitive on a global stage through innovation and advanced technology clearly isn’t among them.
The same cannot be said about a traditionalist society with its rejection of “foreign ideas” and its jaw-dropping birth rate. This would be the time machine’s final destination. The childfree lifestyle, which is totally inconsistent with this idea of a “demographic paradise,” comes in extremely handy in this situation. And if it weren’t for this bogeyman, then they would have come up with another one.
The fact that the ruling elite has to turn to childfree advocacy and quadrobics in search of an enemy betrays a lack of confidence in its own ideology. The concept of “traditional values” is so vague that the people who share them have to be regularly stimulated with irritants – sometimes even artificially produced ones. The authorities are making a mountain out of a molehill because they need an impressive opponent, and a mountain certainly looks more impressive than a molehill.
Two criteria are used when picking an enemy for a new ideological crusade: Western influence and open nonconformism (which is certainly true with respect to quadrobists). The second criterion is important for two reasons. First, it sends a message to the general public: Don’t try to be special, don’t stand out, blend in with the crowd. Second, it shows that the authorities don’t dare to attack groups that would be too large, like the consumers who prefer Western cars, Western electronics, etc. Yes, back in the days of the Soviet Union, people wearing Western brands were denounced as potential traitors: “If you wear Adidas sneakers today, you’ll betray your country tomorrow.” But this slogan would hardly be appropriate today.
Still, no matter how hard all those political consultants try to come up with new ideas, their strategy of keeping “traditional values” afloat by inventing new adversaries is probably doomed to fail. And this isn’t just because the adversaries they come up with do not look authentic; the fundamental problem is that their ideology is weak in the first place. At best, it may temporarily stabilize Russia in its current state. But I doubt this stability would last long. The retrograde nature of this ideology is its biggest flaw. The idea of going back in time does not appeal to most people in the 21st century, when there is so much innovation taking place around us. In fact, this idea did not appeal to people in the 20th century either. Who won in Russia in the early 20th century? Those who pointed the way to the future – no matter how utopian their idea of the future turned out to be. And those who wanted Russia to remain stuck in its old traditional ways, rooted in religion and monarchy, were soundly defeated. The utopian idea of going back in time is not nearly as inspiring as the utopian idea of moving forward. What Russia’s last few tsars failed to realize was that industrialization had made these traditionalist strategies hopelessly obsolete. Their failure to see this resulted in the downfall of the Russian Empire and rivers of blood. I truly hope Russia does not have to go through the same kind of tragedy again.