MOSCOW — Vladimir Putin, who has long cultivated an aura of machismo as Russia’s strongman leader, is enlisting women to grow Russia’s population through childbirth and to rebuild his nation as a great power steeped in traditional family values — a campaign that is eroding equal rights and protections, human rights advocates and Russian feminists say.
“Many of our grandmothers and great-grandmothers had seven or eight children, and maybe even more,” Putin declared to an audience of ultraconservative religious and political figures who had convened in the State Kremlin Palace in November. “We should preserve and revive these wonderful traditions.”
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Putin, who spoke by video link from his office in Sochi in southern Russia, appeared on a massive screen flanked by two images of the “Icon of the Savior, Made-Without-Hands,” suggesting godlike status as he urged Russian women to give birth to very large families. Russian officials, echoing their leader, are telling women to start young — at 18.
As Putin seeks to restore Russia’s status as a superpower, his revanchist policies are rolling back women’s rights, Russian feminists say, with idealized roles fitted to the imperial era that predated communism. Women are being told to forgo education and careers to prioritize child-rearing, even as the war in Ukraine drains men from the workforce, creating critical labor shortages
Russia’s low birth rate and relatively short life expectancies have caused consternation in the Kremlin for decades, and many other countries have similarly struggled with declining populations, seeking to encourage childbirth with more-generous social benefits. But Putin has set Russia apart by declaring the effort a matter of national security and tying it to the war in Ukraine.
His policies are being driven not only by economic interests but by his effort to forge a puritanical, militarized society built on nationalism and Orthodox Christianity — locked in a civilizational conflict with the West.
In pursuing these sweeping changes, Putin has cast Russia as the global leader in a fight against what he considers Western debauchery, and has branded democracy advocates and other liberals as purveyors of “destructive ideology” who must be suppressed. Feminists, LGBTQ+ activists, independent journalists and political opposition figures have been designated as foreign agents, extremists or terrorists and arrested, jailed or forced to flee the country.
End of carouselWomen who embody the traditional image, which is constantly reinforced on state television, are being promoted to high-level positions — such as national children’s ombudswoman Maria Lvova-Belova, who has 10 children, five of them adopted. Lvova-Belova, along with Putin, was accused of war crimes by the International Criminal Court over the forced relocation of Ukrainian children.
The Kremlin has called the charges “outrageous and unacceptable,” but also “null and void” as far as Moscow is concerned because Russia is not a party to the International Criminal Court.
Reality often diverges from official policy. In 2022, Russia’s Labor Ministry adopted a strategy aimed at women’s “de facto equality” with men. The year before, a Soviet-era list of men-only jobs was cut to 100 from 450, allowing women to drive trains or work as sailors.
Among the loudest supporters of Putin’s agenda are prominent Russian women like London-educated Yekaterina Mizulina, a popular role model for Russian youth who is the daughter of a Russian senator and heads the Safe Internet League, a censorship organization.
Mizulina’s denunciations have ruined the careers of risqué celebrities, and led to the closures of gay bars and the blocking of LGBTQ+ internet sites. Asked in an interview what she thought about feminism, she answered flatly: “I don’t think about it.” Russian women, she said, think men should come first.
“Many women in Russia feel fine if they’re deputy to someone. They don’t want to be in charge of something. This is our character,” Mizulina said. European countries made a mistake, she said, when they put women “in weird positions like minister of defense.”
In February, Russia’s unemployment rate was 2.8 percent — a record low. Yet women are not working more, according to Rosstat, the state statistical agency, with women’s participation in the labor force at 48.8 percent, nearly unchanged from 48.7 percent in January 2022.
And even as it calls on women to sacrifice for the fatherland, Russia has regressed in basic protections for women. Many forms of domestic violence were decriminalized in 2017, with lawmakers such as Yelena Mizulina, the senator, saying that parents should be allowed to beat their children and that women are not offended by a man beating his wife. Groups supporting victims of domestic violence or working to safeguard reproductive rights have been designated as “foreign agents.”
The Kremlin denied a request to interview Putin for this series. In response to written questions, Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, said the Russian government’s social policies reflect the will of the Russian people and are designed to increase the population.
Putin has restored a 1944 Soviet “Heroine Mother” award for mothers of 10 or more children, as well as an “Order of Parental Glory.” From the Kremlin’s situation room, Putin on May 30 held a video conference with nine large families across Russia who had won such awards.
Making sure Russians have “as many children as possible,” he declared, is “the underlying goal of our state policy.”
Soldiers’ mothers and wives who openly support the war in Ukraine are also exalted as heroes, while those who advocate for better treatment of their husbands by the military are ostracized and regarded as traitors who must be silenced.
End of carouselEase of access to abortion, legalized by the Soviet Union in 1922, has been curbed. Funding for organizations that promote family values and discourage divorce has been increased.
Marianna Muravyeva, a professor of Russian law and administration at the University of Helsinki, called Putin’s ideology of traditional values “very dangerous,” with women’s rights “constantly challenged and threatened.”
“All this ideology is targeting women,” Muravyeva said. “Go back to tradition. Tradition is 1917.”
“A traditional family is a family where women basically produce and work and are abused, the strong patriarchal model,” she added.
Putin, however, sees growing Russia’s population as part of his legacy. “Saving and increasing the people of Russia is our task for the coming decades,” he declared on the video link from Sochi. “This is the future of the Russian world — the thousand-year eternal Russia.”
When he addressed women on March 8 for International Women’s Day, Putin stood by a massive vase of flowers and reminded them that they are beautiful and charming, and that their most important function is to give birth: “You, dear women, are capable of transforming the world with your beauty, wisdom and spiritual generosity, but, above all, thanks to the greatest gift that nature has endowed you with — the bearing of children. Motherhood is an amazing destiny for women.”
Putin, who is 71 and, like many in Russia’s elite, divorced, is hardly a model for traditional family values. He has long appeared alone at public events and almost never mentions the two daughters from his marriage. He has also never acknowledged children from widely reported relationships with two other women, including a daughter from a secret years-long affair.
Putin has declared 2024 the Year of the Family, and in April he ordered the return of a Soviet competition called “Come On, Girls!” in which young women competed to make the best soup, to vacuum, dance, sing a folk song, or answer questions on kitchen chores.
Senior officials have repeatedly hammered the message for large families and behavioral changes in women. Last July, Health Minister Mikhail Murashko attacked “the downright vicious practice” of women pursuing education and careers before childbirth. The deputy prime minister for social policy, Tatiana Golikova, in March said that the “correct” age for women to have children is 18 to 24.
“The earlier the first child is born, the earlier the second and third will be born,” Golikova said at a youth festival.
Vyacheslav Volodin, chairman of the State Duma, Russia’s lower house of Parliament, said: “Girls need to be prepared for adult life by being taught how to cook borscht, because they have to take care of their husbands.”
Margarita Pavlova, a senator from the Chelyabinsk region, in a television interview in November said: “We need to stop encouraging girls to get higher education … which then leads them nowhere.”
The rules on how to be a good soldier’s wife are laid out in the pro-Kremlin Telegram channel “Wives and the SVO” — using the Russian abbreviation for “special military operation,” the Kremlin’s euphemism for the war in Ukraine.
“Rejoice in every day.”
Create a “magical aura.”
Talk to your children. Maintain your beauty.
“Do not spit on yourself under any circumstances,” commanded a post with an image of a joyful woman in a white dress running through a flower-filled meadow. “Your husband will come back, and you won’t be able to regain your former beauty. So take care of yourself at the same level as before he left.”
This pervasive propaganda infuriates the wives and families of mobilized soldiers who are part of a different Telegram group — “The Way Home” — which organizes regular low-key protests calling for demobilization. Members do not have to disclose their names, but Russian authorities are believed to have the capability to identify Telegram users.
“The aim is just to shut us up,” said one small-business woman from the Moscow region whose husband has been fighting in Ukraine for 18 months. “They’re trying to create an image of a very obedient woman, like a slave.”
Women, she said, are being treated “like incubators,” even as men are dying in the war. The Post agreed not to publish her name because criticizing the war is now a serious criminal offense in Russia.
“We are in the middle of the war and they’re calling on women to give birth to children,” the businesswoman said. “Are they crazy? I’m not going to give birth to children in a war.” If Russia wins, she added, there will soon be another war.
“So why should I have babies who will live till the next war and then be killed in this next war,” she asked. “No! No way.”
Members of the “The Way Home” are portrayed as traitors and foreign agents. Yekaterina Kolotovkina, by contrast, is depicted as the model new Russian woman, an officer’s wife, married to Lt. Gen. Andrei Kolotovkin, the recently retired commander of the Second Combined Arms Army.
“If your husband went to the battlefield, you bring up children and you support him,” said Kolotovkina, who lives in Samara on the Volga River. She married soon after leaving school and followed her husband from one garrison town to another.
“I got married at the right time, and I don’t understand it when women in their 40s marry for the first time and then start to think about having a child,” Kolotovkina said. “I’m almost in my 40s. I look good! I have two sons and a daughter, and my oldest son is 21 years old.”
In September 2022, she launched the project “Wives of Heroes,” an exhibition of photos of women and girls whose sons, husbands or fathers fought or died in the war, with each draped in the man’s military jacket. Exhibited across Russia, the project, designed to replace women’s grief and anger with pride and status, attracted Putin’s personal attention.
In an interview at the House of Officers of the Samara Garrison, with its portraits of Russian imperial generals and Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, Kolotovkina echoed the puritanical tone set by the Kremlin and extolled what she called the war’s purifying effect.
Russia had been “degrading,” importing “filth” from the West, she said. “Now we woke up. Now I see this new Russia being built by our President Vladimir Putin.”
Putin’s effort to increase the Russian population partly echoes Stalin, who instituted a 1941 tax on childlessness and the Heroine Mother award in 1944. An intense propaganda campaign urged Slavic women to bear many children.
After the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, Soviet women flooded into the workforce and, in 1922, abortion was legalized, a world first. Soviet women, including a group known as the “Night Witches,” flew some combat planes in World War II and kept the state farms and factories going, and in 1963 Valentina Tereshkova became the first woman to fly in space.
Under Stalin, a 1936 decree declared that in no other country did women have “such complete equality in all branches of political, social and family life.”
But while Soviet women had social and maternal protections, they were paid less than men, occupied inferior roles, and were barred from more than 450 men-only jobs — the list that was updated in 2021 to allow women not only to be sailors and train operators but also to perform various industrial jobs.
Women’s salaries in Russia on average are 60 percent those of men, according to the World Economic Forum’s gender gap report from 2021, the last year Russia was included. On closing the overall gap, with lower numbers indicating more success, Russia ranked 81st of 156 countries. The United States placed 30th.
Putin has instituted family grants to encourage higher birth rates, yet military spending remains his top priority and the war has exacerbated the demographic crisis. Hundreds of thousands of men have left Russia to avoid conscription or have been killed or wounded in action.
In 2023, 1.26 million children were born in Russia, 9.5 percent fewer than in 2021, according to Rosstat — the lowest number of births since 1999.
Putin’s efforts to shape a conservative society run counter to the values of many Russians. A 2022 study of 15,000 households by Rosstat found that 71.6 percent of women wanted no more than two children, compared with 65.3 percent in 2017.
In late 2022, Russia’s Labor Ministry adopted a national strategy aimed at women’s “de facto equality” with men, with goals such as closing the gender pay gap and increasing women’s political representation.
Things quickly went awry, however. A blizzard of statements by Russian officials, including Putin, contradicted or undermined the strategy — reflecting tension between Russia’s need for female workers and Putin’s obsession with creating a generation of women committed to replenishing the population.
Russia’s ultraconservative nationalist Orthodox movement, which has been riding a wave of anti-Western fervor emanating from the Kremlin, immediately denounced the strategy as Western liberal feminist “nonsense.”
The plan meant that “men’s money must be given to women,” Konstantin Malofeyev, a billionaire oligarch, proclaimed on Tsargrad TV, a station he founded to promote Orthodox ideology. Malofeyev accused the Labor Ministry of promoting “Western feminism, the psychology of individual success and the special rights of women.”
Conservatives such as Maria Popova, a housewife from Yaroslavl with 10 children, believe that their time has come.
Hand on heart, she introduced herself at November’s World Russian People’s Council — where Putin spoke via videolink — as “a simple mother of many children” and called for women to stay home to care for their children and husbands, and for a ban on abortion. Patriarch Kirill, the leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, applauded. Putin took notes.
“It’s very clear: Feminism is not tolerated,” said Sergei Guriev, the former head of Russia’s Higher Economics School and now provost of Sciences Po in France. “Putin is sending female activists, female journalists to prison all the time. He’s afraid of feminists.”
In November 2022, Putin signed a decree proclaiming traditional values to be a matter of national security and declaring that the United States, foreign nongovernmental organizations and some Russian groups and people were fostering “destructive ideology” that threatened Russia’s existence.
“They’re trying to re-domesticate women,” said Sasha Talaver, a Russian feminist based in Vienna.
In a Moscow hall filled with exhibits glorifying Russia’s battlefield successes on the second anniversary of the invasion of Ukraine, Maria Butina, a prominent lawmaker in Putin’s United Russia party, unveiled a propaganda film she had made called “Their Women’s Business,” about three women in wartime, who, according to Butina, support their husbands, never complain and rarely cry.
The women from Kirov, just over 500 miles east of Moscow, embody virtuous traditional values, despise the West and serve Russia.
Anastasia Bortsova’s husband is fighting in the war while she cares for her children and runs a Kirov clothing factory, making military stretchers and camouflage nets. Anna Artemyeva, wife of an officer who is in Ukraine, leads a local foundation that sends drones and equipment to the front. And Susanna Anikitina Yungblud heads a network of medical centers that treat soldiers and help military wives.
“For us, our country is our child,” Butina said at the screening. “You should never get in the way of a woman and their child, because we will stop at nothing to defend them.”
Yungblud, after the screening, told The Post that women must do their part for wartime Russia, work hard, not complain, and take care of their families. “I think the world belongs to men in general, and everything is made for men to have a good life,” Yungblud said.
“The role of woman hasn’t changed since creation,” she continued, adding that young women want “to wear a dress and not men’s clothes, to be beautiful, to bear children, to be called moms.”
Meanwhile, Russian feminists are being silenced. In February, one of the few opposition politicians still in Russia, Yulia Galyamina, announced that she was going silent to avoid jail.
Members of Pussy Riot, the feminist punk protest group — Maria Alyokhina, Nadya Tolokonnikova and Lucy Shtein — left Russia and now work from afar. Putin’s main goal is to “rebuild the dead body of the Soviet Union,” Alyokhina said in an interview. “This is not something new, to oppress women. This is an old, old idea.”
One feminist in St. Petersburg, who has been arrested repeatedly by police, said feminist activists had been dispersed and harassed. “People working in activism are feeling lost,” she said. “They feel like their past and future has been stolen. They’re just floating in a timeless, shapeless space with nowhere to go and no idea how to continue.”
About this story
Reporting by Francesca Ebel and Mary Ilyushina. Robyn Dixon and Natalia Abbakumova contributed to this report. Photography by Nanna Heitmann/Magnum Photos. Graphics reporting by Samuel Granados.
Editing by David M. Herszenhorn and Wendy Galietta. Additional editing by Vanessa Larson. Design and development by Yutao Chen and Anna Lefkowitz. Design editing by Christine Ashack. Photo editing by Olivier Laurent. Video editing by Zoeann Murphy. Graphics editing by Samuel Granados.
Additional support from Matt Clough and Jordan Melendrez.
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