President Putin’s Patriarchal Games

Nancy Folbre is professor emerita of economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

The upcoming Winter Olympic Games in Sochi are shining a global spotlight on Russian domestic priorities, including a long history of efforts to enforce traditional gender roles.

More money has been spent preparing for the Winter Olympic Games in Sochi than for any Olympics in history. The project has been described as the single biggest infrastructure investment in the region since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, a statistic that dramatizes Russia’s failure to convert its rich oil and gas resources into significant sustainable improvements in living standards.

President Vladimir Putin, an avid skier, has made his personal commitment to the success of the games quite clear.

A recent Bloomberg News report described Mr. Putin on a visit to Sochi, watching a mixed-martial arts performance and pronouncing, “Here in Russia, we have always valued and respected men who know how to stand firm to the last.”

Hoping to pre-empt intensified public criticism from human rights activists, he officially pardoned thousands of prisoners last Thursday, including two members of the punk feminist group Pussy Riot jailed on charges of “hooliganism” for a disrespectful public performance in a Russian Orthodox cathedral a little over a year ago.

The gesture, magnanimous only in its slight relaxation of the repressive grip of the Russian head of state, was equally reminiscent of Peter the Great and Stalin.

Russian history reflects the deep legacy of a patriarchal system in which the public authority of a stern father figure both paralleled and perpetuated the private authority of a male head of household. (Russian male serfs - almost enslaved in other respects - had the right to beat their wives.)

In old Russia, class could trump gender, especially for women of the aristocracy, like Catherine the Great. But most women faced restrictions on their education and job opportunities that forced them to specialize in domestic work and motherhood. After the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, they gained new rights, and they, like all other adults, were expected to work outside the home. But such policies did little to reverse cultural norms that assigned them primary responsibility for family care, along with a subordinate role in the public sphere.

During Stalin’s era, in particular, government leaders presented themselves as paternal providers, exhorting Soviet women to bear more children for the fatherland and stigmatizing any deviance from the traditional heterosexual family model.

Similarly, Mr. Putin, currently ranked “the most powerful person of 2013” by Forbes, has vowed to increase Russian birth rates. He has allied himself with Patriarch Kirill, head of the Russian Orthodox Church, who labels feminism a dangerous phenomenon that could destroy Russia and explains that “woman must be focused inwards, where her children are, where her home is.”

The head of the government’s Committee on Family, Women and Children has publicly stated that procreation should be seen as the sole purpose of marriage, with a goal of three or more children per family, and that nontraditional families should be denied any legitimacy.

Earlier this year new Russian legislation dictated punishment for any “propaganda of non-traditional sexual relationships.” President Putin expressed concern that homosexuality may be lowering the country’s birth rate.

Russia currently has no explicit laws protecting women from domestic violence, and church officials have lobbied against such laws. As an old Russian proverb puts it, “He beats her, he loves her.”

After the collapse of the Soviet regime, sexual harassment became widespread, with some job listings for women listing prerequisites such as “without inhibitions.” In a 2008 legal ruling against a woman who had accused her employer of firing her because she refused his advances, the judge ruled that no offense had been committed, because “If we had no sexual harassment, we would have no children.”

In March Russian feminists and other activists applied for but were denied a permit to organize a rally celebrating the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day. Still, online groups such as Pro-Feminism maintain a political presence. Women, too, can stand firm.

The Olympics, at least in theory, represent international competition carefully designed to bring out the best in participants, with strict rules, referees and respect for others. Patriarchal practices violate these principles, and it is not surprising that their flagrant display is associated with other flagrant corruptions, including bribery, coercion and environmental devastation - many of which are documented in “Putin’s Games,” a new documentary produced by Simone Baumann. She says she was offered 600,000 euros to bury it, but refused.