Anti-Gender Politics as Discourse Coalitions: Russia’s Domestic and International Promotion of “Traditional Values”

ABSTRACT

This article proposes Maarten Hajer’s concept of discourse coalition for analyzing anti-gender politics and its interlinkages with other forms of opposition to sexual and gender equality. The perspective conceptualizes how actors with disparate ideological, philosophical, and religious views can communicate and produce meaningful interventions, if they share certain storylines. This primarily conceptual contribution is illustrated with a study of how “traditional values” are promoted by the Russian state. Two storylines, stressing the needs to protect “traditional values” from outside interference, and children from harmful sexual information, enable discursive affinities and interconnections across differences, domestically, internationally, and transnationally.

Introduction

A number of political initiatives in the Russian Federation intended to protect the heterosexual family and “traditional values” have given the country a novel international notoriety. Indeed, Russia has come to epitomize what is often described as a global trend of increased attacks on sexual and gender rights. The 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi became a stage for protests and condemnation of Russia’s treatment of LGBTQ people, after the country had passed a law banning “propaganda for non-traditional sexual relationships” to minors (Edenborg 2017; Suchland 2018). However, in the growing literature on “anti-gender mobilization,” examining how movements in Europe and elsewhere oppose same-sex marriage, sex education, and other phenomena they perceive as expressions of a harmful “gender ideology” (Korolczuk and Graff 2018; Kováts and Maari 2015; Kuhar and Paternotte 2017), the Russian case figures somewhat ambivalently. While developments in Russia have been discussed as instances of anti-gender mobilization (Gradskova 2020; Moss 2017), there is a need to unpack to what extent the “anti-gender” label helpfully captures the conservative turn that came to dominate society and state in Russia in the 2010s.

On the one hand, there are good reasons to discuss Russia in the light of anti-gender mobilization in Europe. Russian conservative intellectuals such as Aleksandr Dugin have been sources of influence for Catholic anti-gender ideologues (Garbagnoli 2017). Russian ultra-nationalists such as Aleksei Komov and Konstantin Malofeev are well-known figures in the World Congress of Families (WCF) and other organizations convening anti-gender activists (Datta 2021; Gessen 2017; Stoeckl 2020). Key tropes of the anti-gender movement, such as arguing that the idea of gender as socially constructed (rather than biologically determined) is harmful to children’s natural development, have been embraced by the Russian state. This is reflected in policies such as the propaganda law, and in the rhetoric of leaders, as when president Vladimir Putin claimed that in Europe “[t]hey now claim that children can play five or six gender roles” (Barber, Foy, and Barker 2019).

One the other hand, recent pro-family mobilization in Russia displays elements that cannot easily be categorized under the anti-gender label. Nearest at hand, while the terms gender and gendernaia ideologiia exist in Russian and are used by some conservative activists, these terms have not performed a central structuring role or functioned as “symbolic glue” (Kováts and Maari 2015) for Russian pro-family mobilization. As we will see, “traditional values” has rather functioned as such an organizing concept (Wilkinson 2014). Moreover, while the Vatican’s critique of “gender ideology” formulated in the 1990s is an important source of influence for European anti-gender movements, Russian conservative discourse has its own intellectual provenance. It draws heavily on Orthodox religious thought, with inspiration from nineteenth-century intellectual traditions such as Slavophilism, Russian Messianism, and Eurasianism. It is also closely aligned with the state patriotic discourse on sovereignty, security, and stability that has been a hallmark of the Putin regime since the early 2000s. In Chechnya, a republic with a special status within the Russian Federation, where a violent anti-gay campaign was unleashed in 2017, the rhetoric on “traditional values” is entangled within a project of authoritarian Islamic revival, indicating yet another source of ideological influence (Brock and Edenborg 2020). Other concepts in the anti-gender literature, such as “the Global Right” (Corredor 2019), also have limitations, as conservative mobilization in Russia includes a range of actors, including the Orthodox Church, Islamic and Jewish clergy, parental organizations, academics, and political parties from ultranationalists to the ruling United Russia to the Communists, a diverse collection that cannot conveniently be described as right-wing (cf. Paternotte and Kuhar 2018).

Given these differences, how can we make sense of the gender-conservative turn of Russian society and state in the international context of anti-gender mobilization and other forms of opposition to sexual and gender rights? How do we account for, on the one hand, context-specific features, and on the other hand overlaps and interconnections, without resorting to either an essentializing narrative of Russia as entirely unique, or conceptual overstretching where the Russian experience is reduced to one more case of anti-gender mobilization? David Paternotte and Roman Kuhar underline that, while there are important intersections between anti-gender mobilization, right-wing populism, and religious fundamentalism, all recent forms of conservative resistance should not be conflated (Paternotte and Kuhar 2018). Instead, they argue, researchers should investigate how such projects can suddenly converge despite sometimes fundamental disagreements. This article seeks to advance our theoretical understanding of some of these overlaps and interconnections. The main argument is that Maarten A. Hajer’s notion of discourse coalitions, which stresses how common storylines enable communication across ideological differences, offers a fruitful lens for analyzing the plasticity of anti-gender politics and its interlinkages to other forms of political mobilization opposing sexual and gender rights.

The primarily conceptual contribution advanced in this article is illustrated by a case study of gender-conservative mobilization in Russia, with special emphasis on how the Putin regime has made the protection of “traditional values” a core part of its international agenda. The empirical material consists in journalistic texts from Russian and Western media sources, previous academic research, and reports by Russian and international NGOs. As the main purpose of the empirical part is to illustrate and exemplify how the notion of discourse coalition may be applied in studies of anti-gender mobilization, the selection of material makes no claims to give a “full” or “representative” picture. Nonetheless, the range of examples chosen for the analysis is not random but guided by, and seeking to reflect, the focus of journalists, researchers, and activists who have documented the sexual rights situation in Russia, and on whose empirical work this study builds.

The article proceeds as follows. Next, I outline the discourse coalitions approach and how it can be useful for analyzing anti-gender mobilization. I then briefly discuss the intellectual genealogy of the rhetoric of “traditional values” and, using Hajer’s concepts, describe the structuration and institutionalization of the discourse in Russian politics and society during the 2000s. Thereafter, I turn to the resonance of this discourse beyond the Russian Federation, discussing, in turn, the circulation of “traditional values” discourse in neighboring post-Soviet states, interlinkages between Russian actors and transnational illiberal civil society organizations, and the way in which the notion of “traditional values” facilitates the forming of alliances in the United Nations. Finally, I summarize the contribution and suggest pathways for future research.

Analyzing Anti-Gender Politics as Discourse Coalitions

Hajer’s approach to discourse, developed in his studies on environmental policymaking in international arenas (Hajer 1993, 2006), emphasizes the multiplicity, plasticity, and non-uniformity of discourse. More specifically, he provides an account of how people who do not fully understand each other and may have fundamentally different ideological outlooks and worldviews, sometimes coalesce around certain shared discursive elements which provide a starting point for political action. Hajer’s work can be situated in the literature of poststructural policy analysis, focusing on the discursive practice of problematization; that is, how political action and policymaking are dependent on the construction of shared meanings about “problems” that supposedly necessitate specific political interventions (Bacchi 2009). Political arguments, Hajer argues, typically rest on multiple, competing, and even incompatible discourses. He gives the example of how, in 1980s Britain, the problematization of “acid rain,” and proposed solutions to it, combined elements of scientific, economic, and engineering discourse as well as political considerations (Hajer 1993, 46).

A discourse coalition, according to Hajer, is “a group of actors that, in the context of an identifiable set of practices, shares the usage of a particular set of storylines over a particular period of time” (Hajer 2006, 70). Thus, such coming together is made possible through common discursive tools such as metaphors and storylines. A metaphor is a term that stands for something else, making sense of one thing in terms of another. A storyline, as Hajer understands it, is a condensed statement in which elements of various discourses are combined into a seemingly coherent whole that can function as a shorthand in discussions and conceals discursive complexity (Hajer 1993, 47, 2006, 69). For example, in the debates Hajer studies, the storyline of “acid rain” functioned as a shorthand for more complex environmental problems, assuming that audiences would know what the speaker referred to although there was in fact no mutual understanding. Despite lack of substantial agreement, the storyline of acid rain made meaningful political interventions possible (Hajer 2006, 69). Thus, storylines have an organizing potential by indicating discursive affinities while obscuring disagreements (1993, 47). In other words, they offer a site of ostensible common ground and create the appearance of discursive unity, as if everyone were talking about the same thing.

To understand the strength and the influence of discourse coalitions, Hajer offers the concepts of discourse structuration and discourse institutionalization. The former means that a discourse comes to dominate a discursive space as central actors are persuaded by or forced to accept the rhetorical power of a new discourse. Discourse institutionalization occurs when a discourse is reflected in the institutional practices of a political domain. If both conditions are fulfilled, a discourse can be said to dominate a political realm (Hajer 1993, 48).

When applying it to anti-gender mobilization, I suggest that the notion of discourse coalition can complement other theoretical tools that have informed previous scholarship, such as Laclau and Mouffe–inspired analyses of how “gender ideology” occupies the space of “empty signifier” enabling “chains of equivalence” (Gunnarsson Payne and Tornhill 2021; Mayer and Sauer 2017), or functions as “symbolic glue” (Kováts and Poim 2015). While these concepts usefully account for the internal structuring of anti-gender discourse (as well as its affective power), they are less helpful to make sense of overlaps and interconnections with discourses where “gender” or “gender ideology” may not perform an organizing role, yet have significant similarities. The notion of “discourse coalition,” in my reading, offers a way to understand complex discursive affinities while avoiding the grouping of heterogenous actors and rhetoric into homogenous entities at the risk of overlooking important contextual features. Inspired by feminist theories of geography, I question too-straightforward arguments about “diffusion” or “copying,” and ideas of a “center” where discourses emanate and then spread to the “periphery” (Nash and Browne 2020). Instead, this analysis departs from a transnational understanding of geopolitical relations, focusing on networks of interconnection, multidirectional flows of exchange, and “engagement across nations in ways that connect and share” (Nash and Browne 2020).

Consequently, Hajer’s theory of discourse coalitions helps us make sense of why and how different actors and organizational practices may come together in promoting, reproducing, or contesting certain forms of politics without necessarily coordinating their actions or sharing deep (or even superficial) values. In the following, the usefulness of this approach will be illustrated by a discussion of “traditional values” discourse in Russia, showing how a variety of ideological factions in Russian society converged in the usage of certain storylines. The theory also helps conceptualize how such storylines have been conducive to forming transnational and international alliances.

“Traditional Values” in Russia: Origins and Discourse Structuration

In the rearview mirror, Russia’s late 1980s and 1990s appear as a brief period of relative openness on gender and sexuality issues, a shift in media representations and popular opinion toward somewhat more accepting attitudes to sexual minorities, and increased visibility of homosexuality and queerness in culture and society (Baer 2009). This period of partial sexual liberalization effectively came to an end in the first decade of the 2000s, with the emergence and strengthening of traditionalist discourse, what is commonly referred to as Russia’s “conservative turn” (Temkina and Zdravomyslova 2014, 13).

The ideological and philosophical genealogies of conservatism in Russia have been examined in previous research pointing at different sources of influence. The idea that Russia has a special mission as the true remaining carrier of Christian values was historically expressed in the notion of Moscow as “the Third Rome,” dating back to the sixteenth century (Sidorov 2006). Nineteenth-century Romanticist currents such as Slavophilism and Eurasianism stressed the uniqueness of Russia as a civilization grounded in spirituality, Christian Orthodoxy, organic community, and traditional authority, in opposition to the supposedly materialist, godless, atomistic, and too-quickly-modernizing Europe (Stepanova 2015; Neumann 2017). Many of these ideas were picked up, developed, and popularized in the 1990s and early 2000s by influential academics such as Aleksandr Panarin, Aleksandr Dugin, and Natalia Narochnitskaia (Horvath 2016; Laruelle 2004).

Others have stressed 1930s Stalinism, when a pronatalist heteropatriarchal gender regime was entrenched and sodomy re-criminalized, as a formative moment. During this period, which historian Dan Healey calls “the birth of modern Russian political homophobia” (2018, xiv), certain discursive tropes were established that continue to structure political interpretations of sexual and gender deviation in Russia today (see also Roldugina 2018). Among these tropes are the association between non-normative sexualities and Western security threats, and the construction of homosexuals as “enemies within” seeking to undermine Russia’s sovereignty, as expressed by the Soviet cultural spokesperson Maksim Gorkii in 1934: “Eradicate the homosexual and fascism will disappear!” (Banting, Kelly, and Riordan 1998, 319). An additional historical link that is sometimes disregarded is the continuity between late-Soviet gender discourses, where the “chaste” Soviet citizen was contrasted to the “decadent” sexual morals of capitalist societies, and contemporary conservatism (Agadjanian 2017; see also Kelly 2001).

While the complexity and diversity of these various strands of ideas cannot be captured within the scope of this article, what is important is that the emphasis on “traditional values” that has become prominent in state rhetoric under Putin was not a Kremlin invention or imposed only from above. On the contrary, the conservative turn encompassed a broad range of actors within state and society, drawing on a variety of historically situated discourses. In addition, there were transnational influences, most importantly the activity of US Christian conservatives in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union (Stoeckl 2020).

Using Hajer’s terminology, we can speak of a discourse structuration occurring from the late 1990s throughout the first decade of the 2000s, in the context of the Orthodox Church gaining influence and forming closer ties to the state, as well as nationalist voices gaining the upper hand over liberals (who had dominated in the early 1990s) in government as well as in public discourse (Neumann 2017). Diverse actors now coalesced around two interlinked storylines: first, that the undermining of “traditional values” constituted a threat to security and national sovereignty, and second, that Russia’s children needed protection from imported harmful ideas of gender and sexuality. When Putin returned to the presidency in 2012, facing a legitimacy crisis manifested in anti-government protests, the government fully embraced the idea of “traditional values” as a guiding notion for both domestic and foreign policy (Edenborg 2018; Healey 2018; Wilkinson 2020). The discourse provided a moral framing for Russia’s more assertive stance in international politics, tying the protection of values to perceived geopolitical threats (Østbø 2017).

The rhetoric of “traditional values,” and the storylines of protecting sovereignty and protecting children, were picked up by a variety of ideological factions representing competing and often irreconcilable positions. Alongside the official multinational state-patriotism represented by Putin, “traditional values” were embraced by Russian ethno-nationalists in moderate or extremist forms (Nehrieieva and Gvianishvili 2020) and by pro-family organizations (Berg 2016), academics in Russian universities (Gessen 2017), Orthodox fundamentalists (Karnaukh and Coalson 2019), proponents of Islamic sharia laws such as Chechnya’s Ramzan Kadyrov (Brock and Edenborg 2020), and the Communist party (gazeta.ru 2020). At the outset, many Russian liberals, too, supported gender-conservative positions, as for example when Aleksei Navalnyi in 2009 suggested that instead of parading, homosexuals ought to “gambol” in closed stadiums, or when the late opposition leader Boris Nemtsov in 2010 mockingly offered to lead a “straight parade” (Patalakh 2020). However, since 2013, the liberal opposition has shifted toward more pro-LGBTQ positions, partly as a result of international influence but also what has been described as “a rebounding effect of the government’s oppressiveness” (Patalakh 2020). As we will see, the discourse coalition that had been established as “traditional values” rhetoric was supported and adopted by a large spectrum of groups in Russian society, paving way for the consolidation of gender conservatism into law.

Discourse Institutionalization—and Contestation

With Hajer’s terminology, the 2010s can be described as a period of discourse institutionalization, when “traditional values” were entrenched in Russian federal legislation. Early examples were the ban on “propaganda for non-traditional sexual relations” among minors (Persson 2015), and the “Dima Yakovlev law” prohibiting adoption of Russian orphans by American families (Makarychev and Medvedev 2015), both passed in 2013 and clearly reflecting the storylines of safeguarding “traditional values” from outside interference, and protecting Russia’s children. Another site of institutionalization has been universities, as critical research on gender and sexuality has been marginalized (Davydova 2019) while academics in some sociology and psychology departments have played a prominent role in giving scientific grounding to “traditional values” discourse (Kondakov 2020). Here, I examine two more recent examples of discourse institutionalization, both of which show the entrenchment of the storylines outlined above within government and society, but also illustrate how gender politics in Russia is a contested and conflictual terrain.

The first example concerns struggles over the legal status of domestic violence. Since 1991 there have been several failed attempts to introduce a law on domestic violence. In 2016, a section on domestic battery was added to the Criminal Code but removed six months later. In 2017, amendments were made to the Administrative Code according to which a first instance of domestic battery not resulting in “lasting harm” was to be treated as an administrative, rather than criminal, offense, punishable with a fine. The author of the amendment, in practice a form of decriminalization, was Duma representative Elena Mizulina, known as the initiator of the 2013 propaganda law. In a speech in 2017, she said that criminal responsibility in such cases constituted illegitimate interference in family life, and that the problem of domestic violence was exaggerated by domestic NGOs that sought to receive foreign funding, part of a Western assault on Russian values and sovereignty (Human Rights Watch 2018). The decriminalization was criticized by women’s rights groups in Russia as well as international rights defenders that described it as a major setback in a country where, according to cautious estimates, 12–15 percent of women suffer from domestic violence (Vykhrest 2017). In contrast to the 2013 propaganda law, which was backed by the entire political establishment, the federal government has been ambivalent on domestic violence, and public opinion more divided; according to a 2018 poll, 55 percent of Russians supported criminalization (Human Rights Watch 2018).

In autumn 2019, the debate was reignited when a new attempt was made to ban domestic violence, initiated by a group of activists and supported by Duma representative Oksana Pushkina from the ruling United Russia party. The proposal generated fierce opposition from conservative civil society and the church. Russian oligarch and billionaire Konstantin Malofeev, deputy head of the Worldwide Russian People’s Council and an active figure in the WCF, used his ultraorthodox television channel Tsargrad to denounce the law. He is also a sponsor of the Russian version of the anti-gender website CitizenGo, where an online petition against the law was launched (Karnaukh and Coalson 2019). The organization “Sorok sorokov” (Forty forties, a name alluding to the supposed number of churches in Moscow before the 1917 revolution) became a main center of religious opposition to the law, organizing rallies around Russia. In December 2019, the church called for boycott of the draft bill, denouncing it as “anti-family.” Patriarch Kirill remarked that “it is very dangerous when strangers and other forces invade the closed, intimate family space” (Yurtaev 2020).

In October 2019, an open letter signed by 180 Russian civil society organizations called for President Putin not to sign the law on domestic violence if passed. The rhetoric of the letter combines elements of official state-patriotism with tropes familiar from the anti-gender movements in Europe. The letter argues that the law’s proposal is a result of lobbying efforts by NGOs, some of which have been designated as “foreign agents,” an “instrument for the destruction of the family and traditional values of the peoples of Russia, and a method for destabilizing society” (Regnum 2018). The rhetoric on national sovereignty and foreign conspiracies is consistent with official Russian state discourse during the 2000s (see for example Lo 2015). In addition, the letter includes passages that clearly draw on anti-gender discourse, noting that among the supporters of the proposal were groups “representing the interests of homosexuals and lesbians.” The letter states that the law would mean “introducing principles of radical anti-family ideologies such as feminism and gender ideology in Russian legislation.” A leading force behind the proposal, the letter says, is George Soros’s Open Society Foundation, whose goal is “to create a ‘world without borders and without discrimination,’ where the rights of all minorities, and especially sexual minorities, are not just legally enshrined, but prioritized above the interests of the majority and traditional understandings of human rights” (Regnum 2018). The mentioning of Soros, as well as multiple references to the Istanbul Convention on domestic violence, are common features in anti-gender rhetoric in Europe (Paternotte and Kuhar 2018). The law on domestic violence, the letter says, is part of a whole range of anti-family measures, including the idea of gender as a social construct open to individual choice, programs of sex education for children, and legalization of prostitution (Regnum 2018). Thus, as captured by the notion of discourse coalition, the formation of resistance to domestic violence legislation was facilitated by the joint storylines of “traditional values” as a matter of national sovereignty as well as protecting children. Statist tropes of sovereignty and security, potentially appealing to ideological nationalists as well as moderate supporters of Putin’s project of stability and reassertion of Russian power, were combined with tropes of “gender ideology” likely to resonate among “family values” groups and religious conservatives.

The second example concerns the 2020 constitutional amendments and subsequent bill on “the family institution.” After a referendum held in June 2020, widely criticized as rigged and unfair (Golos 2020), a set of amendments to Russia’s constitution of 1993 was adopted. The change that received most attention was the nullifying of previous presidential terms, enabling President Putin to run for two additional six-year terms. However, the constitutional amendments also included placing the Russian constitution above international law, ensuring patriotic education in schools, an explicit mention of faith in God, and the definition of marriage as a union between one man and one woman. These measures, and especially the constitutional enshrinement of heterosexual marriage, clearly mark the institutionalization of “traditional values” discourse in Russian legislation.

Two weeks after the referendum, a group of seven senators, headed by the previously mentioned Mizulina, introduced a draft bill to the State Duma to “Amend the Family Code of the Russian Federation with the aim of strengthening the family institution.” The bill defined parents as “biological mother and father,” suggested limitations to social services’ possibilities to take custody of children in dysfunctional families, and included several measures targeting LGBTQ people. For example, it proposed adding an unamendable category of “sex at birth” to birth certificates. As marrying may require showing a birth certificate, this could make it impossible for a person who has transitioned to marry. The draft bill also included new criteria making it impossible for a same-sex marriage registered abroad to be recognized in Russia (Russian LGBT Network 2020). According to activists, the bill, if adopted, would have severe consequences for trans people, practically depriving them not only of marrying but also of the possibility to change gender on official documents (Meduza 2020).

The arguments used by supporters of the bill followed the now well-rehearsed storylines of sovereignty and stability on the one hand, and protection of children on the other. The authors stated that “changes in societal life” had created a “demand in society to preserve traditional family values, strengthening and defending the institutions of family and marriage” (Zatari 2020). Like the 2013 “propaganda ban” and “Dima Yakovlev law,” the bill was said to safeguard children. One of its coauthors, Aleksandr Bashkin, said in an interview that the main purpose of the bill was to protect the interest of the child by preventing same-sex and transgender couples from adopting: “adopted underage children, who haven’t yet formed their identity and views about gender, have the right to be raised in traditional formats” (Zatari 2020).

The family bill, however, did not pass, after being rejected by the federal Council of Human Rights and criticized by Duma representatives, and lacking support from the government. Notably, opposition to the bill was also justified with references to protecting children. Duma representative Pushkina, mentioned above as a supporter of domestic violence legislation, argued that the proposal threatened the security of children by shifting the power balance in favor of parents (Shturma 2020). The above discussion demonstrates that during the 2010s, the “traditional values” discourse, based on the storylines of protection of sovereignty and of children, has been thoroughly institutionalized in Russian political life and inspired a set of legislative reforms, but also that gender and sexual politics in Russia, in contrast to how it tends to be portrayed in international reporting, is not monolithic, but encompasses conflict and discord.

Affinities and Resonances beyond Russia

As we have seen, the analytical lens of discourse coalitions enables us to make sense of how disparate ideological factions in Russian society have coalesced around shared storylines of “traditional values.” If we shift attention to international and transnational spaces, Hajer’s approach provides tools to account for cross-border resonances, interconnections, and concrete collaborations. By zooming in on various sites— conservative mobilization in post-Soviet states, illiberal transnational civil society organizations, and UN institutions—we can identify discursive affinities (Hajer 1993, 47). Also beyond borders, shared storylines make the discourse of “traditional values,” as articulated by Russian actors, reconcilable with a variety of ideological projects, including Islamic-nationalist revival, the Vatican’s rhetoric of “gender ideology,” US Evangelicals’ “culture wars,” postcolonial homophobias in the Global South, and, increasingly, the populist radical right.

Although drawing heavily on Orthodox, Eurasianist, and Russian nationalist thought (as described in a previous section), the rhetoric on “traditional values” espoused by the Kremlin has resonated beyond the cultural and geographical sphere of Russian Orthodoxy. The storyline that the sovereignty of historically rooted cultural and religious values needs to be protected from outside interference and the imposition of foreign values is easily reconciled with the ideological projects of Islamic revitalization being conducted in various Muslim-majority republics within the Russian Federation. This compatibility between the Kremlin rhetoric of “traditional values” and Islam-based nationalism was expressed by Ramzan Kadyrov, the authoritarian president of the Chechen Republic, in 2013:

Unfortunately, a sizeable part of the Russians wants to emulate the Europeans, their way of life, even though, largely speaking, most Europeans have no culture and no morals. They welcome everything non-human. Same-sex marriages are a normal thing for them. […] I do not want to be a European. I want to be a citizen of Russia, and [I want] that our peoples restore their culture, customs, traditions. This is the basis for a strong Russia. (Cited in Morozov 2015, 120)

The state-initiated violent crackdown on LGBTQ people in Chechnya, first reported in April 2017 (Milashina 2017), which included detentions, torture, and several instances of murder, received much attention in Russian critical media as well as internationally. In the same period, there were reports of increased anti-LGBTQ rhetoric and violence in other Muslim-majority federal republics in the North Caucasus, including Ingushetia and Kabardino-Balkaria (Djalilov and Grigoryeva 2018).

That the twin storylines of protecting sovereign values from outside interference and protecting children from harmful sexual information, which have here been identified as cornerstones of the “traditional values” discourse, have political resonance beyond Russia, is clearly manifested in post-Soviet successor states in the South Caucasus, Central Asia, and Eastern Europe. The Eurasian Economic Union (EEU), founded in 2014 as an intergovernmental organization uniting Russia, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Armenia, and primarily focusing on economic integration, contains a civilizational dimension in its stress on “Eurasian values” (Lo 2015, 104). In the 2010s, all EEU member states introduced to parliament laws inspired by or modeled on Russia’s ban on “homosexual propaganda” to children.¹ A 2017 report by Amnesty International concluded that in all EEU member states there had been a marked increase of homophobic and transphobic rhetoric and practice in the previous few years. LGBTQ organizations were under pressure, hate crimes were on the rise, and conservative nationalist groups were depicting queer identities as irreconcilable with national identity. Local activists described the development as a reaction to increased queer visibility, but also associated it with Russia’s growing geopolitical influence. Russian state-aligned media, widely consumed in the region, played a particularly important role in circulating “traditional values” discourse (Amnesty International 2017; see also Djalilov and Grigoryeva 2018; Nikoghosyan 2016). In some other post-Soviet states that have more shifting or straddling geopolitical identities, orienting themselves not only toward Russia but also other great powers, there was also a rise of anti-queer sentiment in the 2010s (Nehrieieva and Gvianishvili 2020; Shevtsova 2020; Tolkachev and Tolordava 2020). In Azerbaijan, police forces rounded up and detained suspected LGBTQ people in September 2017, as part of what was claimed to be a measure to protect public health (Adilgizi 2017). In Tajikistan, authorities drew up a register of 367 allegedly gay citizens in 2017, demanding that they undergo testing to prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases (The Guardian 2017). In Lithuania and Latvia, both members of the European Union (EU), laws modeled on Russia’s propaganda ban have been proposed (Healey 2018, 201). Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan, the most authoritarian states in the post-Soviet space, continue to ban sodomy (International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association 2019). While it would be misleading to attribute this entire development to Russian geopolitical influence, it is undeniable that cross-border discursive flows play a role and that the “traditional values” discourse articulated by Russian actors has been picked up and adapted to diverse cultural, religious, and political contexts.

Interconnections with Illiberal Civil Society

Another example of how the rhetoric on “traditional values” enables discourse coalitions across denominational boundaries is the active international lobbying of the Russian Orthodox Church. Shared opposition to same-sex marriage has facilitated its rapprochement with the Roman Catholic Church, as manifested in the meeting in Havana in 2016 between Patriarch Kirill and Pope Francis, and the adoption of a joint resolution, one of the main points of which was the protection of heterosexual marriage (Moss 2017, 208). Actors affiliated with the Russian Orthodox Church have also contributed to forming international organizations (sometimes referred to as GONGOs, or government-organized non-governmental organizations) for the promotion of “traditional values.” Two examples are the World Russian People’s Congress, headed by Patriarch Kirill and since 2005 having consultative status at the UN, and the Paris-based Institute for Democracy and Cooperation headed by Russian nationalist historian Natalia Narochnitskaia (Horvath 2016; Sozayev 2012).

The identification of shared storylines has also created common ground for Russian state, church, and societal actors to interact with transnational conservative civil society organizations. The involvement of Russian actors in conservative pro-family organizations, providing both ideological and financial contributions, has been well-established. The WCF, co-founded in 1997 by US and Russian Christian conservatives, has a strong Russian branch involving church figures, oligarchs, and politicians closely tied to the Kremlin (Stroop 2016; Gessen 2017). In her detailed study of the Russian involvement in WCF, Kristina Stoeckl (2020) argues that this showcases the emergence of a new type of player in Russia, a “Russian Christian Right,” deploying strategies typically associated with US Christian conservatives, such as interdenominational cooperation (see also Laruelle 2019). According to a report by the EU Parliamentary Forum for Sexual and Reproductive Rights, between 2008 and 2018, Russian oligarchs, primarily the previously mentioned Konstantin Malofeev and the Putin ally Vladimir Yakunin, contributed almost 200 million USD to European anti-gender organizations including WCF and GitizenGo, as well as far-right parties including France’s Front National (now Rassemblement National) and Italy’s Lega (Datta 2021). Another organization that has received support from Russia is the US-based ultra-Catholic C-Fam, which had strong ties to the Trump administration. Russia reportedly supported its bid for consultative status at the UN Economic and Social Council (Belz 2017). Both WCF and C-Fam signed a statement in support of Russia’s 2013 propaganda law (Baranova and Rudusa 2019). Larry Jacobs, managing director of WCF, called the law a “great idea” (Baranova and Rudusa 2019, 20), and other US conservatives have hailed Russia as a role model in standing up for Christian values, and lobbied for anti-LGBTQ legislation in Russia and other East European countries (Nehrieieva and Gvianishvili 2020).

The interconnections and ideological exchange between conservative mobilization in Russia and populist radical right movements in Europe are well-documented (Shekhovtsov 2017). In 2013, Marine le Pen gave a talk at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations where she claimed that the EU “is forcing gender theory on us” (Moss 2017, 207). These discursive affinities were further exemplified in a 2019 interview with Putin in Financial Times (clearly targeting an international audiences). In the interview, Russia’s president combined “traditional values” rhetoric with some typical tropes of rightwing populism, claiming that “[t]he liberal idea has become obsolete. It has come into conflict with the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population” (Barber, Foy, and Barker 2019). According to Putin, multiculturalism and acceptance of gender diversity are signs that liberal elites have lost touch with ordinary people, and he goes on to claim that in Europe, ”migrants can kill, plunder and rape with impunity,” and “[t]hey claim now that children can play five or six gender roles” (Barber, Foy, and Barker 2019).

In the above cases, the possibility to bridge and conceal ideological, religious, and cultural differences through common storylines, as conceptualized through Hajer’s notion of discourse coalition, is key to situating the Russian state project of “traditional values” in the context of transnational and international anti-gender mobilization.

“Traditional Values” at the United Nations

Similar dynamics can be observed in intergovernmental institutions. At the 73rd session of the UN General Assembly in 2018, Russia’s representative Boris Chernenko warned against replacing the concepts of “‘mother’ and ‘father’ with ‘parent no. 1’ and parent no. 2’” in UN documents, a move that he said would cause “irreparable harm to children.” In addition, he said that recognition of same-sex parents “leads to undermining historical, traditional, cultural, and family values” (cited in Baranova and Rudusa 2019, 16 f). The speech effectively articulated the two earlier-described storylines of protecting “traditional values” from outside interference (a state- or culture-centered argument) and protecting the child from danger (an individual-centered argument). At the international level, and especially in the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC), Russia has taken an active role in facilitating the formation of a discourse coalition centering on these storylines, which serve as the basis for opposing the recognition of LGBTQ rights as human rights and rejection of sexual and reproductive rights more broadly.

A formal starting point of this Russia-led effort was the passing of the resolution 12/21 in 2009, adopted by 26 to 15 votes and six abstentions, where the UNHRC requested the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights to convene a workshop in 2010 on “how a better understanding of the traditional values of humankind underpinning international human rights norms and standards can contribute to the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms” (UNHRC 2009, 2). The countries in favor, in addition to Russia, included Egypt, Kyrgyzstan, and Nigeria among others. The workshop was followed by a second resolution (16/3) on the same topic, which was passed in 2011 and affirmed that “dignity, freedom and responsibility are traditional values, shared by all humanity and embodied in universal rights instruments” (UNHRC 2011). The resolution requested that a study on “traditional values” and human rights be prepared by the Advisory Committee. The report, completed by the Russian nominee Professor Vladimir Kartashkin, stated that “human rights agreements must be based on, and not contradict, […] traditional values, and therefore any violation of these standards would render these agreements invalid” (cited in McCrudden 2014, 24). A third resolution, 21/3, passed in 2012, requested the Office of the UNHRC to collect best practices in the application of traditional values. Russia, backed by the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), was the initiator of these resolutions, which brought the notion of “traditional values” into the rhetoric and frameworks of the UN (Baranova and Rudusa 2019, 18).

Before 2009, similar arguments about universal human rights instruments as a violation of indigenous and religious traditions had mainly been articulated by states in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia, along with other post-communist states, was eager to join the international human rights regime, and mostly kept a low profile on matters of family, religion, and tradition, while strongly committed to national sovereignty and non-interventionism. The 2009–2012 resolutions spearheaded by Russia, which coincided with the country’s gradually more assertive stance in international politics, were the beginning of an effort to position Russia at the forefront of the international defense of “traditional values” allegedly threatened by liberal moral internationalism (Edenborg 2021; Wilkinson 2014). On the one hand, the emphasis on family, sovereignty, and respect for religious and cultural traditions followed a long line of particularistic rights argumentation in international contexts, such as the stress on “Asian values” or “African values” in the 1990s and early 2000s (McCrudden 2014, 4). On the other hand, the “traditional values” narrative had novel aspects, not only in terms of its geographic origin in Eastern Europe, but in its tendency to universalism, repeatedly stressing that these values were shared by all cultures. Thus, it sought to replace the idea of LGBTQ rights as an indispensable part of universal human rights not with cultural relativism but with a competing universalistic narrative.

Like Hajer’s example of “acid rain” in British environmental politics, the notion of “traditional values” functions as a shared storyline facilitating a broad coalition in opposition to the idea of LGBTQ rights as human rights, despite a lack of agreement on what these “traditional values” actually consist in. At the UN, Russia has taken a leading role in forming a voting bloc with countries outside its historic sphere of influence, most prominently the African Group, the Arab Group, and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (Baranova and Rudusa 2019, 15 f). When the HRC in 2014 passed resolution 26/11 on “protection of the family,” defining the family in a narrow way through emphasis on “nature” and “children,” Uruguay proposed an amendment aimed at acknowledging multiple forms of family. Russia managed to block this amendment through a “no-action motion” supported by 20 countries, among them China, Kenya, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela (Baranova and Rudusa 2019, 19). When the HRC in 2016 passed a resolution on establishing an Independent Expert on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, the resistance came mainly from the Africa Group, the OIC, and Russia. The same year, Russia led a successful effort in the General Assembly to strip a resolution for ending AIDS from language that called for decriminalization of homosexuality, joined by its by now established allies of African and Middle Eastern countries, but also by Poland (RFERL 2016). These emerging coalitions indicate that the argument of protecting the values of local majority populations from external moral interference can resonate both with anti-imperial narratives in former colonized states and with a populist frame of protecting the “common people” against liberal elites, increasingly influential in Europe and the Americas. Thus, Russia’s articulation of “traditional values” and promotion of this idea in the UN, has contributed to establishing a shared storyline that enables common action among a diverse set of actors in the area of sexual and reproductive rights, and particularly on LGBTQ issues, despite the absence of shared understanding.

Conclusion: Different Worldviews, Shared Storylines

Examining the turn to “traditional values” in Russian state and society within the wider context of transnational anti-gender mobilization and other forms of opposition to sexual and gender rights, this article has shown how Hajer’s notion of discourse coalitions provides a useful analytical lens for understanding interconnections, linkages, and resonances between distinct forms of gender-conservative mobilization. Domestically as well as in transnational and international spaces, the storylines of, on the one hand, protection of “traditional values” as an issue of sovereignty and security, and, on the other, the need to protect children from harmful ideas of gender and sexuality, has worked to conceal complexity, enable communication across differences, and, at times, pave the way for common action and cooperation. Drawing on longstanding philosophical and ideological tropes, the discourse on “traditional values” has thus resonated with various ideological factions in Russian state and society, and provided common points of reference for trans-/international alliance-building.

The primary contribution of this article lies in enriching and refining the conceptual apparatus within the literature on anti-gender mobilization by suggesting a framework for analyzing resonances and interconnections between discourses that share some central ideas but are fundamentally different in other ways, and which may not be easily captured under the “anti-gender” label. In future research, this approach may be helpful for investigating what other storylines, emerging in specific contexts, perform similar functions of enabling communication and coalitions. Also worth exploring are interconnections between anti-gender discourse and various oppositions to gender and sexual rights, including so called men’s rights movements and other more or less aggressive endeavors to “save” and “rehabilitate” white/Western masculinity. The concept might also be helpful to explore the overlaps between conservative anti-gender movements and “gender-critical” trans-exclusionary feminists. Given the global rise of various intersecting forms of opposition to sexual and gender diversity, more fine-tuned and context-sensitive analytical tools will help us to better grasp nuances, complexities, and change, which is key for forming successful strategies of resistance.

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank David Paternotte, Cristian Norocel, as well as two anonymous reviewers for their helpful and constructive comments.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. In Armenia, Kazakhstan, and Kyrgyzstan, draft laws explicitly targeting propaganda of “non-traditional sexual relationships” have been introduced to parliament but halted at various stages of the legislative process. In Belarus, the law “On the protection of children from information harmful to their health and development” (No.362-Z29) was signed into law in 2016 and came into force in 2017. It does not explicitly mention homosexuality or “non-traditional sexual relationships” but mentions information that “discredits the institution of family and marriage.” (Amnesty International 2017, 24; see also Wilkinson 2020)