In Russia, Russian deputies voted Thursday, November 24 the considerable extension of an anti-LGBT law adopted in 2013. Originally aimed at banning "LGBT propaganda" to minors, it now proscribes "the promotion of sexual relations non-traditional" to all audiences in the media, on the internet, in books and in movies.
In parallel with the war in Ukraine, Russia is thus pursuing a conservative turn initiated in the 2000s, and presented by the Kremlin as the defense of "traditional" values against the influence of a West deemed decadent.
Identity search
"Russian society has been experiencing a search for identity since the 2000s, after the failure of the liberal values brought to the end of the USSR, explains Viatcheslav Avioutskii, professor at the École Supérieure des Sciences Commerciales d'Angers (Essca) and specialist Russia and Ukraine. It continues today with even more intensity: in the absence of unanimous support for the war in Ukraine, the Russian authorities have embarked on a conservative enterprise of 'ideological purification' of the population in the face of Western influences deemed harmful."
Duma Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin presented the new version of the law on Thursday, saying that it would "protect our children and the future of this country from the darkness spread by the United States and European countries". .
"We have our own traditions and our own values," he added.
This new attack on the rights of homosexuals, which is a continuation of years of repression, is articulated with the promotion of the traditional family.
"The Russian regime emphasizes the traditional family, as opposed to Western values. Anti-LGBT propaganda is present in children's school books, as is the promotion of the traditional, nuclear family, which is presented as necessarily including a dad, a mom and two children minimum", analyzes Lukas Aubin, director of research at the Institute of International and Strategic Relations in Paris (Iris) and recent author of the live "Geopolitics of Russia" (ed. La Découverte ).
In a speech given at the Grand Kremlin Palace, the former palace of the tsars, Vladimir Putin thus declared on September 30: "Do we really want to have here in our country, in Russia, a 'number one parent', 'number two', 'number three', instead of 'mom' and 'dad'?", in a transparent allusion to the debates agitating several Western countries.
Population decline
But beyond a propaganda discourse, this highlighting of the traditional family is also based on a pragmatic observation.
Despite its pro-natalist policy, Russia has indeed experienced a major demographic decline since the end of the Soviet Union.
The population is expected to continue to decline, reaching between 130 and 140 million by 2050, compared to 148.2 million in 1991, according to demographers' forecasts.
Promoting conservative family values therefore allows the Russian authorities to jeer at the West, but also to respond to an issue that it considers crucial.
Already in 2020, Vladimir Putin presented the demographic crisis as a "historical challenge", assuring: "The fate of Russia and its historical prospects depend on how many we will be".
“The discourse of the Russian regime may seem ultra-reactionary, even delusional, but it is also linked to practical considerations, notes Lukas Aubin. This anti-LGBT propaganda discourse hinges on the need for Russian society to have children. have not yet banned abortion, but they carry a very strong inciting and pronatalist discourse.
Since its annexation by Russia, Crimea has been regularly dotted with anti-abortion posters.
In the capital Simferopol, reports Lukas Aubin, the Russian authorities financed advertising posters representing a baby imploring his mother not to kill him.
"Ideological tinkering"
The promotion of conservative values also allows the Russian power to rely on the Orthodox Church to justify its foreign policy.
Patriarch Kiril, a close friend of Vladimir Putin, thus multiplies the references to the "holy war" waged in Ukraine.
He's not the only one either.
The Chechen leader Ramzan Kadirov also uses the reference to "sheitan", the devil in Arabic, to mobilize the 10% of Russian Muslims.
"Vladimir Putin leads a country that has never become a nation state, exposes Vyacheslav Avioutskii. Russia remains an imperial state, inherited from the tsars and the Soviet Union, and it is therefore by definition fragmented into different regional identities. Exerting strong pressure on society and through propaganda, the Russian regime seeks to build a unifying conservative base that serves as a denominator and engages society behind it."
Conservatism therefore serves, according to the researcher, to transcend the different religions – Orthodoxy, Islam, Judaism and Buddhism – and the 190 ethnicities that make up Russia to unite society in a common identity and purpose.
The Russian Constitution, rewritten in 2020, thus places the territory under the protection of an undefined god.
Not sure, however, that the strategy works: "These conservative and identity measures are part of ideological tinkering to try to create a consensus, points out Viatcheslav Aviutskii. But that does not really succeed. Vladimir Putin does not manage to rally the entire population behind him, and to seek too much to homogenize a country, one risks on the contrary to exacerbate the differences.
>> To read also: When Russia wants to make its vision of History prevail
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