Liberal media sometimes interpret Russia’s war of aggression against Ukraine as an example of a culture war turned into a real war — the war in the name of ‘traditional values’. Yet these same ‘traditional values’ are remarkably ignored in the majority of left-wing analytical pieces about the current invasion, likely seen as just so much noise covering for the key geopolitical or class interests really at work. Without proposing to refute such claims, here my intention is to use a Marxist critique to unveil the struggle for social reproduction that stands behind this ideology of ‘traditional values’. The ideological state apparatus is key to reproducing the conditions of production; however, it usually hides its main goal — the reproduction of the labour force — under some illusions of the general interest.
The current Russian ‘traditional-values’ ideology, however, puts the
question of the reproduction of the labour force at its very core. It thus
directly articulates what Nancy Fraser calls ‘a deep-seated social-reproductive “crisis tendency” or “contradiction”’. She defines this in the following terms:
On the one hand, social reproduction is a condition of possibility for sustained capital accumulation; on the other hand, capitalism’s orientation to unlimited accumulation tends to destabilize the very processes of social reproduction on which it relies.
The Russian regime does not hide its core contradiction, but it uses the war to reframe it as a question of national security and fundamentally change the sphere of reproduction through its linkage to the military effort. Ultimately, its concern is to manage the ongoing crisis in social reproduction, which is crucial for capitalist expansion. This article explores two interconnected processes: how demographic problems became securitised and militarised in Russian public discourse — and how they are managed via military means.
First, I will talk about ‘traditional values’ as an instrument of Russian geopolitical hegemony. Second, I will show how the defence of these ‘values’ helped to frame demographic problems as a question of national security and thereby militarise them. Finally, I will address one of the core processes of the current invasion — the mass ‘passportisation’ of people in the occupied territories and the spread of new Russian citizenship. I thereby argue that the war is a managed crisis in the sphere of reproduction, and one that has brought substantial gains for the Russian regime.
‘Traditional values’ as a Russian device for hegemony
Russian propagandist Margarita Simonyan, reflecting on Vladimir Putin’s February 2024 interview with Tucker Carlson, explicitly compared the role of ‘conservative values’ with the function of the Soviet agenda of ‘social equality’:
It’s a shame Tucker didn’t bring up the conversation about conservative values. This is his strong point— and the Chief’s, first and foremost, of course. This is the only thing on which Russia can and should now build an ideology externally. Just as the USSR once built it on the ideas of social equality.
The darkness in the West is waiting for someone to lead this agenda, waiting for a country that would become a safe haven for people who are not ready to send their children to be raised by LGBT people and other woke religions.
We are such a country. We must trumpet this.
It is itself telling that for Kremlin propagandists, and likely for many Russian politicians, the Soviet project for social equality is today reduced to a purely functional device in the race for global hegemony. The possibility of casting two opposites — conservative values and social equality — as interchangeable exposes the level of political cynicism. Thus, no one should be tricked by Russia’s extensive use of the Soviet heritage — all the Soviet symbols are devoid of any content, but nostalgia or trust in them is used to promote the opposite, namely the conservative reading of human rights. This ideology is critical for Russia’s crusade to reconfigure global power.
Russia has, indeed, changed sides in this struggle in recent decades: from the red threat to the traditional bourgeois order to its main proponent in the global arena, from advocating gender and racial equality on the global level to fighting against any type of egalitarian project. With their ‘loss’ in the Cold War, the Russian political elites coped by identifying with the Other, the ‘winner’s side’ in the historical (republican) form of their victory.
Russian political elites took a conservative social agenda as a possible
ideological device in their struggle for a new hegemony. As scholars argue:
The Russian culture-war story from the 1990s until today is about global ideological dynamics and the refashioning of Russian Orthodox social teaching in the language of transnational moral conservatism. It covers Russian clerics, activists, politicians, and oligarchs pitching Russia as a stronghold of traditional values to the world and West actors falling for a traditionalist Russia of their own making.
In this vision, Russia takes an active role in a culture war, i.e., a struggle for
moral values about the definition of sexuality, gender, family, and religion. This is a struggle that springs from the reaction to challenges of modern society,
‘articulation of modernity’s constitutive tension between individual self-determination and autonomy on the one side and collective self-determination and discipline on the other.’ This phenomenon was first described as an example of tensions in the Western (firstly, American) society as a reaction to feminist, LGBTQI+, anti-racist, and other movements, which then defined political camps in many different contexts.
But Russia never had huge Pride parades or serious discussions about LGBTQ+ marriages, and neither did it see thousands of women on feminist marches or mass protests against its colonial legacy. The discourse around sexuality came to the forefront during Putin’s third term as a reaction to the mass protests in Russia in 2011–12 and popular uprisings in the neighbouring post-Soviet countries. As Dmitry Dorogov argues, since Putin’s third term, the Kremlin has framed sexuality as a question of national security. Since 2014 Russian conservative oligarchs started substantial funding of the European alt-right and anti-gender movements. Volodymyr Artiukh argues, that Russia ‘offered an international system of domination without hegemony’ based on Caesarist domination. While agreeing with Artiukh in his analysis of Russian imperialism, I, however, propose that that from 2012 we can observe not only reactionary and counter-revolutionary violence in Russian international politics but also a quest for hegemony via the device of ‘traditional values’, which were not analysed enough through a Marxist lens. ‘Traditional values’ not only propose a vague description of anti-Western sentiment but also serve as a crucial device for the expropriation of social reproduction that addresses the core crisis of contemporary capitalism.
The militarisation of demography: how a demographic crisis became a national security crisis
Over the past five years, the number of unfilled vacancies posted by Russian employers has increased 1.8 times over, and according to forecasts, by 2030, it will reach 2 to 4 million people. However, in Russian public discourse, the demographic problem is framed not only as a challenge to production but, more importantly, as a threat to national security. This is a tendency that has developed throughout Putin’s rule. Already in his first address to the Federal
Council in 2000, Putin framed it as such:
And, if you believe the forecasts and the estimates are based on actual work, the real work of people who understand this, who have devoted their whole lives to this, in 15 years, there may be 22 million fewer Russians. I ask you to think about this figure: a seventh of the country’s population. If the current trend continues, the nation’s survival will be in jeopardy [emphasis added].
The wide recognition and discussion of demography in the context of national security became a persistent trend in Russian public politics. In 2013 — the year before the annexation of Crimea, which brought Russia two million new citizens — major daily Rossiyskaya Gazeta published an article with the alarming headline ‘Russia is facing a colossal deficit of the working-age population.’ The introduction claimed that ‘Russia has only five years left to get out of the demographic hole.’ Not only economic consequences were discussed, but also threats to the Russian army, given that the demographic crisis ‘will jeopardize the country’s defence capability (by 2020, the number of men of military age will be reduced by more than a third, and by 2050, by more than 40 percent) [emphasis added].’
The more obvious the failure of Russian pronatalist politics, for example the Maternity Capital introduced in 2007 — a bank voucher that is used mostly as a mortgage down payment — the louder the militarisation of motherhood became. The campaign, ‘Give birth to me today so that I can defend you tomorrow’, was launched in 2018. The campaign depicted an embryo in the uterus on the one side and a small male child dressed in a military uniform on the other. These images were widely circulated in public transport and on the streets of different cities. In summer 2022, the order of ‘Mother-Heroine’ for mothers of 10 or more children was introduced. The order received for this life-threatening reproductive activity is the highest state award, the ‘Hero of the Russian Federation’; the majority of its recipients are military personnel.
By framing ‘traditional values’, e.g., the heterosexual nuclear family with many children, as something under threat that needs protection — using belligerent metaphors like the ‘stronghold’ — the Russian ruling class successfully militarised the demographic crisis and turned it into a question of national security. This also meant blaming the failure of its social policies on the foreign sabotage which is embodied in the figure of the ‘NATO LGBTQ-instructors’ invented by Kremlin propagandists.
This image itself shows deep linkages between national security and sexuality. This permitted extraordinary measures for national protection: the (first partial, later full ) ban on so-called ‘LGBT-propaganda’; a full ban on gender-affirming procedures, from medical to bureaucratic ones; and growing restriction of the acceptable expression of sexuality, which now should be measured by the ‘deeds’ of ‘our boys’ and their commitment on the frontline.
The most telling example of this public shift and disproportional attention to questions of sexuality was the outcome of the so-called ‘Almost Naked party’ organised by Instagram influencer Anastasiia Ivleeva. The party gathered Russian pop stars in the dress code that would be normal for any Berlin club: leather, transparent clothes, inventive, almost nude outfits. This otherwise unremarkable event caused a huge backlash at the highest level of Russian politics. Kremlin propagandists immediately shamed the participants using the comparison between the moral norms of those who are fighting on the frontline and those who allow themselves to offend the public with their nudity. Putin referred to this in the context of the soldiers returning home, who have different priorities and ‘will not jump without trousers at some party’. To redeem their shameful expression of sexuality, the artists involved in the party had to go and perform in the war zone in the occupied territories, i.e. purify themselves through participation in the Russian military effort.
By framing ‘traditional values’, e.g., the heterosexual nuclear family with many children, as something under threat that needs protection — using belligerent metaphors like the ‘stronghold’ — the Russian ruling class successfully militarised the demographic crisis and turned it into a question of national security.
Heteronormative, and oriented to reproduction only, sexuality is repeatedly represented as one of the key axes of the Russian war. For example, St. Petersburg Governor Alexander Beglov shamefully wrote that Russian soldiers are dying in the fight against gender-neutral bathrooms: ‘There’s no need to explain what values we’re defending to these guys who, instead of two bathrooms in schools (one for girls and one for boys), have seen three bathrooms: one for girls, one for boys, and one for gender-neutral people.’
This danger of transgression of heterosexual reproductive normativity, ‘parent number one and parent number two’ — as Putin depicts the condition of contemporary Western society — is ultimately seen as a key threat to Russian demography, which requires miltary defence. In his last address to the Federal Council, Putin stated:
The goal of the family is to give birth to children, to procreate the human race, the upbringing of children, and, consequently, the procreation of a multi-ethnic nation. We see what is happening in countries where they consciously destroy moral norms, family as a social institute, and push whole nations to extinction and degeneration. But we choose life. Russia was and remains the stronghold of traditional values on which human civilisation was built. … Yes, today, Russia and other countries are facing declining birth rates. Demographers state that it is connected with global socio-economic, technological, cultural and value change. Young people get an education, build their careers, manage their everyday lives, and postpone giving birth. Obviously, not only does the economy affect birth rates, but also the values that are laid in the family, which are formed by culture, education, and enlightenment. Here, work at all levels of power is important.
The phrase ‘The West needs dying space…But we choose life’ was highlighted by the anti-abortion NGO ‘Women for Life’, which gained substantial political influence over the last year — successfully lobbying for restrictions on abortion rights in different Russian regions. Intensified discussions about abortion rights are legitimsed by war losses — promoting a change in reproductive behaviour in the name of military victory. But what is also that this formula exemplifies how the invasion of the neighbouring country is framed as a fight for ‘life’, i.e. for the norm of reproductive heterosexual family. Putin called for an ideological state apparatus, which should centre such ‘family’ as its key sphere of interest for the sake of the pro-creation of the nation in the face of the threat of external value invasion leading to distinction and ‘sacrifice’ of Russian soldiers.
While the role of economic circumstances, including a high level of poverty among families with many kids, was acknowledged, the solution proposed to the problem leads to a different direction— not to direct state support, but rather to the inclusion of family ties into the circuits of financial capital. Thus, Putin announced a new national project ‘Family’ which consisted mostly of bank loan discounts and minor tax deductions. This new national project goes in line with the Maternal Capital program, which Olena Lyubchenko characterises as the capitalist expropriation of reproduction:
Putin-era pronatalist social policy has become an intricate mechanism in which state benefits, as opposed to being a direct, state-provided form of social provisioning, are fed through circuits of financial capital for profit (in particular for Russian banks and construction companies) — expropriating public goods and working-class households.
‘Traditional values’ discourse simultaneously articulates the crisis of social reproduction, militarises it and camouflages the ongoing expropriation of reproductive labour, not only in Russia but also in the occupied territories. Thus, Putin announced that all the women from the occupied territories who gave birth after 2007, when the Maternal Capital was introduced, would receive it. Russian capital gains via this ‘support’ for families: both new citizens for zero cost and profits for the Russian financial sector.
While the family is presented as a treasure hidden in the fortress of ‘traditional values’ that needs to be defended, it is simultaneously ever-more consumed by the logic of financialisation, as in the case of War Mortgages. It may also be corrupted by a logic of exchange: for instance, a killed relative on a frontline equates to a lottery win-style payout, military service brings a specially allocated university place for children, etc.
A military solution to the crisis of social reproduction
War is always associated with the deterioration of demography: thousands of killed and wounded people, thousands who flee the country, and uncertainty about the future, which undermines the desire to have kids. The situation changes if we see the data as the Russian state would. If the independent media established the death toll at 45,123 combatants, Russian officials have announced a loss of 5,937 combatants. This is a typical gap in Russian bureaucratic data, and we cannot be sure that the ‘actual numbers’ are present or hidden from inner reports as well. But this numbers should be taken in consideration together with the number of potential ‘new citizens’ gained through the invasion. This number is remarkably exaggerated by Russian officials. We saw this when UN data showed that during the year from the beginning of the invasion, more than 2.8 million Ukrainians had to cross the Russian border, lacking almost any possibility of leaving the occupied territories to the Ukrainian side. The Russian authorities boasted figures nearly double that — 5.3 million, among them 738,000 children — thus showing their pride in the forced displacement of millions of Ukrainians and simultaneously articulating their hidden desire: millions of new potential citizens. We can see the same substantial gap in reports about new citizens who are registered for the presidential elections in the occupied territories. While the maximum estimated amount of people who acquired Russian citizenship in the occupied territories is 3.2 million, the Central Election Commission registered 4.5 million people.
Given such an exceptional exaggeration of numbers, one can guess a desire or even some implied norm in expropriating livelihoods. Yet, even if we take the highest evaluation of military losses — 45,123 — and the actual data of passportisation from the Ministry of Domestic Affairs — i.e. 2,8 million people — we can see that the widespread statements about the deteriorating demographic situation are unable to withstand criticism. The human gains from the Russian invasion are enormous. War is a crisis, but capital accumulation needs a crisis that is ‘orchestrated, managed, and controlled to rationalise the system.’
Russian imperialism has uprooted millions of Ukrainians: it took away their houses, ways of life, and community — a ‘devaluation and destruction of previously viable livelihoods’ — to transform Ukrainians from the occupied territories into an even more precarious workforce. As a result, the Kremlin accumulates cheap labour power, appropriating Ukrainian state investment in the birth, care, and education of its former citizens; their reproductive labour; and even their personal relations that allow them to survive in Russia without state support. This — together with the appropriation of companies and the devastation of territories now to be redeveloped — is a typical process of imperialist accumulation by dispossession. However, it is essential to emphasise that the new citizens themselves become the main asset in question, albeit one tremendously devalued through the war with its litany of daily shellings, murders, death, and injuries. Indeed, human life is never as cheap as during wartime.
Remarkably, some Russian propagandists have claimed that next they will invade Northern Kazakhstan, with what they call its predominantly Russian population. The mobilisation of compatriots, the mass passportisation of people in unacknowledged regions, and their military ‘defence’, had all been a tactic the Russian state used already earlier in Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Transnistria. However, if previously, passportisation was used as a device for Russian foreign policy, in the case of the Ukrainian occupied territories, it also served as a way to manage the Russian population, bringing a fundamental change in citizenship and sovereignty.
Before the invasion began, in December 2021, Putin proposed amendments to the citizenship law. It took surprisingly long for the presidential proposal to go through. In the future, we will hopefully learn what kind of debate they sparked, but the interesting missing point of Putin’s proposal, which clearly marked his imperial ambition to expand the categories of people eligible for simplified acquisition of citizenship, including ‘citizens of Belarus, Kazakhstan, Moldova, and Ukraine’ disappeared from the final version of the document. This probably owed to the risk that such a proposal would have damaged Russia’s friendly relationships with Belarus and Kazakhstan, having seen what happened to Ukraine. Yet, the core of the law — a substantial expansion of the crimes that can become a grounds for depriving people of acquired Russian citizenship — passed in an ‘improved’ version, including all the new ‘crimes’ connected with criticism of the Russian armed forces.
The trend for the ‘securitisation’ of citizenship is not unique to Russia; more and more countries are introducing political grounds for the deprivation of citizenship. However, in today’s Russia people with acquired citizenship may lose it for a host of reasons: these range from spreading fake news about or ‘discrediting’ the Russian Armed Forces to calling for separatism; participating in the activities of an undesirable organisation; the desecration of the flag and coat of arms of Russia; encroachment on the life of a statesman; and calls for extremism and the evasion of military service. Besides these are crimes like drug dealing, hooliganism, vandalism, corruption, etc. In December 2023, two men were deprived of Russian citizenship for the circulation of drugs — truly the ‘people’s’ clause’ today providing the basis for one-in-seven court verdicts in Russia. Today, a paediatrician who long ago acquired Russian citizenship is facing the risk of losing it under accusation of spreading ‘fake news’ about the Russian army.
Senators from the occupied territories immediately proposed to expand this law to all Russian citizens (i.e. not just those who ‘acquired’ it). This has not received any political support for now. However, it would be delusional to think that first-class citizens are safe. The law marked a substantial shift in definition in sovereignty in Russia — from remnants of a popular one to the one that is derived from the state itself. Based on the analysis of Putin’s speeches, Oleg Zhuravlev argues that ‘Putin’s embrace of absolute sovereignty precisely constituted the politicisation of the state itself, and this, in turn, required the deliberate exclusion of all popular groups’. The amendments to the Russian citizenship law have begun legalising this process.
The new law together with the call for reproductive mobilization in the face of external threat to ‘traditional values’ gives the Russian state the possibility simultaneously to expand its population and to purify it. There is no reason to expect that it will it stop in that process, so crucial for capitalist production.