Сергей Медведев - The Return of the Russian Leviathan

Unexpectedly for many, political life in Russia has moved into the area of the female anatomy – not in a metaphorical sense, but in the most direct way. The liveliest discussions taking place now are not about Ukraine or Syria and not even about the next Duma elections, but about the womb and the clitoris; about female genital mutilation in the North Caucasus; about the new children’s ombudsman, who is actively fighting against abortion; about the age of consent; and about the schoolgirls who were seduced in School No. 57 in Moscow.

Everything began with a declaration by the Chairman of the Muslim Coordination Centre of the North Caucasus, Ismail Berdiev, who explained the barbaric practice of female genital mutilation in the remote villages of Dagestan as a desire to ‘calm women down’: ‘Women do not lose the ability to give birth. But there will be less debauchery.’ In the discussions that followed, Orthodox fundamentalists supported the Islamic cleric. At their head was Archpriest Vsevolod Chaplin, who declared his sympathy for the mufti on the matter of ‘this feminist howling’.

Discussions about the details of the female anatomy became stronger with the appointment of the new children’s ombudsman Anna Kuznetsova. Journalists quickly uncovered a declaration by Kuznetsova – the wife of a priest and mother of six children – in which she supported the pseudo-science of ‘telegony’, which maintains that the cells of the womb have ‘an information-wave memory’, and when a woman has a number of partners this leads to ‘confused information’, which affects ‘the moral basis of the future child’. The ombudsman’s posts on social media show her to be a conservative Orthodox believer: she is against abortion, surrogate motherhood, vaccinations for children and even ultrasound examination, which she describes as ‘a paid-for mutation’ that will ruin the health of the patient in ten to fifteen years. ‘It’s no wonder that the Old Believers hide their children away in Siberian villages’, she writes on her page in the VKontakte social network.

As well as this, Anna Kuznetsova’s charity foundation, Pokrov (named after the Protective veil of the Virgin) speaks to women who have decided to have an abortion and tries to persuade them not to do it; in other words, the foundation tries to get doctors to go against their professional ethics, and even the law, by telling them they should come up with reasons why they should refuse the patient what she is guaranteed by state medical help, thus frightening and manipulating women. The sociologist, Ella Paneyakh, who has studied the activities of the foundation, describes its behaviour as ‘reproductive violence’.

Now we come at last to the scandal of Moscow School No. 57, where a history teacher (and, more than likely, not just he alone) over the course of many years had been sleeping with his schoolgirls. So as to avoid publicity and scandal, this fact had been covered up by the girls, their parents, the school administration and even the media, which had started to investigate on a number of occasions, but had dropped the case soon afterwards. The matter came to light only thanks to a post on Facebook from a girl who was a former pupil of the school, the journalist Ekaterina Krongauz, which led to an absolute avalanche of similar stories about this and other schools. It is worth pointing out that this wave happened against the background of another, which had already gripped Russian and Ukrainian social networks. This was the flash-mob #yaNyeBoyusSkazat, (‘I’m not afraid to speak out’; see above, ‘Breaking “The Silence of the Lambs”’), in which thousands of women for the first time in their lives spoke out about their experience of sexual violence, humiliation and harassment. The revelations by these women – from battered wives to schoolgirls who had been seduced by their teacher – was a real eye-opener for the Russian mass consciousness; not because people learnt anything new, but because the taboo on speaking out about such matters had been shattered.

The way in which public speech has drifted towards sexuality, physiology and even anatomy shows how the battle for the body in society’s perception has turned around. It is here, and not in the imaginary struggle against NATO, nor on the Russo-Ukrainian border, that we find the frontline in the battle for ‘the Russian World’; it is the line where the citizen faces up to the state. The attack unravels by the conservative, Orthodox forces, behind which stands the authoritarian figure of Putin’s spiritual adviser, Bishop Tikhon, whom some are now calling a modern-day Rasputin because of the level of his influence on the affairs of state. They say that it was he who lobbied for the appointment of Kuznetsova as the children’s ombudsman.

More importantly, though, is that it is not just a case of a few notable individuals, but rather that towards the end of Putin’s third term there was the formation of a new consensus with a particular view of the world; a new profile of power in which the pragmatic, Westernizing technocrats, such as the former Minister of Education Dmitry Livanov, were being replaced with the ‘correct’ sort of fighters on the ideological front, whose ideas are rooted in Orthodoxy. In this profile we find the new Human Rights’ Commissioner, Tatyana Moskalkova, who suggested after the action by Pussy Riot in the Cathedral that a new law be brought onto the statute book on ‘attacking morality’; and Anna Kuznetsova with her ‘telegony’; and the new Head of the Presidential Administration, Anton Vayno, with his fascinating ‘nooscope’ apparatus, for ‘studying mankind’s collective consciousness’ and ‘the registration of the unseen’.

These are all products of the past decade, fruits of the crisis in scientific knowledge and the new cultural condition of society, where on our TV screens ‘Word of the Preacher’ competes for ratings with ‘Battle of the Psychics’; where priests bless spacecraft and astrologers discuss pregnancy with gynaecologists. A post-secular world is developing in Russia with the anti-modernist agenda of a new Middle Ages. Apparently, this is what sets the ideological tone after the 2018 presidential elections, to ensure the loyalty of the elite and social stability in a time of economic crisis and the transit of power. Here we have a parallel with the collapse of various empires, be it the Roman or the Byzantine, when all sorts of sects and Gnostic teachings sprang up; or the Russian Empire on the eve of the First World War, the time of the ‘wise man’ Grigory Rasputin, the favourite of the Empress; or the Third Reich, with its occult organization, the Ahnenerbe, and its searches for Shambhala in the Antarctic. As all great empires have declined, people have sought solace in mysticism.

Coming to meet this anti-modernist wave is a growing civil wave of a totally different hue, characterized best of all by the ‘I’m not afraid to speak out’ flash mob and the revelations of the girls of School No. 57 – a spontaneous modernizing network, linked by both freedom of expression and the removal of taboos. Thanks to social networks, people are breaking the ages-old vow of silence and coming out with their personal stories, which tear away the authority of the principal patriarchal institutes: the family and the school, and the orders of closed groups (be they a clan of relatives or an elite educational institution). They are throwing down a challenge to power, which is much stronger than the state Leviathan. This is the power of tradition, written into the very grammar of the language, in the fear to violate spoken etiquette, in the judgement of the collective (‘everyone does it like this’; ‘there was no need to be provocative’; ‘don’t wash your dirty linen in public’; ‘the most important thing is to preserve the school (or the family)’). All these figures of speech preserve the patriarchal contract even more strongly than the OMON riot police and the Church – and it is against them that these first flash mobs are rebelling. Their language is that of the body: the body is speaking about its independence, its maturity, pain and fear; about the right to choose and the right to speak out.