SERGEI MEDVEDEV ⟩ Russia mobilizing women to bear children for the army

Photo: Evgeniy Maloletka/AP

• Moscow is launching biopolitics.
• In Russia, a woman's body belongs to the state.
• Russian geopolitics has a strong gender connotation.

Putin's Russia is indeed a great role model for men who value patriarchy. Whether these men themselves would agree to be cannon fodder in Russia's endless wars is a different matter. Now, mobilization has also been announced for women, writer and historian Sergei Medvedev writes in his recent essay – the mobilization is aimed at turning them into birthing machines, because there is always a shortage of cannon fodder.

Maybe you have not noticed it, but in Russia a mobilization for women has been announced. No, they are not yet being sent en masse to the assault battalions near Vuhledar (although according to «Important Stories,» female prisoners have been spotted in the assault units of the Ministry of Defense, and recently the death of one of them, Elena Pimonenkova, became known) – they have been registered to childbearing regiments. The fight for a higher birth rate has reached a new level in Russia: the State Duma is considering a bill according to which women can be punished for promoting childlessness. For the dissemination of this satanic teaching, private individuals will be fined up to 800,000 rubles and legal entities up to five million rubles, while foreign citizens face arrest and expulsion from Russia. The State Duma has already proposed to declare the «childfree movement,» which does not exist in reality, as extremist, just as the «international LGBT social movement» was declared an extremist organization and banned in the Russian Federation in 2023. Feminism appears to be next on the list – last year, the notorious MP Oleg Matveychev tabled a bill to declare it an extremist ideology.

The inquisitorial state has resorted to fire and brimstone to burn out of society all trends, orientations and identities that might distract women from their primary task: childbearing. According to a senior Russian state official quoted by the Telegram channel Faridaily, the birth rate is now Vladimir Putin's fetish. Dmitry Peskov resolutely put it: «Anything that hinders increasing the birth rate must disappear from our lives.» According to this logic, gays and lesbians, transgender and non-binary people, feminists and the childless should disappear; procreation has been declared a matter of national security, a raison d'état for which the rights of the individual, privacy and women's bodies may be sacrificed.

On the other hand, a colonial view of women as inferior subjects, limited solely to their biological, reproductive function prevails.

Women are being driven from the social body created by a century of modernization and emancipation – from early Soviet feminism to post-Soviet pragmatism – back into nature, to be biological bodies, to become walking birthing machines. As the high priest Andrei Tkachev recently declared in a sermon (it seems that he has taken up the vacant seat of the chief troll of the Russian Orthodox Church, replacing the deceased high priest Dmitry Smirnov), a woman does not need breasts if she does not breastfeed with them: «She has lived her life and has not breastfed – why does she have these breasts? Better have been a boy instead.»

Politicians and officials are already rushing to propose ways to force women, including minors, to bear children: in the Federation Council, an initiative was presented to award extra points in university admissions to women (essentially yesterday's schoolgirls) who have given birth within the past year. According to Senator Andrei Kutepov, giving birth to a child should be considered a «personal achievement» for these yesterday's schoolgirls and taken into account in admissions. Meanwhile, in the city of Okha in Sakhalin, schoolchildren were shown a close-up video of a surgical abortion as part of a lecture on the dangers of abortion. Some children felt ill after watching it.

This indeed is a genuine mobilization of women. Their bodies do not belong to them, but to the state, which is extending its borders (which, as we know, «end nowhere») not only in geographical space, but also in the human body, appropriating the bodies of its citizens as a strategic resource. This is a new, expanded definition of national sovereignty – not only as geopolitical control over territory, but also as biopolitical control over human life. In this paradigm, the man's job is to kill and die in the countless wars of this country, and the woman's job is to give birth to new men who will set out to kill and die again, locking life into an endless chain of procreation and destruction, a smoothly operating meat grinder of biopolitics (politics of life) and necropolitics (politics of death). Marshal Zhukov's ingenious dictum «women will give birth to more,» which he allegedly used in a conversation with General Eisenhower about the Soviets' huge losses in the battle for Berlin, is too good to be a mere apocryphal.

This indeed is a genuine mobilization of women. Their bodies do not belong to them, but to the state, which is extending its borders (which, as we know, «end nowhere») not only in geographical space, but also in the human body, appropriating the bodies of its citizens as a strategic resource.

What to expect next? Since modern Russia is meekly imitating the Stalinist USSR in a role-playing game, Stalinist biopolitical laws should be expected: the prohibition and criminalization of abortion (things have been moving in this direction for several years, since abortion is essentially excluded from the system of compulsory health insurance) and a childlessness tax. Let us recall that under the name of «tax for bachelors, singles and members of small families» it was introduced in November 1941, during the most critical period of the so-called Great Patriotic War – the connection between giving birth to children and war was the most direct. The tax was paid by men between the ages of 20 and 50, regardless of marital status, as well as married women between the ages of 20 and 45. The war ended, but the tax remained in place until 1990 – and 35 years later, it may return to the legislation of the state that is feverishly grappling with how to force the population to have children. Not far from discriminatory tax measures against the childless are repressive measures: administrative cases and fines for those who do not want to have children, and further, with biopolitical imagination, even forced fertilization – for example, with the participation of such altogether worthy suitors as veterans of the «special military operation.» As the practice of recent years shows, there is no such wild dystopia, such absurdity or grotesque that could not be realized in today's Russia.

Broadly speaking, Russia's war with Ukraine and the state's war with women are two sides of the same coin, two psychological complexes, two hidden resentments of a semi-modernized society that is painfully bidding farewell to patriarchal habits and institutions. On the one hand, a colonial view of Ukraine as an inferior entity, a «little Russia» that has no right to its own culture, language, statehood, foreign policy orientation – the complex of the older brother, or rather the abandoned husband, who wants to knock some sense into his estranged wife and punish her. Russia's geopolitical imagination has a strong gender connotation, and the «right to Ukraine» (as well as the «blue-eyed sister» Belarus) is legitimized by Russia's presumed male privileges.

On the other hand, a colonial view of women as inferior subjects, limited solely to their biological, reproductive function prevails. In Russia's rapid archaization, all state institutions – the army, police, schools, medicine, and the church (also a state institution in fact) – have joined forces to push women into the patriarchal family bed, to mobilize their bodies to give birth to new soldiers for the war. Therefore, the anti-war agenda now largely overlaps with the feminist one (respect for the Feminist Anti-War Resistance): decolonizing the post-Soviet space is as necessary as decolonizing women's bodies. Victory over patriarchy will signal both the final collapse of the Russian empire and the collapse of the «state of men» led by a sovereign obsessed with the idea of procreation.