July 11, 2019

Family ties are the top priority for Russians – at least, in theory

topic:	Humans
located:	Russia
editor:	Igor Serebryany

This Monday, Russians celebrated the Day of Family, Love and Fidelity, an analogue of the Western St Valentino’s Day. Family issues have been a controversial topic in this country due to the rise of the Western-style feminism which, basically, contradicts the Russian traditional notions of how gender relations must be upheld.

Opinion polls conducted by the All-Russian Center for Public Opinion (VTSIOM) revealed that 77 percent of those polled believed that only formal marriages must be recognised, with only 11 percent saying that love should not be “certified” on paper. Another 10 percent insisted that divorce must be outlawed. The poll showed a striking gap between the firm belief in family values and the actual state of family affairs in this country.

UN statistics show that Russia holds the first place in the world by the marriage/divorce ratio, with up to 70 percent of families break up in any given year since 1998. The poll's results have little to do with real life, head of the VTSIOM’s team Mikhail Mamonov highlights. “People say they support traditional values because the family is a sacred thing in the Orthodox culture", said Mamonov. "Few people would admit they prefer common-law relationships. But even those who honestly believe in marriage are not always able to keep normal relations with their other half in their everyday life”, he added.

This is a natural phenomenon, agrees psychologist in the Russian Academy of Science Sergei Enikopolov. “Modern social trends such as women emancipation contradict male sexual instinct, which undermines traditional marriage as a social institute. Marriage falls the victim of political correctness”, he believes.

The leader of the national Men’s Rights Movement, Dmitry Seleznev, advocates the marriage-free lifestyle and finds that formal marriage is a trap for “naive” men. “Those 77 percent of supporters of a formal marriage just don’t understand that a man loses everything in the case divorce: children and property”.

Coincidently, the Russian Ministry of Labor made its own move to enhance gender equality the same Monday, updating a list of occupations women have been banned from. Currently, the list of “man-only” occupations comprises 457 jobs. By 2021, the list will be shrunk to 98.

In two years, Russian women can now work as a truck driver, a car mechanic, serve in the Navy and other “man-only” jobs. Remarkably, the Russian parliament, State Duma, turned down a bill “about state guarantees of equal rights and opportunities for men and women”. The legislators said that Russian women enjoyed more rights than Russian men, thus “equalisation” would actually narrow their current freedoms.

Image: Vladimir Pustovit, flickr