Rebellious Parents: Parental Movements in Central-Eastern Europe and Russia
372
Rebellious Parents: Parental Movements in Central-Eastern Europe and Russia
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780253026675 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Indiana University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/18/2017 |
| Pages: | 372 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.90(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d) |
| Age Range: | 18 Years |
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CHAPTER 1
Nationalism and Civicness in Russia: Grassroots Mobilization in Defense of "Family Values"
Tova Hojdestrand
Introduction
On behalf of the parental community and the civil society of Russia, we appeal to the representatives of the state power of the Russian Federation, who, in accordance to the Constitution of our country, are obliged to defend family, motherhood, and childhood. We demand that further pressure from representatives of international political organizations on Russia should not be tolerated, or their involvement in domestic concerns of our country or in Russian legislation and lawmaking, since they result in the destruction of Russian families, of traditional culture, of family life and upbringing of children, and in the intensification of demographic problems that will result in the extinction of our people.
Thus begins the Saint Petersburg Resolution, an open protest letter against a draft recommendation by the European Council on children's rights and parental responsibilities. It was signed in October 2011 by eighty Russian nonstate organizations, most of them being relatively new grassroots groups, and was published on a broad range of nationalist and conservative religious Orthodox websites. The Parents' Movement (roditel'skoe dvizhenie), as these grassroots define themselves, is a nationwide mobilization in the defense of Russian traditional family values. The Resolution is but one in a long series of petitions and open letters since 2010 in which the movement rejects foreign involvement in Russian affairs, and it (as stated later in the text) expresses deep anxieties about transnational treaties challenging parental authority or equating homosexual relationships with heterosexual marriage.
This chapter will explore the agenda and the emergence of the Parents' Movement, with a primary focus on the very first words of the Resolution, "on behalf of the parental community and the civil society." In documents and discussions in the "parental cyberspace," the word grazhdanskiy (civil/civic; derived from citizen, grazhdan) appears frequently and in various contexts, be it concerning action, resistance, community, or society. Such phrasings are not self-evident in conservative Russian discourse. Intrinsic to the idea of Western liberal democracy, the concept "civic" has previously been associated with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) created in the 1990s, largely with Western funding, for the very purpose to promote democracy and civil society in the formerly authoritarian East. Nationalists relate to this NGO sector with outright hostility, which the Resolution makes very clear: "We are seriously concerned about the activities of some relatively small groups proclaiming their ideals in the name of the entire civil society, while in reality their objectives contradict the authentic interests of sovereign peoples." Human rights in general (which will be discussed later) and children's rights in particular, tolerance, anti-discrimination, and so forth are, according to parental activists, only decoys for Western imperialism in its attempts to eliminate Russia as a civilization.
Nonetheless, the notion of civicness appeals to the Parents' Movement because it aims to establish a dialogue between grassroots and the Russian state administration, which is considered to be not only corrupt and abusive, but also treacherous to Russian sovereignty and tradition by not being patriotic enough. Parental grassroots organizations articulate their own notion of what civicness implies, because neither the organizational forms nor the "moral coordinates," as they would phrase it, of the former liberal guardians of the "civic concepts" match their own ideas about what active and ethically acceptable citizenship implies.
Here, I make no pretensions to new theoretical insights of what "civil society," "civic action," etc. actually are — it is the normativity and Eurocentrism of these concepts that make them malleable and, thereby, rewarding subjects for negotiation and reshaping (Hann and Dunn 1996). Rather, my aim is to show how emic conceptions about civil society and civicness are instrumental for a collective identity in Melucci's (1989) sense: a continuous and highly emotionally charged negotiation of shared aims, means, and fields of action, articulated through interaction by a common language and common sets of practices. This identity also involves antiliberalism, patriotism, and a religious worldview — ideological scaffolds that are relatively stable. Civicness, in contrast, the understanding of how to be and act as a subject in civil society, is perpetually negotiated as the Parents' Movement itself transforms and develops.
After a comment on the methods of this study, I will first contextualize the emergence of conservative profamily discourse and activism in relation to Soviet anti-Western discourse and to post-Soviet global ideological flows. Secondly, I will situate the Parents' Movement in the context of the general development of civic organizations and grassroots activism in Russia from the 1990s onward. After outlining the organizational principles of parental organizations and their cautious relationship (to say the least) to power, I will discuss the movement's agenda and its most prioritized item — the struggle against a legal implementation of the UN Convention of the Rights of the Child that led to the rapid proliferation of the movement in recent years. Success poses new challenges, however, so I will lastly discuss how recent options to influence power have challenged the previously prevalent ideas among parental activists about civicness and, thereby, also the movement's collective identity as a whole.
Field and Method
"The Parents' Movement," roditel'skoe dvizhenie, is a term that activists use in a self-evident manner without further definitions. It refers to anything from a seemingly narrow selection of Orthodox extreme nationalist networks to any supporter of the movement's main objectives. (Since the term is quite general, it appeals also to other parental initiatives, but search machines and media archives reveal few, if any, competitors.) Many groups, including a number of the signatories of the Saint Petersburg Resolution, simply call themselves roditel'skiy komitet, "the Parents Committee," of a particular place (the term is usually applied to the parental committees of schools and kindergartens). Others mix different buzzwords in reference to their agendas: "Family, Love, Fatherland," or "In Defense of Family, Childhood, and Morality." So far, I have counted 300 such parental groups, although not all of them advertise regular activities and some seem to be created for the sole purpose of signing resolutions and petitions. Also, it is not possible to determine the number of participants in these groups since, as I was told by a respondent, "it depends on what you count: me and the other guy who in practice are doing all the work, another 50 who turn up now and then, or the 300 who've joined us at vkontakte."
Vkontakte ("In Touch") is a Russian equivalent to Facebook that is my main source of information, together with a wide array of virtual communities, social networking sites, blogs, websites of "real life" organizations; Orthodox patriotic internet journals and news websites; and mainstream media archives (Integrum, in particular). From March 2012, I have followed two main websites that have served as points of departure to further trace significant issues, concepts, actors, and events.
I have also conducted twelve interviews with activists and leaders of local parental groups in Moscow and Saint Petersburg in 2012, in addition to talking to several professionals experienced with the policies and projects of concern to the Parents' Movement. All respondents are anonymized: the professionals because many of them spoke off the record, and parental leaders because their decision to meet me, (as two told me), might compromise them in the eyes of other activists. It was evident in 2012 that these respondents positioned me as a potential enemy, both as an academic and as a Westerner, and the ongoing conflict in Ukraine has hardly ameliorated this animosity. Many of those whom I contacted never replied, so I have decided to not include the names of the ones who nonetheless did; I am just very grateful that they agreed to talk to me at all.
Maleficent Modernity and Western Warfare: The Emergence of a Moral Conservative Opposition
The Russian Parents' Movement dates back to the mid-2000s, but its critical stance toward Western ideologies and culture has considerably older roots. Messianic ideas about "the Third Rome" and "Holy Rus'" have, for at least five centuries, pitted Russia against an allegedly degenerated Western adversary. In the Soviet period most social problems were glossed over as results of capitalist ideological contagion. A core trope in today's anti-Western rhetoric is Russia's demographic decline, which was already proclaimed a major social threat in the 1980s. Socioeconomic explanations were not ignored, but many politicians and leading intellectuals preferred purportedly Western scapegoats such as feminism and licentious sexual behavior (Attwood 1990).
Birthrates and "cultural influence theories" remained central tropes to nationalist discourse throughout the drastic demographic decline of the 1990s. By the end of the decade, Russian nationalists picked up a moral crusade against sexualized mass media and Western-funded educational projects on reproductive health and sexuality (cf. Kon 1999). Initiated by ultranationalist Orthodox clerics and intellectuals, this debate was not a social movement inasmuch as a battle fought in mass media. Nonetheless, by the turn of the millennium a handful of grassroots groups of "concerned parents" appeared, from which the Parents' Movement would emerge nearly ten years later.
This nascent conservative opposition stems from a historically rooted local anti-Western tradition while simultaneously tapping into a contemporary global social conservative ideoscape (Appadurai 1996), in which the Russian "anti-sex rhetoric" (Fine 1988) differs little from others of its kind. Russian sexologist Igor Kon (1999) has even suggested that US missionaries initiated the Russian campaign. Whether or not he is right (I lack other sources), discourses and ideological currents tend to travel in less intentional ways. Today, parental activists worldwide are immersed in a global cyberspace with endless options to pick from each other's repertoires. US sources are particularly rewarding since they, being among the oldest, provide the largest amounts of text, moreover in English, which is today's major lingua franca.
The cross-fertilization between domestic and foreign elements is particularly conspicuous in the narratives of moral warfare and conspiracy from which the Russian anti-sex rhetoric departs. Conspiracy theory as such has century-old roots in Russia, but it became, for obvious reasons, a commonplace facet of Cold War propaganda in both the East and the West. In Russia, an endless number of mutations have developed rapidly in the post-Soviet period (Ortmann and Heathershaw 2012), many of which are heavily inspired by a burgeoning US supply of similar narratives. In the Russian "sexualized" narrative, the formerly near-obligatory Jewish plot is replaced by a mafia of gays and/or liberals, and anti-Communist elements are re-wrought to fit the prevalent Soviet nostalgia of Russian nationalists. It borrows from US sources also by linking the UN and other supranational agencies to a demonized "new world order" and the coming of the Antichrist (Herman 2001).
Irina Medvedeva and Tatiana Shishova, child psychologists and to this day the most influential debaters of the Parents' Movement, thus trace the allegedly satanic origins of the International Planned Parenthood Foundation (IPPF) from Margaret Sanger's well-known interest in Rosicrucianism and her endorsement of eugenics in the 1930s (the then predominant scientific paradigm) to Nazi mysticism, Aleister Crowley, homosexual Knights' Templars, the cult of Baphomet, and ancient Egyptian sects. With the benign aid of "liberal" Russian NGOs and corrupt state administrators, IPPF and allies such as the World Health Organization (WHO) are allegedly conducting a demographic war against Russia by proliferating an immoral and promiscuous lifestyle that, ultimately, will aggravate the already alarming abortion rates and lead to mass infertility due to STDs (Medvedeva and Shishova 2001). The strongly polemical prose relies heavily on biased or falsified information, hyperboles, and what Irvine (2004) in the US context calls depravity stories (i.e., unconfirmed urban legends about the disastrous effects of sexual education). Truth is immaterial to this kind of rhetoric, since its purpose is not to provide facts inasmuch as to shock and accommodate an emotional climate (Irvine 2004, 58). Russian depravity stories are usually about events in the West, as a way to underline the foreign origins of evil — English children are, as an example, said to begin their sexual lives at the age of nine and suffer from impotence by the age of twelve (Medvedeva and Shishova 1996).
The Sociopolitical Environment: Power and the Civil Sector
A significant part in "anti-sex" conspiracy narratives is played by a purported fifth column of corrupt Russian state administrators, liberal politicians, and NGOs, who are assumed to do the dirty job of the supranational agencies by promoting family planning and programs for sexual education and HIV prevention at the local level. The presumed evil intentions notwithstanding, these claims are correct insofar that Western aid agencies indeed were important for the emergence of a civil sector after the demise of the Soviet Union. The Yeltsin administration neither encouraged nor impeded civic activism, and in the chaotic 1990s people in general were too preoccupied with plain survival to have much time and energy left for collective mobilizations. Hence the "first generation" of NGOs largely comprised specialized advocacy organizations with permanent staff and facilities funded by Western grants. Predominant aims were human rights, gender equality, and other aspects of democracy building, as well as attempts to compensate the deficiencies of the crumbling sector of social welfare. The high Russian rates of abortions and HIV infection made reproductive health a prioritized issue, and such projects were frequently carried out by Russian NGOs in cooperation with sectors of the state administration. They frequently turned out to be very productive, but the professionalization of the NGOs simultaneously estranged them from ordinary grassroots (cf. Jacobsson and Saxonberg 2013). In effect, the presumed new civil sector was perceived by many in terms of the old nomenklatura: a remote and privileged elite benefiting from resources unavailable to others (Hemment 2004). To the (thus far) relatively limited and marginalized flora of extreme nationalists and anti-sex activists, they were, in addition, the agents of hostile Western forces attempting to undermine Russian culture and sovereignty.
A few years after the beginning of the millennium, the political opportunities for civic action changed radically. In contrast to the Yeltsin administration, the Putin regime actively encourages the development of a civil society, on the condition that it serves a common national cause instead of advocating the interests of particular social groups (Henderson 2011). A federal Civic Chamber was created in 2004 to counsel the Duma on social issues and to distribute government funds to the civil sector, and the number of nonstate domestic funders has increased. Western funding has in the same period become politically inopportune and difficult to receive, due to nationalist policies and the fact that the relative economic stability has prompted foreign development agencies to leave Russia on their own accord.
Since the mid-2000s, mainstream official rhetoric has to an increasing extent revolved around patriotism, traditional morals (aka Orthodoxy), and family values — tropes that were formerly employed mainly in the distinctly Orthodox and/or ultranationalist sectors of the political spectrum. In spite of improved birthrates in the 2000s, the imminent "death of the nation" has remained pivotal, and so is the claim that the most effective remedy is pronatalist policy and a return to "tradition" (Rivkin-Fish 2006). Hence no enterprise today fails to include a profound concern for family and children in the presentation of its aims, be it within the state sector, the business world, or the "third sector" of nonstate organizations. The latter category includes a number of well-funded profamily organizations engaged in charity, educational projects, pro-life agitation, and demographic research. In contrast to, for example, the US Christian Right, these elite organizations do not simultaneously try to organize local grassroots networks (Irvine 2004), but they are solidly connected within the Russian power elite and, in some cases, associated with transnational profamily networks such as US-based World Congress of Families (cf. Morn 2013; Levintova 2014; Federman 2014).
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgements Introduction: Rebellious Parents in Central-Eastern Europe and Russia / Katalin Fabian and Elzbieta Korolczuk1. Nationalism and Civicness in Contemporary Russia: Grassroots Mobilization in Defense of Traditional Family Values / Tova Hojdestrand2. "For the Sake of Our Children's Future": A Conservative Parents' Mobilization in Ukraine / Olena Strelnyk3. (Un)deserving Parents: Constructing Parenthood and Nation in Bulgaria through New Reproductive Technologies / Ina Dimitrova4. In the Name of the Family and Nation: Framing Fathers' Activism in Poland / Elzbieta Korolczuk and Renata E. Hryciuk5. Civil Society and Fatherhood in the Borderlands: Promoting Active Fathers in Russian Daddy-Schools / Pelle Aberg and Johnny Rodin6. Fathers' Activism in Contemporary Ukraine: Contradictory Positions on Gender Equality / Iman Karzabi7. Down and Out in a "Femo-Fascist" State: the Czech Fathers' Discussion Forum / Steven Saxonberg 8. Resisting Mandatory Vaccination: the Formation of the "Informed Parent" in the Czech Republic / Jaroslava Hasmanova Marhankova9. From Tired Parents to NGO Advocacy for Children with Intellectual Disabilities: The Case of the Baltic States / Egle Sumskiene10. The Natural Childbirth Movement in the Czech Republic / Ema Hresanova11. Parents Rebelling against the State: Emotions and Images in the Hungarian Home-Birth Movement / Katalin Fabian12. Regional and Theoretical Lessons: New Perspectives on Civil Societies and Ambiguities toward the State, the West, and Gender Equality / Katalin Fabian and Elzbieta KorolczukIndexWhat People are Saying About This
"We see here evidence of engaged citizens, not directly challenging political leaders about broad economic or political policies, but seeking to change public attitudes to vital issues facing people in their everyday lives as parents. ...This is very much a contribution to scholarship and knowledge. We just don't know about this type of activism."
We see here evidence of engaged citizens, not directly challenging political leaders about broad economic or political policies, but seeking to change public attitudes to vital issues facing people in their everyday lives as parents. ...This is very much a contribution to scholarship and knowledge. We just don't know about this type of activism.
This is an important and innovative book about a developing social phenomenon — parental movements — that is not yet on the radar screens of gender scholars of eastern Europe and those interested in gender-inflected social movements more generally, around the world. But it should be. The volume collects contrasting case studies that are not easy to categorize as conservative or progressive. That contributes to the book's interest, opening up new conceptualizations. It reveals emerging and sometimes unexpected positions, strategies and commitments among eastern European citizens.
We see here evidence of engaged citizens, not directly challenging political leaders about broad economic or political policies, but seeking to change public attitudes to vital issues facing people in their everyday lives as parents. ...This is very much a contribution to scholarship and knowledge. We just don't know about this type of activism.
This is an important and innovative book about a developing social phenomenon — parental movements — that is not yet on the radar screens of gender scholars of eastern Europe and those interested in gender-inflected social movements more generally, around the world. But it should be. The volume collects contrasting case studies that are not easy to categorize as conservative or progressive. That contributes to the book's interest, opening up new conceptualizations. It reveals emerging and sometimes unexpected positions, strategies and commitments among eastern European citizens.
This is an excellent collection with conceptual and methodological unity and high quality contributions that are thoroughly researched. ... The work makes a real contribution to the field (both theoretically and empirically), challenges stereotypes, and presents new areas of valuable research.