Chechnya is an unruly part of the Russian Federation. Different though its islamic traditions might be from Russian Orthodox Russia publicist Anna Arutunyan sees similarities. In Chechnya violence is justified because it enforces obedience and honor. In Russia domestic violence has been decriminalized by a conservative parliament. It is a return to a primitive state that individuals, society, and government resort to when they feel threatened by the proliferation of choices.
Women protest against Myanmar in centre of Chechen capital Grozny in september 2017 (picture Wikimedia)
For several years now, Russia’s Vladimir Putin has been talking about strengthening family and spiritual bonds as a means to revive national identity. And in Chechnya, strongman leader Ramzan Kadyrov has been using those bonds to rule the republic with an iron fist. While they are entirely different cultures, the common elements in their return to family values can shed light about why social conservatism is spreading worldwide.
The turn to traditional family values in Russia became starkly visible around Putin’s return to a third presidential term, and it went hand in hand with a growing reliance on the Russian Orthodox Church. The trial and jailing of Pussy Riot, whose dance at the altar of Moscow’s biggest church was judged an insult to religious feelings, was one step in a process whereby the government of a country that lacked a coherent national identity turned to religion and 'tradition' to find something to unify society. But another step was a recent legislative bill that decriminalized domestic violence – not in the name of making the criminal code more efficient (there could be an argument for that), but in the name of family values. In other words, when lawmakers and church clerics in Russia justified decriminalizing cases where a man beats his wife or children by citing family values, they took a major step in defining 'family values' as inherently violent and coercive.
Chechnya is not Russia
Chechnya is not Russia, it is frequently said – an adage that applies to practically any ethnic republic within the Russian Federation, and if you visit, it is clear why. Customs, language, culture, religion, mentality, flora, fauna – even the architecture – are as different as if you have changed continents. And the Chechen people in particular – after two unsuccessful wars for independence – cherish and jealously guard the uniqueness of their culture, as they should.
But part of what many Chechens themselves refer to as Chechen tradition – a kind of extreme familial bondage in which individual choice and interpersonal boundaries are virtually non-existent and where violence, particularly against women, is an acceptable means of enforcing family bonds – is not that dissimilar to the kind of conservative family ideology being imposed on society by the Russian government and the Orthodox Church. There is, at heart, little uniquely 'Chechen' about intolerance towards gays or the stigmatization of divorced women.
To understand this logic of bondage, I spoke to several human rights activists in Chechnya’s capital, Grozny, where the government recently set up a committee that persuades divorced couples to get together.
In Chechnya, there are practical reasons why divorced women might want to go back to a bad relationship: courts there generally give custody of the child to the father, who can prevent his ex-wife from seeing her child. A committee serving to reconcile the couple could be a last resort for the wife, because at least officials will hear both sides of the story in a bid to bring the two back together.
But aside from this, there was an underlying logic that argued that a marriage, no matter how bad or abusive, was better than a divorce.
'You know, every family has various things going on. Maybe there is violence. But at least we have values, and at least now we have a government body that divorced women can go to,' Heda Saratova, a human rights activist who has become loyal to Ramzan Kadyrov and seeks to use government resources to help women, told me.
'A woman knows her traditions, knows that her actions will cast a shadow upon her father and her mother. If a woman violates her traditions, it doesn’t matter where she goes. It’s already a crime. Against her family.'
Indeed, another man in Grozny, an educated, cosmopolitan publisher, admitted that a person fears the shame of the mother and father more than Kadyrov’s power. It appears that the pain of enduring that shame outweighs the pain of enduring an emotionally or physically abusive relationship. The logic is further bolstered by the powerful idea that divorce – especially one in which a child can be deprived of seeing his or her mother – is disastrous for the child.
Another independent human rights activist, who spoke to me on conditions of anonymity, said she had been wary that the committee to reunite divorced couples would operate coercively, but heard of no cases of couples being reunited against their will. That may be so, but it may also be because coercion is embedded into the very logic of a value system that places a premium on togetherness and obedience above all else: a woman may not even be able to admit to herself, let alone others, that she is going back into an abusive relationship.
'Of course, sometimes a woman leaves because of physical or emotional abuse. But one of the conditions this commission set was that abuse or violence against the woman was unacceptable,' the independent human rights activist said. 'The woman is also pressured – her condition is that she has to obey the husband. The man doesn’t have a right to beat her, but if she disobeys him he can divorce.'
An extreme version of this logic can be seen in a handful of growing cases in which young women growing up in Chechen families living in Europe are sent back to Chechnya to be 're-educated', i.e. purged of their 'European' values of choice and equality, often by force and violence.
Svetlana Gannushkina, a Moscow-based human rights activist who has worked with such women, described a case where a mother living in Germany sent her 19-year-old daughter back to Chechnya, where she was beaten and choked by male relatives for refusing to give up her documents. (The documents were taken anyway, although the woman was later found and brought back to Germany through Gannushkina’s efforts).
Violence here is justified because it enforces obedience and honor. Gannushkina further described this logic: 'The strangulations. The beatings. By Chechen standards, nothing untoward happened: after all, she was told to hand over her documents, and she disobeyed! What else can you do with her? A Chechen girl, a college student, where I was giving a lecture about right to life, when I ask her, have I managed to convince you that honor killings are unacceptable? She says, no. If a girl has been told once, told twice, and she doesn’t understand, then, well, honor is more valuable than life. Two other girls agreed with her. Although later, in private, they thanked me for raising the question, and said they couldn’t have disagreed in the presence of their friend.'
Ultra-conservative drives from below
Putin supports family values and religion. Ceremony with mufti, rabbi and patriarkh on Red Square on Day of national unity (photo Kremlin.ru)
Where does this logic come from? Both Putin and Kadyrov especially have publicly encouraged the harshest forms of traditionalist family bondage: primarily by talking up the premium of women having as many children as possible, regardless of whether they want to or not. But that is only half of the story – many of these ultra-conservative drives are coming from below. In Chechnya and Tatarstan, for instance, recent years have seen radical groups emerge on social networks that shame and police women for posting immodest pictures or behaving in ways that run counter to Shariat law. This is not just online shaming – these groups’ efforts have ultimately led to these women being kidnapped and punished, sometimes by their own relatives. A recent case saw a Chechen woman seeking refugee status in Norway detained by police in Minsk and set back to Chechnya thanks to the efforts of one such group. https://meduza.io/en/feature/2017/09/12/when-a-daughter-is-killed-for-an-offense-i-stand-and-applaud
The government appears not quite sure what to do with these groups. On the one hand, in evidence that these drives genuinely come from the populace, Russia’s federal media watchdog, Roskomnadzor, blocked the Chechen group Carthage after the Prosecutor General’s Office found their activities extremist. https://www.vedomosti.ru/technology/articles/2017/09/12/733434-soobschestvo-karfagen But it’s notable that this measure came from the federal authorities, not Chechnya, where Ramzan Kadyrov has all but condoned honor killings. And as for the official rights activist, Heda Saratova, this was all she had to say when I asked her about these cases: 'These things, they are not talked about. I’ve heard about it. But there are no facts. It’s kept in shadow. And if people don’t ask for help, then I can’t go in there and dig.'
More notably still, similar, although not as extreme, conservative measures coming from below are seen among Slavic populations in Russia: a poster spotted by the online journal Takie Dela defined a 'normal family' as one where a husband and wife are in their first and only relationship, where the husband is the head of the family, and the family has as many children as 'God sends'. In another case, an Orthodox nun from Yekaterinburg authored a textbook on 'family relations' which dictates a family 'hierarchy' in which the wife must be subordinate to the husband. The textbook is already being taught in schools across the country and the Education Ministry is mulling a possibility of making it mandatory for the school curriculum nationwide.
Encouragement by government
These incidents, from the decriminalization of domestic violence to the social acceptability of violence against women in Chechnya, to the ideological familial coercion imposed across Russia, while different, have certain common denominators: they are about limiting choices for women, they reflect a social demand from below, and they are met enthusiastically and encouraged by the government. While these sentiments can’t thrive and be put into practice without government encouragement, they do not originate in government policy.
Kadyrov and Putin in 2016 (photo Wikimedia)
Instead, governments seek to channel these sentiments to better control the population. Vladimir Putin, speaking in 2012, used the following words about different types of traditional family values: in order to fight a 'deficit of spiritual bonds' the government 'must wholly support institutes that are carriers of traditional values. We must understand and cater to the demands of modern society to strengthen the traditions of the [various] people of Russia'.
In Chechnya, if a man or a woman goes astray he or she will be punished or denounced to the authorities by friends and family, so much so that they fear the shame of those close to them more than they do the government. A family unit, meanwhile, becomes the primary authoritarian building block upon which an authoritarian regime functions.
Return to organic instincts
But this is not really about tradition, Chechen or otherwise: it is about a return to an organic functional state that individuals, society, and government resort to when they feel threatened or disenfranchised by the proliferation of choices. In Europe and in the United States, conservatives and the 'alt-right' espouse similar views about curbing individual freedoms in favor of family, and spin whole ideological movements and policies based on such primitive, organic instincts. In Chechnya, women finding themselves in abusive relationships flee to Syria, are seduced by soldiers of ISIS, and hand themselves over to even more rigid forms of familial coercion. And so 'tradition' here is really about the control of the means of production of other human beings: women. And authoritarian governments in particular are happy to oblige such social impulses when they arise.
