Why Ending The Incomprehensible Destruction Of The Russian Family Depends On Ukrainian Victory

A 2017 petition to toughen the domestic violence law failed in a society where 40% of all violent crime is committed in the family.

American political economist Nicholas Eberstadt called Russia’s depopulation a “terrible mystery.”

In his view, “the health disaster underway in Russia is not only outside Western experience; in important ways, it may still be beyond Western understanding.”

It is also important to understand that it will not change unless the current social structure is allowed to break free – something that only happens when Russia is defeated in war.

Eberstadt offers a glimmer of understanding of the mystery: he says that Communist governments are less effective in dealing with poverty than are non-Communist governments.  You could substitute the word “fascist” or “Mafia State” for that term and cover whatever Putin thinks he’s doing. Nutshell: government-controlled societies do not cure poverty or advance society.  The case of India (free) v.s. China (New Xi-Land) is proof-point.

Voiceless populations do not get the best of treatment.

Putin has retained everything that was bad about the USSR.  The USSR and Russia are based on brittle foundations of ethnic conquest and repression, possess no unified national identity, whether civic or ethnic, and exhibit persistent struggles between nationalists, imperialists, centralists, liberals and federalists.

He inherited a backward developing country whose economy is based upon resource extraction with collapsed demographics. Putin has made it worse.

The average age of death in Russia is one of the lowest in the world, on a level with Kirgizstan and North Korea, and much lower than in any developed country. There are also revealed gender differences that are less well known.

What does a Russian family look like?

They can be gentle, emotional people. Russian society is crushing that.

Its poverty is overwhelming.  More than one in five Russians live on less than ten dollars a day, and 21-million people live on less than two dollars a day.

Russian families were rarely full and rarely nuclear.

Russia tops the world for divorce rates: about 75 percent of marriages ended in divorce and the average duration of a marriage is about ten years.

The husband is typically 5-10 years older; same age marriage is rare. Women are expected to get married as early as possible.

Even if she stays married the average Russian woman lives for fourteen years longer than a man. She will spend a greater part of her life as a widow or divorcée than as a wife.

Life expectancy in Russia in 2021 is 65.3 for men and 77.1 years for women – a difference of almost twelve years, the highest in the world. 

It is different in many other countries.  In Italy, for example, the gender gap in longevity was 4.3 years and the average marriage was expected to last seventeen years. The average Italian woman spent more years as a wife than as a widow.

Part of the reason for the high divorce rate – and high male death rate - is that Russian men make a habit of binge drinking, heavy smoking, high-fat diets and rarely exercise. Unhealthy lifestyles are also the norm for many Russian women, but - even if unemployed or impoverished - women still have their children and grandchildren to take care of.  For them, childcare is both a burden and a refuge.

Men also avoid their families and children far more often than women, and this crucial difference is connected to men’s shorter lives.

Historical traumas, a general lack of trust and the debilitating experience of many Russians in prisons and military barracks also play a role.

One factor in this family degeneration has been the rotting of the political economy.

People are refusing to reproduce because they distrust the promises of their leaders or they are protesting against their decisions.

When people are unhappy and disloyal to their leaders, they have two options: voice or exit.  In the 1990s, the Russian people had a voice – an opportunity to express their discontent in the public sphere and sometimes in democratic elections. That voice was silenced when Putin came to power in 2000.

Insecure, unhealthy people die young; unhappy, hopeless people refused to reproduce.

Children suffer. Nearly two million children are abused in Russia annually (v.s. 600,000 in America, which has twice the population – not that abuse in any number is acceptable).

In fact, women are birth-avoiding.  From the late Soviet period onwards, Russia was a world leader in abortions.

In 2022, the number of terminations per woman in Russia – a country in which abortion was almost never talked about – was four times higher than in the US, where it was a central political issue.

They are not supported by their men.  Russia is a patriarchal state. The frequency of domestic violence in Russia exceeds Western figures by a factor of four. Every year, some 600,000 women are victims of domestic abuse and 15,000 women are murdered by their male partners,  and Russia’s per capita rate of feminicide surpassed that of all other countries.  Moreover, in 2017, Russia decriminalized domestic battery.  Domestic battery kills a Russian woman every 40 minutes. Russian police, if called to a scene, tend to laugh it off as in internal matter and tell the woman to be nicer to her husband.

Violence affects one in four families in Russia; two thirds of homicides are committed due to family or domestic reasons.

Now, under Putin’s new rules, a man who beats his wife or children can only be punished with a fine or 15 days in prison. The bill proposing the change was passed almost unanimously in the socially conservative legislature.

An article in the popular tabloid Komsomolskaya Pravda cheerfully told readers about an “advantage” of wife-beating: “Recent scientific studies show the wives of angry men have a reason to be proud of their bruises. Biologists say that beaten-up women have a valuable advantage: they more often give birth to boys!” 

The logical extension of the proposition was never mentioned: pain makes boys.

The article was later amended.

Health spending per capita is appalling: 104th place, on par with Nigeria and Uzbekistan.  Russian people don't go to the doctor in regular basis, they are afraid of them or simply don't believe in them.

Education spending is deadly: though a richer country, Russia spent less per capita on education than Turkey, Mexico or Latvia.  In the portion of GDP spent on educational institutions, Russia ranked 125th.

Orthodox Church leaders unite with the state in the belief that domestic violence is a part of the Russian traditional family.  The Church has stated that: 'reasonable and moderate use of physical punishment in child rearing in the context of normal family relations does not cause them (children) any significant harm', and parents should not be legally limited in their methods of raising children.

After the fall of the USSR the church did not take advantage of the opportunity to become more important in the lives of families.  The Orthodox Church set off on its own agenda: the restriction of other religious organizations; the introduction of Orthodox chaplains in the military; the restitution of Church property; and the introduction of an Orthodox component to the curriculum of public schools.  As a result some 10 percent of Russians go to church regularly – it has no connection with their lives. 

Women are disadvantaged in their attempts to get out of their trap. They cannot engage in job activity with the same effectiveness as men.  The salary of a Russian woman is 40 percent less than that of a Russian man. Women are well integrated into the labor market and hold skilled jobs even more often than men, but these jobs were not better paid.

Poor pay extends to poor power: In 2021, 10 percent of ministerial positions in Russia were held by women, compared to 46 percent in the U.S.

Poor people drive old cars that do not meet modern standards, and Russia had the highest number of road deaths per population in the world.

The absence of women is starkly seen at the top of the job market: all of the employees in the one percent of the Russian population employed in the oil and gas extraction are men.

The privileged all-male minority extracts and trades that valuable resource. To caricature the economic character of this human type, he could be given the name “petro-macho”.

Women are further competing for work in an economy that is deflating. Average Russian incomes have been falling since 2012, which has happened in very few other countries. In median incomes, Russia ranks 46th (2021) – lower than Lebanon or Bulgaria.

The Harvard Atlas of Economic Complexity ranked Russia 51st, between India and Vietnam, and far lower than its geographic neighbors Finland and China.

All these factors – low life expectancy, the high divorce rate, and the gender gap in mortality and the gender pay gap – contribute towards the disappearance of the father.

In one in three Russian families, children were raised by only one parent, usually the mother. One in three alimony payers, usually the father, refuse to fulfill their obligations.

A fatherless childhood lowers test scores, school grades, educational aspirations and years of schooling. Children who grow up without a father are more likely to have emotional issues as students, to suffer from low self-esteem and to have issues with their peers.

Reports have mentioned the absence of the father as a possible precondition for the emergence of an authoritarian personality.

Fatherlessness leads to narcissism and aggression.

This leads to mistrust of Putin’s promotion of “family values” as a counter-weight to Western liberal values.  His rejection of Western views of fundamental human rights, particularly the rights of women, are part of his continuing efforts to depart from observing Western norms. This has made life for women in Russia increasingly difficult and unsafe. A report from the Wilson Center notes: “Today, Russia lags behind most nations in a number of categories that measure the empowerment of women. Whereas most nations have seen gains in the number of women holding elective office, the share of women in Russia’s parliament declined [and Russia dropped to] 131st position among 198 countries with respect to the percentage of women in the of categories that measure the empowerment of women.”

Under Putin, the Russian Ministry of Justice placed many organizations defending women’s rights on its list of “foreign agents.” NGOs across the country that relied on funding from international donors, including many women’s shelters and support groups, were forced to shut down.

Putin’s invented battle of Western values versus Russia’s “traditional values” is part of his effort to justify his broader actions in the eyes of Russian citizens, placing them in the context of a global struggle in which Russia is the target of aggression.  A victim again.

With all these pressures, it is not surprising that Russia’s population growth is four times less than in the US and the UK.

It is also not surprising that one global happiness index placed Russia 78th, between the silent Turkmenistan and the protesting Hong Kong.

This does not help Putin establish political stability; Russia ranks 147th in 2020 , between Belarus and Papua New Guinea.

Five million people left the country during the first twenty years of Putin’s rule.

Putin’s administration did not mind losing its young and educated subjects because it saw them as a source of social protest, and also thought they were not needed anyway.

What makes its people so unhappy and unhealthy?

The Russian petro-state.

It is huge, archaic and very expensive. In Russia we see the triumph of archaic beliefs, de-modernization and decay.

Modern society is a society of open access to social movement, including the potential to enrich and improve oneself.  Modernity comes with the openness of the elite.

Knowledge is always in conflict with capital: smart new approaches are shut down by those whose wealth comes from yesterday’s practices.

In Russia’s closed system, smart people become increasingly poorer, and rich people increasingly stupid.

And the size of the ruling class swells beyond necessity: governments of petrostates are twice as big as those of their neighbors.

Petrostates are demonstrably synonymous with the incompetence of the ruling elite, who consolidate their power in order to amass even more wealth.

Society’s “oili-garchs” build their yachts with foreign firms and sail them in foreign seas, which are safer and cleaner.  Their spouses require private goods that are only made overseas.

All of Russia’s top billionaire class have their wealth based in extraction industries, providing the infrastructure to produce oil and gas:

The top ten: Potanin (nickel), Mikhelson (gas), Mordashov (steel), Lisin (steel), Usmanov (steel), Melnichenko (coal), Vekselberg (aluminum), Abramovich (steel), Prokhorov (metals), and Kerimov (precious metals).

Unearned money does not bring freedom; it entraps the entire society.  When oil extraction is the key to wealth, then a working population becomes unnecessary. Russia has transformed the populace itself into an unnecessary adjunct to the life of the wealthy, to be taken care of with paternalistic gestures…if remembered.

But the wealthy class needs protection:  the costs of Russia’s military, security and law-enforcement classes are equal to a third of federal expenditure.

Where people have a voice, this is reversed.  In America society comes first: its federal expenditures are on Social Security (21%), Health (14%), Medicare (13%), Income Security (13%) and then National Defense (12%).

In the last two decades, Russia’s military budget increased by a factor of seven, compared to a factor of two in Germany and 2.5 in the United States.

In addition, one-fifth of Russia’s budget remains “secret” (‘just trust us’) which is unparalleled in modern economies.

Russia’s corruption, inequality and bad governance converged in the destruction of social and family trust.  Russia is the most unequal and most militarized economy of the large countries.  Post-Soviet Russia witnessed the fastest rise in inequality that has ever been seen worldwide. In Russia 58% of national wealth belongs to the top 1 percent, compared to a still-reprehensible 35% in the U.S.

The parasitic state is a political community that maintains the attributes of a state but fails to fulfil its functions.

Stolen wealth generates more evil per dollar than earned wealth.  Family members have less reason to bond together if the path to advancement is dishonesty and theft. Children are expected to testify against their parents in courts of law.

Students, intellectuals and IT workers dominated Russia’s protest movement of 2011–12 and Ukraine’s democratic revolution. While they won in Ukraine, they lost in Russia, and this has had enormous consequences. 

In the heady days of 2019, a protester carries a sign that reads: “We demand a law against domestic violence. We are not killed yet, but we're close.”

The revolution that freed Ukraine was the same revolution that failed in Russia.

Both foundations shook – and Ukraine re-arranged itself afterwards.  Russia doubled down on the autocratic formula that had crushed the people for centuries.

Why did freedom succeed in Ukraine and fail in Russia?

Ukrainians are family-oriented people and value their time together.  They hold more pro-democratic and liberal values than Russians. They show high moral standards as citizens and taxpayers.  They distance themselves so much now from Russia that they have officially changed the date of Christmas to December 25^th, in the Western style, instead of the Orthodox January 7^th.

Russian families are more alienated and untrusting. It would be harder for them to ‘gel’ around a cause, and the individuals are suspicious of each other. This mistrust is reflected in a mistrust of their social institutions, which is at a lower level than in unstable countries like Nigeria or Columbia. Stalin started today’s spin with his policy of turning children into spies against their parents; sons would gladly send their fathers to the firing squad because they were proud to be Russian “Pioneers” (like Scouts with a political shade).

It might have been those differences in family values in Ukraine and Russia that led to the tragically different outcomes of the liberation movements of 2011-12.

How will Russian families rise to the level of Ukraine’s, so that the next revolution will “stick”?

It can only happen after Putin is gone.

This will come with a military defeat.      

Russians are unforgiving about military defeats; they are always followed by a change of regime.  This happened after the first Crimean War, after the Russo-Japanese war, after Russia’s failures in World War I, after Khrushchev’s Cuban debacle in 1962 and after Brezhnev’s Afghanistan disaster.  The Russian people do not forgive military defeat.

This will hit the world map.  The Russian Empire disintegrated at the end of an imperialist war. The Soviet Union collapsed at the end of the Cold War.  The same thing will happen to the Russian Federation after the Ukraine war…it will morph into even smaller regions.

The war that Putin started to make Russia bigger will end up shattering it.

So, sadly, the state of the family in Russia is contingent on Ukrainian military success. The Russian mold needs to be broken. The crowds need to gather on the streets again.

Who knew that such a link would surface, when Putin started his war?

Families on both sides should be praying for Ukrainian success, as soon as possible.

There are desperate women and children in Russia who depend on it.