Unpacking ‘Traditional Values’ in Russia’s Conservative Turn: Gender, Sexuality and the Soviet Legacy

Abstract

We argue for analytically separating women’s and LGBTQ+ rights and differentiating the degrees of sexism and LGBTQ-phobia in Russia to better understand its conservative turn in the 2010s. Comparing Putin’s speeches to domestic audiences (1999–2020) with public opinion, we identify a somewhat conservative trend regarding women’s rights and a far more conservative one on LGBTQ+ rights. While Russia made a sharper conservative turn in summer 2021, we find that until 2020, state discourse and public opinion on these topics mostly echoed Soviet approaches, suggesting that the conservative ‘turn’ amounted more to a ‘return’ than to a novel development.