The regime’s close ally, the Russian Orthodox Church, labels feminism a dangerous phenomenon that threatens Russian civilization by turning women away from their central mission as wives and mothers. President Putin argues for protecting Russia from Western cultural influences that reject moral principles and traditional identities, including sexual ones, and for reversing demographic decline by boosting traditional family values, with the goal of increasing birth rates and establishing a three-child norm family. Major scholars characterize the Putin era as a patriarchal renaissance, as an onslaught of conservative ideology that paints feminists as deviant in relation to both their gender and their Russianess.
