The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia

Allan Carlson's explanation was entirely different: Russians were dying because what he called the "natural family" was on the wane. During his visit, he and members of the sociology department decided to organize a conference to discuss what Russia and other countries could do to resist the attack on the family waged by the decadent West. The conference would be called the World Congress of Families. The gathering, held in Prague in 1997, drew about seven hundred people. Western participants were primarily representatives of conservative religious organizations mobilized against advances in gay rights. Eastern European participants came from newly independent nation-states, some of them very small and all of them struggling with cultural and economic change; they were driven by existential panic—and so were the Russians.

Inspired by the turnout, the organizers turned the World Congress of Families into a permanent organization dedicated to the fight against gay rights, abortion rights, and gender studies. The headquarters of the new organization was in Illinois, but its spiritual center was in Russia, at the sociology department of Moscow State University.¹⁶ Over the next decade the Russians, who had started out as Carlson's disciples, became the senior partners in the organization: with the backing of the government and the Russian Orthodox Church, they could deliver the political muscle.

In his 2006 state-of-the-federation address, Putin called depopulation the country's most pressing problem. "I am going to speak about the most important thing now," he said. "What's the most important thing? At the defense ministry they know what it is." In Putin's language of macho humor, the phrase was supposed to signal that he was about to speak about something that soldiers—real men—think about all the time.

Yes, I am indeed going to talk about love, about women and children. About the family. And about contemporary Russia's most

acute problem: demographics You know that our country's

population shrinks, on average, by seven hundred thousand people a year. We have talked about the issue many times, but have yet to

do anything of substance about it.¹⁷

Putin proposed a financial solution: more money to National Project Health (the one where Masha was facilitating the payment of 80-to-90-percent kickbacks), more money for birthing clinics, and, most important, more money for mothers. He instituted a onetime payment of the equivalent of over $8,000 to any woman who gave birth to a second child (Russian women were having an average of 1.3 children¹⁸). The "maternal capital," as it became known, would remain an act of unparalleled generosity on the part of the Russian state toward its citizens, showing just how highly the president valued his subjects' willingness to reproduce.

In the 2000s, the World Congress¹⁹ established positions for what they called ambassadors—lobbyists at various international and European organizations, including the United Nations. The jobs went to Russians, who used the weight of the Russian delegation's backing to organize informal coalitions to press for anti-gay initiatives and oppose measures that advanced LGBT rights.²⁰

In the United States, the Southern Poverty Law Center designated the World Congress a hate group.²¹

back at the sociology department at Moscow State, students received a steady diet of ultraconservative rhetoric—and nothing else. "As a graduate of the department, I can tell, based on my own experience, that the education students received there could never stand up to either academic or practical scrutiny," a 1996 graduate said in a 2007 interview. The graduate, Alexandre Bikbov, did what Moscow State students had done back in the Soviet period if they wanted to learn: he educated himself, as Gudkov and Arutyunyan had done one or two generations earlier. "Back then it was possible to go to the library or to another department in the university in order to compensate for the lack of knowledge that the sociology department systematically produced," said Bikbov, speaking about the 1990s. "And then, at the crucial moment of the exam, I could almost always count on unassailability if I could demonstrate that I knew the subject well." In the 2000s, though, said Bikbov, things deteriorated. "Now there is open anti-intellectual censorship at exams: when students show that they 'know too much,' they get lower grades and are threatened with more severe punishment. The same thing happens during seminars, when some faculty tell students not to read [French sociologist Pierre] Bourdieu or when they cut off any and all discussion in the most demeaning manner."²²