top of page

The Kremlin’s Family Values Fantasy Myth, Utility, Identity, Export


I was enjoying a typical Milanese afternoon with prosecco and (relevant to the story) non-Russian company. When completely unprompted, a fellow Gen Z participant said: “I wish I could go to Moscow, I really respect Russian values. They have traditional values, not like the West”. Needless to say, this derailed the conversation and made me think 2 things: first, that being a houseplant is underrated; and second, whether Russia’s “traditional values” brand amounts to anything more than pictures of beautiful blonde women cooking.


Myth 


Well… if we are talking about actual statistics… then no. Russia is being marketed as a profoundly Christian country in Europe where family, faith and moral order flourish, a last bastion of stability in an otherwise decadent continent. In reality, and on the chosen European chessboard: Where do people go to church the most? Poland. What country has the lowest divorce rates? Malta. And who drinks the most while crying into their soup? Here, the competition is fiercer, but somewhat inconveniently for the mythology of stoic vodka-soaked masculinity, Romanians tend to outdrink the Russians.



Utility


The real value of this brand lies in how meticulously it was crafted. This is not merely a bundle of stereotypes or nostalgic projections from abroad; it is official state doctrine.


Take one heir to a state that spent decades trying to secularise society by force and that made family law far more permissive than its current admirers would probably care to remember. Then ask: how many images of Putin crossing himself, plunging into ice water or posing in front of icons does it take to turn 31% Orthodox identification in 1991 into 72% by 2023, and to transform a country once seen abroad as the face of militant secularism into a self-appointed beacon of traditional Christianity?


The answer is: enough for the Kremlin to codify the performance into doctrine. In 2022, the Kremlin formally approved the “Fundamentals of State Policy for the Preservation and Strengthening of Traditional Russian Spiritual and Moral Values.”


What this branding offers the Kremlin is not just ideological coherence at home or a pronatalist vocabulary for demographic anxiety, but narrative coherence abroad. Once the state casts itself as guardian of “traditional values,” Russia becomes easier to market internationally as the civilisational alternative to a West supposedly exhausted by its own liberalism. The fact that this image translates so well into so many languages deserves its own explanation.


Identity


Before we give the Kremlin’s propaganda machine too much credit, it should be said that Russia did not reinvent the wheel by clothing power in the language of values. China does so through the language of civilisation, harmony and “core socialist values”, while the UAE through family cohesion, preserved identity and social order. However, for them it does not land quite as neatly, not because the propaganda is weaker, but because the civilisations they are selling feel too unfamiliar to invite identification. China may impress, the UAE may glitter, but Russia can do something more useful: it can masquerade as the old West, only with more icons, fewer pronouns and a better tolerance for cold weather.


More importantly, Russia also had the decency to come riding on a (unfortunately not white) bear just as many young people were becoming unusually susceptible to anything that looked like order with a jawline. Economic insecurity is not a culture-war side note; it is one of the conditions under which moral certainty starts to look attractive. A meta-analysis in the British Journal of Political Science finds enough evidence to “conclusively disperse any doubts” about the causal role of economic insecurity in the populist backlash against globalisation, while a comparative study using data from the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany finds that economic insecurity is associated with greater support for conservative parties. 

Young people, meanwhile, are coming of age in conditions that make certainty look more attractive than it should. Deloitte’s 2025 global survey found that more than half of Gen Zs live paycheck to paycheck, while 48% say they do not feel financially secure. In the Federal Reserve’s latest report, only 63% of U.S. adults said they could cover a $400 emergency expense with cash or its equivalent. Meanwhile, the TUI/YouGov Young Europe 2024 study found that 34% of young Europeans have a pessimistic view of the future, with the report explicitly linking that mood to the pressure of “numerous global and national crises.”


Now, that does not mean that economic anxiety automatically turns everyone into a trad influencer with a Madonna fetish. It does mean that certainty becomes easier to sell, and that the backlash to feminism starts finding a more receptive audience among young men who already feel precarious, ignored or displaced. One recent Social Politics study on South Korea identifies economic insecurity as the primary driver of young men’s support for anti-feminist right-wing populism, while new King’s College London research on the tradwife phenomenon argues that what looks like a return to “tradition” is often better understood as exhaustion with modern pressures rather than nostalgia for the past.


Moscow, in other words, did not create the demand. It merely slapped icons on the supply.


Export


With much of the script already written for them, the Kremlin mostly has to tighten the dialogue, light a candle or two, and send the performance abroad. By the time Russia’s “traditional values” brand reaches foreign audiences, the message is already emotionally legible: the West is decadent, liberals are confused, men are weakened, Christianity is under siege, and somewhere in the distance a blonde woman is quietly making soup. The genius of the export is that it rarely needs to persuade from scratch. It lands in a media and political environment already stocked with sympathetic interpreters, from state media and Orthodox networks to far-right politicians, online grievance merchants, and assorted men with microphones who are more than happy to translate Kremlin aesthetics into local resentments.


This is, perhaps, the laziest form of successful propaganda: the kind that other people are willing to localise for you. By the time the message is repeated by a European politician, a podcast host, or the internet’s latest apostle of civilisational masculinity, it no longer even sounds Russian. It simply sounds like common sense in a darker filter.


Bibliography







Comments

Our Rubrics

Our Podcast

Newsletter

Go Back

Recent Posts
Categories
Archive
bottom of page