One thing you have to hand Vladimir Putin—he’s no sexist. The Russian leader treats women who dare to oppose him with the same steely vindictiveness that he uses against superstar dissidents such as Alexei Navalny.
Take the most recent court case. In late December, Ksenia V. Fadeyeva, 31, was found guilty of extremism and sentenced to nine years in a penal colony. Fadeyeva’s chief offense appears to be that, in 2020, she ran for and won a seat in the Tomsk city parliament as a member of Navalny’s political party.
Putin has a thing about Tomsk. It is the Siberian city where Navalny almost died of Novichok poisoning in August 2020. He fell ill on a Tomsk-to-Moscow flight and would have died in Siberia had his wife—along with international pressure—not forced the Kremlin to allow him to be airlifted to a Berlin hospital.
Putin, never one to forget a botched assassination attempt, has gone full Arctic Circle: he recently transferred Navalny, who is currently serving a 19-year sentence for “extremism,” from a prison in central Russia back to a remote Siberian penal colony. Fadeyeva will also be banished to an Arctic gulag.
And Fadeyeva is no exception. Last week, The New York Times reported that under new censorship laws that Putin put in place after the invasion of Ukraine, some 6,500 men and women have been arrested, fined, or thrown into jail on trumped-up charges of terrorism and extremism, and we’re not talking about plotting assassinations, coups, or even organizing protest marches.
Brandishing a white, wordless banner in public is considered treason. Women have been arrested for wearing blue-and-yellow nail polish and scarves—the colors of the Ukrainian flag. In November, Aleksandra Skochilenko, an artist, was handed a seven-year prison sentence for replacing five supermarket price tags with uncensored information about Russia’s war in Ukraine, such as the bombing of a Mariupol art school that was sheltering 400 Ukrainian civilians.
In an age when women are prime ministers; fly helicopters in combat; are held hostage in war zones; run ministries, corporations, hospitals, and universities (well, except, at the moment, Harvard); and have four seats on the United States Supreme Court, it may seem anachronistic to be shocked when they are treated just as badly as men.
Women have been arrested for wearing blue-and-yellow nail polish.
But the thing is, Putin is a misogynist at heart; he patronizes women as the weaker sex, in need of male guidance and protection—and sneering chivalry. In 2021, at a meeting with the formidable Angela Merkel, he handed the then prime minister of Germany a huge bouquet of pink and white flowers. Merkel looked like Putin had just thrust a wet, crying infant into her arms and quickly passed it off to an aide.
Needless to say, during Putin’s more than a quarter of a century in office, women in Russia have not reached anything close to parity. His Kremlin is a small, all-male club; the few women in power positions, such as Margarita Simonyan, the hawkish head of the state TV channel, RT, are employees, not dacha buddies.
In fairness, unfairness runs pretty deep in Russian society, and it was that way even under Boris Yeltsin’s so-called liberating, progressive democracy: back when I gave dinner parties in Moscow in the 90s, young, enlightened writers, publishers, and politicians typically came without their wives. (It was primitive, but it also solved the “extra man” problem.)
In Soviet times, the women who won official recognition and publicity were ballerinas, cosmonauts, and gymnasts. Under Putin, they are ballerinas, tennis players, and gymnasts. Putin gives an annual smarmy speech on March 8, International Women’s Day, and in 2023 he praised motherhood as the highest calling, even for servicewomen. “Reverence and respect towards women and motherhood is an unconditional value for us,” he told Russian women while giving a special shout-out to female nurses, medics, and soldiers doing their “duty” in Ukraine.
Early on after the invasion, there were mothers’ marches that were shut down by security forces without arrests. A friend of mine in Moscow went with female friends to a local police station and basically scolded the officers until they let a 15-year-old girl out. And that’s why unconsciously, and idiotically, I thought Putin might showily grant convicted female opponents lighter sentences or even home arrest—echoing the selective, patriarchal magnanimity of commissars and czars. I should have known better. “Of course he targets women. Why wouldn’t he?,” Rachel Denber of Human Rights Watch said. “His aim is to completely crush all dissent, and this sends a very shocking message to any Russian who is thinking of stepping out of line.”
After all, he learned from the worst—Joseph Stalin.
Stalin’s one exception to his men-only Kremlin was Polina Zhemchuzhina, the wife of Vyacheslav Molotov, a longtime minister and drinking buddy of the Soviet leader. Polina was a high-powered minister in her own right, a feminist, and a friend of Stalin’s wife Nadezhda Alliluyeva. (According to one biography, at the height of Bolshevik puritanism in the 1930s, Polina secretly gave her daughter and Stalin’s daughter piano lessons, saying that even Communist girls should be able to sit down at a party and play a polonaise.) She was also Jewish, and in 1948, with purges in full swing, Stalin banished her to a labor colony in the Gulag, while Molotov kept his mouth shut and stayed on as a Kremlin insider.
When it comes to punishment, Putin is just as gender-blind. In 2006, the investigative Russian journalist and human-rights activist Anna Politkovskaya, who opposed the war in Chechnya, was shot dead in an elevator in her Moscow apartment building.
Putin is a misogynist at heart; he patronizes women as the weaker sex, in need of male guidance and protection.
The role of women is factored into any measure of a government’s moral worth; we rate countries higher when they pay women the same as men and give them the same opportunities to succeed and fail.
But Russia has never really caught up with the times. The Soviet Union paid lip service to women’s equality, idealizing in posters the women who drove tractors on collective farms and fought in the Red Army during World War II. But that was for show. Remarkably few female scientists, writers, or entrepreneurs in the U.S.S.R. were rewarded for their work, and that pattern persists. The last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, wasn’t just hated for his devastating economic reforms; Russians also despised the way he gave his wife, Raisa, equal footing and her own power base.
Under Communism, women did the same work as men in offices, factories, submarines, and hospitals, and they also cleaned, cooked, and raised the children, yet their contributions were belittled and de-valued. Small wonder that the Soviet-era women with lasting renown in the world were dissidents such as the poet Anna Akhmatova and Yelena Bonner, a pediatrician, human-rights activist, and the wife of Andrei Sakharov, the physicist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate.
Putin too will be remembered not for the talented women he promoted but for the women such as Anna Politkovskaya, Ksenia V. Fadeyeva, and Aleksandra Skochilenko, who rose to prominence by defying him and suffering equal injustice under the law.
Alessandra Stanley is a Co-Editor at AIR MAIL and was a Moscow correspondent for The New York Times from 1994 to 1998