Suchergebnisse

Abstract: HIV and AIDS in Russia: Regime Dynamics and ResponseOver the last two decades, the number of persons living with HIV in Russia has increased dramatically. According to WHO criteria, Russia is now facing a generalized HIV epidemic. This article analyzes how regime dynamics have influenced Russia's capacity to build a domestic response to the epidemic. Putin's cultural conservative turn in 2012 may have negatively affected the regime's ability to curb the spread of HIV. Evidence collected for this study indicates that three developments in particular have contributed to this. The first is the introduction of legislation aimed at reducing foreign involvement in Russia, which has weakened civil society as the main provider of prevention programs and services to key populations, and has forced global agencies to leave the country. Secondly, the increasing use of value-based conservative rhetoric after 2012 has meant better access to state structures, policy crafting and governmental funding for actors opposed to conventional methods of preventing HIV. Lastly, Putin's post-2012 cultural conception of the state has served to entrench Russian neopatrimonialism. As neopatrimonialism creates conditions unfavorable to successful implementation of reforms, including those necessary to deal with the ongoing epidemic, its stabilization may have assisted inaction as regards HIV.

The article analyses representations of history in today's Russia as part of the ideology for expressing central political concepts underlying the Putinist regime. Mainstream interpretations of history build on a populist vision of Russia as a community with a stable, unchangeable core of identity. In this ideological context, history serves as the canvas on which the 'authentic' Russian identity manifests itself. The present research article examines representations of history by focusing on the concepts of 'historical sovereignty', 'unity of history', and the role of elites in history. It finds that regime ideology in today's Russia relies on a sizable infrastructure that involves producing historical knowledge for the purpose of securitizing history and making it an instrumental element in the populist (conservative-communitarian) ideology. Sources for this study come from the network exhibition 'Russia – My History', contextualized through content analysis of the key producers of ideology in Putin's Russia.

The amendments to the Constitution of the Russian Federation adoped after a 2020 referendum included a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage. This is a recent manifestation of the turn to 'traditional values' in Russian politics and society, the best-known expression of which is the 2013 ban on 'propaganda for non-traditional sexual orientation'. This development cannot be understood as solely reflecting 'traditional' attitudes of the Russian population, nor as a backlash against LGBTQ activism. The turn to 'traditional values' must be considered in the context of a global pattern of increased pro-family mobilization, which opposes LGBTQ rights, feminism and the alleged undermining of gender as biologically determined and strictly binary – described by researchers as 'anti-gender mobilization'. Traditionalist politics in Russia should be analysed in a transnational and international perspective, but conservative mobilization is not a monolithic phenomenon. Using the concept of 'discourse coalition' developed by Maarten Hajer, I show how the identification of shared storylines enables a range of actors to act in similar ways, sometimes coordinating their actions, despite ideological, religious or strategic disagreements, on the domestic as well as the global arena.

Abstract: 'Have we ever been European?' Everyday reflections from Russia on the gender and sexuality 'culture wars'Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork in European Russia, Jeremy Morris examines everyday attitudes to homosexuality in Russia, and the linkage to an understanding of terpimost (or 'tolerantnost') – 'tolerance' – as an insincere 'Euro-American' attitude. In this companion-piece to work focusing on male homophobia and conservative attitudes to childrearing (Morris & Garibyan, 2021), the focus is on how women describe their experience of same-sex relations and their heteronormative attitudes towards what they understand as 'non-normative' sexuality. Whereas the influence of Russia's state-led policy of conservatism is reflected in everyday talk – especially in relation to the idea that Euro-American values of permissiveness and 'tolerance' are misplaced – the findings reveal more nuanced ideas 'from below' about cultural differences between Russia and the putatively 'other' Europe. The article further notes the volatility and variance in survey methods that seek to measure 'intolerance' and cultural difference. They can exacerbate what, as Katherina Wiedlack and others have pointed out, is a colonial and orientalizing discourse that features an 'enlightened' West and a 'passive, backward' East. This article shows how 'intolerance' and acceptance of non-normative sexuality in Russia do not differ greatly from the situation in comparable societies of the global North.