The Modern Sufferage: Putin’s Love for Misogyny
Reforms to deform
I’ve read the interview with German foreign policy expert Sabine Fischer in Der Spiegel way too many times. I promise you, I’ll keep reading it until everything she said is permanently etched in my memory. It’s a treasure trove of information about Russian society. She said a ton of things, but there’s this one passage that I just can’t get out of my head
DER SPIEGEL: In your book, you quote a rape metaphor that Vladimir Putin applied to Ukraine shortly before the Russian invasion when explaining to French President Emmanuel Macron why Ukraine had to adhere to the Minsk agreements. At a press conference, he said: “Whether you like it or not, you’re going to have to put up with it, beautiful.”
Fischer: Yes, Putin intentionally uses such metaphors. We hear this over and over again from feminists in Russia: Putin is a rapist. Feminists, by the way, play an extremely important role in the Russian underground antiwar movement. Women were also in the majority among those arrested in the early days of the antiwar protests.
As hundreds of thousands of men ran for neighboring countries forming mile long queues in border check posts, antiwar protests sprang to life in Moscow. According to data from OVD-Info, a Russian group that monitors protests, 71% of the 848…
