family policy

Peter and Fevronia and the Day of Family, Love, and Fidelity: Pronatalism and Unstable Gender Order in Contemporary Russia

This paper investigates the role of the Day of Family, Love, and Fidelity in the deployment of Russian state family policy since 2006. It argues that the holiday is emblematic of a cooperative, rather than synchronous, relationship between Church and state in the promotion of pronatalism and so-called “traditional family values”, and highlights the ways in which public discourse around the holiday intentionally obscures internal contradictions within the dominant family ideologies of both institutions.