‘Russian Women who Marry Foreigners are Our Secret Weapon,’ Narochnitskaya Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, March 8 – “Russian women who marry foreigners,” Natalya Narochnitskaya says, “are in general our secret weapon: they are capable of adapting even to an alien culture, they delight everyone there, and they always support in their husbands and in their families a love for Russia.”

            Narochnitskaya, a Russian historian and self-described Orthodox activist who heads the Russian government’s European Institute for Democracy and Cooperation in Paris, made that observation in the course of a 3500-word interview on International Women’s Day in which she attacked feminism and the Western approach t human rights (business-gazeta.ru/article/460447).

            She says that Russian folklore in contrast to its counterparts in the West does not posit a contradiction between the abilities of women and men or the equality of the two. And she argues that feminism today “is part of a movement in which the LGBT community is involved,” one that is “not about the defense of the rights of women but about a revolutionary philosophy.”

            That philosophy, Narochnitskaya continues, promotes “gender equality, a revolt against the God-given nature of man” and that insists that everyone has the right to choose which gender they are part of and how they will behave. In this system, “tolerance has been transformed into a philosophy of indifference to sin.”

            Indeed, she suggests, “tolerance has been transformed into a totalitarian prohibition on the defense of one’s own worldviews and positions. For example, a Christian does not have the right to defend the values which flow directly from his faith.”

            “Russia, thank God, is far from this,” the Orthodox historian says. “I would like men to remain men, and in the dreams of any young girl appear the images of the hero on a white horse whom one can trust and who will defend you,” someone who displays “will, spirit, honor, and the ability to take decisions.”

            In this regard, Narochnnitskaya says, women “objectively” lag behind men because “it is more difficult for women to take decisions and to separate the most important from the secondary.”

            Russians today are the only nation “who at the level of power, the president and the parliament openly declare in favor of the defense of Christian values and in general of traditional values,” she insists. “When Pope Francis was elected, President Putin was the only one who in his message wished him success in spreading Christian values.”

            In the West, however, the rot is very deep. In support of that claim, she recalls a UN meeting at which Western women but not Russian ones opposed stoning women for infidelity not because stoning is a cruel punishment but because infidelity is not wrong, a reflection of the collapse of morality thanks to Western feminism, the Russian spokesperson says.

            Russian women who marry foreigners can help counter this, she concludes; and that is why they are “our secret weapon.”