Push for Family Values Opening the Way for Full-Blown Fascism in Russia, Kordochkin Says

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Nov. 24 – The Putin regime’s push for family values is not only about ensuring that Russia will have enough manpower to fight more wars or to legitimate the Kremlin by distracting people from its failures at home and abroad but most seriously about opening the way to “the hell” of full-blown fascism in Russia, Archpriest Andrey Kordrochkin says.
    The Spain-based Russian Orthodox priest who has been banned from conducting services by the Moscow Patriarchate for his opposition to Putin’s war in Ukraine says that the Putin regime has very different goals than the ones it trumpets in its current campaign for “traditional values” (theins.ru/opinions/andrei-kordochkin/276320).
    It isn’t just to ensure that Russians will have more children so that Putin will have more soldiers but rather so that Russians will have a new domestic enemy at a time when the war in Ukraine is headed toward its third anniversary and so that they will see Putin’s power as sacred and go along with his efforts to impose fascism on Russia.  
    Those latter goals, as Umberto Eco’s well-known list of the 14 markers of fascism show, are vastly more important and more dangerous than even the horrific and immoral attacks on homosexuality or childfree beliefs especially in a country where life expectancy remains low by international standards and broken families are the norm.
    If the Putin regime were really interested in promoting strong families, it would be acting very differently than it is, Kordorchkin says, and Russians would know far more about Putin’s family life. Indeed, he says, Putin likely ordered the death of opposition figure Aleksey Navalny precisely because he had a strong family and Putin couldn’t stand the comparison with himself.