The Hate Review

Country Group: State capture

Key indicators in 2025: Contamination 4.00 / 4  ·  Impact 4.00 / 4

The trajectory of the anti-gender movement in Russia over the past decades is one of progressive institutionalisation, moving from conservative intellectual frameworks and failed recriminalisation attempts in the early 2000s, through a regional legislative cascade and federal consolidation under Putin from 2006 to 2013, to the full integration of anti-gender politics into state ideology, constitutional law and wartime rhetoric from 2020 onwards. What began as the agenda of conservative Duma fringes and the Russian Orthodox Church became, within two decades, the defining ideological framework of the Russian state, with the rights of LGBTIQ+ people, feminist advocacy and reproductive autonomy systematically dismantled through successive waves of legislation, administrative pressure and judicial repression. Through its financial networks, its state media and its international conferences, Russia has actively exported this agenda, funding and modelling anti-gender movements and shaping the playbook of far-right and conservative actors across Europe.