Cultural Marxism is at the root of the chaos we see in the world today. Feminism and LGBT mania, for instance, are communist front movements. The entire spectrum of anti-traditional trends has been promoted by the communist conspiracy since day one. Russia picked up the Marxist-feminist standard with the advent of Bolshevism and has carried it ever since. The purpose of today’s article is to obliterate the prevalent notion that Russia is a family-friendly “bastion of traditionalism” and share the truth that Russia is the true home of modern feminism.

I can’t express how dismayed I am every time I see a self-proclaimed traditionalist, or a fellow Christian, refer to Russia in glowing terms. In “trad” social media groups and on traditionalist pages and websites, I routinely encounter people parroting Moscow’s propaganda about how “traditional” Russia is, how “feminine” the women are, how Russia is a “bastion of masculinity,” how there is a Christian “revival” occurring, and how wonderful Vladimir Putin is. Each and every point just mentioned flies in the face of the facts and is an inversion of reality.

I will focus primarily on the first three of the five points listed. Before discussing the first item, perhaps we should address we mean by “traditionalism.” Apart from the obvious definition that traditionalism means upholding tradition, regardless of what that tradition is, the sense in which the word is used today is defined by Google as “the theory that all moral and religious truth comes from divine revelation passed on by tradition, human reason being incapable of attaining it.”

This is an accurate enough definition, though in popular parlance it usually refers to culture and families. Traditionalism is a culture. It is a mentality and philosophy. It is a way of life. Those who live a “traditional” life are those who embrace marriage, create families, are sexually upright, reject degeneracy, and are generally conservative and modest in manners, dress, appearance, and behavior. Traditionalism is heavily linked – I would argue inexorably linked – to Christian values and Christian views on marriage, family, and morality.

With this in mind, is Russia a “bastion of traditionalism”? That is, does Russia, as a society, embrace the traditional or Christian perspective of marriage, family, sexual purity, modesty, and upright behavior? Any honest examination of the reality on the ground – and I have seen that reality firsthand as I lived in Russia for two years and spent my days talking with average folks and meeting inside their homes – must conclude that Russia is not a traditional society.

Let’s analyze a few statistics and points of history. We must remember that Russia was conquered by the alien Bolshevik forces in 1917. The first communist regime was approximately 85% Jewish. That is, it was virulently anti-Christian and devoid of morals. Christian chapels were looted and then literally demolished. Priests were shot. Nuns were raped. And Orthodox cathedrals all across Russia were converted into “Museums of Atheism,” complete with pagan statues and blatantly anti-Christ exhibits. This had the effect of hardening the people and they remain hardhearted towards religion in general to this day, only attending church on holidays to gawk and take pictures at the astonishingly fanatical and theatrical displays of Orthodox priests.

One of the Soviets’ first orders of business was to abolish church marriage and institute in its place civil marriage. In fact, they desired to abolish marriage altogether and began by replacing religious marriages with civil unions and figured the institution would “wither away” of its own accord. Some Communist Party members even performed “red marriages” in mockery of traditional Christian marriage.

The institution of marriage was and is viewed by the Marxists as inherently oppressive. They see marriage as slavery. It was in The Communist Manifesto that these enemies of humanity had threatened the “abolition of the family” throughout the world. In harmony with this evil design, the Reds began destroying marriage in Russia. In 1925, a Soviet publication in boasted:

“Already the Soviet power has freed [marriage] from any superfluous shackles, has eliminated from it all religious and ecclesiastical survivals. . . . Marriage in Soviet legislation has ceased to be a prison” (Harold J. Berman, “Soviet Family Law in the Light of Russian History and Marxist Theory,” Yale Law Journal, Vol. 56, Issue 1, 36, 1946).

Indeed, the communists made marriage an irrelevant and unnecessary formality of social life. Not just marriage, but the family as a whole was also targeted. After effecting their coup, the Bolsheviks set to work rewriting the Russian Family Code. Soviet Russia became the first nation to institute no-fault divorce. Divorce became so absurdly easy that you could actually send your spouse a letter in the mail saying “we’re divorced” and it was legally binding. In this sort of culture, marriage lost its sacred stature and divorce became the norm. They legalized abortion-on-demand and even subsidized it. And they did their best to collectivize children and make sure they were raised out of the home and in public schools where they could be indoctrinated in Marxist thought.

Russia Beyond gives us a glimpse into the Soviet attack on traditionalism. In his article “How sexual revolution exploded (and imploded) across 1920s Russia,” Alexander Rodchenko wrote:

““On the abolition of marriage” and “On civil partnership, children and ownership” were among the first decrees of the Soviets in 1918. Church weddings were abolished, civil partnership introduced. Divorce was a matter of choice. Abortions were legalized. All of that implied a total liberation of family and sexual relations. This heralded the beginning of the raunchiest epoch in recent Russian history.

“A relaxed attitude to nudism was a vivid sign of the times: on the bank of the Moskva river, near the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour [which Stalin later blew up and replaced with the world’s largest swimming pool], a nude beach formed, the likes of which Western Europe could not have dreamed of at the time. . . .

“Rape by 1920s has become an epidemic. Quite strikingly, sexual violence towards former noble and bourgeois women was for a time even considered “class justice” among the proletarian males. Meanwhile, up to 20 percent of Russia’s male population had carried sexually-transmitted diseases . . . New laws on marriage and the overall atmosphere of breaking with the past encouraged promiscuity and casual approach to sex, unthinkable just years ago.

“Soviet society was breeding a dangerous generation of homeless orphans – official reports indicate that, by 1923, half of the children born in Moscow had been conceived out of wedlock, and many of them were abandoned in infancy.”

Yes, the Marxist sexual revolution was in full swing in Russia before most in the West had even contemplated it. It made havoc of families and homes and left, as you have seen and will see, a trail of societal desolation, broken hearts, and destroyed individuals in its wake – just as it was designed to do.

One of the best analyses of the family during this dark era of history is found in Paul Kengor’s superb book Takedown. I excise several choice paragraphs and share them with you:

“The disciples of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were committed to a revolution in family life, to a radical rupture in traditional relations between husband and wife and parents and children. Their first and most ardent practitioners, the Bolsheviks, followed the new faith with reckless abandon. . . .

“The Russian Orthodox Church’s long-standing prohibition against divorce was lifted by the Bolsheviks, leading to an explosion in divorce rates and utter havoc upon the Russian family. The dramatic combined effect of an immediate full liberalization of divorce laws and institution of “red weddings” became especially acute with the corresponding complete legalization of abortion in 1920, which was an unprecedented action anywhere in the world at the time. With those changes and the squashing of the Russian Orthodox Church and its guidance in marriage and families and children and education and more, Lenin and his allies dealt a severe blow to marital and family life in traditionally religious Russia. Right out of the gate, within the first months and years after they seized power, the Bolsheviks had initiated these jolts to society. . . . .

“In the Soviet Union and other subsequent communist countries that followed suit, the effect on marriage and the family was nothing short of catastrophic. The divorce rate skyrocketed to levels unseen inhuman history. In short order, it seemed as though everyone in Moscow had a divorce. One Russian man, painfully recalling his boyhood years from the late 1920s, stated, “The years 1929 to 1932 were the unhappiest period for my family. At that time there were many cases of divorce. Many of our acquaintances got divorced. It was like an epidemic.”

“The numbers grew worse decade by decade. As one study reported in the 1960s, “it is not unusual” to meet Soviet men and women who had been married and divorced upwards of fifteen times.

“The world certainly took notice of this domestic carnage. It looked to outsiders as if these communists really were looking to abolish marriage. In fact, it is instructive that the influential American magazine the Atlantic published a 1926 piece with the title “The Russian Effort to Abolish Marriage.”

“If divorce was an epidemic in the USSR, abortion was a black plague.

“The Bolsheviks legalized abortion shortly after they seized power. Like divorce, it was a rare area where the communists allowed for individual freedom. Here they enacted full privatization. So long as the family went up in flames, it seemed, the communists would eagerly allow full and free private ownership of gasoline and matches – with no rationing. You weren’t free to own a farm or factory or business or bank account or go to church or print your own newspaper, but if you wanted a divorce or abortion, the sky was the limit in Bolshevik Russia.

“Having overthrown the ship of state and murdered the entire Romanov family in July 1918 – a fitting symbol to the coming war on the family – Vladimir Lenin made good on his June 1913 promise for an “unconditional annulment of all laws against abortions.” By 1920, abortion was fully and legally available and provided free of charge to Russian women. The number of abortions skyrocketed.

“By 1934 Moscow women were having three abortions for every live birth, shocking ratios that American women, in the worst, wildest throes of Roe v. Wade, never approached. The toll was so staggering that an appalled Joseph Stalin, the mass murderer, actually banned abortion in 1936, fearing a vanishing populace. . . .

“. . . A more progressive Nikita Khrushchev put things back in order in 1955, reversing Stalin’s abortion ban (and ramping up religious persecution), thus allowing rates to ascend to heights heretofore unwitnessed in human history. One authoritative source from the late 1960s reported, “One can find Soviet women who have had twenty abortions.”

“By the 1970s, the Soviet Union was averaging 7 to 8 million abortions per year, annihilating whole future generations of Russian children. (America, with a similar population, averaged nearer 1.5 million abortions per year after Roe was approved in 1973.)” (Paul Kengor, Takedown: From Communists to Progressives, How the Left Has Sabotaged Family and Marriage, 32-35).

Let’s build on this information with a few more quotations. The next statements come from the 1926 article Kengor mentioned titled “The Russian Effort to Abolish Marriage.” It informs us:

“The question whether marriage as an institution should be abolished is now being debated all over Russia with a violence and depth of passion unknown since the turbulent early days of the Revolution. . . .

“One must live in Russia to-day, amid the atmosphere of torment, disgust, and disillusionment that pervades sex relations, the chaos, uncertainty, and tragedy that hover over the Russian family, to understand the reasons for this heated discussion, for these passionate pros and cons.

“When the Bolsheviki came into power in 1917 they regarded the family, like every other ‘bourgeois’ institution, with fierce hatred, and set out with a will to destroy it. ‘To clear the family out of the accumulated dust of the ages we had to give it a good shakeup, and we did,’ declared Madame Smidovich, a leading Communist and active participant in the recent discussion. So one of the first decrees of the Soviet Government abolished the term ‘illegitimate children.’ This was done simply by equalizing the legal status of all children, whether born in wedlock or out of it. . . .

“At the same time a law was passed which made divorce a matter of a few minutes, to be obtained at the request of either partner in a marriage. Chaos was the result. Men took to changing wives with the same zest which they displayed in the consumption of the recently restored forty-per-cent vodka.

“‘Some men have twenty wives, living a week with one, a month with another,’ asserted an indignant woman delegate during the sessions of the Tzik. ‘They have children with all of them, and these children are thrown on the street for lack of support! (There are three hundred thousand bezprizorni or shelterless children in Russia to-day, who are literally turned out on the streets. They are one of the greatest social dangers of the present time, because they are developing into professional criminals. More than half of them are drug addicts and sex perverts. It is claimed by many Communists that the break-up of the family is responsible for a large percentage of these children.)

“The peasant villages have perhaps suffered most from this revolution in sex relations. An epidemic of marriages and divorces broke out in the country districts. Peasants with a respectable married life of forty years and more behind them suddenly decided to leave their wives and remarry. Peasant boys looked upon marriage as an exciting game and changed wives with the change of seasons. It was not an unusual occurrence for a boy of twenty to have had three or four wives, or for a girl of the same age to have had three or four abortions.”

This is only a snippet. I encourage you to read the full article at this link. I urge you to comprehend that communism brought about the destruction of the family in Russia – and that the wreckage can be seen everywhere today. And we need not try to divorce feminism from communism, for it was the Bolshevik revolutionary Inessa Armand (who also had an affair with Lenin) who proudly boasted:

“If women’s liberation is unthinkable without communism, then communism is unthinkable without women’s liberation.”

Suffice it to say that Soviet Russia obliterated the family unit and destroyed the institution of marriage. Human life was made cheap and infanticide reached mind-boggling proportions. Marriage lost its significance and divorce became something everyone did. Even homosexuality and transgenderism flourished in the early days of the Soviet Union, with one Russian writer commenting that “members of the gay community were incredibly brave – some wore women’s dresses and corsets, wore their hair long and often looked like real women.”

Those who think the West introduced feminism and LGBT madness to Russia need to get their story straight – it was the other way around. We are just starting to really deal with those problems that have plagued Russia for over a century. The Bolsheviks deliberately exported these feminist ideas everywhere they could – particularly to the West – with the deliberate intention of weakening us so that we would succumb to their world revolution. It was the Jewish-Marxist radical Willi Munzenberg, of Frankfurt School fame, who is quoted as saying: “We will make the West so corrupt that it stinks.” Sadly, their efforts have nearly succeeded – though thankfully our culture doesn’t yet stink as badly as Russian culture.

This is the awful legacy and crumbling foundation modern Russia is working from. While you can perhaps say today’s Russia is an improvement, the difference is negligible. Despite the carefully-concocted propaganda, Russian society has yet to break free from Soviet norms and is still further advanced down the road of cultural Marxism than the United States. Russian women still abort far more of their babies than their American counterparts and have a lower birth rate. And Russia has a staggering 60% divorce rate – the highest in the world. Russian homes are in tatters and their culture remains hostile to the traditional family. In no sense whatsoever can Russia be considered a “bastion of traditionalism.”

Let’s now move on to the second point. How feminine are Russian women? And do they really reject “Western” feminism as we so frequently hear? Sadly, the answer is no, they’re not particularly feminine and they don’t reject feminism. I’m convinced that most people believe Russian women are feminine because a good many Russian women are exceptionally attractive and, outwardly, dress in skirts and heels and always do up their face and hair. But is this what real femininity is?

Wikipedia defines femininity as “a set of attributes, behaviors, and roles generally associated with women and girls.” According to this definition, you might be able to get away with calling women “feminine” if you really stretch it. But when we couch this in terms of traditionalism, the attempt falls flat. Remember, part of being traditional is being modest and moral. Russian women are not modest. Trust me on this one. Russian women are in the habit of wearing very short skirts, revealing attire, and overdoing it on makeup and accessories. They spend an exorbitant amount of their money on cosmetics, furs, and fancy clothes and shoes.

And what about behavior? Part of being feminine is to act ladylike and fulfill womanly duties like motherhood. 65% of Russian women work – a substantially higher percentage than in the United States. That’s not terribly feminine. Why aren’t these “feminine” women at home with their children? Perhaps one reason they’re in the workplace instead of in the home is that they don’t have a family. Remember, 60% of Russian marriages end in divorce. Also, the birthrate in Russia is pitifully low and even lower than the U.S. birthrate at 1.75 children per family. Again, this behavior is not very feminine.

Furthermore, Russian women are bossy – like Western feminists. They’re often shrill – again, just like Western feminists. Frankly, they push the men around and I’ve seen them be both physically and verbally abusive. They also drink, do drugs, and sleep around at a higher rate than Western women (though, fortunately, alcohol consumption is decreasing). Russia has one of the most rapidly rising AIDS/HIV epidemics in the world due in large part to the rampant sexual immorality. Can women who break the Lord’s law of chastity honestly be considered feminine?

Russians in general engage in many behaviors that are repugnant to most Americans, such as public urination and defecation (though San Francisco, Commiefornia apparently sees nothing wrong with this). It’s a real problem. I watched mothers teaching their young boys to pee on the road and in the streets – not in emergency situations, but as a matter of course. I’ve even seen grown women squatting on the side of the road doing their business as people walked by. Fortunately, American women haven’t yet followed that trend.

Prostitution and public indecency are also massive problems in Russia. I’ve never seen so many prostitutes in one place in my life as I did in Russia. You’d see them selling their bodies on the side of the road as their handlers waited in a dirty van behind them. Then, down the road, their mafia oversees sat in cars monitoring police radios so they could warn their girls to run if the cops were on their way. I witnessed this phenomenon on more than one occasion. It’s remarkable how fast some women can run in high heels. I guess, as Vladimir Putin said, Russia has the best hookers.

As for pornography, the “new drug” that is scourging the world, I saw men and women both looking at pornographic magazines and videos while riding on trains or public transport. Billboards could also be a tad too salacious at times and you’d see far too much skin whenever you saw people sunbathing or swimming. If you visited the markets (the same ones where ripped-off American products or cheap knockoffs of everything imaginable proliferated), you had to be careful where you looked.

It’s sad that the sex-industrial complex is so well-established that we have detailed analytics on porn usage by country, region, state, gender, device type, day of the week, search category, and so forth, but we do. According to the data, Russia ranks 12^th in global traffic to the world’s largest online porn site and their top search category is “Russian.” And there are a lot of Russian porn stars to search considering that Russia ranks #2 in the world (behind, tragically, our own country) in contributing female “actresses” to pornographic films (five of the top ten porn-star-contributing nations are Russia and four of its “former” Soviet satellites).

In short, Russian women are gripped by feminism without even realizing it. No, they don’t consider themselves feminist – but neither do American women if statistics are to be believed. Yet, the feminist culture dominates. It is exhibited in habits and thought patterns. Russian women, like women in the West at the present time, are conditioned to believe that they are “liberated” by being single and sexually debauched, “free” when they murder their offspring, and “fulfilled” when they work. They are not submissive ladies and are in fact more willing to walk all over you, hit you, curse you out, cheat on you, or divorce you than American women are. Simply, don’t buy the hype about the “feminine” Russian woman.

The third and final point on our list I will cover only briefly. There is a myth circulating on the internet, perpetuated largely by Marxist-controlled Hollywood, that Russian men are masculine and strong. Sorry to burst the bubble, but this is laughably untrue. The Hollywood image of a tall, broad, muscular man with a great big beard is the polar opposite of reality in today’s Russia. Most Russian men are short, scrawny, and look as if they’ve been on a concentration camp diet. On a daily basis, I’d shake hands with people I met with on the streets. And on a daily basis Russian men audibly gasped and winced when I shook their hands. For the most part, they had a limp-wristed grip. A handshake really does tell you a lot about a person.

In 2007, I participated in a three-on-three basketball tournament in the small city of Ramenskoye to the south of Moscow. One of the opposing teams had a player from the Russian national basketball team on it. When we played them, I guarded the professional player. I held him scoreless and usually out-rebounded him even though he was one of the few Russians I ever met who was taller than me (I’m almost 6’1” and at the time I had lost thirty pounds and weighed only 160 lbs.). He was frustrated and thought I played too rough. I played against Russians in basketball, soccer, tackle football, and gatorball and in each case Russian men and boys wined about how physical Americans played (I’ve read that pro players from other countries almost universally observe the same thing when they come to America to play). In truth, they were simply unfit wimps. Physically, the average Russian man is a pitiful specimen.

Naturally, there’s more to masculinity and character than physicality. A real man should be chivalrous, gentlemanly, courteous, polite, hard-working, a protector of women, have an upright character, be totally loyal to his wife and marriage covenants, and so forth. When this is applied to Russian men, however, they fail again. Russian men are, as a whole, drunkards. They also use a large amount of drugs.

In the city of Mytishchi where I lived for a time, you’d see drug needles littering the streets and our church building happened to be located in what people called “the drug area” (which was also home to numerous prostitutes and mafia groups). Russian SWAT routinely raided our neighbor’s property looking for drugs. In some cities, it was common to see Russians walking down the road with alcohol in one hand and a cigarette in the other. More times than I can count I’ve seen Russian men passed out in the street, peeing on themselves in public, convulsing from drugs in a corner alley, or dancing lewdly and making fools of themselves in front of everyone. The constant smell of cigarette smoke hanging in the air really completed the atmosphere.

Additionally, Russian men brawl and fight, curse and quarrel. It was routine to see men walking or staggering down the street covered in blood from either fighting or falling down drunk and bashing their face. The number of Russian men with missing or broken teeth was also astonishing – again, largely from brawling or drunkenness. And the number of Russian men who had been to prison – as evidenced by their tattoos – was also staggering.

As noted, Russian men get pushed around by their women (that is, when they’re not committing rape and murder at high rates). And why wouldn’t they? Russia is a feminist country – the first feminist country. It is a bastion of feminism and yet they don’t even realize it. Russian men (and, sadly, many Western men) see their raucous and dangerous behavior as some sort of masculinity. But it’s not real masculinity; it’s juvenile and crass. Drunkenness, fighting, prolific swearing (when I learned the various forms of the f-word in Russian, I was shocked at how commonplace their usage was), sexual unchastity, violent criminality, and physical unfitness do not a masculine nation make.

When you really look at the whole picture, Russia is not the “bastion of traditionalism” that propagandists and those who have been taken in by propaganda claim. I wish Russia was a bastion of Faith, Families, and Freedom. This is my wish for my own country and for every nation on earth. I yearn for the day when evil will be swept away, when the communist cancer will be eradicated, when feminism will die its natural death, when corruption and war are terminated, when sanity will prevail once more, when the Gospel of Jesus Christ sinks deep into every heart, and when Freedom will prevail.

Sadly, we are not there yet and won’t be until the Lord returns in His glory. Until then, Russia stands as an enemy to the human race. The notion that “communism is dead” and “the USSR collapsed” is one of the most devastatingly effective ruses ever pulled on the world. The reality is that the Soviets faked their demise and communism never died. Indeed, the communist conspiracy is more powerful and prevalent than ever before. Russia, China, and their allies are in a strategically advantageous position over the West and the final clash draws closer despite Washington’s boast of strength and stability. You will live to see Russia and China strike the United States and initiate world war. Mark my words.

One final word is in order. You have doubtless noted the contempt in my tone. Let me make it clear that my contempt is for the Russian government and for the communist regime that so thoroughly demoralized and beat down the Russian people. I don’t hate the Russian people – I pity them. They are a product of communism – victims of the most wicked conspiracy ever created. I pity them and pray for them.

Here is the reality: Russia today is the America of tomorrow unless we root out the communist cancer among us. Russia is not following the West, as I so often hear, but we are following them – and to our detriment. From no-fault-divorce to civil marriages to abortion-on-demand to massive drunkenness to feminist women and emasculated men, Russia set the example and blazed the trail. And yet, still, there remain some fantastic individuals, including the most humble man I’ve ever met in my life – a spiritual giant from Ukraine who settled in Moscow – who call Russia home.

I mentioned that I lived in Russia for two years. I was there as a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints – one of the few foreign proselytizing churches that hasn’t been banned and kicked out by Putin’s regime (though Putin recently signed laws that severely restrict our ability to do the Lord’s work). I walked the streets speaking with Russians about their core beliefs, about their aspirations, and about their families. I met with them in their homes and churches. I visited the cities and villages. These people told me their life stories. They shared their beliefs about God. And some of them became lasting friends. I was even, for a short while after I returned home, engaged to a Russian gal.

My point is that I don’t hate the Russians. I love them and spent many nights on my knees praying for them. I do, however, hate communism. I hate the Russian regime that rules in Moscow and despise the KGB conspirator named Vladimir Putin who rules in the Kremlin and pretends he’s a Christian and traditionalist, despite his well-publicized affairs and broken marriage, so that the gullible will sympathize with and support Russia as some sort of world “savior.” Don’t fall for it.

One day, I firmly believe, though it will probably come only after a day of fire and cataclysm, Russia will throw off her shackles and become the Christian nation too many people wrongly believe she is now. The blood of Israel runs in their veins, as it does in the veins of most Caucasian peoples, and they have a glorious future. They will be gathered in by the Lord, but the time is not yet. At present, a communist pseudo-tsar rules in Moscow. Russia’s unparalleled stockpile of nuclear and biological weapons stands ready to be used to bring about the one-world order and one-world religion dreamed of by the global Elite. If we continue to allow the cultural Marxism imported into our nation by the Bolsheviks to infect us, we will be weak enough for the Elite to carry out their pre-planned strike.

It was this article’s purpose to wave the smelling salts under your nose to awaken you from the mental fantasy that Russia is a “bastion of traditionalism” and the hope of the world. Russia is, in truth, the home of feminism and the world leader in cultural degradation. The West is the way it is because we have followed Russia’s example. If we seek to reverse the trends, we need to stop listening to Russian propaganda and those who buy into it and instead cling to the traditions, values, and institutions that made Western Christian civilization great.

As Americans, we must rush forward to defend our Faith, Families, and Freedom against Marxist machinations whether promoted by Washington, Moscow, Tel Aviv, London, or Beijing. Our only hope is in turning to the Lord Jesus Christ and in rejecting all anti-Christ philosophies. If we seek traditionalism, we must look for it here at home – not on the Red steppes of Russia.

Zack Strong,

January 16, 2020