If he’d known he was going to be picked as Donald Trump’s 2024 running mate, JD Vance might have decided to keep his views on childless “cat ladies” to himself. After all, cat ladies get to vote too in the United States.
But Vance’s tirades against child-free modern women have gone down much better in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, where women aren’t allowed anywhere near political power and elections stopped having any meaning years ago. In fact, the Ohio senator has become something of a hero among Russian right-wingers trying to bring back traditional values—and persuade young Russians to start having large families again.
“Putin and his administration have been inspired by Vance’s ‘childless cat lady’ comments,” former Putin speechwriter Abbas Gallyamov told the Daily Beast. “Putin sees Trump as his absolute ally and Vance’s words give the Kremlin encouragement. Now they can say, ‘See! We are not marginals!”
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Women have been a thorn in the Kremlin’s side for decades. The “Soldiers’ Mothers” movement led the protests against Putin’s various wars; women journalists—including the murdered Anna Politkovskaya—investigated and criticized his government’s corruption; female human rights defenders recorded the crimes against humanity committed by his officials. In fact, Putin allows just one female into his inner circle of power: Valentina Matviyenko, a 75-year-old senator, is the sole woman among 30-plus men sitting on the Security Council of Russia.
And that’s only because she plays their game. Only last month, Matviyenko fluffed up her hair in the Kremlin style and put on a Barbie pink suit to denounce modern feminism as “dangerous games” and “confrontation against men.”
The long-term problem is clear: Russian women don’t want to have babies, or at least not like they used to. The birthrate plummeted in the economic and political chaos that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s, before recovering. Since 2010, births have been falling again, reaching historic lows this year. Rosstat, the state statistics agency, recorded just under 600,000 births in the first six months of this year, down more than 16,000 over the same period last year. Deaths outnumbered births by over 50 percent as the overall population fell by more than 320,000. The fertility rate is now about 1.44 children per woman, far below the 2.1 replacement rate needed to renew the population. The conflict in Ukraine, which has cost the lives of more than 100,000 young Russian men, can only add to the crisis.
The answer, for Putin and his supporters, is to force women to have more children, using the law if needed. Parliamentary Speaker Vyacheslav Volodin, one of the president’s closest ideological allies (best-known for the saying, “If there’s no Putin, there’s no Russia”) says the issue is a “to be or not to be question” for the Kremlin. Volodin is trying to push through a law that would extend existing anti-LGBTQ legislation to cover “childlessness propaganda” too. Those pushing the “child-free” narrative would face fines of up to 400,000 roubles ($4,300).
When the draft legislation came before the Duma last week, Volodin warned lawmakers not to stand in its way. “That’s a question about our future: whether an MP is going to be in this audience or not,” Volodin told the parliament, which is, at least officially, elected by Russian voters.
So Volodin was furious, after lawmaker Sardana Avksentyva of the New People’s Party, dared to criticize the proposed ban as “an obscurantist initiative that will open the way to a million unfounded denunciations, filed out of revenge and envy.” A return, in other words, to the dark days of Stalinism when Russians were encouraged to snitch on their friends and neighbors.
Meanwhile, top officials keep a close eye on events in the United States as Election Day approaches. According to Gallyamov, the former Putin speechwriter who spent almost two decades in the Kremlin, Putin’s close aides, including foreign police advisers Yuri Ushakov and deputy chief of staff Sergei Kiriyenko, “constantly monitor every word Vance says, every populist speech from the Trump-Vance campaign, and write reports for the Kremlin.”
“The Kremlin is terrified by Kamala Harris,” Gallyamov told the Daily Beast. “To see her as the president would go against everything Putin believes in. He never liked the ‘active’ first lady Raisa Gorbacheva, so his own wife, Lyudmila, quickly disappeared from the screen. We don’t even know who his wife is now.”
He went on: “There are a couple of decorative women figures in Russian politics, but they have no right to put a word in when decisions are being made, when it comes to the [Ukraine] war.”
According to the leading Russian feminist Alyona Popova, a campaigner against domestic violence who ran for a seat in the Duma in 2021 before being designated a “foreign agent,” Russian and American fundamentalists have more in common than a fascination with Donald Trump.
“Putin echoes Western fundamentalists like Vance, following the anti-abortion trend and other ideas that restrict women’s personal liberties,” Popova told the Daily Beast.
“I really hope Kamala wins, as the Kremlin’s administration is so closely following ultra- conservative agenda in the U.S., words said by men like Vance,” Popova added. “Vance is young, so Moscow’s young fundamentalists are cheering on his ‘cat lady’ comments. The Kremlin would be happy to see him in power, to put even more pressure on Russian women.”
If Volodin is hardline, then the ultra-nationalist ideologue Alexander Dugin goes even further. Dugin is reportedly pushing for a ban on the sale of condoms and other contraceptives to ensure a supply of new “warriors” for Putin’s endless wars.
In January, Putin himself told students in Kaliningrad that every Russian woman should have at least three babies. But the Kremlin’s own social study shows that 46 percent of Russians don’t want any children at all, let alone three or more.
“I live on $400 a month with my daughter in Moscow and all my girlfriends are single, depressed, and lonely women—and yes, many of them have cats. It’s so horrible to mock that or ban any discussion about a child-free life,” 42-year-old Svetlana told the Daily Beast. “We just feel even more depressed when we hear the demands for three babies per woman.”
