“I am the candidate against all the above”. Photo courtesy of ksenia-sobchak.com. All rights reserved.I felt that something was wrong back in July. It was during the children’s “Direct Line” with President Putin. A girl from Sochi’s Sirius centre for gifted children asked — out of nowhere — what the president’s attitude to feminism was. Without blinking, Putin stated that feminism has been around for a while and that it has some useful qualities. “It’s good to defend women’s rights, we just don’t need to go crazy with it.” The conversation was for children, but the rules were for adults. The Russian President always decides for himself which questions he’s going to answer on a given day. The girl’s interest in feminism surprised me, but definitely not Putin.
Earlier in the year, on International Women’s Day, Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev confirmed a National Women’s Strategy for Russia up until 2022. Recently, Valentina Matvienko, Speaker of the Federation Council, has started mentioning women’s rights more often — for instance, loudly applauding female appointments in the world. And then in July, Vyacheslav Volodin, Speaker of the Russian Parliament, dug up his draft legislation (previously amended, then declined) on the equality of men and women and began insisting on having this 14-year-old bill made into law. The conspiracy theorist of a feminist inclination inside me assumed that this topic was going to emerge in the Russian presidential campaign. It turns out that the Kremlin was simply looking for a woman.
If Ksenia Sobchak didn’t exist, they would have had to invent her. Putin wanted to liven up his own election, as even in his own fantasies it looked deadly boring
