Peter and Fevronia and the Day of Family, Love, and Fidelity: Pronatalism and Unstable Gender Order in Contemporary Russia

Abstract

This paper investigates the role of the Day of Family, Love, and Fidelity in the deployment of Russian state family policy since 2006. It argues that the holiday is emblematic of a cooperative, rather than synchronous, relationship between Church and state in the promotion of pronatalism and so-called “traditional family values”, and highlights the ways in which public discourse around the holiday intentionally obscures internal contradictions within the dominant family ideologies of both institutions. Investigating these contradictions, the paper analyzes the manner in which the state deploys a selective segment of the Church's teachings on marriage, gender, and the family to bolster the official pronatalist agenda while rejecting the Church's most conservative solutions to demographic decline, such as an abortion ban. Most importantly, the paper examines a problematic connection of the hagiography of Peter and Fevronia - the basis for the Day of Family - with pronatalist goals, arguing that the clash between the ideal of family life portrayed in the hagiography and the goals of the holiday now celebrated in the saints' honor points to a larger incompatibility between Orthodox matrimonial theology and the politicized promotion of reproduction.