Every year I make my third year Bachelor students read Carol Cohn’s article “Sex and Death in the rational world of defense intellectuals” and they are genuinely surprised by the number of penile metaphors one can use to describe a missile. Except this year: current Secretary of Defense (War?) has prepared them for lots more virtual dick-measuing exhibits. 

The need to appear masculine has often driven many militaries. But what happens if economic policy is suddenly driven by the need to perform hypermasculine virtues? Most authoritarian and totalitarian regimes relied on images of muscular men performing hard labor in steel plants. In this quest for gender, food can help too (I am looking at all the straw- and soy-fearing Fox News hosts): Bourdieu and Lévi-Strauss  have both written about the way boiled food is connoted with femininity as opposed to fried/roasted kind. I have written before about how food helps perform identity and of course there are a number of ways gender can be baked into it (pun intended). But where else can it be baked into?

Russian economic policy! And specifically, digital policies. Of course, the Russian government is also concerned with Brut-drinking and mango-eating pacifists, but now that the foreign cheese can’t get into Russia, it’s important to make sure neither does foreign content. You might already know that Meta is considered extremist and Instagram violates the 1948 Convention for prevention of genocide, but the Ukrainian Army’s recent drone incursions deeper into Russian territory have led to drastic measures limiting mobile internet access and Telegram, wreaking havoc on many businesses that rely on the mobile internet for their daily operations.

The hard(ware) economy

The Russian mostly matured political elite’s understanding of what constitutes a “real” economy is deeply gendered. Even the famous Soviet statue had a factory worker holding the hand of a Kolkhoz woman – agriculture was the more feminine of the two options back in the day. These days, sectors associated with heavy industry, extraction, and physical labor are treated as strategically important and worthy of state support, while digitally mediated sectors are often viewed as secondary, suspect, or politically dangerous. Even when talking about digital technologies, Putin reduces the conversation to “hardware” (zhelezo – literally metal) and how it’s important not to depend on foreign infrastructure. The investment dynamics tell the same story: the investment into telecommunication is 16% lower compared to more than 68% increase over the same period in metal products, despite the fact that digitalization used to be the primary driver of growth.

Even though before full-scale invasion of Ukraine, many would rave at the advanced level of digital service provision in Russia, top-down digitalization in Russia has been often pursued primarily as a tool of state control and surveillance rather than as an independent source of economic dynamism. The relative freedom of RuNet in the early 2000s was short-lived, capped by the protests against electoral fraud in 2011 with Internet policies growing more restrictive every year. The one seemingly genuine enthusiast for things digital on the high level was President Medvedev, who was warming up the seat for Putin between 2008-2012, famous for his Silicon Valley enthusiasm, love for Iphones and even schlepping Russian bloggers to America as part of his press pool. Now he is busy writing genocidal screeds on Telegram, although probably from his Iphone. An appeal from a former reality show star Viktoriya Bonya (that even The New York Times has written about) to stop stifling the digital economy provoked a slew of misogynistic insults but not much else. 

Back in Covid times there were a lot of fears of “Digital GULAG” – increasing implementation of facial recognition, digital permits for exiting your residence, spreading fakes about the pandemic. Ironically, those same laws are now used to track anti-war activists and IT workers continue to leave the country fearing military conscription or simply because they are no longer able to do their job amid online shutdowns. Rather than empowering autonomous digital entrepreneurship, Russian authorities frequently seek to discipline and contain digital spaces “that have servers in California”. Makes sense if you consider the Internet “a rubbish dump of the State Department” and your boss (Putin) doesn’t know how to use it. So of course, it’s ok to squeeze the sector of the economy, where “real men” like Putin don’t work.