Russian authorities, Orthodox clergy and artists close to power see nothing innocent or amusing in this emerging trend, detecting in it the mark of “Satanism” and a threat from the West to destroy the so-called “traditional” values of Russia.
In line with the ultraconservative turn of Russian power since the start of the assault on Ukraine in February 2022, deputies have tabled a bill to ban quadrobics, as they have already done for “the promotion of life without children” or as the Supreme Court did for the “LGBT movement”.
“We are being told how many children we should have and what they should play? Seriously?” says Iana's mother, Ioulia, 38, a travel agent who prefers not to give her last name in a country where repression is in full swing.
In their plush apartment in Moscow, Yulia helps her 12-year-old daughter sort out the bushy tails and multicolored cat and fox masks that she has made.
Iana, who practices quadrobics at home or in a park with friends, finds it “so cool”: “Physically, I have become stronger, I can walk on my hands.”
But this activity, all in all still quite confidential, has become an important matter in Russia, discussed during a round table on “the fight against Satanism” or throughout debates and television reports with an outraged tone.
– L'hydre quadrobics LGBT –
The Commissioner for Children's Rights of the Russian Republic of Tatarstan, Irina Volets, said she had received “a number of complaints” from citizens who are concerned about “dehumanization of children”.
“Quadrobics” and “furries,” another community of people who dress up as animals, are “heads of the same hydra with the LGBT movement,” she said.
“Did you know that among quadrobics there are ten times more people who identify as LGBT?” asks director Nikita Mikhalkov, Oscar winner in 1995 for “Deceptive Sun” and today a Kremlin propagandist.
For Fyodor Lukyanov, in charge of the family at the Moscow Patriarchate, “quadrobics is not a child's game or a sport but a subculture (…) which prepares the child for the adoption of “anti-values including those of gender plurality and the LGBT (movement)”.
“We are at the stage where we are being pushed to renounce not only our gender identity but also our human identity,” added on October 11 on Telegram the president of the Duma, the lower house of Parliament, Vyacheslav Volodin, denouncing a trend coming from “the United States and the West”.
It was a Kremlin partisan singer, Mia Boïka, who sparked the storm when, in September, she humiliated a young practitioner on stage: “Today it's a cat, tomorrow a dog. And the day after tomorrow, “she'll decide she's become a boy… and we'll have Mom 1 and Mom 2 in our families.”
– “Nefarious foreign influence” –
“What a horror! Where do they get all this from?”, says offended Ioulia, Iana’s mother. “These are our children who are just having fun. The time will come when they will all become boring adults.”
But the ultra-nationalist deputy Andreï Svintsov, at the origin of the bill which provides for fines for practitioners, loses his temper at the memory of “a video in which a woman walks her son on a leash dressed as a dog. Ca disgusts the Russians.
Before continuing: “We are 25 years late with (the ban on the) LGBT movement”, placed by the authorities in the category of “extremist” organizations, thus opening the way to heavy prison sentences.
“We must at least catch up with these new movements”, “imposed by the West” and which “aim to destroy our demography”, he says, an allusion to the demographic crisis that Vladimir Putin promises, without success, to resolve for a quarter of a century in power.
For independent political scientist Konstantin Kalatchev, the government “is imposing this debate to drive a wedge between the Russians and the West.”
And the campaign is bearing fruit: 35% of Russians believe that the appearance of quadrobics is attributable to “harmful foreign influence” and a third want a ban, according to a survey by the VTsIOM Institute close to the Kremlin.
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