Putin and the polygamists

Homosexuality may not be tolerated in today’s Russia, nor political dissent. Polygamy, though, is a different matter. Ever since news broke this summer of a 57-year-old police chief in Chechnya bullying a 17-year-old local girl into becoming his second wife, Russian nationalists and Islamic leaders alike have been lining up to call for a man’s right to take more than one wife.

Most vocal has been Ramzan Kadyrov, the flamboyant 38-year-old president of Chechnya (part of the Russian Federation), who advocates polygamy as part of ‘traditional Muslim culture’. Veteran ultranationalist politician Vladimir Zhironovsky has long held that polygamy is the solution for ‘Russia’s 10 million unmarried women’. And even Senator Yelena Mizulina, one of the architects of Russia’s anti-gay laws, is sympathetic to the idea. ‘There are not enough men, the kind with whom women would want to start a family and have children,’ Mizulina told the Duma, calling a fellow lawmaker’s plans to make polygamy a criminal offence ‘absurd’.

The latest debate was triggered in May when villagers from the tiny Chechen hamlet of Batarki complained to Novaya Gazeta — one of the few independent news-papers in Moscow — that their chief of police, Nazhud Guchigov, had threatened a local family to hand over their daughter to be his wife, or he would come and claim her by force. Guchigov also allegedly posted policemen around the village to prevent the family of 17-year-old Kheda Goilabiyeva from spiriting her to safety. Bride kidnapping, once a common Caucasian practice, has been illegal in Chechnya since 2010, and in 2012 the legal age of consent was raised to 18. Polygamy is also a civil offence under Russian Federal law — and Guchigov already has a wife and grown-up son. No matter. When the story broke and Moscow liberals began kicking up a fuss, President Kadyrov, not a man to shrink from a fight, stepped in to host the nuptials himself.