Pundits around the world have wondered about the miracle of the public opinion ratings and popularity of Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin. For a decade and a half Putin has been able to maintain high levels of public support that has risen to new peaks since the 2014 events culminating in Crimea’s annexation and a war in Ukraine. An answer provided by Daniel Treisman posited the importance of economic factors in maintaining Putin’s popularity (American Journal of Political Science, July 2011). Valerie Sperling’s book advances yet a different explanation of Putin’s success, exploring and demonstrating the importance of symbolic instruments for building and maintaining political legitimacy and, specifically, the strategy of relying on gender norms and sexualization to dominate Russian politics.

Putin’s machismo as a political legitimation strategy has attracted wide scholarly attention and public commentary. It is hard to ignore the explosion of publicly circulating images exhibiting bare-chested Putin—wrestling, fishing, flying with cranes, or posing for a picture with a tiger—as well as other sexualized visual and audio artifacts in support of the Russian president, promoting him as the model man that every Russian woman desires. An achievement of this book is to bring all this evidence together, placing it in the context of particular events, policies, and political challenges faced by the regime and highlighting their centrality to the public side of politics in Russia. The book not only meticulously describes the episodes staged by the Kremlin but adds an important, frequently overlooked nuance: Gender norms are used as political tools not only by the pro-Kremlin forces but also by the political opposition in Russia. While the regime defenders actively reproduce and promote Putin’s image as a real man—muzhik (p. 37) and a “masculine supermodel” (p. 113)—and present the opposition as feminine and weak, the anti-Kremlin activists employ similar tools. In their struggle to undermine Putin’s authority, they question his masculinity, using homophobic or feminizing labels.

This row of competing sexualized images and representations colored much of the period of open political protests in 2011–2012 and, as Sperling demonstrates, became the central stylistic feature of political process and competition in this period. Putin first set the stage and the parameters of the debate by referring to white ribbons worn by opposition protesters as condoms. The opposition picked up the banner in earnest, portraying Putin, in turn, as a condom on actual protest banners and using numerous other linguistically provoking, sexualized terms and images. Besides Putin’s macho image-building covered in Chapter 2 and the regime-opposition dynamic during 2011–2012 protests illustrated in Chapter 3, Sperling analyzes the use of gender norms in policy-promotion. Chapter 4 focuses on how traditional ideas about masculinity and femininity were regularly evoked in the policy spheres concerned with patriotism, military conscription, and pro-natalism. The remaining chapters explore the widespread nature of sexism and homophobia in political and economic spheres and the troubles of Russian feminism.

The book’s empirics do show Russia as a boorish, sexist, and homophobic polity and society. Yet from the get-go Sperling is eager to note that Russia is far from extraordinary in its reliance on sexualization and gender norms in politics. As scholars of the comparative politics of gender have long noted, gender is central to political processes everywhere, and Sperling goes to great lengths to illustrate the universality of battles over political masculinity by citing examples from such diverse cultural and political contexts as China, the United States, Italy, Bulgaria, Mexico, and Malaysia. The motive driving the book is the burst of these strategies in Putin’s Russia.

Why has Russia’s 21^st century political landscape been barraged by such overtly sexualized language and images? Exploring the conditions that make such practices possible, Sperling advances the “multiple opportunity structure” model. Russia, Sperling argues, has seen a “perfect storm” of opportunities and few obstacles for employing these legitimation strategies (p. 48). The first factor is the “invisibility” of women’s movement, organizations, and issues on the public sphere in the 2000s. The presence of a strong women’s movement might have at least resulted in public questioning and opposition to the use of gender stereotypes and display of misogyny on the public arena. The negative connotation of feminism in Russia is another related factor that Sperling notes in her discussion: The Soviet system promoted women’s issues in its own right and for its own interests, while dismissing feminism as a bourgeois ideology. The Russian society had internalized to a considerable extent the Soviet “achievements” in regards to gender equality treating feminism as alien and undesirable. The imperatives of public politics in the political system based on electoral support and, at least in theory, competitive electoral race is another piece of the opportunity structure Sperling notes in her discussion. The utilization of media and PR methods started under Yeltsin already but was really brought to new heights and sophistication under Putin, when media outlets, having learned from economic advertising, were utilized to promote a “political product” (p. 55). Pertinently, Sperling brings attention to the role of commercial capitalism and the sexualization of economic products in the 1990s as an economic opportunity structure paving a way for the “sexualization of political products” (p. 60).

This important nuance in the book might have benefitted from greater elaboration and emphasis as it really adds to the comparative aspect of the book and the author’s aspiration to contribute to “comparative politics of gender.” As Sperling accurately notes, the sexualized emphasis on Putin’s masculinity is hard to imagine in the Soviet context as well as the context of the 1990s. Patriarchy and misogyny—as two foundational societal features that make the use of gender norms possible—are not new to Putin’s Russia. The late Soviet leaders are, perhaps, the most infamous “patriarchs” yet their public images are as far from sexualization as possible. Soviet social conservatism and tabooing of sex (remember, “there is no sex in the Soviet Union”) was reflected in the promotion of grim images of ascetic “patriarchs”—the descendants of “great Stalin,” modest and unpretentious, ever-dressed in his trench coat. Arguably, that grey, stern-looking, Soviet nomenklatura style was in effect through most of the 1990s. Putin’s leather jacket or “no jacket at all” is therefore a sort of a stylistic/cultural revolution in Russian politics made possible by the new culture of capitalism and glamour promoted in advertisement, glossy magazines, and a burst of licentiousness in the absence of strong religious mores or an imposing ideology. That 1990s cultural foundation for political legitimation strategies of the 2000s is an important analytical point for understanding the origins and the success of the political strategy adopted by the Putin regime. The book seems to emphasize the patriarchy more than these cultural boundaries for what is permissible and what “sells” politically. Given the universality of patriarchy, the argument grounded on this structural force as a key driving factor (p. 28, for example) has a lesser analytical leverage than an argument that emphasizes the more specific aspect of Russia’s cultural transformation as the country embarked on the path of market reforms in the 1990s. Nonetheless, Sex, Politics, & Putin is the most comprehensive illustration of the regime’s gender-based legitimation strategy to date and is a must-read for those who strive to understand Putin’s Russia.