Fathoming Filimonov

A neopagan Stalinist who hates abortion and Hollywood — meet Russia’s most controversial governor

With his penchant for Mao suits and his veneration for an entire pantheon of chekist ghouls, not to mention his hastily implemented attempts to limit alcohol sales and women’s access to abortion, Georgy Filimonov, the ultra-conservative governor of Russia’s northwestern Vologda region, may have been elected less than two years ago, but his high-profile antics have already brought him national attention.

Though his ties to Putin’s daughter, as well as Kremlin éminence grise Sergey Kiriyenko, inevitably aided his rapid rise through Russia’s political system, Filimonov’s often bewildering actions in office, which have been further amplified by his savvy use of social media, have very quickly made him notorious far beyond his northern fief.

Arguably, the single important fact in Georgy Filimonov’s early biography is that his father Yury once trained at a martial arts centre in the Vologda region’s biggest city Cherepovets with one Sergey Kiriyenko, who, despite briefly being Russia’s prime minister, is best known today for being the Kremlin’s deputy chief of staff, a role that has grown to be extremely powerful during his tenure.

Filimonov’s career success is tightly bound up with the name Kiriyenko, and it was through his patron that he got a job in the Presidential Administration in 2005, aged just 25. Beginning as a consultant, he rose to become an adviser in the foreign policy department where he compiled analytical reports and assisted with preparations for Putin’s trips abroad.

In a 2014 interview, Filimonov recalled: “I had no direct contact with the president, of course, but … when someone who’s only just graduated writes a document that will be on the head of state’s desk 5–10 minutes later, it’s a real adrenaline rush. I learnt an enormous amount.”

In an unusual move for anyone desiring political power, Filimonov left the Kremlin in 2009 to be the deputy managing director of an insurance company, while also giving lectures on US foreign policy at his alma mater, the Peoples’ Friendship University in Moscow. Even then, Filimonov saw Hollywood as a “weapon of mass destruction” wielded by Washington and used to serve US foreign policy by “overthrowing regimes and fomenting revolutions”.

2014 and all that

Filimonov was, unsurprisingly, a staunch supporter of Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014, and was even inspired to write an opinion piece for state-owned newspaper Svobodnaya Pressa where he argued that the return of Crimea was just “the first step in the coming together of Russian lands”.

Indeed, in 2020, independent investigative outlet IStories uncovered emails sent by Filimonov in 2014 to Kirill Shamalov, who at that time was married to Vladimir Putin’s daughter Katerina Tikhonova, in which he argued that it was time for the Kremlin to launch a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, writing, “We need to strike a blow against the criminal junta. There’s no time to lose.”

In the years that followed, nationalist media outlets continued publishing Filimonov’s polemics about the “junta” running Ukraine and Russia’s enemies in the US. Perhaps most notably, just days after the 2015 assassination of opposition politician Boris Nemtsov in Moscow, Filimonov told Ivan-Chay, a TV channel that claims to espouse “traditional” Russian values, that the hit had been ordered by Russia’s enemies “to sow the seeds required for a colour revolution along the lines of that seen in Ukraine”.

Filimonov returned to the Kremlin in 2017 after being appointed a consultant in the Presidential Administration’s Internal Affairs Department. This time he put the role to good use as a springboard for his political career, earning him an appointment as the deputy governor of the Moscow region in 2021. Two years later, he was made the acting governor of the Vologda region, before finally being elected governor in his own right with 62% of the vote in September 2023.

Filimonov has called the “rebirth of the Russian North” his top priority and has repeatedly called for a return to the type of strict abortion ban that existed during the Stalin era,

Even before he won election last year, Filimonov’s deeply odd ideas were well known to the electorate, such as his affection for the likes of Lenin and Stalin, as well as Soviet secret police chiefs Felix Dzerzhinsky and Lavrenty Beria, whose portraits adorn his office walls.

Since his election, however, Filimonov has given his ultra-conservative views free reign and his tendency to eccentricity has only increased, with many of his less orthodox decisions leaving even his supporters bewildered.

For instance, Filimonov’s devotion to paganism — his daughters bear the ancient Slavic names Veleslava and Ladoslava — led him to order the installation of a sculpture of the Slavic pagan god Veles not only in the centre of Vologda, but also opposite a monastery. The statue was ultimately taken down a few days later following mass protests serious enough to make Filimonov issue a public apology to local churchgoers.

However, there was no such popular outcry in December when Filimonov solemnly unveiled a monument to Joseph Stalin in Vologda, and he has subsequently signalled his intention to erect a statue of Ivan the Terrible in the city to boot, which, if enacted, would face not one but two local cathedrals.

Anti-abortionist

Filimonov has called the “rebirth of the Russian North” his top priority and has repeatedly called for a return to the type of strict abortion ban that existed during the Stalin era, when women would frequently die after resorting to having backstreet abortions.

Fuelling Filimonov’s animus for a female autonomy is the rapid rate of depopulation in the Vologda region, which, at 3.4% over the past five years, far outstrips the already dire national average of 0.4%, and is, he claims, further exacerbated by a net regional loss of 8,500 people of working age every year, though he hasn’t specified exactly how and to what they are lost. His aim is for the Vologda region to have the second highest birth rate in the country after Chechnya.

To bring about such a vast demographic shift, in late 2023 Filimonov signed a regional law making it illegal for anybody to encourage women to have an abortion, after which he went a step further and began calling for a complete ban on abortion, despite the fact that it would breach federal law, with exceptions only in cases of rape or when a woman’s life is at risk.

While federal law currently guarantees a woman’s right to an abortion under certain circumstances, Filimonov’s proposed ban has been warmly welcomed by both the Russian Orthodox Church and those who support the war in Ukraine, and though still not technically the law, an unofficial abortion ban is already in effect in the region.

Last month several local women complained that they had been denied abortions at public health facilities in the region. Alexander Morozov, a regional deputy for the Communist Party, contacted the regional Prosecutor’s Office about the claims, and was told that it would be checking clinics for compliance with health legislation. The Prosecutor’s Office also asked locals to report any similar incidents.

While Filimonov didn’t comment on the claims directly, he did repost a Telegram post by a pro-war blogger condemning Morozov’s action and calling him a bloodsucker.

Fighting Severstal

Since being elected governor, Filimonov also has not been shy of picking fights with other powerful figures in the region, and has begun to purge anyone associated with steel and mining company Severstal, whose key asset, the Cherepovets Metallurgical Plant, is in the Vologda region, and provides a significant proportion of the region’s budget.

Above all, Filimonov has had Alexey Mordashov, Severstal’s owner and the second richest man in Russia according to Forbes, and those around him, in his sights. Five deputies of the Cherepovets City Duma and the Speaker of the Legislative Assembly, all associated with Severstal, have been removed from their posts thus far. The most high-profile case came on 21 February when the popular mayor of Cherepovets, Vadim Germanov, a former general director of the Severstal Russian Steel division, was forced to resign.

Filimonov has frequently blamed Severstal for its role in making Cherepovets one of Russia’s most polluted cities, and has been critical of what he calls the company’s failure to invest in regional development, claims rejected by Mordashov, who has insisted that its annual investment in the regional economy amounts to 2 billion rubles (€22 million).

Another point of contention has been Severstal’s use of migrant workers at its plant in Cherepovets, something that prompted Filimonov to ban foreigners from doing construction work in the region last month. Severstal warned that the ban could lead it to miss deadlines or, in some cases, force it to suspend entire projects altogether. Within a few days, Filimonov was forced to row back on the decision, though he attempted to save face by claiming that a recent rise in the number of vacancies in the region’s construction sector meant that the local workforce was not big enough to meet demand.

‘Defeat the devils’

While Filimonov has clearly felt like lord and master of the region since his election, only time will tell how long the Kremlin will allow him to continue indulging his whims with impunity.

Indeed, many in the region are already frustrated with Filimonov, and Moscow knows it. Last month, 120 members of the ruling United Russia party in the Vologda region lodged a complaint about Filimonov, who also heads the regional branch of United Russia, with Vladimir Putin and former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev, in which they described the “ever-increasing bewilderment” with which Filimonov’s antics are met.

Once again, Filimonov didn’t comment on the complaint, but continues to speak out regularly on matters important to the Kremlin, such as the war with Ukraine, perhaps in an attempt to remind those in the corridors of power that though he may be an oddball, he’s their oddball. “Strength to our warriors. Defeat the devils,” Filimonov has said by way of encouragement.

Yevgeny Domozhirov, an exiled Vologda politician who left Russia in 2022 after publicly condemning the invasion of Ukraine, is dismissive of Filimonov, calling him “a bigmouth with an anti-American bee in his bonnet” who tries to play the populist card but has actually “plagiarised all his regional development programmes from the previous governor”.

Given Mordashov’s own connections in Moscow, Filimonov’s decision to challenge Severstal’s dominance in the Vologda region could easily end up costing him his career, though even if it doesn’t, Filimonov’s own bizarre antics are unlikely to help him win a third appointment to the Russian capital, the ultimate desire of any governor who has previously worked at the federal level.