THE NEW YORK TIMES: A firebrand governor aims to transform his region into a laboratory for the Kremlin’s reactionary ideals.
He restricted alcohol sales to two hours on workdays and effectively banned abortions in the region’s private clinics. He erected statues of Stalin and Ivan the Terrible, and his government tried to name a youth group after the medieval czar’s dreaded secret police. He emblazoned nearly every bus and even the local airline’s four Soviet-era jets with nationalistic slogans and repainted them ruby red.
Georgy Y. Filimonov, the governor of the northern region of Vologda, is an especially keen reader of Russia’s political winds. He has vigorously embraced the sort of “traditional Russian values” espoused by the Kremlin, asserting Vologda as an undistilled bastion of “Russianness.”
His campaign to make his region “the powerhouse of the Russian world,” which began in late 2023, melds imperial and Soviet nostalgia with some of modern Russia’s strictest social laws.
As he pushes his region’s citizens to carry out what he sees as their patriotic duties, high on his list is having more babies. » | Ivan Nechepurenko | Visuals by Mary Gelman | Ivan Nechepurenko spent several days in the Russian city of Vologda and in the surrounding region. | Monday, May 18, 2026
