Russia Is Not a Moral Alternative

Why the data undermine claims of tradition, order, and renewal

The idea that Russia represents a moral alternative to the West has gained quite traction in recent years, especially among young men searching for seriousness in a culture that feels unmoored. The Russian moral alternative myth presents Moscow as disciplined, where the West is permissive, rooted where liberal societies feel hollowed out, and anchored in tradition, where Europe and the United States appear adrift. It is an appealing narrative. It is also one that collapses under scrutiny. If Russia had discovered a durable model of order and renewal, it would show up not in aesthetics or rhetoric, but in outcomes: stable families, low despair, low violence, and confidence in the future. On those measures, Russia fails decisively.

I turned twenty in Germany in 2007. I was stationed in Mannheim, assigned to military police duties at Benjamin Franklin Village. Europe then felt settled in a way that is easy to forget. Outside the gates, life was ordinary. Young Germans drank too much beer, slept with one another, argued politics casually, and went to work the next morning. Inside the U.S. Army, “don’t ask, don’t tell” was still official policy, but in practice it barely mattered. No one kept score. No one acted as if political leaders were meant to supply moral instruction. Meaning came from work, relationships, private belief, or simply getting on with life.

I am thirty-eight now. The distance between those two moments is not nostalgia; it is evidence of a shift. Somewhere along the way, politics absorbed a new function. It stopped being administrative and began to masquerade as theological. Limits, purpose, and moral seriousness were outsourced upward. In that vacuum, Russia has been repackaged as an answer.

The problem is that moral claims are testable.

Divorce and family stability

Traditionalist rhetoric begins with the family. Russia, we are told, preserved it while the West dismantled it. The numbers tell a different story.

Russia has one of the highest divorce rates in the world: roughly four divorces per thousand people, with close to two-thirds of marriages ending in separation. This pattern has persisted across regimes, from the late Soviet period through the Putin era. It is not a recent deviation; it is structural.

The United States now sits closer to 2.4 divorces per thousand, a rate that has been declining for nearly two decades. Sweden and much of the European Union fall into a similar range.

Defenders of the Russian model often argue that Western cohabitation masks instability. Yet in Northern Europe, long-term cohabitation frequently substitutes for marriage without producing higher breakdown. In Russia, marriage remains culturally emphasized, but brittle. Alcohol abuse, domestic violence, and economic insecurity routinely overwhelm it. Tradition that survives only as ceremony is not tradition; it is branding.

Suicide and despair

Few indicators speak more plainly about meaning than suicide. It reflects not momentary dissatisfaction, but sustained hopelessness.

Russia’s suicide rate remains among the highest in the industrialized world. Overall figures hover around seventeen per hundred thousand, but the gender divide is severe. Male suicide routinely exceeds twenty-five per hundred thousand. These numbers long predate contemporary Western cultural debates. They are not reactions to liberal excess. They are conditions.

The United States, despite a troubling rise since 2010, remains lower. Sweden and the EU average lower still.