How many Russians really understand the state they live in?
Last Updated: 25.06.2025 03:37
Therefore, only the second, i.e. official wife, who was pregnant at the time, received payments for her deceased husband. The first wife and children were left with nothing.
If the marriage is only religious, according to the law she cannot claim anything. There’re seismic changes in that regard as Dagestani women look up to Moscow where ex-wives take husbands to the cleaners and leave them with nothing. A lofty goal and something to strive for.
As Kremlin and the State Duma refuse to acknowledge the fact that conservative family values exist only in their dream, so do imams wear pink glasses. Dagestan men can barely support or hold responsibility for one wife and taking more for selfish reasons leads to mayhem.
There are fights, scandals and even murders that happen because of polygamy, or rather because the first wife does not recognize the second and subsequent ones.
The boss and his partner, former Muslims who converted to Orthodox Christianity and then concurrently converted to Judaism, approved. Nowadays, you can change religion, wives and passports (one of the partners carries five Western passports and communicates with his countrymen by means of Google Translate) at will. There is a utilitarian approach to morals nowadays and Russian Muslims are no different from everybody else.
In Dagestan, girls are taught to work hard from childhood and must do housework all day long. A mother is obliged to teach her daughter everything that needs to be done around the house. Otherwise, the mother-in-law will be unhappy with her.
Dagestan is a republic of Russia situated in the North Caucasus of Eastern Europe. It is one of 22 ethnic republics that tries to balance between Islamic tradition and modern secular state.
A woman in Makhachkala complained that her husband took on a second wife after she had experienced problems with her health. This is exactly the opposite of the ideals preached by the elders of Dagestan. Selfishness and treatment of women as dispensable and easily replaceable permeates social relationships in the whole of Russia, not just in Dagestan.
A woman complains on social media that her man lies on the couch all day and doesn't work, but wants to take a second wife. The man lives off his wife's salary. He’s a nice guy. Pays attention to his daughter, but wife is tired to carry the household on her shoulders. And the last straw was when husband began to look for a second wife online.
The fact that this arrangement didn’t raise anyone’s eyebrows tells you all you need to know about the current state of morals.
The real state of things is often not as benevolent and reflects the decline of morals and dissolution of the nuclear family in Russia irregardless of religion or ethnicity.
Dagestan men answer when asked about polygamy that they want to try something new and religion is only a pretext. On social networks, they don’t hide the fact that many men in southern republics of Russia take second wives for the sake of diversifying intimate pleasures. There’re practically no other reasons.
In Islam, a man can have up to four wives but officially in the Russian Federation it is allowed to register only one marriage in the registry office. Second and subsequent marriages in Dagestan are concluded by religious marriage.
Islamic laws complicate receiving payouts. A Dagestani woman lost her husband in the special military operation. She and her husband have three children and have been together for 12 years. According to religious rites, she is the first wife, but he only officially married his second wife.
Plenty of women in Dagestan dispatched good-for-nothing husbands to the special military operation to get them off the couch. Other men ask for advice online how to afford two or three wives like their wealthy friends or relatives.
What are some current examples of injustice?
Elders in Dagestan say the true reason for polygamy is that if a man has enough money, he can take an orphan or a widow with children as a second wife in order to be a benefactor and help a woman who finds herself in a difficult situation.
That said, there are women who are happy that their husband took a second wife.
Good relations exist until the division of property. Since the issue of polygamy is now acute in the Dagestan, women with children turn to crisis centres so they could get some property out of ex-husbands.
This of course goes both ways.
At my business office of a pharma company in Moscow, there was a man who had his ex wife working in the open space in front of him, his second wife was at home with two children, and there were two happy women in the office, his third and fourth unofficial wives, who had a relationship with him and were friends with each other. His ex-wife’s child was paid for by her salary. He plans to have children from the other two women so that they would be supported by their salaries. The man and his wives are Orthodox Christian.