Putin's Policies Aimed at Re-establishing Russian Conservatism

By Henry Srebrnik, [Moncton,NB] Times & Transcript

Russian politics has been characterised by increasing cultural and political conservatism since Vladimir Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012. This “cultural turn” has seen the promotion of social, political and cultural conservative themes in official political discourse.

The notion that Russian traditional values should be the source of regime legitimacy and a guide to public policy was not particularly strongly developed by Putin during his first period as president between 2000 and 2008.

But it became more prominent in recent years, particularly as the country has grappled with ongoing economic problems, exacerbated by sanctions imposed by other countries since the takeover of Crimea in 2014.

Action against oligarchs and regional leaders, and Putin’s efforts to strengthen the capacity of the Russian state through the reassertion of its monopoly rights over violence, has enhanced his personal powers.

Putin has promoted the concept of “sovereign democracy,” a term first coined by the ideologue Vladislav Surkov in 2006, to argue that Russia’s democratic standards were not comparable to those proposed by Western conceptions of democracy.

Russia, he contends, is different to other places because of the character of its civilisation and the extent to which it has retained it. It is, for Putin, a “state-civilisation.” There is, he stated in 2013, a close alignment between Russia’s ability to exist as a state and as a civilisation; each depends on the other.

The character of this civilisation is essentially a religious one, namely Russian Orthodoxy. This identity needs to be protected so that the state can survive.

 “Today, many nations are revising their moral values and ethical norms, eroding ethnic traditions and differences between peoples and cultures,” Putin declared in his address to the Russian Federal Assembly in 2013. And this, he claimed, is antithetical to true democracy, “since it is carried out on the basis of abstract, speculative ideas, contrary to the will of the majority.”

Putin is part of a long Russian tradition that predates the Soviet Union and goes back as far as the Orthodox Christian idea of Russia as the “third Rome,” first put forward in the early 16^th century.

Rome itself was the first, but it was succeeded by Constantinople after the Christian Church split into Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox faiths in the 11^th century. When the Muslim Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453, Moscow inherited the mantle of Orthodoxy, as the third Rome, making Russia a “world-historical” country.

In the 19^th century, intellectuals who became known as Slavophiles began to oppose the westernization of tsarist Russia. They declared that Russia was unlike Europe and that its type of civilization was higher than the European.

They denounced the ongoing Europeanization of Russia as a fatal deviation from the genuine course of Russian history and wanted Russia to come back to the principles of the Orthodox Church and state -- in other words, to autocracy.

Their opponents, the westernizers, believed that Russia’s development depended on the adoption of western technology and liberal government. They were rationalistic rather than emotional and mystical. Some remained moderate liberals, while others became socialists and political radicals.

The Bolsheviks who took control of the Russian Empire after 1917 were adherents of western ideas; after all, they were followers of the German political theorist Karl Marx. The dissolution of the Soviet Union also temporarily led to westernization.

Russia tried to become part of the “common European home,” as the last Soviet leader, Mikhail Gorbachev, put it. In a July 6, 1989 speech before the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, Gorbachev declared that the concept “rules out the probability of an armed clash and the very possibility of the use of force.” Westernizers sought reforms under Russian President Boris Yeltsin, but his decade in office was a shambles.

So the westernizers have, for now, lost the battle for Russia’s future. Putin’s “cultural turn” is in fact a “re-turn” to Slavophilism, and he has put these ideas into practice, especially since his 2018 presidential election victory. It accounts for the extreme measures taken against westernizers such as the activist Alexei Navalny.

A referendum held last summer on Russia’s constitution allows Putin another 12 years in power after his current term ends in 2024, should he win two more presidential elections.