Analysis
Putin Offers False Comfort to Western
Conservatives
By Leonid
Bershidsky | Bloomberg
Today at 6:42 a.m. EDT
Running
Russia as a near-absolute monarch was never enough for Russian President
Vladimir Putin. The story of his 21-year rule is equally about trying to
formulate Russia’s proposition to the rest of the world — a kind of
national brand message, something that was lost when the Soviet Union ceased to
be the global purveyor of the far-left ideal.
The
current — and likely final — edition of Russia’s brand essence is
“reasonable conservatism,” as formulated by Putin at the most recent
session of the Valdai Discussion Club, an annual gathering of Putin-friendly
and Putin-curious intellectuals.
Ever
since an oil and gas windfall in the mid-2000s allowed Russia to behave more
assertively on the international stage, Putin and his propaganda
machine, always attuned to the boss’s thinking, have tried on different
concepts: an anti-terrorist stronghold (since 2001, when Putin famously
offered his support to George W. Bush after 9/11), an “energy superpower”
(a term first applied to Russia in 2006), one of the leading powers of the
emerging non-Western world (it was in Russia that the BRIC, later BRICS,
countries held their first official meeting in this format, also in
2006).
None of these constructs had the power of the Soviet offering,
and none of them held up in the real world. The shaken but still
self-confident U.S. of the early 2000s wasn’t prepared to treat Russia as an
equal ally. “We have lots of fossil fuel” turned out to be an increasingly
unsexy message. And the growth trajectories of the BRICS countries have
diverged so drastically that the world’s nascent multipolarity quickly boiled
down to China vs. the U.S.
So Putin’s search for a message zeroed in on the conservative
idea and “traditional values”: He started speaking of his Russia as a
bastion of conservatism back in late 2013, in his annual speech to
parliament — just months before the Crimea annexation marked his
decisive break with the Western world.
In that speech, and again at the Valdai forum on
Oct. 21, he paraphrased Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyayev, who wrote in
1918, when he felt Russians needed an intellectual alternative
to Bolshevik “revolutionism”:
The meaning of conservatism isn’t in hindering
the forward and upward movement but in hindering the backward and downward
movement, the backsliding toward chaotic darkness, the return to a state that
preceded the formation of states and cultures.
To Berdyayev, conservatism was defined as the exact opposite
of Bolshevism, and Putin tries to dress up his brand of conservatism in
the same clothes:
As we watch what’s going on in a number of
Western nations, we’re astonished to recognize our own homegrown practices that
I hope we have left in the distant past. The fight for equal rights and against
discrimination is turning into an aggressive dogmatism bordering on the absurd.
They even stop teaching the great authors of the past — such as
Shakespeare — at schools and universities, because their ideas are
believed over there to be backward. The classics are declared backward because
they didn’t understand the importance of gender or race. In Hollywood, they
publish manuals that dictate how movies are to be made and about what, how many
characters of what color or gender there should be. This is stronger stuff than
we saw from the Soviet Communist Party’s Agitation and Propaganda Department.
It’s as if the Russian leader lived in a Trumpist
social network echo chamber and tried to reconcile what he read with
uncomfortable memories of his Soviet youth and with Berdyayev’s
century-old writings. But Putin has said he doesn’t use the internet, his
Soviet memories are mostly of the misty-eyed variety, at least judging by
his policies, and his paraphrases of the Berdyayev quote on the meaning of
conservatism don’t include this important sentence:
The meaning of conservatism is in the obstacles it sets for
manifestations of the chaotic, animal element in human societies. This element
always lurks within a human being, and it has to do with sin.
I’m no apostle of wokeism, but linking modern
progressivism with the sinful “chaotic, animal element” of human nature
feels like a stretch. One can make a case for likening it to Soviet-style
leftist dogmatism, but not to the manic, violent energy of the Bolshevik
revolution, which was what Berdyayev rejected because to him, it was the
energy of death.
When he expounds on conservatism, Putin doesn’t
sound as though he’s turned into a conservative thinker as he approaches his
70s. Rather, he sounds as though he’s heard tell of certain media
phenomena, mostly of U.S. origin, and used them to formulate a sales pitch, an
offering to those in the Western world and beyond who reject social
progressivism. That audience’s identity politics have more to do with
nationality than with race or gender; it’s focused on sovereignty and
safe borders, scared of feminism and disdainful of gender and sexual variety.
Putin is pitching his regime to these people as a bulwark of “traditional
values” simply because he appears to see a niche that Western governments
and media are not serving — in the same way that Soviet rulers saw an
opportunity in Western leftist and peace movements.
This search for allies was opportunistic for the Soviets once
they’d stopped hoping for a world revolution, and it’s opportunistic for Putin.
Nothing he’s done since he won power positions him convincingly for moral
posturing, or for lecturing others on Christian values. But it’s important for
him that Russia should stand for something, be a beacon to people outside its
borders. Without a mission, Russia is just a normal country — and that’s a
status Putin just can’t embrace. So now, with conservatives on the run
politically since Donald Trump’s election defeat and a series of electoral
disasters in Europe, from Spain to Germany, Putin figures that Western
conservatives need a friend like him— perhaps a somewhat exotic ally, but
still, you don’t “OK Boomer” somebody who can order you poisoned.
Russia’s propaganda outlets immediately picked up
the sales pitch. Vesti, the state television news program, called Putin’s
Valdai speech his “most important” one, a presentation of a “national idea” for
Russia. Margarita Simonyan, editor-in-chief of RT, the government-controlled
network of foreign-language broadcasters, wrote on her Telegram Channel:
So now our ideology has been formulated. Moderate
conservatism. And that’s great!
As a moderate conservative, I can’t bring myself to share the
excitement. The center-right is in such a sorry state that Putin sees a wide
opening in the West on this flank — and not just on the populist far right
of the political spectrum. That’s hardly anything to celebrate. There’s also
Putin’s record with previous visions for Russia’s global role: He’s hardly
distinguished himself by championing the most promising causes.
Besides, I feel a little sorry for those foreigners
who will be taken in by Putin’s pitch — and some inevitably
will. Back in 2016, before Trump was elected, I was hanging out with some
Three-Percenters in Florida, people who wouldn’t part with their guns even
inside their leader’s house. They spoke admiringly of Putin as a champion of
law and order, someone who could keep the liberals in check. As I listened, I
couldn’t shake a mental image of these guys being dragged off to jail by
Russian cops after their gun cache has been confiscated; Russian terrorism laws
were practically written with them in mind.
Moderate conservatives, too, might be somewhat
shocked by the ways and customs of Putin’s Russia, were they to encounter them
in real life. They might find their free speech muzzled in ways that the
“liberal media” and Silicon Valley would find unthinkable. And if
the more literary-minded of them read Berdyayev on conservatism for
reference and like the emphasis he put on creativity and the rejection of
violence as a means of achieving progress, they should beware: Putin’s
adoption of the philosophy has always been rather selective, and not in
their favor.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion
of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Leonid Bershidsky is a member of the Bloomberg News
Automation team based in Berlin. He was previously Bloomberg Opinion’s Europe
columnist. He recently authored a Russian translation of George Orwell’s
“1984.”
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