Putin’s administration devotes much time and energy to the task of purveying a national vision that placates and excites the Russian people. They understand the priority of persuading Russians that they are committed to bringing them a better life. But they do not go about this task in a selfless fashion. The administration and its most influential supporters set out a vision that had wide appeal while also bolstering their own interests. Political self-service lies at the foundations of their efforts.
At a time when most citizens still struggle with the changes that flooded over them after the end of the communist order, Putin – like Yeltsin before him – is keen to assure fellow citizens that a radiant future awaits them. He speaks in elevated tones, ‘Russia is a country that has chosen democracy for itself by the will of its own people.’1 He tells the Russians that they no longer have anything to apologize for. Their country, he tells them, is a model of decency and peaceful intent. He warns that malign foreign elements have conspired to produce a picture of Russia and its rulers that is the opposite of reality. He depicts Russophobia as a confection built on prejudice and lies that contributes to the dangerous volatility of global order. Though his message is targeted at fellow Russians, it is also one that he wants to resonate around the world.
Putin claims to be different from all those Soviet communist general secretaries who imposed their ideology on the Russian people:
It is up to all of us, to our entire society – both the so-called neo-Slavophiles and the neo-Westernizers, both the statists and the so-called liberals – to work together to formulate common developmental goals. We need to break the habit of only listening to like-minded people and unhesitatingly rejecting any other point of view with malice and hatred. You can’t toss around the country’s future like a football, booting it into the air and plunging us into rabid nihilism, consumerism, criticism of absolutely everything, or gloomy pessimism.2
But this chariness about telling the Russian people what to think lacks credibility. In fact, Putin and his public relations advisers are ardent advocates of their values and want fellow Russians to adhere to them.
After returning to the presidency in 2012, Putin increasingly advocated the virtues of ‘tradition’, railing against the ‘permissive’ cultures of Europe and the United States. For Putin, societies come to grief when their rulers abandon ancient customs:
Today the norms of ethics and morality are being revised in many countries, wiping away national traditions and the distinctiveness of nationality and culture. Society is now being asked to provide not only a healthy recognition of everyone’s right to freedom of conscience, political views and a private life but also an obligatory recognition of the equal value – strange as it may seem – of good and evil, concepts which clash. Such a destruction of traditional values ‘from above’ not only produces negative consequences for societies but is also fundamentally anti-democratic.3
He identified the Middle East as a blatant example of the harm that such ideas caused:
In recent years we have seen how attempts to impose a supposedly progressive model of development on other countries have in practice resulted in regression, barbarity and immense bloodshed. This is what happened in a whole number of countries in the Middle East and North Africa. This is the dramatic situation that presented itself in Syria.4
Rulers are said to imperil their people when they abandon tradition. He depicts Russia as the one powerful country to hold a torch for custom and decency:
We know that the world has more and more people who agree with our position of support for traditional values which for millennia have constituted the spiritual, moral foundations of civilization for every people: values of the traditional family and of genuine human life including the religious life, not only material but also spiritual life – which are the values of humanism and the diversity of the world.
This, of course, is a conservative position. But, in the words of Nikolai Berdyaev, the meaning of conservatism is not that it prevents movement forwards and upwards but rather that it prevents movement backwards and downwards, into chaotic darkness and a return to a primitive state.5
Russians, in Putin’s estimation, have held to their ancestral values regardless of who governed them: ‘Even with all the well-known costs, the level of morality both in tsarist Russia and in Soviet times acted as a very meaningful scale and criterion for people’s reputation at place of work, in society and in daily life.’6
Putin denies wishing to change the Russian people. For him, their worthiness is axiomatic, and he ridicules the utopianism of Lenin and his successors in trying to transform the outlook of ordinary Russian men and women through violent revolution. Putin’s attitude can be seen as an echo of the kind of mindset that prevailed in many European countries undergoing ‘nation-building’ in the nineteenth century when poets, musicians and folklorists joined efforts with political activists to unify their own people by eulogizing their national virtues. But those were countries that, to a greater or lesser extent, would turn into nation states. ‘Russia’ before 1917 was not a nation state but an empire whose government had to take account of the experiences and sentiments of many subject nations. This obligation remained after October 1917, when the communists, with their internationalist creed, seized power. The Kremlin leadership is making up for lost time. Whereas Yeltsin was half-hearted in playing the nationalist card, Putin regularly throws it down on the table and misses no chance to praise the instincts and attainments of Russia’s men and women.
His courting of their approval also carries a note of ethnic nationalism. This is dog-whistle politics: he wants Russians to know that he will always protect their interests. But he cannot say this openly, for fear of giving unnecessary offence to the other national and religious groups – and he certainly rejects ideas of ‘racial purity’.7 He has repeatedly called on citizens to treat each other with tolerance regardless of ethnicity, faith or political doctrine. His requirements are stability and harmony:
This means that liberals have to learn to talk with representatives of left-wing views and, conversely, that nationalists must remember that Russia from its very inception was formed specifically as a multi-ethnic and multi-confessional country. Nationalists must remember that by calling our multi-ethnic character into question and by starting to exploit the matter of Russian, Tatar, Caucasian, Siberian or any other nationalism and separatism, we are starting down the road of destroying our genetic code. Essentially, we are beginning to destroy ourselves.8
Such a formulation camouflages the fact that Putin and his administration, while displaying a pronounced favour for ethnic Russians, do not refer to themselves as nationalists. They walk the walk without talking the talk.
Yet Putin still stresses Russia’s shared European heritage when it suits him. He has the chameleon’s capacity to change colour according to each shift in circumstance in which he finds himself. When talking to the European Commission president José Manuel Barroso about the Islamist threat to the continent, he asked, ‘How many are we?’ By ‘we’ he meant the Christians, seeking to draw a line between Christianity and other ways of life and governance such as in China or the Islamic world.9 Putin said all this when he still hoped that the rest of Europe would sympathize with his armed reduction of Chechnya. More recently he has put an emphasis on Russia as the friend of the world’s Muslims and on the choice of China as a strategic partner. He adjusts his ideas according to current political convenience, but always gives salience to the theme of Russian national distinctness.
One of Putin’s most fervent advocates, the chairman of the Duma’s Education Committee, Vyacheslav Nikonov supports the same school of thought when expounding his concept of Eternal Russia. Nikonov has called himself a ‘hereditary politician’ by right of being the grandson of the notorious Soviet Foreign Affairs Minister Vyacheslav Molotov, but his views would have horrified his grandfather, who barbarically crushed Russian traditions in the course of Stalinist agricultural collectivization and Stalin’s Great Terror. Nikonov, however, is going with the flow of contemporary Russia. Like others in the ruling elite, he assures Russians that their past is glorious and that they have nothing to learn from abroad.10 He celebrates Russian national peculiarities. He claims that Russians have always been unusually lacking in materialistic attitudes and that they are exceptional exponents of tolerance and peacefulness. Noting that Russia has usually been ruled by an unelected leading group, he sees this as a source of pride. He derides political oppositionists who denounce the existence of a bloody dictatorial regime while knowing full well that ‘they can go off to their dachas after saying that, and not to [prison in] Siberia’.11
Nikonov differs from the extreme conservative Alexander Dugin, who brags of having developed a conceptual scheme that constitutes an advance beyond the main currents of modern social theory – liberalism, Marxism and fascism. His Fourth Political Theory is, in fact, a dangerous rag bag. Russian civilization, he trumpets, has consistently had militarism at its foundations, ‘War is our mother.’ He expresses certainty that more wars are Russia’s fate, and is gleeful about the prospect.12 He predicts that liberalism is about to fade away as did Marxism and fascism. He ridicules Putin for calling Russia a European country. His own starting point is that Russia constitutes a self-contained civilization, situated geographically between Europe and Asia. Dugin sponsors what he calls neo-Eurasianism. When Westerners demand respect for the principles of tolerance, they supposedly are engaged in an attempt to subvert age-old Russian values. Only by following its own special path, according to Dugin, can Russia avoid ruin – and he repeatedly predicts ruin for the West itself.13
Dugin’s crazed effusions overlap at key points with the thrust of arguments by Putin’s supporters such as Nikonov and Lavrov. All of them, including Putin, are nationalists of a kind that denounces rampant globalization, liberalism and progressive social thinking. But Dugin has expressed sympathy with the philosophy espoused in the United States by Steve Bannon, a founder of Breitbart News and Donald Trump’s ‘chief strategist’ until August 2017, and Bannon’s team helped to publish an English translation of Dugin’s main work, The Fourth Political Theory.14 Dugin held a chair in the Department of the Sociology of International Relations at Moscow State University until 2014 when his extremist opinions led to public protests. He had been giving vent to his angry disappointment that Putin held back from annexing eastern Ukraine. But despite his travails, he continues to receive air time on Moscow TV channels. This is less surprising than it may appear. It is one of Putin’s techniques to allow his associates and sympathizers to rant and rave, leaving him appearing to be a sober statesman. Though Dugin has become an opponent and fills the air with nationalism, he constitutes no serious political threat to the Kremlin leadership.
There is a consensus among nationalists in supporting traditional social values. They were united in anger in February 2012 when the female rock group Pussy Riot staged one of their guerrilla performances in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour. Pussy Riot sang out against both Putin and the Orthodox Church hierarchy. They were arrested and convicted of ‘hooliganism motivated by religious hatred’. The episode increased the disgust with which Putin was regarded around the world. The sentence of two years’ imprisonment was a wholly excessive punishment to which the performers reacted with stoicism and dignity. But the Western media had not taken account of the fact that Pussy Riot had deliberately chosen a prominent place of Christian worship in which to commit an act of blasphemy involving foul language. If they had done the same thing in Canterbury Cathedral, the public sympathies would have been on the side of the clerical custodians of the building. Russian leaders were banking on the fact that most Russians would agree that political protests were out of place on sanctified ground.
The Kremlin leadership also stresses the importance of traditional families. Putin keeps silent about the collapse of his own marriage. He talks in general terms about the sort of society he envisages but clearly wants couples to have more children than has recently been the norm. In his second presidential term he declared:
Yet another general national problem is the low birth rate. The country has more and more families that have only one child. We have to raise the prestige of motherhood and fatherhood and create conditions that are favourable to the bearing and bringing up of children.15
This remark flowed from anxiety that Russia’s shrinking population will create difficulties for welfare and economic output in future generations. Putin also has it in mind – like Kremlin rulers over several decades – that whereas the ethnic Russians had a birth rate in serious decline, the non-Russians in the Russian Federation – the Muslims in particular – continued on average to have a large number of children.
As to how a family should live its life, Putin has said little beyond open disapproval of parents who beat or slap their children. But he is against active state interference in private matters. What happens at home, should stay at home.16 If he has opinions on the best relationship between spouses, on feminism or on how to bring up one’s offspring, he has yet to share them with the public. The State Duma, however, was less restrained in February 2017 when it passed a law to decriminalize physical domestic abuse. Feminist groups complained in vain about the licence this gives to archaic patriarchy. But then Putin is not a ‘new man’ in the contemporary Western style. When he and his then wife Lyudmila met the US National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice he joked about her efforts to get fit: ‘Yes, Lyudmila is learning ballet. She is dancing Swan Lake. Of course, if I tried to pick her up, I would be a dead swan.’17 And once, when asked whether he ever gets down and moody, he retorted, ‘I’m not a woman, so I don’t have bad days.’18 These were the words of an unreformed, unabashed Russian male. Among his associates, they evidently still pass as being normal and acceptable.
Putin’s attitude to relations between men and women attracts little commentary from abroad. Not so his remarks on same-sex relations. He and his political friends have no patience with the advocates of homosexuality. In 2012 Railways Minister Vladimir Yakunin said that Western enemies of Russia had spread gay propaganda in order to bring down Russia’s birth rate and make Russians vulnerable to easy manipulation.19
Yakunin saw homosexual activism as a national security question. Putin has never gone as far, but is plainly uncomfortable about the entire topic. Putin shook his head when Oliver Stone asked whether he would be comfortable about sharing a sports club communal shower with a man who was known to be gay. Grinning, he explained that he would not want to ‘provoke’ such an individual.20 People of a traditionalist frame of mind, including those in Russia, may have seen nothing untoward in what he said – they may even have admired Putin’s frankness, but it was a rare misjudgement if he was trying to gain the sympathy of a liberal Western audience. As were his attempts to justify his remarks by saying that he simply wants to prevent gay activists from proselytizing among the young and innocent, an offence under Russian law since 2013. He added that same-sex marriages conflict with the interests of society since they will not produce children.21
Foreign criticism was vehement, including from singer and gay-rights advocate Elton John. This had a comical upshot when John received a phone call from someone purporting to be Putin inviting him to Moscow. It was a prankster who made Elton John look silly as the newspapers picked over the banalities that he and ‘Putin’ had exchanged. The real Putin soon found himself being asked by reporters to explain his standpoint. Under pressure, he declined to specify whether he thought that gays were born or made, but he rejected any imputation of anti-gay discrimination, stressing that homosexual activity was not illegal under Russian law, in contrast with the situation in seventy other countries. He also pointed out that, by contrast, certain Islamic countries had laws that applied capital punishment in cases of homosexual activity. As president he opposed the Orthodox Church’s appeal for the recriminalization of homosexuality and emphasized the constitutional separation of church and state.22
Putin wants people to appreciate his moderation, and the ruling group paint their Russia as the bringer of peace and decency and deplore what they see as scurrilous images of the country. If only other nations followed the Russian example, they suggest, there would be no wars. Putin has even complained about being misunderstood before an audience of invited foreign visitors:
Russia has no intention of attacking anyone. The whole thing is laughable . . . It is simply inconceivable, stupid and unrealistic. Europe alone has 300 million people, all being NATO members. Together with the USA this is probably a total population of 600 million. Russia currently has only 146 million. It is simply laughable to bring up the subject. No, people are anyway using all this in pursuit of their political aims.23
He has continued to insist that Russia’s ambitions are both modest and benign, in the facing of increased global dangers:
If we don’t create a coherent system of mutual obligations and agreements and if we don’t build the mechanisms for resolving crisis situations, the signs of global anarchy will inevitably grow.24
He voiced these thoughts in front of a foreign audience only months after ripping up the Budapest Memorandum and annexing Crimea. If foreigners have suspicions about military ambitions, they should lay them aside. Even Russia’s deadliest armaments should cause no alarm:
Brandishing nuclear weapons is the last thing to do. This is harmful rhetoric, and I do not welcome it. But we must proceed from reality and from the fact that nuclear weapons are a deterrent factor that ensures world peace and security worldwide. They cannot be considered a factor for any potential aggression, because it is impossible and would surely mean the end of our entire civilization.
But the absolutely clear thing is that nuclear weapons are a deterrent factor and many experts believe that if the world hasn’t experienced great armed conflict in more than seventy years since the end of the Second World War, one of the reasons is the possession of nuclear weaponry by leading countries. It is still important that the non-proliferation framework for nuclear arms and their delivery vehicles should be observed and that all the nuclear powers should take a very responsible attitude towards their nuclear status. Russia will follow this line despite any statements that could be made in the heat of a polemic. But let me repeat that at the government level Russia will always treat its nuclear status very responsibly.25
This is the vision that Kremlin leaders offer for Russian life in the twenty-first century. It is intended both to soothe and to stimulate. The ingredients blend celebration and optimism with a menacing commitment to neutralize those whom the administration designates as the enemies of Russia at home and abroad. The Kremlin assures the Russians that its vision is the one best fitted for their country’s needs and customs in an ever more turbulent world.