Russia is remaking itself as the leader of the anti-Western world. By Masha Gessen. Washington Post, March 30, 2014. Also here.
Gessen:
“This is not another Cold War that we’re entering into,” President Obama said
Wednesday in Brussels, presenting the post-Crimea world order as he sees it
after consultations with other NATO leaders. “After all, unlike the Soviet
Union, Russia leads no bloc of nations, no global ideology.”
President
Vladimir Putin would surely beg to differ. Over the past two years, a new
ideology has taken shape at the Kremlin. Insistently pushed out over the
airwaves of state-controlled television, it has taken hold as Russia’s national
idea — and is the driving force behind its newly aggressive international
posture. Russia is remaking itself as the leader of the anti-Western world.
During
his annual state-of-the-federation address to parliament in December, Putin
articulated this ideology. This in itself was novel: For his preceding 13 years
at the helm, Putin had stuck to the pragmatic in his speeches. Now he was
putting forth a vision for which many Russians had longed in the nearly
quarter-century since the Soviet Union collapsed, leaving a giant hole where
its citizens’ identities used to be.
In his
December speech, Putin said that Russia had no superpower ambitions in the
sense of “a claim to global or regional hegemony.” Yet, he said, “We will
strive to be leaders.” In explaining Russia’s new identity with relationship to
the West and its claim on leadership, he said:
“This
is absolutely objective and understandable for a state like Russia, with its
great history and culture, with many centuries of experience not of so-called
tolerance, neutered and barren, but of the real organic life of different
peoples existing together within the framework of a single state.” Putin was
placing Russia’s very approach to life in opposition to the Western one. The
“so-called tolerance” he mentioned as the key feature of Western civilization
is, from this perspective, nothing but a slide into immorality. More likely
than not, that includes homosexuality, which is why tolerance is described as
“barren and neutered.”
“Today
many nations are revising their moral values and ethical norms, eroding ethnic
traditions and differences between peoples and cultures,” he continued.
“Society is now required not only to recognize everyone’s right to the freedom
of consciousness, political views and privacy, but also to accept without
question the equality of good and evil, strange as it seems, concepts that are
opposite in meaning.”
Finally,
said Putin, it was time to resist this scourge of tolerance and diversity
creeping in from the West. “We know that there are more and more people in the
world who support our position on defending traditional values,” he asserted.
Russia’s role is to “prevent movement backward and downward, into chaotic
darkness and a return to a primitive state.”
In
short, Putin intends to save the world from the West. He has started with
Crimea. When he says he is protecting ethnic Russians in Ukraine, he means he
is protecting them from the many terrible things that come from the West. A few
days after the December address, Alexei Pushkov, head of the Duma committee on
foreign relations, defined that threat on the floor of the chamber: “European
Union advisers in practically every ministry of any significance, control over
the flow of finances and over national programs, and a broadening of the sphere
of gay culture, which has become the European Union’s official policy.”
Three
months later, this is exactly how Russians see the events in Ukraine: The West
is literally taking over, and only Russian troops can stand between the Slavic
country’s unsuspecting citizens and the homosexuals marching in from Brussels.
Now,
Russia is not leading a bloc of nations in this new anti-Western crusade — at
least, not yet. But it is certainly not alone in its longing for “traditional values.” Russia has been assembling an informal “traditional values” bloc in
the United Nations, where the Human Rights Council has passed a series of Russian-sponsored resolutions opposing gay rights over the past three years.
Russia’s allies in passing these resolutions include not only its post-Soviet
neighbors but also China, Ecuador, Malaysia and more than a dozen other states.
The
anti-gay agenda may seem like a thin basis for forming a militant international
alliance of state-actors, but it has great unifying potential when framed in
terms of a broader anti-Western effort and, indeed, a civilizational mission.
That
mission, rather than the mere desire to bite off a piece of a neighboring
country, is the driving force behind Putin’s new war — and the reason the
Russian public supports it so strongly. This war, they hope, will make Russia
not only bigger but also make it great again.
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| Masha Gessen |
The Employer’s Creed. By David Brooks. New York Times, March 31, 2014.
