Russia and the Question of Legitimacy: A Symposium (Part III)
Boris Kustodiev, The Bolshevik (1920). Tretyavov Gallery, Moscow
The Simone Weil Center’s Symposium on Realism and Legitimacy began by questioning America’s ability to embrace realism and reality. It continues by asking whether or not Russia suffers from a crisis of legitimacy.
From the perspective of U.S. elite opinion, of course, the answer to this question is unambiguous: Russia has no legitimacy. But this is nothing new. Indeed, for at least the past ten years American political elites have spoken of Russia and its leaders in dismissive, even insulting terms such as were never leveled even against the USSR. Part of our hope, in posing this question, was to explore the reason for this de-legitimization of Russia by Western ‘liberal’ elites.
Another aspect of this same problematic is the long-standing (going back to the 19th century) failure of the Russian state to live up to the ideals of Russia’s ‘intelligentsia.’ Which circumstance, in turn, raises an interesting philosophical question: Which ideals, if any, confer ‘legitimacy’? Is legitimacy primarily a matter of holding the correct ideals?
Which calls to mind another unexpected but interesting aspect of this same question. When New York Times columnist David Brooks travelled to Russia in 2015, he discovered that Russia was no longer inspired by a Grand Idea, as it had been during the Soviet period. The American liberal David Brooks had, to his chagrin, discovered a bourgeois Russia oriented to consumer comfort. But he found himself longing for something more.
We are enormously grateful to Anatol Lieven, Nicolai N. Petro, Andrei Tsygankov, Ethan Alexander-Davey, and Gordon Hahn for having provided the following extremely thoughtful reflections on this problem. In Part IV, a somewhat expanded perspective on all these issues, including in the geographic sense, wraps up our second Symposium. — the Editors
The historic tragedy of state-intelligentsia relations in Russia
— Anatol Lieven
“Our Russian intellectuals complain constantly that Russia does not have a government like that of France. They would do better to thank God on their knees every morning that it does not have a government like that of China.”
-- Sergei Witte
For more than 200 years, at the core of the Russian state’s lack of legitimacy among its people – or at least its educated classes – has been the fact that Russia is in Europe, but not fully of Europe. Economically, Russia has been distant from the great economic powerhouse of the Atlantic economies as it developed from the 17th century on. Politically, Russia has long had more authoritarian forms of government than most of western Europe – not just because of different traditions and history, but because a vast multi-ethnic empire is extremely hard to hold together without them.
Since it is situated on the periphery of Europe, the Russian state has been doomed to compete with far more prosperous and developed European states. For more than a hundred years, under Peter the Great and his successors, it did so with great success – though at enormous cost to the Russian people, including the tightening of serfdom. As with most other states across Asia, the industrial revolution in Western Europe and North America then led to several generations in which imperial Russia lagged badly behind the West, with economic backwardness leading to military failures.
Compared to the rest of the non-European world, Russia’s progress was in fact impressive, especially during the industrial revolution of the last 20 years of imperial rule. For educated Russians, feeling themselves part of the West and yet feeling themselves looked down on by the West, this was however not nearly enough.
From the Decembrists on, more and more educated Russians came to blame the backwardness of Russia not on inherited and deeply rooted features of its society, but purely on the imperial state. Excluded by the state from practical experience of government, encouraged by the all too real (but globally speaking, also all too common) corruption and brutality of state officials, this led to blind contempt and hatred of the state, rejection of realistic incremental reform, and utopian belief that the state’s destruction would automatically lead to magnificent progress. This combination of attitudes became the dogma of the Russian “intelligentsia”. The Bolshevik Revolution was the catastrophic outcome of this dogma.
The result of this intelligentsia opposition was to strengthen the worst aspects of the state forces. Many Russian state nationalists, disgusted by the intelligentsia’s contempt for national interests, national identity and indeed reality itself, were strengthened in their belief in rigid, ruthless authoritarianism and a rejection of advice from below (the “Samodur” tradition). Some, humiliated and infuriated by Western cultural contempt and Russian liberal acquiescence in this contempt, turned to mystical forms of nationalism that ran contrary to the economic needs of the state, and encouraged a dangerous national messianism.
Faced with gathering threats, like other conservative regimes in Europe, the imperial state also sought to regain legitimacy by an appeal to militant nationalism. This led Russia into ambitions and commitments that were far beyond its real strength, and the disaster of the Russo-Japanese War, the far greater disaster of 1914, and finally the Communist Revolution.
Communism carried its own form of national messianism to insane heights. Its programme of international revolution created an unbridgeable gulf between Russia and its natural allies in Western Europe, enabling the rise of Nazism, the Second World War and the Cold War. Stalin’s forced industrialisation did however enable Russia to defeat the Nazis, thereby creating the most important element in subsequent state legitimacy.
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[T]he same intellectuals only rarely acknowledged the ways in which their own ancestors had contributed to the disaster of Communism …
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Communism’s monstrous crimes against its own peoples however created a fundamental flaw in Soviet state legitimacy. The acknowledgement of Stalin’s crimes under Khrushchev shook the legitimacy of the Soviet state. The revelation of Lenin’s under Gorbachev helped destroy it altogether, at least as far as the intelligentsia were concerned. On the other hand, it should be noted that the same intellectuals only rarely acknowledged the ways in which their own ancestors had contributed to the disaster of Communism, through their Utopianism, and their willingness to allow idealism to feed ruthlessness towards their fellow countrymen.
Communist messianism also reproduced Russia’s key historical dilemma in a new, extreme, and (from the point of view of Russian national interests) utterly unnecessary form. Instead of an aspiration merely to equal the West, Soviet communism now claimed to have created a system that would utterly outdo the West and create a new form of ideal society for all mankind.
This project once again involved Russia in a geopolitical struggle that was far beyond its strength. Coupled with the lunacies of Communist economic planning, the costs of competition with the Capitalist world wrecked the Soviet economy. Economically speaking, the history of the Soviet Union is a speeded-up, brutalised and vulgarised repetition of Russian history from Peter the Great to the 1850s: the creation of a system that for a while was tremendously successful at its given tasks, but which then proved far too slow to adapt to the next wave of economic development and competition. The growing gap between Soviet claims of superiority over the West and the actual reality gnawed away at the legitimacy of the state among the growing number of people (above all, the younger sections of the Soviet elites) who came to know the real situation.
When, under Gorbachev, Soviet repression and isolation were relaxed, the revelations both of Soviet economic backwardness and of past Soviet crimes shattered the legitimacy of the state among its educated classes, and helped bring about the state’s collapse.
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[O]ne force that may restore some feeling of state legitimacy among at least some westernizing Russian intellectuals … is the West itself.
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The relationship between the liberal intelligentsia and the state that followed replicated in some respects that of the generations before 1917, but with some additional tragicomic twists. Isolated from the West under Communism, Russian liberals engaged in blind adulation of the West and went overboard for some of the most fatuous and contemptible aspects of Western culture. This was coupled with an extreme and ostentatious version of metropolitan elite contempt for the masses – but at a time when those masses were suffering terribly as a result of the Westernizing economic policies urged on by the liberals. This combination wrecked the ability of Russian liberals to gain mass support, and helped open the way for Putin’s program of authoritarian state restoration.
Russian liberals also inherited an old tradition present in 19th Century Russia and so many authoritarian states: that of viewing the state as all powerful and therefore responsible for everything wrong in Russia. Or, in the words of the Soviet and Russian comedian Gennady Khazanov, “The problem here is that if there is a butter shortage, people think it’s because Gorbachev has eaten it all himself.”
A new element was also present. Nineteenth Century Russian liberals (though not socialists) were also patriots. They believed in westernizing Russia in order to strengthen Russia. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Western triumphalism led to demands for unconditional Russian subservience not only to Western political, cultural and economic programs, but to U.S. and Western geopolitical agendas as well; and the West (and the Russian oligarchs who had moved their stolen fortunes to the West) had the money to make their wishes talk. The result among many Russian liberal intellectuals was a combination of crawling public subservience to the West and arrogance towards their own people that was extremely unpleasant to witness. This picture has been only partially redeemed by the great physical and moral courage shown by certain liberal intellectuals in resisting Putin’s authoritarianism and the invasion of Ukraine.
As in late imperial Russia, these tendencies on the part of the intelligentsia fed in turn the authoritarian and nationalist instincts of Russian state forces, embodied in Vladimir Putin. For a considerable time, these were held in check by a continued belief in the need for elements of Western economic reform, coupled with a desire to maintain reasonably good and co-operative relations with the West, or at least France and Germany.
But as the West impinged more and more on what the Russian establishment views as vital Russian interests, and belief in French and Germany willingness to restrain America faded, so the liberal element in the Putin administration was reduced and reduced until, with the invasion of Ukraine, it appears to have been eliminated almost completely. Putin himself, in his policies and personal manner, has become more and more of a classical “Samodur.”
The breach between the contemporary Russian state and its liberal intelligentsia now once again appears total. Many intellectuals have left Russia, most probably never to return. Many more have gone into a kind of internal exile. The state itself now relies for legitimacy purely on militarist nationalism. However, a combination of the strength of Russia’s enemies and the weakness, corruption and incompetence of the Russian state means that – as under late Tsarism – striking military victory has not been achieved. Compensating for this failure seems likely to mean more and more domestic repression, sapping real state legitimacy still further.
Paradoxically, the one force that may restore some feeling of state legitimacy among at least some westernizing Russian intellectuals back into the arms of the state is the West itself. Attacks and insults against Russian culture in the West have caused deep offence in the Russian cultural elites. Bars to employment in the West make it much more difficult to emigrate.
And now there are calls to ban any travel at all by Russians to the West – which would replicate the self-imposed isolation of the Soviet Union, but this time imposed by the “Free World”. Finally, it is clear that powerful forces in the West desire a shattering weakening of Russia, and perhaps the creation in Moscow of what would in effect be a puppet regime.
It is very fortunate that the latter hope at least is very unlikely to be fulfilled; for such a state would lack all domestic legitimacy, and the chauvinist backlash that would overthrow it might well make Putin look like the mildest of autocrats by comparison. As to whether the Russian state will ever again be able to seek legitimacy through economic growth and political reform, that prospect is hidden beyond a storm-wracked horizon.
Anatol Lieven is Director of the Eurasia Program at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and a board member of the Simone Weil Center.
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By breaking with the West, Russia is returning to its roots
— Nicolai N. Petro
In respect to this Symposium, it appears that there are two distinct points being made. The first is that the West is trying to de-legitimize Russia as a global power, and that this is a problem for Russia abroad. The second is that Russia is insufficiently attractive even to its own elite, and that this is a problem at home.
This is certainly the view of contemporary Western elites. It is important to underscore this fact because, from almost any other perspective, Russia is viewed quite differently. It is this larger global reality, which has been highlighted by authors as diverse as former Singapore diplomat Kishore Mahbubbani and Pope Francis, that leads Russian analysts like Sergei Markov and Sergei Karaganov to regard Russia’s divorce from the West as a net gain, rather than as a net loss.
No one in Russia (and least of all Putin) denies the pain that this divorce will cause in the short term, but they believe that it is worth the price, because in the long run Russia will emerge stronger and more self-reliant for it. As Putin has repeated ad nauseam, Russia can become truly sovereign only by relying on its traditional cultural, political, and religious values.
His argument hearkens back to the nineteenth century Slavophiles, who complained that Russia’s Westernized elite had lost touch with their own culture. To thrive, this connection had to be restored, and this could only be accomplished by the direct involvement of the people, against the opposition of Russia’s Westernized elites.
When one considers that both Putin and his successor Dimitry Medvedev undertook key reforms that strengthened Russia’s independence from the West, one can see another parallel to the early Slavophiles, who sought to abolish serfdom and end what they saw as St. Petersburg’s slavish intellectual subservience to Germany. Slavophiles like Ivan Aksakov and Yuri Samarin borrowed heavily from the German Romantics and Idealists, but then combined this with the teachings of the Eastern Fathers of the Church, and the customs (they assumed) of the Russian peasantry. The result was a distinctly Russian version of what German sociologist Ferdinand Tönnies would later call Gemeinschaft, that is, a society that was a living organism, with unity and concord among all members based on family feeling and a unity of faith and custom (see Andrzej Walicki, The Slavophile Controversy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975, 170).
Putin’s modern day Slavophilism likewise rests on engaging broad swaths of the Russia people in a long-term effort to resist the West. The West, meanwhile, is helping him by demonizing all things Russian. Despite being on opposite ends of the political spectrum, Putin and his adversaries are pursuing complementary policies, each convinced that it will lead to their desired outcome. For the West, that is the destruction of Russia, which cannot possibly stand up to the West. For Russia, that outcome is a re-invigorated Russia, finally cleansed of the West’s deleterious influence.
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… self-reliance is always more attractive than subservience.
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I will not presume to predict, at this point in time, which outcome is more likely. I would only hasten to point out that self-reliance is always more attractive than subservience. And since such a new global order is premised on the co-existence of many models of development, rather than the imposition of a single Western model, I suspect that it will find many supporters around the globe. Both Russia and China have demonstrated that such self-reliance today is not only feasible, but actually results in a more resilient political and economic system. This is a challenge that the West should take very seriously.
There now seems to be broad agreement that we are heading toward a new balance of forces in the world, though no one seems to be quite sure of what that balance will be. I suspect that it will not be between democracy and authoritarianism, but between the current global order that privileges the United States (and those of nations loyal to it), and a new global order that privileges the autonomy of nations. The latter strikes many liberal internationalists as risky and undesirable, because they anticipate that with more diversity and autonomy there will be more conflicts over values. Those who welcome such a new world order, however, argue that this danger can be dealt with by removing values from the international arena. This would very effectively curtail liberal internationalism’s messianic component, which, they say, is the main source of conflict among nations.
As the balance of power in the world shifts away from the West, Russia understands that it will not be the dominant player. It does believe, however, that it will be on a more equal footing with other players, once the pre-eminent role of the United States is weakened, an outcome that would probably suit Russia just fine.
Nicolai N. Petro is Professor of Peace Studies and Nonviolence and Professor of Political Science at the University of Rhode Island. He is a board member of the Simone Weil Center.
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A Mutual Crisis of Legitimacy?
— Andrei Tsygankov
If by crisis of legitimacy we mean the lack of recognition of Russia by the West, then the crisis is evident. Russia’s relations with non-Western countries are an entirely different matter. However, Western condemnation of Russia indeed exceeds that of the Soviet state and in many respects must be placed in a different category.
Multiple evidence can be cited in support of this conclusion. The most recent ones involve the West’s treatment of Russian leaders who are regularly labeled as thugs, kleptocrats, and war criminals. As if there was no involvement of Western political and business elites in the exploitation of the world’s wealth since the 1990s (and before), torture, and mass killings following ruinous economic policies and military interventions in Yugoslavia, Iraq, and elsewhere. Western leaders have long decided that they have the right to form political rules and moral standards but there is no relevant agency to assess whether the West follows its own rules and standards. That the U.S. Congress is now pressuring the Department of State to designate Russia as a state sponsoring terrorism on par with North Korea, Iran, Cuba, and Syria is also unprecedented and cannot compare to the way the Soviet Union was treated during the Cold War.
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… there is no relevant agency to assess whether the West follows its own rules and standards.
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Any explanation for such glaring lack of legitimacy/recognition must deal with both sides in the West-Russia relations. These relations are principally different today than during the Cold War. Western powers are not likely to grant others recognition until they demonstrate important accomplishments. Russia today lacks the ability to persuade the West of Russia’s importance, in part because Moscow has failed to build an ideological alternative to Western neoliberalism and in part because Russia has not yet demonstrated sufficient power capacity to impress the United States and Europe. What Russia possesses today is promising but not yet successfully exploited – asymmetric military capabilities, energy/transportation capacity, and a unique cross-civilizational capital of soft power. Following the war in Ukraine, Russia will need years to strengthen its power capabilities and is likely to continue to struggle to develop a coherent ideological vision for a successful future development. By contrast, the Soviet Union and – to some extent – today’s China, are in a different category because they were/are formidable ideological and material adversaries.
The other side of the West-Russia relations has to do with the role of the West. Western nations’ crisis of legitimacy – both internal and external – couldn’t be more obvious and the Ukraine war has revealed it further. Internally, Western societies are suffering from economic stagnation and political polarization. In the outside world, they no longer command the respect or fear they once did. While not extending Russia full support in its confrontation with Ukraine and the West, the non-Western nations such as China, India, Iran, Turkey, Brazil, South Africa, Indonesia, and others have refused to side with the West. The non-Western world continues to extend Russia all the benefits of international recognition while increasingly questioning the West and the motives of its actions.
Low-confident nations rarely extend recognition to others. Instead, they tend to blame others for their own problems. Although Russia bears the primary responsibility for invading Ukraine, Western nations have exploited Russia’s strategic blunder to compensate for their own political and economic failures and crises of ideas and national identity. By waging a misguided economic, political, and military proxy war on Russia, the West has contributed to threatening the entire world’s economic, energy, food, and financial stability. The current involvement of the United Nations to partly address these issues is a tacit admission of the West’s failure to punish Russia by punishing others, as well as an admission of the failure to lay all the blame on the Kremlin.
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… [S]capegoating Russia is not going to help with overcoming the West’s crisis, as the Russiagate controversy has demonstrated.
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The crisis of legitimacy is therefore mutual and cannot be resolved by addressing one of the sides. Even if Russia becomes stronger ideologically and materially and even if it refrains from aggressive actions in foreign policy, the West will continue to use the Kremlin as a scapegoat in domestic political battles. As an active challenger of a U.S.-centered world order, Russia is viewed as essential for diverting attention from the West’s pressing problems at home, problems which include inflation, government (in)effectiveness, and rising energy prices. As the significant other and the “dark double” of Western nations, “autocratic” Russia also remains a tool for highlighting the West’s “democratic” values and for mobilizing emotions in support of Western policies.
However, scapegoating Russia is not going to help with overcoming the West’s crisis, as the Russiagate controversy has demonstrated. Although Americans have tended to view Russia as a “critical threat” since 2014, the issue of Russia and the war in Ukraine doesn’t concern US citizens very much relative to other issues. According to a recent Gallup poll, only 1% of Americans mention the situation with Russia as the major problem facing the U.S.
Both sides will have to address their internal issues before they can engage in a meaningful conversation. Until then, their dialogue will be limited to management of the most dangerous international crises.
Andrei Tsygankov is Professor of Political Science and International Relations at San Francisco State University. His books include The Anti-Russian Lobby and American Foreign Policy, and Russia and the West from Alexander to Putin.
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Russia’s flight from reality
—Ethan Alexander-Davey
It seems to me that Russia’s governing elite today is also guilty of a flight from reality, and that is the main source of its illegitimacy. The Russian flight from reality consists, mainly, in a disjuncture between its aspirations and its ability to achieve them. The alternative vision that some Russian intellectual conservatives have for their country and the world order is interesting, and worth serious consideration. But the Russian governing elite has, in my view, never showed serious commitment to that vision, and, even if it did, Russia’s elite does not have the economic, cultural or military strength to support it. Boris Mezhuev remarked some months ago that Russia’s policy toward its periphery was a failure before February 24, because the country has not made its culture or its economic model attractive even to its closest neighbors, such as Ukraine. I am not sure how Russia could have done so. The Ukrainian elite, and many ordinary Ukrainians are drawn by the higher standard of living enjoyed by Western and Central Europeans. They probably hope that the EU can help them root out the stifling corruption of their institutions. For this large segment of Ukrainians, Russia, before the invasion, represented the kind of economy and society from which they hoped to escape. The Russian government, as currently constituted, does not seem able to address these kinds of problems.
The resort to military force already is a kind of failure. But the political-military solution chosen by the Russian government is in itself another failure, as it has exposed a level incompetence that not even hostile Western observers could have anticipated prior to the invasion. After all, when the invasion began, US intelligence predicted the fall of Kiev in 96 hours. The Russian government’s inability to anticipate Ukrainian resistance, together with subsequent logistical, technological, strategic and force generation failures, are a disgrace for the Russian state.
Liberal internationalists will always be hostile to any group that presents an alternative to the liberal world order, especially if that group is European and Christian. But even ideologues have to show some respect for opponents who display unquestionable competence and power. If the Russian government were more powerful and competent, if its efforts, for instance, to reverse demographic decline, and modernize its military, had borne more fruit, then Western elites would have a lot more to fear from it, and that fear would earn it, at least in some, a grudging respect. Today, the embarrassments of the Russian government, which go well beyond any atrocities of war, real or imagined, undermine the legitimacy of the Russian government in Western eyes more than anything else.
Ethan Alexander-Davey is Assistant Professor of Political Science at Campbell University in Buies Creek, NC and on the advisory board of the Simone Weil Center.
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Russia enjoys a surfeit of legitimacy — except in the West
— Gordon M. Hahn
Russia’s ‘legitimacy deficit’ and harsh condemnations of Russia are almost entirely confined to the West. The deficit and the resulting exceedingly harsh Western condemnation of Russia and its President Vladimir Putin that accompanies it as compared to the Cold War era – all this is something entirely absent among ‘the rest.’ There are several situational explanations for Russia’s hyper-deficit of legitimacy in Western eyes. For one thing, the West is compensating and lashing out. During the Cold war the West was not in decline relative to its competitors as it is now. In addition, during the Cold War, NATO was immediately set at the borders of the USSR and its Eastern European satellites. There was no expansion process to drag out and help to provoke various crises. The establishment of NATO, of course, sparked a backlash in the form of the creation of the Warsaw Pact.
During the Cold war, neither NATO nor the USSR was attempting to expand their respective European military spheres or infrastructures; Cold War military-political confrontation was limited to non-European, Third World regions and proxy forces. This lack of direct military confrontation in Europe stands in sharp contrast to NATO expansion and other policies such as stationing anti-missile defense forces in NATO members in Eastern Europe (Poland and Romania). These and other encroachments led quite naturally to Putin’s military responses in Georgia, Syria, and now Ukraine. Putin’s willingness to stand up to Western military infrastructural expansion at a time when the West is in decline and wants to forestall that decline provokes Western ire against Putin and Russia.
In the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, Western hubris and traditional Russophobia superseded, indeed seems to have canceled out any magnanimity Washington and Brussels might have afforded Moscow. Where the USSR inspired a grudging respect and, among leftists, outright admiration in the West, Russia’s weakness and betrayal of Marxist-Leninist principles fostered a lack of respect on the part of conservative hawks and leftist-oriented Westerners alike.
Cultural factors are also at play here. At least at present, the maniacal identitarianist or cultural Marxist politics that have seized the ruling elites in Washington and, to a lesser extent, in Europe, are wholly unacceptable from the perspective of Russian culture. Putin has taken up the banner of global conservatism or traditionalism against the rise of minority reverse-discrimination, radical feminism, LGBT-ism and especially transgenderism and anti-binary multi-genderism. As a result, Putin has been assigned the role of ‘white heterosexual supremacist’ poster boy for the Western world in much same way that Trump has played that role on the American domestic stage. This is evidenced by the fact that it is mostly Democrat Party leaders like Hillary Clinton, Barak Obama, and now Joe Biden, who have leveled the harshest rhetorical attacks at Putin and Russian. This cultural or anti-cultural factor explains the unusual hawkishness Democrats and their more radical Marxist-culturalist fellow travelers exhibit in relation to NATO expansion, countering Russia militarily and politically, and in supporting Ukraine through arms sales and calls for NATO military intervention. It also explains the aggressive application of American cancel culture censorship and discrimination against Russian cultural and sports figures and institutions—reverse discrimination on the international level.
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[B]oth the new Russian traditionalism and the new Western anti-traditionalist cultural Marxism, eschew liberal tolerance and republican values …
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America’s liberals and leftists also disdain Russia’s traditionalist public religiosity (an antipode to the Western sexual revolution on steroids), turning upside down the Cold War table when Soviet atheism was countered by Western religiosity. Russia’s return to an Orthodox rooted social conservatism and cultural traditionalism is seen in the West by the ‘liberal’ and leftist regimes that rule there as nothing less than a frontal assault on Western ‘wokeness,’ a circumstance which further aggravates Western ire over Russia’s rejection of liberal republican government. Interestingly both the new Russian traditionalism and the new Western anti-traditionalist cultural Marxism, eschew liberal tolerance and republican values in general. The West cannot stomach Russia’s military and security culture. As much as Russians might despise a gay parade, Westerners, especially liberal Westerners, are equally appalled by a military parade.
To all of this one must add the Western cultural Marxists’ globalist allies and their opposition to Putin. The globalists of the World Economic Forum and the George Soros empire support all of the American liberal-leftist identitarianism mentioned above. Moreover, they see Russians’ statist (as opposed to ethnic) nationalism and patriotism as antithetical to their goals of dismantling state sovereignty in the service of global governance and, ultimately, a global government addressing the globalists’ preferred issues such as climate change, wealth redistribution, and pandemics. Russia’s refusal to submit to the will and whims of globalist-oriented but Western-led international institutions has led it to strengthen its strategic partnership with China towards building with Beijing an entirely autonomous, alternative military-security, economic, and monetary-financial system (including a new international currency) for ‘the rest’ against the U.S.-led Western globalist empire. This will only intensify the globalist backlash against Moscow and hatred for Putin.
In short, Russia is very unattractive in the West, and the Ukrainian crisis and war will only make it less so as Russo-Western relations become more confrontational. Russia will not appear any prettier to the West in the morning when the Chinese sun rises along with the emerging Sino-Russian axis of ‘the rest’ against the West based on a network of international organizations: BRICS, the One Belt-One Road Initiative, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, the Eurasian Economic Union, and the Collective Security Treaty Organization. Russia’s important role as funder of many and participant in all of these institutions testifies to Russia’s relative attractiveness to the rest as opposed to the West. This factor and East-West confrontation along the Iran-Syria-Israeli arc can only make matters worse, perhaps even catastrophic.
While Russia’s legitimacy deficit within the West cannot be overstated, her internal legitimacy deficit should not be overstated. The Russian state’s unattractiveness to Russian liberals is obvious and needs little elaboration. However, the liberal portion of Russia’s political spectrum has been reduced to some 10-15 percent of the electorate. By inheriting the economic disaster of the Soviet collapse, ignoring NATO expansion, and closely associating themselves with the West while disassociating themselves from any and all Russian national interests abroad, Russian republicans (democrats) have increasingly discredited themselves in the eyes of most Russians. The so-called ‘system liberals’ are for the most part economic technocrats. Those that had the potential to be more – such as former President and Prime Minister Dmitrii Medvedev – have proven themselves unable to conduct an independent policy, much less stand up to Putin’s authoritarianizing instincts.
The Russian state’s unattractiveness to Russian conservatives should not be overstated and is even a non-factor. If we unpack what constitutes critical Russian conservatives among the elite, only the very far right – from Aleksander Dugin to those who might be termed neofascist – is strongly or irreconcilably opposed to Putin’s system and/or policies. Even in that part of the political spectrum, the Russian invasion of Ukraine has reduced discontent. Among more moderate conservatives, traditional statists, dissatisfaction is largely connected with the view that Putin’s economic policies are too close to the Western liberal economic model and have not secured Russian sovereignty from Western-dominated international institutions such as the IMF and World Bank.
Meanwhile, the bulk of Putin’s and his traditionalist state’s popular support is well-rooted in: (1) the Russian countryside and in the republics of titular Russian Muslims; (2) some other nationalities where traditionalist patriarchal and religious hierarchies eschew liberalism and deliver public goods to the population in return for votes for the regime; and (3) the conservative elderly; and (4) the so-called ‘budgetniki’—those whose living depends on working for the state or state-funded state institutions. So as long as Putin preserves some semblance of listening to the public through media contact and holding elections, however flawed they may be, he can maintain this coalition.
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Culturally and ideologically speaking, Russians traditionally support a strong leader and have no love lost for the West …
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Culturally and ideologically speaking, Russians traditionally support a strong leader and have no love lost for the West, the actions of which -- from Serbia to Georgia to Ukraine and, first and foremost, NATO expansion -- have repeatedly consolidated public opinion behind Putin.. History teaches Russians that the West is a potential military and political stability threat to Russia, and that forms the basis of Russia’s national security and vigilance culture. And given that any state’s most legitimate function is to provide national security and defense, there is much popular satisfaction with the state’s security apparatus and military. Since Putin has positioned himself as a champion of traditional social values he is seen as providing ontological security against a potential Western values onslaught against Russian Orthodoxy and Islam. Traditionally, Russians have tolerated a more authoritarian state, and this is never truer than when Russia is seen as under threat militarily, politically or culturally. Russians have had little to no experience with a state that is highly responsive to the population’s lesser needs, and there is a traditional gap between the ‘them’ above and the ‘people’ below. While there is a limit to Russians’ tolerance of official arrogance and corruption, the other factors discussed above easily trump angst over bureaucratic arbitrariness as long as there is bread, guns to fend off the West, and a leader who at least appears to limit the apparatchiks’ greediness and funnel some substantial part of the state’s wealth to the people.
If it is true, as D. C. Schindler suggests, that politics is a sphere that requires something more, and requires the introduction of a purpose or vision that aspires to approximate something of the transcendent rooted in tradition or some esteemed idea or set of ideas, then it is no surprise that Putin has begun to address this issue in recent years. Abandoning any hope of rooting Russia in any close association with the West and Western values, Putin, in addition to promoting the highly transcendent Russian Orthodox tradition, has promoted what we might call ‘historicity’ and a quiet, messianic semi-universalism or universalism. Historicity is the idea that Russia is united by the unity of Russia’s great if tragic history. Messianic universalism posits the idea that Russia is the defender of religious values and other forms of spirituality as well as the defender of those vulnerable to, or victims of, Western political hegemony and social decadence. Russia, from this perspective, is a leading force, along with China, in organizing Eurasia and the rest of the rest towards the protection of the East and South from Western arrogance, materialism, and globalist-enforced civilizational uniformity.
In sum, in contrast to the 1990s, the Russian state now enjoys a surfeit of legitimacy formed by trepidation towards the West and a faith in God and a distinct Russian mission. The Russian state’s domestic legitimacy is unlikely to wane significantly any time soon in the absence of major military defeat or an economic collapse. But this would be true not just for Russia but for any country anywhere. In conditions of Western antagonism and ongoing threats, the present authoritarian state system may even survive the death of Vladimir Putin.
Gordon M. Hahn, Ph.D., is an analyst at Corr Analytics and a senior researcher at the Center for Terrorism and Intelligence Studies (CETIS). He has taught at a number of U.S. universities and has been a senior associate and visiting fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, at the Kennan Institute in Washington DC, and at the Hoover Institution.