By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

Putin's world view Part Two

While Soviet leaders espoused the official doctrine of internationalism and world revolution, another Russian view of the world was emerging, one developed by anti-communist exiles and one from which Vladimir Putin has increasingly drawn. These ideologies grapple with issues that also engaged the nineteenth-century Slavophiles and Westernizers, namely why Russia had not followed a political and economic path similar to that taken by Europe and what it should aspire to be going forward. Eurasianism was a worldview developed in the 1920s by exiled Russians who despised communism and dreamed of a conservative utopia. But it also had its dissident adherents within the USSR, the most prominent of whom was Lev Gumilev, who spent much of his life in and out of labor camps. Rejection of Western values, Eurasianism stressed Russia’s unique civilization, which incorporated both European and Asian elements, including the coexistence of Christianity and Islam, celebrating Russia’s Asian heritage.13 The early Eurasianists argued that Russia had an inalienable right to rule over its imperial territories and urged Russia not to try to emulate the West.14 One conservative exiled Russian philosopher whose writings have influenced Putin is Ivan Ilyin, who accused the Bolsheviks of knowing nothing about Russia, failing to understand its unique national traditions, and deciding to “rape it politically.”15 Ironically, although they passionately disagreed, the Stalinists and their exiled opponents both believed that Russia had a unique destiny that set it apart from the West and legitimized its right to rule over large swaths of the adjacent territory.

As described here, contrary to what its name suggests, “neo-Eurasianism” is, however, not a continuation of extrapolation, but rather a distortion of originally Eurasianist views. Classical Eurasianism, as has been shown here, and “neo-Eurasianism” are both, to be sure, partially built on Russian anti-Western ideas. The ideological content, geographic focuses, and ultimate goals of Eurasianism and “neo-Eurasianism” differ.

Contrary to its name, “neo-Eurasianism” is not a continuation of extrapolation but rather a distortion of originally Eurasianist views. Classical Eurasianism and “neo-Eurasianism” are both, to be sure, partially built on Russian anti-Western ideas of the 19th century, including the ideas of the Slavophiles of the 1840s-1850s or the theories of Nikolay Danilevsky (1822-1885) and Konstantin Leontyev (1831-1891). Nevertheless, as can be glimpsed here, Russian Eurasianism, the ideological content, geographic focuses, and ultimate goals of Eurasianism and “neo-Eurasianism” differ.

As an Orthodox theocracy, Russia initially considered her growing size and strength to serve a divine purpose. In Muscovite Russia in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, this idea appeared in the shape of the doctrine of Moscow as the Third Rome (Russian: Москва — Третий Рим, romanized: Moskva — Tretiy Rim) is a theological and political concept asserting that Moscow is the successor of the Roman Empire, representing a “third Rome” in succession to the first Rome (Rome itself, capital of Ancient Rome) and the second Rome (Constantinople, capital of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) a messianic doctrine that was based on the legacy of the Byzantine Empire.

A critical juncture took place in 2020 when Russian constitutional changes extended Putin’s term in office until 2026. This introduced a mod­ified version of Orthodoxy-Auto­cracy-Nationality, drawn up in 1833 under Emperor Nicholas I, where Sarov’s triad is reused in official Russian nar­ratives in a revitalized continuous manner.

Hence Patriarch Kirill (pictured below), the Primate (head bishop) of the influential Russian Orthodox Church, has repeatedly supported Russia’s campaign in Ukraine since the war started in February 2022. President Putin and Patriarch Kirill have enjoyed a close relationship for years. Underneath, Putin brings flowers to Patriarch Kirill:

This whereby initial contacts between Russian political actors and Western far-right activists were established in the early 1990s, but these contacts were low profile. As Moscow has become more anti-Western, these contacts have become more intense and have operated at a higher level.

 

The new Russian Idea

When the Soviet Union collapsed, the official ideology abruptly disappeared, with nothing to replace it. The country had imploded the justification for an expansionist foreign policy. Indeed, territories that had been part of imperial Russia and the USSR for two centuries or more suddenly emerged as fifteen independent states. How were the new—and old—elites to deal with this? Amid the chaos of the Soviet collapse almost immediately came the search for a new Russian Idea.

A small group of pro-Western liberals around the new president, Boris Yeltsin, initially sought to redefine Russia’s interests in a revolutionary way: Russia should join the West. Chief among them was a young diplomat, Andrei Kozyrev, who had worked in the Soviet Foreign Ministry and had decided to throw his lot in with Yeltsin in 1990, acting as an important liaison with the United States during the abortive August 1991 coup against Gorbachev. Yeltsin appointed him foreign minister in 1992, much to the consternation of the old Soviet diplomatic corps. Kozyrev’s position was clear: “Our choice is… to progress according to generally accepted rules. The West invented them, and I am a Westernizer in this respect.… The West is rich; we need to be friends with it.… It’s the club of first-rate states Russia must rightfully belong to.”16 Note the acknowledgment that the West had set the global rules and Russia had to accept them—a sentiment Putin later rejected vigorously.17

The idea that Russia could find greatness again by renounciIdeats uniqueness and otherness went against centuries of Russian traditions. Russia’s American and European interlocutors welcomed the apparent desire of Yeltsin’s reformers to become part of the West. But in their enthusiasm to reform and reimagine Russia, they misjudged the extent to which the majority of the political class shared these desires. Kozyrev’s views of the West became more skeptical and ambivalent as the decade wore on. Boris Yeltsin replaced Kozyrev in 1996 with the veteran Soviet diplomat Yevgeny Primakov, who repudiated a pro-Western stance. Instead, he proposed an alliance between Russia, China, and India.18 Today Kozyrev lives in the United States, and his successors have uniformly rejected his ideas.

After the USSR’s collapse, the debate between post-Soviet Westernizers and Slavophiles reprised. The Westernizers called themselves Atlanticists, and the Slavophiles, Eurasianists, harking back to the 1920s. The immediate focus was on how Russia’s relations with the former Soviet states—the “near abroad,” as they preferred to call them—should evolve. Andrei Kokoshin was a prominent writer and member of the Duma, the newly elected parliament, which had taken its name from the pre-revolutionary days. He advocated that Russia create a new Eurasian state political structure on the territory of the former Russian Empire and USSR. The Russian Federation would be the nucleus around which all other states would unite on a mutually beneficial basis. The Russian language would be an essential factor in this reintegration.19

Sergei Karaganov, another influential intellectual, argued that Russian speakers living in newly independent countries, such as Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic states, would become the prime guarantors of Moscow’s political and economic influence over its neighbors, predicting that Moscow might one day feel compelled to use force to protect them, and thus its interests in the former USSR. “We must be enterprising and take them under our control, in this way establishing a powerful political enclave that will be the foundation for our political influence,” he wrote.20 Right from the start; therefore, there was a consensus that Russia had the right to proclaim its own Monroe Doctrine in the post-Soviet space. This Monroe Doctrine would ensure that no post-Soviet state would join Western structures. The Russian Monroe Doctrine differed from the American original in that it was an “anti-doctrine with no discernible strategic program, encompassing disjointed responses to growing Western interest in the FSU.”21 The consensus among most of the Russian elite was that some form of reintegration with the post-Soviet space was inevitable because, without the former Soviet space, Russia could not become a great power again. The Western assumption that Russia would gradually accept the loss of empire and its new, diminished role in the global order turned out to be a product of wishful thinking.

Under the presidency of Vladimir Putin, these ideas have become more structured and elaborate. It is customary to say that, in contrast to the Cold War years, there is no ideological antagonism between Russia and the West. But this ignores the fact that Putin’s Russia has defined its role in the world as the leader of “conservative international” supporting states that espouse “traditional values” and as a protector of leaders who face challenges from “color” revolutions—popular uprisings against authoritarian governments, which Putin believes are orchestrated by the West. The image of Russia as the defender of the status quo—against what is depicted as a revisionist, decadent West trying to promote regime change against established leaders, be they in the Middle East or the post-Soviet space—is an integral part of this new Russian Idea. Russia today argues that its values and policies Ideadifferent from and superior to those of the United States. Putin has said that Western Christianity is decadent because it supports LGBTQ rights and multiculturalism. In 2013, he said:                                      

We can see how many Euro-Atlantic countries are rejecting their roots, including the Christian values that constitute the basis of Western civilization. They deny moral principles and all traditional identities: national, cultural, religious, and even sexual. They are implementing policies that equate large families with same-sex partnerships, belief in God with the belief in Satan.22

Russia is depicted as the bastion of forces that oppose revolution, chaos, and liberal ideas. A new element in Putin’s worldview has been his explicit commitment to the notion that a Russian world (Russky mir) exists, one thatIdeanscends Russia’s state borders, and that Russian civilization differs from Western civilization. Since the annexation of Crimea, Putin has invoked the concepts of a “divided people” and “protecting compatriots abroad.” The central argument is that, since the Soviet collapse, there has been a mismatch between Russia’s state borders and its national or ethnic borders and that this is both a historical injustice and a threat to Russia’s security. After the Soviet collapse, twenty-two million Russians found themselves outside Russia, living in other post-Soviet states. In Putin’s view, Russia has a right to come to the defense of Russians under threat in the post-Soviet space.

Putin’s eighteen years in power have created a new Russian Idea that resembles the old Russian Idea: Russia is a unique civilization, in many ways superior to that of the West, and is both European and Eurasian. Western concepts of individualism, competition, and untrammeled free expression are alien to the more holistic, organic, communal Russian values. Russia has a right to a sphere of influence in the lands that were part of both the Russian Empire and the USSR, and Moscow has to defend the interests of compatriot Russians living outside the motherland. The West represents a threat to both Russian values and interests. And its agents inside Russia are poised to do its bidding.

 

13. V. Orlov, “Evraziistvo: V Chem Sut’?” Obchestvo I Eknomika, September 1, 2001.

14. Marlene Laruelle, Russian Eurasianism: An Ideology of Empire (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, 2008).

15. McDaniel, The Agony of the Russian Idea, 10.

16. Quoted in Angela E. Stent, Russia and Germany Reborn: Unification, the Soviet Collapse, and the New Europe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999), 188.

17. “Interesi Rossii I Vneshnaia Politika. Andrei Kozyrev: K Slovu Patriotizm Prilagatel’nie ne Nuzhni,” Krasnaya Zvezda, November 20, 1992.

18. “Evgenii Primakov o Vneshnei Politike Rossii v Novom Godu,” Krasnaia Zvezda, October 1, 1997.

19. Fiona Hill, “In Search of Great Russia: Elites, Ideas, Power, the State, and the Pre-Revolutionary Past in the New Russia, 1991–1996” (unpublished PhD diss., Harvard University, 1998).

20. Mark MacKinnon, “Sergey Karaganov: The Man Behind Putin’s Pugnacity,” Globe and Mail, March 20, 2014, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/sergey-karaganov-the-man-behind-putins-pugnacity/article17734125/.

21. Bobo Lo, Russian Foreign Policy in the Post-Soviet Era (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 52.

22. “Meeting of the Valdai International Discussion Club,” President of Russia website, September 19, 2013, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/19243.

 

 

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