Foreign Affairs: The end of the Russian idea. Putin's place in Russian imperial ambition from czarist era thru the Soviets to the present (8 marzo 1917 anni – 1 gen 2023 anni)

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The End of the Russian Idea
What It Will Take to Break Putinism’s Grip
By Andrei Kolesnikov
September/October 2023
Published on August 22, 2023

"Putin’s attempt to resurrect an empire by naked force is failing. The imperial model is on its last legs and can no longer be revived. The question is: For how much longer will ordinary Russians be receptive to Putinism, Russian messianism, and the state’s increasingly flimsy justifications for using military power? "
...Now, Putin seeks something different from any of these predecessors: an empire without modernization..... Putin resurrected the Russian imperial idea with the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and expanded it with the launch of the “special operation” eight years later. Buttressed by the abstract and archaic teachings of the Russian Orthodox Church, he has also embraced an older strain of nationalist ideology in which the decadent West is the enemy and Russia has a messianic destiny to oppose its harmful influence. If Peter I, as Pushkin once said, cut a window to Europe, 300 years later, the man who sits in the Kremlin is boarding up that window.
...
In Putin’s version, the Russian Idea amounts to little more than territorial expansion and the repression of domestic dissent in defense of a sacralized state. The regime’s embrace of this concept in its most primitive form has coincided with a shift from soft authoritarianism into what is now closer to a hybrid totalitarianism modeled on Stalinist precepts....
...Paradoxically, little of this reactionary tradition held much sway when Putin first came to power 23 years ago. At the time, post-Soviet Moscow was awash in Western ideas. Under Gorbachev in the 1980s, the Soviet government had progressively abandoned social controls and opened up to liberal thinking. Then, after the Soviet Union’s dissolution, the economist and acting Russian prime minister Yegor Gaidar, with the backing of Russian President Boris Yeltsin, undertook dramatic reforms that transformed the shell of a 70-year-old Marxist empire into a market economy with modern Western-style political institutions. Although this wholesale restructuring was controversial, it helped usher in a new concept of Russia: one of Gaidar’s principles was that it was impossible to build a liberal economy on the scale of an empire and that for the reforms to succeed, the country would have to redefine itself as a nation-state.
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Putin’s dramatic reorientation of the Russian state is not unprecedented. At least since the beginning of the nineteenth century, Russia has repeatedly swung toward and away from the West, as well as between modern Western-style conceptions of state power and Russia’s place in the world, and nationalist, reactionary ones. ....
At the same time, however, Prigozhin is a product of Putin-style state capitalism, in which the Kremlin distributes tax revenues to various outsourcers. This is what Putin’s Russia has been reduced to: a feudal system in which the supreme leader hands out pieces of property to his vassals to manage or delegates functions to them at his subjects’ expense. As one of these outsourcers, Prigozhin was paid more than $1 billion in state—that is, taxpayer—money to create a private army that was not fully controlled by the state. He was allowed to briefly cause chaos and in the end was not punished for his antics. Such an anomalous situation can be explained only by the extreme personalist nature of Putin’s autocracy and the need to defend the homeland from Western attacks and promote Russia’s military influence abroad, as for example in Africa. Prigozhin was valuable because he was a supplier of expendable human material. In this case, he felt he might be losing his government contract and decided to show his capabilities. His goal was not to displace Putin but to be recognized as an equal partner of the president. But he made a false start and overplayed his hand. In his eruption, Prigozhin malfunctioned, frightening Putin but not significantly shaking his hold on power....
Prigozhin’s mutiny has had little effect on Putin’s approval ratings. In the eyes of ordinary Russians, Putin won that battle, and the country has remained relatively calm. ...

Although Putinism may be finite, its advanced state of development and its deep roots in anti-Western thought suggest that it may take more than the outcome of war for Putin’s hold over Russian society to break.
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... To fully apprehend Russia’s continuing intervention in Ukraine and how it has been presented to the Russian people, it is necessary to recognize this impulse. Putin resurrected the Russian imperial idea with the annexation of Crimea in 2014 and expanded it with the launch of the “special operation” eight years later. Buttressed by the abstract and archaic teachings of the Russian Orthodox Church, he has also embraced an older strain of nationalist ideology in which the decadent West is the enemy and Russia has a messianic destiny to oppose its harmful influence. If Peter I, as Pushkin once said, cut a window to Europe, 300 years later, the man who sits in the Kremlin is boarding up that window.

Putin’s dramatic reorientation of the Russian state is not unprecedented. At least since the beginning of the nineteenth century, Russia has repeatedly swung toward and away from the West, as well as between modern Western-style conceptions of state power and Russia’s place in the world, and nationalist, reactionary ones. Much the same has happened with the state’s attitudes toward Stalinism. Three times in the last 70 years—under Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev in the 1950s and 1960s, under Premier Mikhail Gorbachev in the 1980s, and under Russian President Boris Yeltsin in the 1990s—Soviet and Russian leaders have sought to rid the country of Stalinist ideas and Stalinist discourse, only to have those precepts return, even if just tacitly. For much of the past century, Russia’s political ideas have been shaped by the struggle between liberal and totalitarian tendencies, or what could be called de-Stalinization and re-Stalinization.

What is particularly striking about Putin’s Russia, however, is the extent to which it has combined re-Stalinization with antimodern imperialism. In reviving some of the most extreme versions of what in the nineteenth century was called “the Russian Idea”—a concept originally meant to convey the country’s separateness and exalted moral stature but that in practice came to stand for raw militarized expansionism—Putin has drawn on a pernicious ideological tradition to shape both the campaign in Ukraine and his long-term vision of power.

...Beginning in the 1840s, the debate between “Westernizers” and “Slavophiles” became a central theme in the political conceptualization of Russia. The Westernizers viewed the tsarist state as backward and argued that Russia could only compete with the great powers of the West through European-style modernization and constitutionalism. The Slavophiles were also dissatisfied with the tsar’s absolute power but believed that Russia, founded on its own unique values, stood apart from the West and was morally superior to it. But that romantic vision gradually evolved into something else. Unlike the early Slavophiles, who opposed despotism, their successors in the second half of the nineteenth century defended it, arguing that any attempts to limit autocracy would weaken or undermine Russia’s place in the world.

In the second half of the nineteenth century, these ideas were pushed in a new direction with the work of the Russian philosopher and ideologue Nikolai Danilevsky. ... Danilevsky was also deeply suspicious of the West and its modernizing ideas. “Europe is not only something alien to us, but even hostile,” he wrote. These theories have long found echoes in Putin’s own rhetoric about Russia as a “state-civilization” defined in opposition to its European counterparts. In the October 2022 meeting of the Valdai Club, the annual forum that Russia has hosted since 2004 that has in the past included prominent foreign analysts and scholars, Putin invoked Danilevsky directly to explain why the West must be resisted.

In 1856, the novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky added his own vision of Russia’s special destiny with his concept of the Russian Idea. Although a great connoisseur of European culture, Dostoyevsky, like other Slavophiles, believed that the West was declining and that an ascendant Russia would take its place. ... As Dostoyevsky saw it, the state should serve as the guardian of the country’s special path and revive the system of universal Christian morality that had preceded the Enlightenment—values that reigned before Europeans became obsessed with ideas of progress, freedom, and individual rights....

PUTIN VS. SATAN

In his early years, Putin did not oppose continued modernization based on market principles. But from the outset, he has publicly regretted the collapse of the Soviet empire and sought new ways to regain control of Russian society. He took advantage of the country’s economic liberalization and its lucrative natural resources, which allowed him to lavishly reward loyalists and strengthen the state’s grip on the political and economic system. When he returned to the presidency in 2012 after Dmitry Medvedev’s one-term administration, he began to dismantle the liberal reforms that he and Medvedev had earlier supported. By that point, he was already openly embracing authoritarianism and repression and had begun using conservative ideology to justify the shift. He was also increasingly irritated by the West—he claimed the United States and its allies did not treat Russia as an equal partner or consider its interests and were fomenting internal opposition and turning civil society organizations against the government—and he felt less need to maintain the appearance of political pluralism and free speech. As the Kremlin now saw it, Russia’s liberal economists served solely to maintain macroeconomic stability and could be reduced to mere technocrats.
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By 2022, Putin and many around him were actively adopting the most extreme forms of Russian nationalist-imperialist thought. A common refrain in Putin’s circle is that the West is in moral and spiritual decline and will be replaced by a rising Russia. Since the “special operation” in Ukraine began, the Kremlin has used these claims to justify the disruption of ties with Europe and the United States and an ever more sweeping repression of Russian civil society, including attacks on Western-oriented human rights organizations, the promulgation of laws targeting gay and transgender people, and broad new restrictions on organizations and individuals identified as “foreign agents.” Putin’s ideologues now suggest that Russia can only uphold its status as the defender of civilization by combining a reinvigorated empire with the conservative precepts of the church. “We are fighting a war to have peace,” Alexander Dugin, the ultranationalist thinker and self-styled Kremlin philosopher, said in June.

Today, Kyiv has taken the place of Constantinople/Tsargrad in right-wing discourse, with Putin effectively assigning the role of lost Byzantium to Ukraine. According to Kremlin propaganda, Ukraine is slipping into the grip of a dangerous and “satanic” West that has been encroaching on the historical lands of Russia and the canonical territory of the church. In a post on Telegram, a messaging service popular among Russians, in November 2022, Medvedev cast Russia’s fighting in Ukraine as a holy war against Satan, warning that Moscow would “send all our enemies to fiery Gehenna.”

THE EMPEROR UNCLOTHED
Part of what makes the Putin regime so threatening is the way it has simplified traditional ideas to the extreme. As the historian Andrei Zorin has observed, in Count Uvarov’s era in the early nineteenth century, “the past was called upon to replace a dangerous and uncertain future for the empire,” In Uvarov’s view, Russian autocracy and the Orthodox Church were “the last alternative to Europeanization.” By the early twentieth century, however, nationalist ideologues were already using the concept of Russian exceptionalism to defend an unvarnished militarism. “Russia’s national idea . . . has become incredibly crude,” the Russian philosopher Georgy Fedotov, who had left Soviet Russia for France, wrote in 1929. “Epigones of Slavophilia . . . have been hypnotized by naked force, which made them miss the moral idea.”

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