Putin’s Cold War Vision of Russia

The recent escalation in unjust imprisonments and brutally conservative policy has charged up opponents of the Kremlin. Alexei Navalny, a popular blogger and anti-corruption lawyer, has emerged as a prominent opposition figure to Vladimir Putin. Navalny is a whistleblower who shed light on corruption by a senior Russian official, led anti-Putin street protests, and provides an unfiltered news source for a huge audience in Russia and worldwide. Unsurprisingly, last year Navalny was charged by a state official and widely expected to be convicted—not an unusual track for prominent opposition. As the case garnered mass global attention and criticism, the Kremlin backtracked. Navalny’s release was ensured to subdue the unrest and enable him to run for mayor of Moscow, although his poll numbers now spell a return to imprisonment. Letting Navalny run, then, creates a brilliant semblance of political adversarialism and democratic fairness, without any real risk for the regime. However, what may seem to be a concession by Russia’s ruling class and a victory for political activists should not be mistaken for a Westernizing Russia. Navalny’s successful activism and verdict of innocence (which may be temporary) highlights the lack of judicial legitimacy and the supreme authority of the Kremlin. Furthermore, Putin has a long-term vision, and is using the raging battle against corruption as a strategic appeasement to liberal unrest. Putin’s plans for Russia will move the country further out of the grasp of the ideology that Navalny and his liberal advocates are touting. For his past three terms, Putin’s focus has been on maintaining Russia’s cultural integrity and economic prosperity, often at the cost of individual liberties and democratic openness. Catering to a religiously conservative, nationalist base, and rejecting the incursion of Western influence, Putin’s absolute power and social conservatism are becoming increasingly embedded and intertwined in policy, and it looks like those policies are here to stay.

Putin’s focus on supporting traditional Russian values is highlighted in the juxtaposition of Navalny’s release with the brutal imprisonment of members of the feminist punk band Pussy Riot. In the August 2012, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova (Nadya), Yekaterina Samutsevich (Katya), and Maria Alyokhina (Masha), were sentenced to two-year prison terms by a judge who ruled that their impromptu performance of a song deriding Putin in a Moscow cathedral last February was “motivated by religious hatred” and convicted them on charges of hooliganism.  Masha and Nadya were denied parole, and judged to be insufficiently repentant for the “punk prayer”, in which they call on the Virgin Mary to “send Putin packing!” Pussy Riot accused the Russian state of an intentional campaign to portray them as antireligious activists, when in fact their protest was specifically aimed at the Church’s open and unapologetic collaboration with an undemocratic and oppressive regime. The immense influence of the Church and socially conservative values in Russian society reflects why the Pussy Riot protest was far from universally embraced, and the women were sent away to prison camps.

There was a conservative outcry at the protests, and many were enraged by their flagrant display in a holy place, with one Russian woman noting when interviewed, “How would you feel if someone took a shit in your house?” The Orthodox Church has been a central ally for Putin, helping to refocus the nation’s attention on cultural values, rather than civil rights.  The Orthodox Church has “been critical in helping Putin recast the liberal opposition’s fight against state corruption and alleged electoral fraud into a script of ‘foreign devils’ versus ‘Holy Russia.’” And its not just the Russian Orthodox Church – the World Congress of Families states on its website that, “statism, individualism and sexual revolution challenge the family’s very legitimacy as an institution,” and praises Russia’s “historic commitment to deep spirituality and its “Christian values” which are forgotten in the “postmodern West”. Putin’s focus on maintaining Russian values and rejecting Western influence is reflected in domestic policy. He has most recently signed two controversial laws: the infamous ‘gay propaganda’ bill, which strengthens the penalties for “propagating homosexuality among minors,” and a bill criminalizing insulting people’s religious feelings in public. Both bills caused outrage in the West, though Russia has paid no heed. In the past several years there has been a blatant effort to purge Russian life of “foreign elements”, ranging from banning American adoptions to banning the use of so-called ‘Americanisms’ and other foreign words and expressions.

In addition to touting socially conservative domestic values, Putin’s foreign policy seems guided by an effort to assert Russia’s cultural and economic significance in the new world order. Russia’s refusal to denounce Assad and support the rebels is reflective of his opposition to the West and a drive to be important in the global sphere. Incensed by the West’s propensity for interventionism and its broad interpretation of United Nations Security Council resolution, Putin characterizes Western moralizing and calls for intervention in Syria and involvement in Libya as hypocritical and self-interested. Putin’s antagonism to Western involvement is highlighted by his support of Bashar al-Assad. An Islamist-led revolution in Syria, especially one that receives support through the intervention of America and Arab states, will seriously harm Russia’s stake in the region while expanding Western influence even further.

More recently, blatant antagonism toward the West is highlighted by the granting of asylum to Edward Snowden. The irony is striking­. Snowden’s main mission was to fight the “U.S. surveillance state,” yet he has found himself residing in exponentially larger surveillance state in Russia (­the e-mails and telephone conversations of Navalny were often hacked, even before charges were filed against him, and surveillance is not uncommon in Russia even against lesser opposition members). It is certainly clear that Putin has little patience for human rights activists, except of course when they work to challenge U.S. dominion (Ed Snowden, take a bow). While the members of Pussy Riot were sent off to Siberia to be in prison camps, Snowden was welcomed into Russia.

Snowden’s presence in Russia and Putin’s refusal to extradite him led to Obama’s cancellation of their presidential summit scheduled for September. Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s foreign policy adviser, blamed the cancelation on Snowden and the deficiencies of the United States, noting that, “This problem testifies to the remaining unpreparedness of the United States to build an equal relationship,” though the evidence would point to Russia’s lack of interest in building a relationship with the United States. The speed with which Russia approved Snowden’s asylum request shows that the “significance of America for Russia is decreasing”, according to Alexei Makarkin, deputy director of the Centre for Political Technologies in Moscow. The intentional humiliating move has marked a rift and reflects Moscow’s “Cold War mentality”, according to President Obama. Though Obama had strides with Dmitry Medvedev, this progress has been lost since Putin returned to the presidency

Putin’s hard grip on cultural and nationalist sentiments is underpinned by a darkening economic picture in Russia. According to the median estimate of 13 economists in a Bloomberg survey, there’s a 30 percent chance of a recession next year in Russia, up from 20 percent a month ago. Speaking at the St. Petersburg International Economic Forum this past June, Putin laid out his intentions to expand economic relationships in the Asia-Pacific region, rather than to its traditional markets in Europe. He proposed huge plans to stimulate economic growth and connect Russia with the East, including upgrading the trans-Siberian railway. He also went on to laud the Russian state oil company Rosneft for completing a major export deal with China. In hopes of gaining leverage against the West, Putin has looked to strengthen ties with its own neighbors in the East. In July, Putin attended religious ceremonies in the Ukraine, to commemorate 1,025th anniversary of events that brought Christianity to Ukraine and to Russia. The visit appears intended in part to highlight historical and spiritual ties that unite the two countries even as Ukraine seeks greater links with West.

In light of Putin’s blatant Russo-centric ambitions, perhaps we should not be too quick to consider the release of Navalny a shifting of the tides. It seems that progress may be losing out to a dream of the past – a Cold War era of Russian glory.