What has been happening since Vladimir Putin’s third coming to the Kremlin is indeed new for post-Soviet Russia. However, it is not so much a new political direction but a correction, albeit a significant one, of Kremlin’s previous attempt to build an alternative, self-sufficient civilisation to the West.
The ‘Munich’ course
Not quite so explicit before 2012, the beginnings of this alternative vision can be identified in Putin’s infamous ‘Munich speech’ at the international security conference in February 2007. In both his speech and answers to delegates’ questions, Putin warned western leaders not to try to teach Russia about democracy. His strong protest against NATO expansion and proposed anti-missile defence systems in Poland and the Czech Republic seemed less a reaction to fear of a military threat than to a fear of a threat to Russian civilisation.
Discussions at the time about Georgia and Ukraine becoming NATO members raised the possibility of these countries adopting western democratic values, which would have presented the Kremlin with a challenge it couldn’t answer. It was not necessarily the proximity of NATO tanks and planes to Russia’s borders that scared the Russian leadership, but the geographical proximity of European civilisation, whose values are incompatible with Russia’s post-Soviet political system. After Munich, Moscow began planning for the Russo-Georgian War of August 2008, the purpose of which was to avert this threat.
What we now see in the first year of Putin’s third presidential term is a continuation of the ‘Munich’ course, adjusted to take account of a new challenge. The challenge this time is an internal rather than external one — from Russian citizens protesting in public about the rigged results of parliamentary elections.
The response to December
Who could have predicted that a mass of educated and prosperous people would be moved to protest for ‘fair elections’? The December 2011 protests represented a cultural-civilisational repudiation of governance without ethics or civil rights. It was a reaction to the progressive degeneration of civilisation in Russia. How did the Kremlin respond to this challenge?
First, it began to talk of Russia as a ‘unique civilisation’, a ‘state-civilisation’. This was something new: until then the development of an alternative to the west had been couched in vague terms of a ‘European choice’ for Russia.
Second, the Kremlin blasted the protesters for their alleged lack of morals while organising its own rallies which celebrated militarism and patriotism. At a pro-Putin rally before the presidential election he called the assembled crowd ‘defenders of the fatherland’ and even felt it appropriate to quote lines from Lermontov’s poem ‘The Battle of Borodino’, familiar to all Russians from their schooldays: ‘Let’s die defending Moscow, as our brothers also died!’ Naturally, all this was accompanied, and is still accompanied, by references to the external enemy in the shape of the USA’s State Department and its ‘fifth column’ of protesters and their leaders.
Third, moral pressure on the opposition was supplemented by repressive legislation, reminiscent of emergency wartime measures, and the prosecution of both opposition leaders and ordinary protesters. These measures blatantly violated both Russia’s Constitution and its international obligations. Faced with a demand that it observe its citizens’ civil rights, Putin’s ‘unique civilisation’ showed itself to be openly hostile to the very concept.
Fourth, legislation was passed to allow the Kremlin to strengthen its control over its bureaucrats and lawmakers. They are now obliged to declare not only their incomes but also their expenditures. They are also no longer permitted to have money in foreign bank accounts. In this way, the ‘unique civilisation’ is attempting to pre-empt any splits within the elite and pre-empt the appearance of groups that might show disloyalty to the Kremlin.
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