Russia looks to its history in search for a new ideology

For much of the 20th century, Russia was the laboratory for one of the most far-reaching ideological experiments in history. But for most of the two-and-a-half decades since communism’s collapse, Russian politics has been bereft of guiding ideas.

To the casual observer, it might seem otherwise. Listen to the country’s politicians speak, and you still hear echoes of the last century’s great battles of ideas. Russian propagandists are not shy about calling their adversaries “fascists” — the term of abuse most often deployed against those in Ukraine who oppose the Russian-backed rebels.

In Russian parlance, however, “fascism” does not denote an ideology but merely an orientation. Fascists are people who attack the country from outside — no matter what they believe. Nazi Germany and its allies were called fascists during what Russians know as the Great Patriotic War. But now the term is also used to describe pro-western liberals, including the late Boris Nemtsov.

Clearly the fall of the Soviet Union left an ideological vacuum. The communist faith, which had initially been so powerful as to replace Christianity itself, was gone. Democratic values could have supplanted it, but they were quickly discredited by the excesses of the economic oligarchy that took root after the privatisations of the 1990s. In this pillaging of communist collective property, the west came to be seen as an accomplice.

For a time, the void was filled by the consumerist distractions of a booming economy. Only after the economic troubles of 2008 did a protest movement begin to incubate the first strands of a new ideology. Russians called it democracy and so did westerners, but it was not a doctrine that western liberals would recognise as their own. Alexei Navalny, the movement’s leader, was against corruption. But he was also against immigrants, tapping into beliefs which westerners associate with the far right, but which often pass for household wisdom. Slogans such as “Russia for the Russians” may not be to everyone’s taste, but their appeal is far from marginal. Migrants from the southern former Soviet republics, along with Russian citizens from the Muslim Caucasus, have become victims of a campaign of propaganda, and often violence.

It is in the crisis over Ukraine that the contours of Russia’s new national ideology have become clear. Its foundation is an unlikely emulsion of nostalgia for a glorious past, resentment of the oligarchs, petty-bourgeois materialism and xenophobia. But its nationalistic hue is supplied by what Russians perceive as a pressing external threat.

There are undoubtedly many people among the Russian-speaking population of Crimea and eastern Ukraine who felt themselves under attack from the west, even if the number of the beleaguered was less than Moscow claimed. And mobilising against a common enemy, as they did during the second world war, is Russia’s most enduring political tradition.

Russians feel their national identity most strongly when they come under pressure from the outside. City dwellers in Moscow and St Petersburg might betray a weakness for western cars and other imported comforts. But wherever you go in Russia, you will encounter limitless national pride. Western sanctions, inconvenient though they are, have done little to dissuade Russians from supporting Putin’s Kremlin.

The new Russian ideology presents European values as part of a hypocritical propaganda the west uses to rationalise its pursuit of geopolitical and economic interests. Westerners should not compromise on their values. But they should also be aware that neither economic sanctions nor (if it comes to that) military help for Ukraine are the right antidote to Russia’s new ideology. Instead they are a potential trigger that could turn a suspicious Russia into an outright enemy.

The writer is a film and television director whose works include ‘Poisoned by Polonium: The Litvinenko File’

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Letter in response to this column:

No one expects the Russian people to rise against the Kremlin / From James Beadle