Russia is not the West; Russians are different. This is not news; it’s been that way for centuries. The news is that the differences are accelerating.
Through the past 25 years, the Western world and Russia have been drifting in opposite directions, their hopes and social visions increasingly at cross purposes. Russia today is a country where many people find solace in traditional values that many in the West reject. Moreover, the country’s ruling elite is trying to bend this conservative rebound to its own ends. That is why the Kremlin is waging its own culture war — stoking the values of religion and nationalism as it rails against “foreigners,” sexual “deviants” and a “degenerate” West.
The key to understanding this lies in the recent past. The 1990s treated the West well but Russia very badly. What many Western people saw as a time of limitless prosperity at home and unprecedented prospects for democratic freedom abroad, most Russians saw as the darkest nightmare in living memory. The economy crashed, debt piled up and the political system went into meltdown. Most Russians lost all their savings and any sense of security. The failure of Soviet Communism left the country bereft of national purpose, paralyzed by anxiety over what the next chapter of its turbulent history would bring.
It was only in 2007 that the Russian economy returned to its pre-collapse levels. As economic growth revived, support for Vladimir Putin peaked. Since then, the economy has crashed, bounced back, and stalled again. But these boom and bust cycles don’t tell the whole story. Social scientists who compare personal well-being in nations around the world say that Russians have lived through the sharpest decline ever recorded.
Ronald Inglehart and Eduard Ponarin of the World Values Survey note, for example, that people in the world’s prosperous regions have enjoyed high and stable levels of personal satisfaction — ranging from 80 to 90 percent of those polled — throughout the 30-year period from 1981 to 2011. By contrast, Russians went from relative personal harmony in 1981 (76 percent) to acute distress in 1995 (28 percent). A slight recovery began in 2000, jumped to 60 percent in 2005, and then 69 percent in 2011, according to the survey.
Though the average Russian is now earning and consuming a lot more than under the Soviet regime, relative prosperity has not seemed to quench a bigger thirst for personal contentment.
Russia is a special case in another respect. Poland, Hungary, Latvia, Ukraine and other countries struggling for independence in the late 1980s and early 1990s could blame Moscow for their misery. Liberation brought a new sense of national direction that included running away from Russia. But Russia, the center of the imploded Soviet universe, could not run away from itself. Most Russians found compensation in religion — another key factor that sets them apart from the West, where religious faith has been fading for decades. (Indeed, according to the World Values Survey, the six countries showing the greatest gains in religious faith are ex-Communist: Russia, China, Belarus, Bulgaria, Serbia and Romania.)
In most Western societies, the drift from traditional religious values to secular ones evolved over centuries. But in the Soviet Union, modernization was a top-down project that sought to eradicate religion by force. When Communism collapsed, the quest for God, suppressed for more than 70 years, broke free.
The Russian authorities soon realized that they could profit by harnessing this conservative trend. Traditional values, after all, include national pride and respect for authority — qualities any authoritarian ruler can easily manipulate. Thus the Kremlin touts the virtues of nationalism against the vices of an overly tolerant West. If we forsake our culture, say the ideologues, we will lose out to both the West’s unprincipled atheists and Islamic traditionalists.
But the real reason the Kremlin is suspicious of Western values lies in the truth that tolerance of individual difference comes hand in hand with greater freedom of expression and government accountability. This is why Putin is waging an all-out cultural offensive, sponsoring legislation that punishes “gay propaganda,” investing in patriotic movies, micro-managing TV networks.
The country’s only independent television channel, TV Dozhd, Russian for TV Rain, is struggling to ward off a Kremlin-generated attack for “unpatriotic” broadcasts. Two weeks ago the station aired a show that questioned the wisdom of defending Leningrad during World War II. The Kremlin responded with orchestrated outrage. All cable networks were pressured to drop the channel, a move that would drive it out of business.
Some commentators say that Putin is pushing his country back in time to keep his base from eroding. This is only partly true. The country’s conservative rebound is real. The question is the degree to which he can manipulate social change. Whether Putin will succeed is a big question. Russians are not just tired of blaming themselves for their country’s ills. They are also tired of Putin.
Putin knows this. He will respond with more of his familiar tools — more religion, more nationalism and more pressure against Russia’s neighbors and against his critics at home — all in the name of Russia’s greatness.
Maxim Trudolyubov is the opinion page editor of the business newspaper Vedomosti.