Putin will go for what works. He is happy to read writers like Ilyin and enjoy the sense that his innate bias towards a strong, powerful and centrifugal state has a rich cultural pedigree, to quote the soundbites that work today. But he believes in power and pragmatism rather than in philosophy. As long as he can get what he wants from the existing system, he’s content.
The same utilitarianism applies to Putin’s foreign policy. He is increasingly presented as a leader who is committed to overturning the existing world order and its liberal democratic norms. He will certainly criticise what is, after all, an order largely created by the West, in the West’s image, and for the West’s advantage. He also plays with the role as champion of traditional social values, of a bygone age where men were men, women knew their place, and no one had even heard of transgenderism. But again, this is more instrumental than ideological. He believes that the West is essentially hypocritical and that a mark of a great power – like the USA – is its exceptionalism, the idea that it can ignore the pesky rules when it wants to, which is what he wants for Russia. He is happy to exploit the current fractures within the West, presenting the EU as prey to degenerate ultra-liberalism; if you watch Russian television coverage about Europe – or ‘Gayropa’, as some spiteful propagandists put it – you’d believe that children there are being forcibly ripped from their families and given to gay couples, and that every spare bedroom has to house a jihadist Muslim migrant, by law. Ultimately, this is because these are ways in which Putin can persuade Russians that they don’t want to be more like us, while also dividing, distracting and demoralising us. Above all, though, he is trying to assert Russia’s great power status de facto and to get us to accept that vision. But it’s all politics. If the price of securing Russia a great power get-out-of-jail-free card were to be to bless non-traditional marriages in Europe and gender-neutral bathrooms in the American Midwest, I imagine he’d accept that deal in a heartbeat.
The disappointing truth for the alt-right fanboys in the West who see Putin as their ideal patriarch is that he is nothing of the sort. Yes, he is a tough, even ruthless leader, but in social terms he is hardly the champion of conservatism they think. He upholds gun control and abortion rights, and while he went along with small-minded laws against so-called ‘gay propaganda’ – which can be stretched to almost anything normalising gay relationships – it was not an initiative that came from the Kremlin. He is a confirmed Russian Orthodox Christian, but has demonstrated no hint of anti-Semitism, notable in a country with a dark history of its relations with its Jews. If anything, the opposite is true: he has encouraged the revival of synagogues at home and forged a close alliance with Israel abroad. Although he is happy to engage in horrifyingly sexist ‘banter’ – as such language is so often normalised – including joking about rape, he is again unusual by the standards of many Russians of his generation in listening to, and sometimes even empowering, women. For example, Elvira Nabiullina has been chair of the Central Bank since 2013. She has been carrying out a ruthless campaign to try and clean out toxic and criminal banks. In the process she often comes up against powerful vested interests, but Putin has backed her time and again against men who might have been useful new cronies for him.
This is one of the abiding themes of Putin’s politics: he is happy to play many roles to many audiences, as seems useful, but beyond those primal bedrock issues of power, security and respect, they are simply performances. The same pragmatism applies at home. According to some more hostile foreign commentators, Russia is near enough an earthly Mordor, North Korea with balalaikas. However, walk the streets of Moscow, and you’d find yourself in a modern, dynamic and frankly fun European city. Even out in the provinces, where money is tighter and the new middle class are rather thinner on the ground, there is ample evidence of change. By this I don’t just mean coffee houses, Wi-Fi and branches of Marks & Spencer (thirty-six in Russia so far), but also real debate, investigative journalism and even civil society.
