Back in the Cold War, when Russia behaved badly, it
did so with what purported to be philosophical purpose. Its malfeasance was
ideologically driven. Or at least there was an ideological cover for it. Sure,
Stalin murdered millions of innocent people, but it was all in the name of
establishing a communist utopia.
Today’s
Russia is different. It has no lofty ideals, not even sham ones, beyond
reclaiming its lost status as a superpower, no redeeming philosophical
rationales, no theoretically uplifting message for humanity at large. Russia has emerged from communism, and a
brief dalliance with Western-style capitalist democracy, with little in the way
of national purpose other than to make itself great again. It’s the exact
counterpart of the theme Donald Trump rode to the White House. In Russia’s case
it makes more sense because, with the crumbling of communism, Russia really did
lose much of its power. Under communism it never did have all that much
economic power, but militarily it was one of the two main players in the world.
Then it made the mistake of invading Afghanistan and fighting a long losing war
there while simultaneously trying to keep abreast of the US military buildup
under Ronald Reagan. Military spending being notoriously unproductive
economically, the Soviet economy, weak to begin with, couldn’t take the strain,
and the whole contrived system collapsed.
And the founding myth of Russia
leading the world the way to the workers’ paradise collapsed with it. So did
much of Soviet iconography. The red banner with the hammer and sickle was
replaced with a red, white and blue tricolor flag much like France’s. The
Soviet national anthem was swapped out for an instrumental composition with no
lyrics. The name of Peter the Great’s old capital reverted from Leningrad to
St. Petersburg. For ten years or so Russia muddled along in a weirdly
ambivalent crash course, at once feverish and half-hearted, to remake itself as
a Western-style capitalist democracy.
That campaign did not go
well. It seemed to produce mainly gangsters, military and diplomatic impotence
and poverty. It pretty quickly spawned a nationalistic reaction amid which
Vladimir Putin appeared on the scene. Putin, a former KGB officer and
self-described teenage thug, has made it his mission to reassert Russian power
globally. There’s no pretense this time of Russia’s offering anything to anyone
else in the process. Russia’s behavior under Vladimir Putin is strictly
self-interested. But that’s not to say that no one else is taking anything from
it. Putin has become the global poster boy for autocracy, the bare-chested,
cold-eyed bad-boy darling of authoritarians everywhere.
Sadly for Russia,
autocracy is as Russian as borscht and sour cream. Russia has experienced nothing
but for all but about twelve of the last twelve hundred years or so, and those
twelve exceptions—including much of 1917 and the years 1989 to 2000—were not
exceptionally happy. So it should not come as a huge surprise that Russia under
Putin has reverted so largely to its old ways. The worldwide authoritarian wave
Putin represents having not yet washed away the liberal democratic order that
has largely prevailed in the world since World War II, Putin feels compelled to
cast himself and his country as nominally democratic, but his choice of symbols
reflects his true colors much more accurately than the sort of staged election
he just won in a completely predictable landslide does. He has brought back the
Soviet national anthem, with new lyrics, and as a national symbol the old
twin-headed czarist eagle. The nation as a whole retains the new tricolor flag
but the Russian army has readopted the red Soviet banner. And the former
functionary of an officially atheist regime has embraced the Russian Orthodox
Church, effectively making onion domes, bearded priests and Orthodox icons
symbols of the new/old regime as well.
What’s strange is not
that Putin’s rehash mishmash brand of Russian autocracy should appeal to as
many Russians as it does, but that it should exert such charm on so many
American conservatives to whom the Soviet Union was the Evil Empire. Deluded conservatives
make Putin out to be a bold fresh face reasserting traditional norms of
patriotic masculinity, but basically what he represents is as crude and
timeworn as Josef Stalin or Ivan the Terrible and as sinister as Lavrentiy
Beria. He’s a homicidal bully whose critics—reporters, businessmen,
politicians, former spies—have a way of showing up in prison, or dead, or both.
He’s an international political vandal who hates and fears democracy and has
embarked on a concerted campaign to undermine it—a campaign so obvious by now,
even his fawning admirer Donald Trump has begun to acknowledge it. Among the
dark Russian traditions he carries on is that of antisemitism: he recently
insinuated in an interview with Megyn Kelly that the perpetrators of the
meddling he himself obviously orchestrated, or at the very least condoned, in
our 2016 election may have been Jews.
Russia under Putin is not
so different from Russia under communism except insofar as the new Russia no
longer espouses a philosophy calling for the dictatorship of the proletariat.
It’s still a dictatorship, still a police state, and still seeks to undermine
democracy—most notably, ours—but it no longer poses a threat to the
accumulation of private wealth. Some of Putin’s best friends, or some of his
most useful ones, are billionaires, and he himself is said to be one of the
wealthiest men on the planet. So if you’re a proponent of good old-fashioned
red-blooded bare-chested tough-guy machismo, and for all your talk of freedom
you mainly want law and order, low taxes, lax regulation and stirring displays
of military might, what’s not to like about Vladimir Putin? And just as Putin’s
choices of symbols reveal his true colors, in their admiration for him those
conservatives who do admire him reveal theirs.
