Russia Profile
March 20, 2006
Vladimir Putin’s Presidential Philosophy
Moving Away From the Defeatism of Old
Comment by Alexander Tsipko
Alexander Tsipko, a political commentator for the weekly newspaper Literaturnaya Gazeta, holds a doctorate in philosophy and was one of the pioneers of glasnost. He submitted this comment to Russia Profile.
Except for his 1999 article “Russia at the Turn of the Century,” President Vladimir Putin, like his predecessor, Boris Yeltsin, has avoided programmatic statements about his political ideology.
This self restraint is likely rooted in our strange constitution, which recognizes pluralism in the sense that it prohibits the establishment of any kind of state ideology. This declaration was clearly a reaction on the part of the Soviet-era intelligentsia who authored the document to the official Marxist-Leninist ideology of the past. What they didn’t realize was that “ideological pluralism” inevitably means recognition of the very Marxist teaching that inspired the Bolshevik genocide of the peoples of Russia. Don’t forget that fascism and racism are also “ideologies.” A country that lost over 20 million lives in defeating fascist Germany can hardly afford to support this kind of “ideology.”
I don’t think the Soviet system can be transformed into a normal, democratic civil society without an ideological, moral assessment of the regime we have rejected. Ideological neutrality makes it unclear why we rejected all that we had been building for 70 years.
There is a profound contradiction between the widespread demand for ideological imperatives and the continuing lack of ideological discernment. Our goals can’t be reduced simply to the establishment of electoral democracy, as this procedure alone won’t guarantee the sovereignty or security of our borders, political stability or a feeling of unity between the government and the governed. In such a situation, much depends on the ideology of the country’s leader and his gut feelings about the direction of the country’s development.
Putin’s January press conference indicated to me that he is not simply a competent manager, but a leader who understands his responsibility for preserving and developing Russia as a sovereign state. Reading Vasily Klyuchevsky’s history of Russia, as Putin said he is doing, is not something that would have occurred to either Yeltsin or Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev.
Putin’s remarks about overcoming the “defeatism” of the 1990s were significant. He wasn’t implying that we didn’t need reforms and “freedom,” which he instead identified as the main thing Russian citizens gained in the Yeltsin era (although in all fairness, you could add that the freedoms of speech, conscience and movement, as well as against censorship and discrimination were products of the Gorbachev era).
What is most important in Putin’s logic is that we rejected communism because it meant no freedom. As he wrote in the 1999 article: “The main thing is that Soviet power did not make the country prosperous, the society dynamic, or the people free. We spent seven decades heading away from the main road of civilization towards a dead end.”
It is important to understand Putin’s statements as those of a “Westernizer,” someone who believes that Russia is an integral part of European civilization. In his address to the Federal Assembly in April 2005, he said: “We are a major European nation, we have always been an integral part of Europe and share all its values and the ideals of freedom and democracy. But we will carry out this process ourselves, taking into account all our specific characteristics, and do not intend to report to anyone on the progress we make.”
In the “defeatist” era of the 1990s we had no concern for Russia’s integrity and indivisibility. The journalists’ questions and president’s answers at the press conference demonstrated that this concern today is real. The president’s resolve not to give up a single bit more of Russian land is likely to be the key to the consistently high approval ratings he enjoys.
Putin’s philosophy is based on a very simple system of values. First and foremost, these are a determined Russian statism, freedom, national sovereignty, and dignity. This system addresses all of Russia’s major deficiencies today.
Having a president who believes this is clearly a positive thing. But it seems to me that we should somehow safeguard these ideas by enshrining them in the constitution. Our entire policy, foreign or domestic, could change under another defeatist leader, one ready to trade sovereignty and territory for ideas like a United Europe. The constitution should at least ban the ideology of defeatism. It should ban propaganda that undermines belief in the constructive forces of the peoples of Russia.