“Russia is not Putin. The phrase that we liberal Russians have been chanting for almost a month tries to counter the amalgam between an entire country, its culture, its mores, its history, its identity and the man who started a murderous war in Ukraine.
Posted at 1:00 p.m.
“Russia is not Putin. We publicly express our anger and outrage…then we turn inwardly to our literature, classical music, paintings, etc., to relieve ourselves of this all-encompassing sense of shame. “Russia is not Putin. Certainly, the reduction of a nation to its leaders testifies to a closed-mindedness. Certainly, Russian culture has within it a liberalism that has never ceased to fight against the authoritarianism of the various hypostases of the Kremlin. Certainly.
However, Putin is very Russian and his regime did not appear ex nihilo at the turn of the millennium. The precautions we take to combat a potential amalgam must be accompanied by an examination of conscience, otherwise nothing will change. Putin’s ideology draws its sources from the thought and culture of Russia. Of course, it operates by simplification and distortion.
Putin’s version of Russian culture is vulgar and crude. The fact remains that the elements integrated into the ideology that Putin deploys to justify his invasion of Ukraine do indeed come from this culture that we cherish so much.
And it is up to us, Russians eager for change, to identify these elements, their potential for diversion and the mechanisms of their transformation in order to lay the foundations of identity for a post-Putin democratic Russia, of which we all dream.
This examination of conscience will be long, painful and complex. I do not pretend to settle the question in a single article published in the foreign press. I simply want to participate in this questioning by highlighting one of the ideological roots of the evils that are hitting us at the moment: Russian messianism. “Russia will save the world”… this motif is followed and repeated as much among conservatives as among radicals throughout the history of Russian thought. The first evoke a Russian people “carrying God” who preserved “true” Christianity in the face of a “morally decadent” West, while awaiting the advent of the divine Kingdom; the latter speak of Russia as a blank page on which the history of the future utopia of the socialist Earth Kingdom will be written. For all, Russia projects itself into a universal salutary role.
In 1917, Russia moved from theory to practice. The revolutionary apocalypse destroys the old order and promises a bright future. But paradise never comes. Worse, the apocalypses follow one another: famines, repressions, wars, large-scale dehumanization. This utopian project which took the lives of millions of people culminated in 1991 in failure: the USSR collapsed… but not messianism. The idea of a Russia at the heart of world salvation persists in a bastardized and revengeful form. Russia can still save the world. It only needs to regain a status of greatness in order to oppose the West, which is still just as “decadent”, but triumphant at the end of the cold war.
By saving Russia from decline, Putin prides himself on saving the world. He saves him from this “gay-rope”, a nickname given to liberal Europe by the ultranationalists.
So, if Ukraine aspires to join the European community, it becomes imperative for this messianism 2.0 to go on a crusade against “decadence” and to put an end to the “march of Sodom and Gomorrah”.
For present-day Russian messianism, in addition to its openly retrograde aims, conceals within it two substantial dangers. On the one hand, it is built on an idea of power and glory with patent imperialist overtones. In this logic, we must “give ourselves the means to save the world”. The “small nations” can therefore only bow before the accomplishment of the historic mission of “Holy Russia”. On the other hand, the idea of messianic salvation transcends the individual. This one is no more than a pawn in great historical schemes… cannon fodder. Civilians in Ukraine are dying by the thousands, Russian soldiers in a poorly organized army are falling in battle one after the other, the Russian and Belarusian populations are sinking into unbearable economic precariousness… and then too bad. Mission trumps all.
A renewed post-Putin Russia must imperatively get rid of this messianism. Its rhetorical swelling fuels the worst excesses, justifies the worst atrocities, denies the most fundamental truths of the dignity and value of human life. Breaking free from his grip will not be easy. It intertwines in the deep cultural strata of Russia, from the novels of Dostoyevsky to the paintings of the avant-gardes. We will have to make allowances in the reconstruction of our cultural heritage, failing which the same errors risk being repeated again and again in an endless cycle, as Chekhov so aptly described in his plays.