Paul
Goble
Staunton, November 3 – Vladimir Putin
has not only moved the Valdai Club from its original venue but has also
transformed it from “an analogue to Western think tanks” with “a free dialogue”
into an exemplar of what Samuel Huntington called “the clash of civilizations,”
according to Vadim Shtepa.
The Kremlin leader began this
transformation in 2013 when he told the group that in his view, “many
Euro-Atlantic countries had in fact broken with their roots, including
Christian values which form the basis of Western civilization” by their policies
on families and faith (rufabula.com/articles/2015/11/03/valdai-club-as-a-clash-of-civilizations).
Putin’s decision to make accusations
of a religious and moral nature “surprised many participants at the time. But
somehow no one responded to Putin,” Shtepa says. “Or were those capable of
responding no longer invited to these forums?”
However that might be, Putin has
continued in the same vein. At this year’s meeting, he suggested that “representatives
of classical Russian literature see the causes of the differences between
Russia in the West on the whole and in the broad sense of the term as
reflecting differences in world view.”
“And in part they are right,” the
Kremlin leader said. The Russian weltanschauung rests on ideas about good and
evil and about the divine, while underlying Western thought, he suggested, is “interest
and pragmatism” – thus simultaneously assuming that the divine is “a priority
of Russian culture” and is absent in Western ones.
By transforming the discussion from
politics to this moral level, Putin not only creates the condition of religious
war but makes any serious discussion impossible because anyone who opposes him
is by his definition opposed to sacred things like the Russian state. And in
this sense, Shtepa says, the Valdai Club now looks all too much like “a
medieval church assembly.”
Putin’s words show that he conceives
the state as “a sacred institution standing OVER society” and that he views “any
change of this structure as an attack on ‘state sovereignty.” That does set him apart from and in conflict
with the West where the state is viewed as the servant of the people rather
than the other way around.
Such comments, of course, are “quite
strange” to hear from a former member of the CPSU “which initially set as its
goal a revolution against all historical traditions.” But now Putin claims to
be an Orthodox Christian and loves to cite the texts of leading Russian
philosophers of the 20th century.
One of those whom he has not cited
and is unlikely to, Shtepa suggests, is Georgy Fedotov “because this thinker
did not seek to eternally oppose Russia to the West but on the contrary sought
points of the future rapprochement.”
For example, Shtepa writes, “Fedotov
was an opponent of imperial centralization and in his essay, “Russia and
Freedom” (vehi.net/fedotov/svoboda.html),
wrote the following: Muscovy created Russia by conquest and by then
taking all the top strata of the population back to Moscow.
As a result and unlike in the West,
Fedotov continued, “the small motherlands lost all historical coloration of the
kind seen everywhere in France, Germany and England. Rus became only a larger Muscovy,
a territory with few distinctions and a centralized regime, natural
preconditions for despotism.”
In Russia today, Shtepa notes, “the
model of a bipolar world is again being restored in Russia, one in which a
harshly centralized country opposes the West.” Moscow assumes that the West is
equally “centralized” although this is not the case, and that assumption
creates no end of problems.
But in a reflection of the fact that
Russian thought often “combines things that cannot be combined,” Putin at the
end of this year’s Valdai meeting stopped
talking about religious things and used in a positive way the very term he had
attacked as “the foundation of Western thought.” That term was “pragmatism,” something
he said would need to triumph in Syria.
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