Putin Doesn’t Define ‘Traditional Values’ Because He Uses Them Selectively and Wants to Form a New Reality from Various Parts of the Past, Kukulin Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Aug. 10 – Vladimir Putin never define “traditional values” not only because he and his supporters invoke this term to cover different things at different times but also because he and they hope to use various parts of the past to form a popular bulwark against change even as they themselves are promoting it, Ilya Kukulin says.

            The HSE cultural historian says that the authorities are able to do this because traditional values have enormous emotional power in uniting people against those they are told are alien and because they have experienced destructive changes and want something to hold on to (polit.ru/article/2022/08/10/tsennosti/).

              What is in fact going on in Russia today, Kukulin continues, is the kind of “invention of tradition” that Eric Hobsbawn and Terence Ranger talked about in their 1983 book of that title. They showed and Russia demonstrates that many things people believe are traditional are in fact quite modern.

            A classic example of this in contemporary Russia is the widespread belief that matryoshka dolls are part of the Russian tradition, the historian says, when in fact they were developed only in 1900 and likely in response to imported Japanese dolls rather than being the products of indigenous imagination.

            More instructive in terms of its consequences is the elevation of the day of Sts. Petr and Febronia into the Day of Family, Love, and Fidelity. As liberal critics noted when the Putin regime started this in the first decade of this century, the two did not have any children and therefore could hardly be presented as a model family.

            Such efforts to insist on the traditional nature of things that aren’t has “two goals.” The first is to frighten people against any innovations the regime doesn’t present as traditional, and the second is to come up with a means of defining some people who oppose this or that step as alien to the country’s history and thus meriting disrespect.

            All totalitarian and authoritarian regimes do this, Kukulin says, because it is necessary to maintain their power. The bigger question is why so many people in some societies such as the Russian are more than eager to accept this model. According to the cultural historian, there are two reasons for that as well.

            On the one hand, there is still a significant stratum in the population that has experienced massive changes that they view as harmful and thus support those who oppose them. And on the other, the regime itself is promoting ever more rapid change but must do so in ways that keep people from being frightened of its moves. Calling them traditional is an effective way to do so.

            All this leads to censorship but it also becomes a “self-reproducing” mechanism and thus drives the regime to become more extreme in whatever direction it takes. Thus, it is likely to become more aggressive rather than less both against its own society and against the rest of the world, claiming in every case to be defending a past that never existed.

            This is already leading to absurd contradictions which may ultimately explode, Kukulin argues. For example, at a time when some Russians are putting statues of Lenin back up in Ukrainian cities the Russian army has occupied, other Russians are pushing radical Orthodox fundamentalism in the Donbass.

            For the time being at least, he concludes, these two trends coexist “because both the cult of Lenin and conservative Orthodoxy relate in equal degrees to the past and therefore as it were help defend against the future. But the future has the capacity to surprise because it comes independently of whether we want it to or not.”