Despite Its Claims, Putin Regime has Nothing in Common with Genuine Conservatism, Sapozhnikov Says

Paul Goble
    Staunton, Nov. 25 – For more than a decade, Vladimir Putin has regularly proclaimed that he is a supporter of conservatism, but his approach has nothing in common with genuine conservatism and has been accepted only because internationally conservatism has been defined not in its classical sense but as an anti-liberal ideology, Andrey Sapozhnikov says.
    The Novaya Gazeta commentator argues that Putin’s abuse of conservatism has happened because Russia after 1991 did not initially focus on what it was descended from but on how it wanted to change and then got a leader, Putin, who did not want any additional changes because they would threaten his power (novayagazeta.eu/articles/2024/11/25/ne-pravye-nepravye).
    When the Russian Federation emerged as a separate country in 1991, Sapozhnikov says, “the issue of its relationship with the past was not a priority concern of the authorities.” Instead, they focused on building something new but using both the methods and often the personalities of the old regime – and any talk about that pastiche could have produced real problems.
    Genuine conservatism, which favors a small state and great respect for the diversity of the population, thus had no basis for developing. The new Russian authorities did not want the state to be limited, and they had little or no respect for the diversity of the population with its varied traditions, the commentator says.
    In actual fact, Sapozhnikov continues, “the Kremlin in principle never considered the territory under its control as a space of habits and traditions worthy of being preserved, defended or subject to coordination.” Instead, it continued to view the population as something it had the right and power to modify at its will, hardly a conservative position.
    Putin’s rise to power did not change this. Instead, he first acted as a continuer of Yeltsin’s approach at home and to the West, but only after his return to power following the Medvedev interregnum, did he begin to talk about traditional values as the core of his ideas, an approach that “was not conservative but defensive.”
    Then, following his expanded invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Putin began developing his conservative image “for export,” something that was possible because conservatism in the West had changed beyond recognition, from support for a limited state and respect for popular values and traditions to anti-liberalism as such.
    Indeed, Sapozhnikov says, Putin invokes the term conservative in the same way many of its current adepts in the West do as a synonym for opposition to liberal ideas rather than as a political doctrine in its own right. That has brought him a certain success, but it has nothing in common with genuine conservatism, the commentator concludes.