Russia: An ideology for domestic purposes and another for foreign

Nationalism or internationalism or both?

It has been obvious to even casual observers of the Russian political scene that Russia has had a severe problem of ideological self-definition since the dissolution of the Soviet Union. This is not surprising. The country has gone through remarkable political changes over a century; changes that required ideological reformulation at every step of the way. In a span of one hundred years, it has overthrown a centuries-old monarchical rule that drew its ideological inspiration from Eastern Roman Empire; it then created the embryo of a new universalist classless state that, in theory, should be joined by all societies that adopted communism; this cosmopolitan project became Russianized after World War II with Rusia being, tacitly, treated as a senior partner in the Union. (Being a senior partner did not always come with advantages only: Russia was the only republic without its own Communist party or its own Academy of Sciences.)

And then, it decided to destroy that Union, that some of its population and its leader in particular, perceived as a burden and to create a big, but much more territorially limited, oligarchic republic that, in its brief existence, oscillated between anarchy and rule of business leaders-cum-assassins. Finally, the rise of intelligence services to the top created an entirely new situation that, in turn, required an ideological rationalization.

The uniqueness of the rise of the intelligence service to the top in Russia is often not correctly assessed. It is true that secret or intelligence services were always very powerful, in the Empire or the Soviet Union. But in both cases they were not the deciders. Okhrana was under formal and often (but not always) effective control of the Tsar and its entourage. For sure, like any intelligence service, it at times did operations on its own—most famously and bizarrely, the operation (which backfired spectacularly) to incite workers’ discontent and create “false” trade unions—but it did not rule the land. Likewise, the power of the Cheka, GPU, NKVD, MVD and finally KGB derived from the Politburo and later from Stalin. And even after Stalin, all the way to the terminal crisis of the Soviet Union (under Andropov), the power emanated from the Politburo. In a recent book on Russia NKVD’s omnipotence is allegedly illustrated by its massive executions of people during the Great Terror. But this is a misinterpretation of its power. NKVD was simply executing people on Stalin’s orders. It was a tool, not a decider. Even under Beria, who surely had more power than any of his predecessors, it was doing what it was told. The party controlled both the sword and the shield (that are shown on Cheka’s coat of arms).

This head-spinning succession of changes over the past hundred years has understandably led to intellectual confusion. What is the Russian idea and country’s raison d’etre? Yeltsin, naively, believed that if he organized a (paid) competition for the best national idea, the problem could be solved. Is Russia an empire, a multi-ethnic federation, an ethnic-based country, a community of all Russians anywhere (русский мир)? A beacon for the world or a self-interested imperial power?

The ideological confusion, present since the 1990s, has reached its apogee under the current rule by the secret police. Intelligence services in Russia seem to believe that ideologies can be proclaimed by decree. Ideologies are, it seems, the same as nominations to a higher post, or the decisions to designate somebody a “foreign agent”. It suffices to put together in the same room three secret policemen and three university professors for three days, and they would come up with the ideology that will be then declared by an ukase.

Putin has therefore formulated two distinct and mutually incompatible ideologies. Domestically, it is the ideology of a great imperial nation that has been unjustly shorn of some of its attributes by Communist, and especially Leninist, rule. In his famous Summer 2021 long historical article, Putin criticizes Russian Bolsheviks and Lenin personally for pushing the Eastern Ukraine revolutionary regime (Donetsk-Krivoy Rog republic), against its own wishes, to become a part of the Ukrainian republic. The “Leninist” borders thus artificially separated eastern Ukraine, populated mostly by ethnic Russians, from their Russian brethren. Communism is attacked for destroying Russia and “Russianness”. The patriarch, the priests and all the assortment of such individuals known from the 19^th century processions is brought back for every state occasion: from the blessing of the troops sent to die on the front, to various anniversaries or funerals. Putin openly fashions the country (and perhaps himself) on the Tsarist three ideological pillars: autocracy, pan-Slavism, and orthodoxy. But while these pillars had some sense under Romanovs, they scarcely have any, except for autocracy, today. How can Russia’s ideology be the protection of Slavs and orthodoxy when it is engaged in a war against a Slavic and orthodox nation closest to itself in culture and history? Indeed, Tsars also suppressed Ukrainian nationalism (which was an entirely marginal political force then), but did not send drones on Kiev. Even the autocracy, the only plausible connection between Tsardom and FSB-ism is shaky: autocracy (Emperor, the autocrat; царь самодержец) was based on a multi-century tradition, and derived from Byzantine caesaro-papism. It thus had both cultural and historical roots. Nothing remotely alike exists in the current regime.

But to make the ideological confusion complete—and this is my principal point—Putin has devised for international consumption an entirely different ideology. This has happened with force since 2022 and the war with Ukraine. According to that narrative, Russia is the new leader of the Global Majority and is leading the rest of the world in the opposition to the hegemony of the richest and most powerful states. This ideology appears like some risible ersatz of Lenin’s 1920s synthesis of Marxism and anti-colonial struggle. But while Lenin was a serious theoretician, the current leaders are not. Lenin saw the Soviet Union as a prototype of the classless and cosmopolitan state in accordance with key Marxist tenets. Such a state would naturally be an ally in the anti-colonial struggle of the rising Asian and African nations. It was fully ideologically coherent to support India and China in their anti-colonial struggles even when the main domestic forces in those countries were bourgeois because the Soviet Union stood for internationalism and end of colonial exploitation. It is ludicrous to claim for Russia internationally the ideology it explicitly rejects domestically. How can a country that, according to self-description stands for autocracy and nationalism lead the “Global South” in its struggle for a more equitable world? One cannot affirm the principles of imperialism and nationalism in the morning to one audience, and in the afternoon, when speaking to a different audience, proclaim himself to be an internationalist and in favor of equality of all nations.

Russia has thus found itself ideologically at a total impasse. Not only in the projection of its ideology domestically, where similar contradictions (which I do not discuss here) exist in the treatment of Tsarist and communist experiences (is Stalin great because he won World War II or a villain who mined and exploded hundreds of Russian orthodox churches?)—but most crucially at the global level where the contradiction between nationalism for domestic purposes and (alleged) internationalism for foreign purposes shows fully its paradoxical nature.

The issue perhaps would not have been so important if Russia were some small country where similar ideological contradictions might matter for the county itself, but not for the rest of the world (Serbia and Croatia are such examples). But what is the dominant ideology in Russia, and how Russia sees itself both in regard to its own history and to the world today, can become (and is) dramatically important because it might lead now, or in a few years’ time, to bigger wars and conflicts and even nuclear apocalypse. While power is always important the use of that power is shaped by countries’ and leaders’ perceptions of what they are fighting for, and what they can convince their citizens to die for, and thus the role of ideology is crucial in all modern societies as indeed it was in the past.