From Mr Putin (Fiona Hill & Clifford Gaddy, 2015) p253-6
Beyond politicians, parties, and movements, the Russian Orthodox Church was the sole organization in Russia with mass mobilizing potential for patriotic purposes. Religious events attracted hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom had some sympathies for nationalist political agendas. Putin had to ensure that the Church hierarchy and believers stayed focused on spiritual matters, not politics. During the Soviet period, the state and the KGB had been greatly concerned about the potential political appeal of Russian priests and religious activists. As British journalist Oliver Bullough recounts in The Last Man in Russia – which retraces the life of one of these figures, Father Dmitry Dudko – the state was always worried that a priest or a patriarch might make the leap from the spiritual realm to the realm of politics. Even when the activities of a religious figure were seemingly innocuous or even beneficial to society, as in the case of Father Dudko’s mobilization of his congregation against alcohol abuse, the state feared that these activities might rally the public to further political action. Dissident priests were treated just as harshly by the KGB as political dissenters.
In the wake of the 2011-12 protests, Putin and the Kremlin needed a unifying set of ideas that would appeal to the maximum number of people. Russian Orthodoxy offered both deep ideas and intensity. It also helped to provide a clear dividing line between nash and chuzhoy, between “us” and “them.” It removed the gray zone. You were either a Russian Orthodox or religious believer, or you were not. The Kremlin’s attack on Pussy Riot signaled the approach. The members of the group were “hooligans,” and were convicted of hooliganism. They had not insulted Putin with their “Punk Prayer,” they had insulted the Russian Orthodox Church. Their performance art had defiled the inner sanctum of one of the Church’s most sacred places. Pussy Riot members were anarchists, but worse than this, they were atheists, nonbelievers. They and their kind – the Russian intelligentsia and others who embraced their cause – were chuzhoy. They were not part of the true Russian community. This viewpoint resonated in Russian opinion polls. Russian citizens were somewhat sympathetic to the plight of the young women as they faced trial, but they had no sympathy whatsoever with what Pussy Riot had done and thought some kind of punishment was deserved.
Putin’s overall conclusion from his observations of the 2011-12 protests was that Pussy Riot, the intelligentsia, and the urban professionals had all acted as a “fifth column” for foreign influence during the events. As we will discuss in more detail in chapter 14, he determined that whether they intended to be or not, they became conduits for Western attempts to undermine his presidency. In the wake of the protests, those who followed their example would be similarly extirpated, and they would be excommunicated. They would find themselves outside the big tent coalition and, instead, in the camp of the chuzhoy. In his address to the nation in December 2012, Putin marked out this new dividing line in Russian society:
In society there are always some sort of bacilli that infect the organisms of society or the state. But they are only activated when immunity to them is lowered, when problems appear, when the masses begin to suffer. . . . I think it was Pushkin . . . who once said: “We have a lot of people who stand in opposition not to the government, but to Russia.” Unfortunately, our intelligentsia has this tradition. This is of course because they always want to highlight how civilized and learned they are. They want to follow the best models. And perhaps this is inevitable at a certain stage of development. But it is undeniable that this loss of self-identification with the state during the periods both of the collapse of the Russian Empire and the collapse of the Soviet Union was ruinous and destructive. We must understand this in advance and not allow the state to fall into such a condition as it did in the final phase of World War I or, for instance, in the last years of existence of the Soviet Union.
Putin’s punishment of the women from Pussy Riot and these harsh statements were all very logical from his point of view. He had a situation to deal with. He also had potent tools to deal with it – the Russian Orthodox Church and Russian nationalism. Putin had always criticized the Bolsheviks for destroying the Church and depriving the Russian government of using this important instrument. Russian nationalism was more risky to deploy, as Putin had concluded at the beginning of his presidency (see chapter 3), but it could also be used in certain circumstances if he exercised appropriate caution. Over the course of the 2000s, Putin had gradually begun to suggest in his speeches that “universal values,” as argued by the United States and the West, were, by definition, anti-Russian. Instead of being universal, they were actually the West’s own values, which it sought to impose on others. True “Russianness” (russkost’) was instead embodied in the Orthodox Church. In his annual address to the Russian parliament in December 2012, Putin called on the Russian people to turn inward to protect the Russian state. He asserted that the international system Was entering a critical period that could be a “turning point” for Russia in terms of increasing risks and threats rather than opportunities. Russia should not reach out to the world under these circumstances. Instead, “real Russians” should look inward and even physically move inward, deep into the Russian Provinces, where the repositories of russkost’ could be found. Russians, Putin commanded, should look to their own patriotism, not Westernism; to solidarity, not individualism; to spirituality, not consumerism and moral decay.
A year later, in his annual address of December 2013, Putin went even further in using language that he had previously avoided when sketching out the contours of the Russian Idea in the early 2000s (see chapter 3). He told Russians that Russia would now have to go it alone. It should create its own model in world affairs and become a bastion and champion of political and social conservatism. The West was not a model for Russia, Putin argued. Its “allegedly more progressive model of development” was more likely to lead to “retrogression, barbarism, and much blood” than to global and regional stability. Putin’s speech was replete with old Russian Orthodox Church terms and historical allusions. He invoked “Russia’s historic responsibility” to “defend its value-based approaches . . . [i]ncluding in international relations.” He denounced “the ‘top down’ destruction of traditional values” in the West, which was, in his view, implemented on the basis of “abstract ideas, against the will of the majority.” Putin declared that “more and more people support our position on the defense of traditional values, which for millennia have constituted the spiritual and moral basis of civilization, of every nation: the values of the traditional family, of genuine human life, including religious life -not just material life but spiritual life as well. . . .” And Putin confirmed: “Of course, this is a conservative position. But . .. the meaning of conservatism is not that it prevents movement forward and upward, but that it prevents movement backward and downward, to the chaotic darkness, a return to a primitive condition.”
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