Putin’s Play for the Western Right

 

Putin’s Play for the Western Right

The Russian dictator makes his pitch to the world’s reactionaries.

 

 

By Tom Nichols

The Atlantic, October 28, 2022

 

 

Russian President Vladimir Putin on stage during the Valdai International Discussion Club on October 27, 2022. (Contributor / Getty)

 

 

 

At his annual conference with foreign international-affairs experts, Vladimir Putin ranted about cancel culture and gay-pride parades. He’s trying to unite the global right.

 

Also: We’re keeping an eye on the story from San Francisco about a brutal attack on Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband, Paul. The suspect, now in custody, was apparently looking for the speaker, who was not at home. Paul Pelosi was seriously injured. For more, read my colleague David Graham’s story on the assault, ”January 6 Never Ended.”

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For nearly two decades, Russian President Vladimir Putin has held an annual event called the Valdai Discussion Club, named for the picturesque lake in Russia near where the first meeting took place in 2004. It’s a kind of Eastern Davos for influential foreigners—the Valdai website notes that this year, it included “111 experts, politicians, diplomats and economists from 41 countries”—who come for a few days of high-level discussions with the Russian political elite.

 

The star of the show, however, is always Putin, who gives a speech and then sits for questions. You go to such an event knowing that the regime is going to have its say—but even under a repressive government, there is value in such things, as my friend Dan Drezner wrote when he attended in 2016. (I went to conferences with Soviet colleagues in the old U.S.S.R. in the 1980s, and yes, they were worthwhile; I managed to learn things and exchange a few ideas.)

 

 

This year, Putin tailored his message to appeal to right-wing forces in the United States and Europe. The Russian president has been pursuing his own version of “Unite the Right” for some time now, but at Valdai, he didn’t even bother with the pretense of speaking to diplomats and public intellectuals. Instead, he baited Westerners into arguing with one another about the culture wars instead of opposing his criminal war in Ukraine.

 

It’s not hard to spot the raw meat in his speech. “If the Western elites believe they can have their people and their societies embrace what I believe are strange and trendy ideas, like dozens of genders or gay-pride parades, so be it. Let them do as they please,” he fumed. “But they certainly have no right to tell others to follow in their steps.” Putin has been attacking gay and trans people in speeches for a while, but reprising his homophobic complaints at a place like Valdai is an indication that Putin is aiming for Western televisions, not an audience of international-affairs experts.

 

There was, of course, the usual Soviet-era hangover in Putin’s discussions with the audience, including how the “so-called West” is seeking global superiority over the rest of the world. (To add “so-called” is a way of indicating that he is really speaking mostly of the decadent United States and its friends.) But Putin returned to the themes he no doubt hopes will show up in the Western media, including “cancel culture”—which is not exactly a source of anxiety in wartime Russia these days, but is of great interest to Western rightists:

And what is happening now? At one time, the Nazis reached the point of burning books, and now the Western “guardians of liberalism and progress” have reached the point of banning Dostoyevsky and Tchaikovsky. The so-called “cancel culture” and in reality—as we said many times—the real cancellation of culture is eradicating everything that is alive and creative and stifles free thought in all areas, be it economics, politics, or culture.

 

The mention of Dostoyevsky might be a reference to one Italian university that canceled and reinstated a course on the Russian author. And it’s true that while Putin’s forces are engaged in mass murder in Ukraine, some American orchestras have become skittish about playing the “1812 Overture,” which is a celebration of a Russian military victory. (The Boston Pops play it every summer at Tanglewood and on the Esplanade; this year, they decided to add the Ukrainian national anthem just before it.) This is not “canceling” Russian culture, and Putin knows it—but the accusation makes great material for Putin’s useful idiots outside of Russia.

 

(As an aside, Putin quoted from Dostoyevsky’s Demons to make his point, but in a wonderfully revealing moment, he added, “These were great thinkers and, frankly, I am grateful to my aides for finding these quotes.” Culture is important, but who has time to read those books?)

 

And, of course, Putin exhibited his classic chutzpah, the insulting audacity the Russians would call naglost. “I am convinced that real democracy in a multipolar world,” Putin said, “is primarily about the ability of any nation—I emphasize—any society or any civilization to follow its own path and organize its own sociopolitical system.” The Soviets used to say this too, but it’s especially galling to hear it as Russian forces continue their quest to erase an entire nation.

 

There was much more, but for Americans, the most important point is that among the many ways Putin intends to pursue this disastrous war in Ukraine, he is staking at least some of his hopes on undermining unity in the United States and Europe. It’s not a bad bet; the Republicans appear poised to retake the House in November, and the putative speaker, Kevin McCarthy, has already had to walk back a gaffe in which he admitted that support for Ukraine might weaken (which I think is likely) once the GOP gets control.

 

Putin would much rather have us arguing over gay rights than over how many more artillery systems to send to Ukraine. His comments at Valdai might seem like hyperventilation, Soviet-era blather, or even just plain silliness, but he knows what he’s doing. It’s up to us to make sure his culture-war-propaganda gambit doesn’t work.

 

 

Related:

• Germany is arguing with itself over Ukraine.
• The war that Russia already lost