The ‘cold war’ was a conflict between Western-created secular ideologies masquerading as liberal democratic and Marxist-Leninism. These ideologies were both secular and, despite their differences, ostensibly shared the ultimate goals of equality and material well-being. Until the Bolshevik Revolution, in October 1917, Orthodox Christianity was central to the Russian culture and identity. After that violent communist revolution, however, the Bolsheviks ordered the destruction of churches and monasteries across Russia. These enemies of Christianity organised anti-religious carnivals to coincide with traditional feast days and declared the replacement of faith in God with faith in Communism. The Bolsheviks outlawed religion and imprisoned, tortured, exiled and executed thousands of Orthodox priests.
On 7 May 2000, Vladimir Putin took the presidential oath of office in the nation’s first democratic transfer of power. In his inaugural address, the new Russian leader boldly declared that he was taking on a “sacred duty” to restore Orthodox values and preserve the nation’s unity. After that, the Russian Orthodox Patriarch, Alexei II, pronounced a solemn blessing and offered him a personal prayer. Alexei II presented the new president with religious relics, handing him an icon of St Alexander Nevsky and recreated icons of the Saviour and St Nicholas. The Patriarch then humbly requested Putin “to remember about the great responsibility of the leader to his people, history and God”.
The new Western leaders are notoriously woke globalists, demonstrating increasingly Christophobic inclinations. And this precisely so at the very moment that Russia has decidedly embarked on a new phase of proud restoration of its rich Orthodox values and traditions. Arguably, a Western leader could carry on an intellectual debate with his Soviet Marxist counterpart, but it appears simply impossible for the present Western ‘woke’ leaders to do so with a Russian Orthodox nationalist counterparty.
In this context, the ongoing war in Ukraine finds its parallel in the parting of ways between Russia and the West in all matters of culture. This found expression in 2021 when Putin delivered an important speech at the Valday Club, an annual gathering of intellectuals, philosophers, writers, scholars, journalists, and politicians.[1] There the Russian President explained the disturbing cultural trends in the West and compared those to the Russian experience. Putin spoke, among other things, about the destruction of monuments in the United States, where the monuments of past heroes were torn down, just as the monuments to the Tsars were torn down in 1917 or monuments to Lenin after 1991. For the Russians that was déjà vu. Twice their old heroes became villains and the result was the politicisation of society and intolerance.[2]
Putin also spoke about feelings of guilt among Westerners concerning slavery. This, he said, causes them to use “reverse discrimination”. Now it is perfectly fine to deny a job to a white person, especially if this person is a man, in favour of a black person, especially if this person is a woman. In today’s “Western democracies” race is everywhere and anti-white discrimination is rampant. People proudly parade their colour of skin to demand advantages based on ethnicity. This, according to Putin, is similar to the Bolsheviks moving out the aristocrats from their apartments and resettling the Bolshevik activists there for the sake of “social justice”.[3] And it is European guilt about their colonial past that makes them open up their borders to millions of unskilled migrants from Africa and the Middle East, to the detriment of native inhabitants and inexorable cultural suicide.
In that particular speech, Putin specifically criticised ‘critical race theory’, which rejects ‘colour-blindness’. The most famous expression of this concept of ‘colour-blindness’ was Martin Luther King Jr’s dream that his children would ‘one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character’.[4] Putin said that King’s dream is now rejected by race theories who argue for ‘race consciousness’ and ‘recognition of racial categories’. He thinks that this is inimical to social cohesion and the preservation of national unity. Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, the former a historian and the latter a mathematician by background, note the deleterious consequences of this insidious movement across the West:
By focusing so intently on race and by objecting to ‘color blindness’ – the refusal to attach social significance to race – critical race theory threatens to undo the social taboo against evaluating people by their race. Such an obsessive focus on race … is not likely to end well – neither for minority groups nor for social cohesion more broadly. Such attitudes tear the fabric that holds contemporary societies together.[5]
What makes his speech really insightful is Putin’s thoughtful description of ‘critical race theory’ as a kind of Bolshevism. Because the West is effectively going through a destructive process of legitimising and celebrating racial discrimination, Putin refers to this remarkable phenomenon as a form of neo-Bolshevism.[6] If one substitutes the word ‘proletariat’ with ‘race’ then everything else looks pretty much the same. ‘We, the Russians, have seen it before. The oppressed proletariat (race) shakes off the chains of exploitation and asserts its rights’, Putin said.[7]
However, Putin’s sharpest critique is focused on the ongoing assault on the traditional family. Under the guise of “tolerance” “identity politics” is celebrated. As a consequence, homosexuality and other forms of “alternative” sexual practices are taught to children at schools regardless of the preference of parents. Putin believes that the traditional family is under assault in the post-Christian West, where the words “father” and “mother” have been discarded and replaced by “parent one” and “parent two”. Christian values have been thrown out and anybody with enough courage to disagree is labelled a racist or a homophobic reactionary. Intolerance is officially endorsed and compliance legally enforced.[8]
Like the vast majority of Russians, Putin is against legalising same-sex marriage or any other recasting of the traditional family. The Russian leader is adamant that his country should not follow the socially destructive path of the West, which, according to him, is a form of neo-Bolshevism.[9] Interestingly enough, in one of my edited books, Wokeshevism: Critical Theories and the Tyrant Left (2023) I called the Western Woke movement “Wokeshevism”, which is a portmanteau of “woke” and “Bolshevism”.[10] Wokeshevism denotes the woke’s revolutionary zeal of the post-Christian Western “elites” to impose their radical worldview on all parts of society and across the entire world, and to crush any dissent. James Lindsay notes that:
The term ‘Woke’ refers to being ‘awakened’ or ‘woke up’ to the alleged realities of ‘systemic power dynamics’ that order society. These alleged power dynamics are said to create what sociologists call ‘stratifications’ in society, like kinds of upper and lower classes, depending on who has ‘privilege’ and who is ‘oppressed’ by various power dynamics like systemic racism (or white supremacy), systemic sexism (or patriarchy or misogyny), cis-heteronormativity, and so on … The Marxian flavour of this analysis – which sees them as structural and sites of necessary conflict – is also obvious but hard to pin down.[11]
And what about Bolshevism? Bolshevism may be characterised by strong organisation, commitment to world communist revolution, and the rejection of objective morality as a form of ‘bourgeois oppression’.[12] Bolshevism was the political ideology and practice of the Bolsheviks, a radical Communist faction under the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. The Bolsheviks embraced a Marxist philosophy of “merciless violence” that strove for the complete annihilation of every actual and potential enemy. They displayed, according to Richard Pipes, ‘a philosophical inability to deal with opinions different from their own except by abuse and repression’.[13] For these reasons, Pipes adds, ‘they should be regarded not as utopians but as fanatics: since they refused to admit defeat even after it stared them in the face’.[14] The Bolsheviks came to power during the Russian Revolution of 1917. For them, all moral questions were ultimately subordinated to revolutionary needs. Bolshevik leaders identified themselves as a moral and political vanguard, whose messianic sense of calling demanded that its members prove their worthiness to belong to that elite.[15] As history professor Orlando Figes points out:
Bolsheviks were expected … to be involved in the daily practice of its rituals – its oaths and songs, ceremonies, cults, and codes of conduct – just as the believers of organized religion performed their belief when they attended church. But the Party’s doctrines were to be taken as articles of faith by all its followers. Its collective judgement was to be accepted as Justice. Accused of crimes by the leadership, the Party member was expected to repent, to go down on his knees before the Party and welcome its verdict against him. To defend oneself was to add another crime: dissent from the will of the Party.[16]
The Russians, of course, have already seen all that destructive Marxist ideologies can generate and are immune to this new form of Western Bolshevism. In 2024, when elected to his third consecutive term in office, he refused to debate the Communist challenger. His views, as opinion polls recurrently show, find genuine support from the majority-conservative Russian population. People in Russia do not want to emulate the West, and rightly so.[17] Instead, ideological separation from the decadent West has been encouraged through the concept of separate paths for Russia, breaking economic, political, and cultural ties with the decadent West. For example, with unanimous approval in the Duma (i.e.; Russian Parliament),
Putin signed bills banning medical procedures and surgeries used to change one’s biological sexual orientation. The changing of public records and personal identification to declare changes in gender are not legal including same-sex marriage licenses. In September 2022, the court in St. Petersburg uphold a prosecutor’s appeal to declare that social media posts which condone or promote LGBTQ and transgenderism as socially acceptable norms are illegal in Russia.[18]
In his speeches, Putin often condemns Western nations for departing from their traditional Christian morality – for effectively becoming the world’s leading advocate of materialism, sexual immorality and transsexuality. In some of his public speeches, the Russian leader directly attacks the Western ‘woke’ elites for practising what he vividly describes as a form of “religious Satanism”, where even the lives of little children are sacrificed. The West, in his view, is promoting a culture of death, provoking gender confusion, and even altering the physical nature of children, thus leading, in Christ’s words, these “little ones to stumble.” In a remarkable speech delivered on 30 September 2022, Putin declared:
Do we really want in our schools, from elementary school, for children to be imposed perversions that lead to their degradation and destruction? That they are taught that in addition to a man and a woman there are other genders and they are offered some operations for gender change? Do we really want this for our country, for our children? All this is unacceptable to us, we have our own different future. Such denial of a human being, the rejection of traditional faith and values, and the suppression of freedom appear to me as a form of religion of perversion, pure Satanism. [19]
Many Russians do not necessarily love Putin per se. What they really love is Putin’s Russia and its return to traditional Christian Orthodox values. According to Paul Coyer, an American foreign policy expert with a focus on the geopolitics of Eurasia, ‘Putin is broadly perceived as the champion of a Russian nation beset by a hostile West determined to reshape Russia in its own image’.[20] And yet, says Dr Coyer, ‘even without Putin, the conflict between Russia and the West will not fade away. One of the reasons is that culture, including that of Russian Orthodoxy, is at stake’.[21] Still, Putin has the undeniable merit of dramatically increasing the strength of Russian Orthodox Christianity, with over 20,000 churches being built from 2000 onwards. As Dr Coyer points out,
Around 25,000 Russian Orthodox churches have been built or rebuilt since the early 1990’s, the vast majority of which have been built during Putin’s rule and largely due to his backing and that of his close circle of supporters. Additionally, the Church has been given rights that have vastly increased its role in public life, including the right to teach religion in Russia’s public schools and the right to review any legislation before the Russian Duma.[22]
Little wonder the Russian Orthodox Patriarch calls Putin a “miracle of God”. With the war in Ukraine, however, the Russian President has been painted by Western leaders as “the most evil man in the world”.[23] Of course, this is all propaganda. Putin often draws attention to the fact that the West has moved away entirely from traditional Christian culture and values that had founded and sustained this civilisation. Arguably, Putin’s “war” is not against Ukraine but against a “decadent” and imperialist West. The Russian leader stated in a speech in 2013:
We see that many Euro-Atlantic countries have taken the way where they deny or reject their own roots, including their Christian roots which form the basis of Western civilization. In these countries, the moral basis and any traditional identity are being denied – national, religious, cultural and even gender identities are being denied or relativized.
There politics treats a family with many children as equal to a homosexual partnership; faith in God is equal to faith in Satan. The excesses and exaggerations of political correctness in these [Western] countries indeed lead to a serious consideration for the legitimisation of parties that promote the propaganda of paedophilia.
The people in many European States are actually ashamed of their religious affiliations and are indeed frightened to speak about them. Christian Holidays and celebrations are abolished for “neutrality” renamed, as if one were ashamed of those Christian holidays. With this method one hides away the deeper moral value of these celebrations. And these countries try to force this model onto other countries, globally.
I am deeply convinced that this is a direct way to the degradation and primitivization of culture. This leads to deeper demographic and moral crisis in the West. What can be a better evidence for the moral crisis of a society [in the West] than the loss of reproductive function? And today nearly all “developed” Western countries cannot survive reproductively, not even with the help of migrants.
Without the moral values that are rooted in Christian and other world religions, without rules and moral values which have formed and been developed over millennia, people will inevitably lose their human dignity, become brutes. And we think it is right and natural to defend and preserve these moral Christian values.[24]
On 21 February 2023, while delivering a State of the Nation address to the Russian people, Putin accused Western elites of deliberately distorting historical facts in order to impose their “woke” ideologies. He mocked what he perceives as “Western stupidity,” adding that the “decadent” West is deliberately waging a “culture war” against Russian Orthodox culture. Putin declared:
Their main target is, of course, the younger generation and our younger generation. And here, once again, they lie constantly. They distort historical facts, constantly attacking our culture, the Russian Orthodox Church and other traditional religious organizations in the country. Look at what they do to their own people: the destruction of the notion of family, culture and national identity. Perversion, child abuse, and even paedophilia are declared the norm – the norm of their way of life.
I would like to say to you: Look at the Holy Scripture, the sacred books of all the other religions of the world. It’s all said there – including the fact that marriage is the union of a man and a woman. But even these sacred texts are now being revised. As it has become known, the Church of England, for example, plans to consider the idea of a gender-neutral God. What can I say? May God forgive them for they do not know what they are doing. [25]
Alexander Etkind is a leftist academic who was born in Leningrad and is now a professor of history at the European University Institute in Florence. He unwittingly vindicates the worst feelings of the Russian leader towards the West. According to him, “by promoting Trump and Brexit” and supporting “far-right” movements across Europe, that is, conservative-nationalist movements, as well as practising “climate denialism” and “increasing homophobia”, Vladimir Putin, according to him, is basically a genocidal “far-right” dictator.[26] Etkind distinguishes the traditional Orthodox values advocated by Putin, which he disparagingly calls “paleomodernity,” on the one hand, and the “gaiamodernity” of the West that embraces “climate awareness” and the transsexual agenda, on the other, which he thinks is great.[27]
According to a Levada poll released nine years ago, 60 per cent of the Russians believe that the West poses a serious existential threat to their country. 31 per cent believe that Washington could attempt to invade and occupy Russia. Perhaps even more significantly, 36 per cent of the population is convinced that the West is attempting to impose “alien and decadent” values system on Russia’s society.[28] Hence, ‘Russia has an advantage in its citizens’ mindsets, in that they are more fiercely dedicated to their homeland. By contrast, a 2015 Pew Research Center poll found that Europeans overwhelmingly would not be willing to fight for their countries’.[29]
Like many Americans, the majority of Russians strongly believe in their nation’s uniqueness and sense of destiny. Putin knows what Russians expect of their leader: something close to godlike status. He is, therefore, ‘keen on creating a leader’s image steeped in tradition, history, and mythology, often associated with the uniqueness of the “Russian soul” – spiritual endurance, persevering patience, belief in miracles, and material sacrifice.’[30] Accordingly, many Russians believe that their present leader has restored their nation’s status of a great power, which the Russians believe is destined by Divine Providence for leadership and the advancement of Christian Orthodox values, particularly in Eurasia.[31]
To avoid the undesirable Westernization of Russia, the activities of Western-sponsored NGOs are slowly and surely being curtailed in Russia. Under Putin’s leadership, Open Russia Foundation, an NGO created under the banner of George Soros’s Open Society Institute was rightly dissolved. The goal of Open Russia Foundation was to radically change Russian society via the injection of millions of dollars in “educational” and “cultural” projects, especially “cultural youth projects”.[32] Henry Kissinger, Lord (Jacob) Rothschild and Arthur Hartman, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia, were among its board members. According to Mark Fulmer, a geopolitical analyst and head of the U.S.-based Real Geopolitics,
Soros’s Open Society has provided more funding than any other progressive left-wing organization to totalitarian regimes around the world and has advance the cause of a new world order even in the U.S. with the appointment of liberal judges and leftist politicians.[33]
Vladimir Putin has come to see the greater threat coming from domestic weakness – possibly supported by hostile foreign powers – and thus his regime is essentially conservative.[34] Besides Soros’s Open Russia Foundation, any other so-called “progressive” organisation that receives funds from these Western oligarchs is duly required to declare itself as an agency of foreign influence. Pro-Western media outlets in Russia are not necessarily banned but they have to bear an inscription that they are receiving funding from Western individuals and/or organisations. They are deemed foreign-sponsored entities.[35] This is also in direct response to Western measures against the Russia Today media outlet, which was banned in “Western democracies”.
Although an avowed supporter of Orthodox Christianity, at first, the Russian leader was quite willing to be a partner with the West, assuming that so long as Russia backed the U.S.-led “Global War on Terror” the Western leaders would treat his country with respect and not threaten its national borders.[36] During his first years in the presidential office, writes Russian history professor Orlando Figes,
Putin looked to further Russia’s integration with the West. In interviews he spelled out his vision of the country as ‘part of western European culture’, and said that he was open to the possibility of Russian joining NATO and the European Union. Everything depended on how Western institutions would respond, on how NATO, in particular, would act in regions where the Russians had security concerns, historic links and sensitivities, which, if offended or ignored, might provoke an aggressive response from Moscow … Russia wanted to be part of Europe, to be treated with respect. But if it was rejected by the West’s leaders, of if they humiliated it, Russia would rebuild itself and arm itself against the West.[37]
If in the early years of Putin’s presidency merging with the West was a goal, now a conservative Orthodox movement has begun to define Russia’s separate path. The Russians want to be a civilisation in its own right.[38] Whatever one might think of this, ‘Putin deserves full credit for stabilising the country at home and restoring its role on the world stage’, says Mark Galeotti, a British historian and writer on Russian history.[39] Not only does Putin believe that his country’s greatest strength lies in its traditional Orthodox values and national social cohesion, but also that isolation from the irremediably decadent West allows the Russians to preserve their own Byzantine inheritance and Slavonic culture, untouched by the socially destructive trends destroying Western Europe and North America.[40] According to Putin, writes Galeotti,
Russia is not an Asiatic country, or yet – even though some use the term – a ‘Eurasian’ hybrid. It is European, but proper European. It was Russians who defended Europe time and again, sometimes from enemies without, such as the Golden Horde, at others those within, whether would-be conquerors such as Napoleon or Hitler, or forces of chaos and deviance. In other words, the line is that Russia holds to the true European values at a time when the nations to its west have abandoned them. Its Orthodox faith is the genuine form of Christianity, just as its social conservatism is simply a refusal to cater to degenerate fads and post-modern moral subjectivism.[41]
Above all, Vladimir Putin’s criticism of Western wokery – a form of neo-Bolshevism – reveals that the Russian leader has made a substantial break with the “Westernisers”, and with those who collectively are described in Russia as Atlantic integrationists.[42] Putin is now calling for a “healthy conservatism” based on respect for traditional family values and Christian Orthodox morality. From this perspective, Russia is not abandoning its rich cultural heritage but it is the West itself that has completely abandoned its own cultural heritage in favour of multiculturalism and other socially detrimental ideologies that effectively mimic Bolshevism. As Fulmer points out, ‘Putin is a conservative traditionalist to the core and is unapologetic about the values and convictions on morality’.[43] Accordingly, Putin sees the West’s growing immorality and spiritual decline as posing an existential threat to the nation’s renewed conservative values and Orthodox Christianity. Who can disagree with him?
Professor Augusto Zimmermann PhD, LLM, LLB, CIArb is a former member of the Law Reform Commission in Western Australia and a former associate dean (research) at Murdoch University, School of Law. He is also the President and Founder of WALTA Legal Theory Association.
[1] ‘Valdai Discussion Club Meeting’, YouTube, 22 October 2021, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctLOtI32cWY
[2] Vladimir N. Brovkin, From Vladimir Lenin to Vladimir Putin (Routledge, 2024) 267.
[3] Ibid.
[4] ‘Read Martin Luther King Jr’s ‘I Have a Dream’ Speech In Its Entirety’, NPR (Web Page, 14 January 2022).
[5] Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, Cynical Theories: How Universities Made Everything about Race, Gender and Identity – and Why This Harms Everybody (Swift Press, 2020) 134.
[6] Vladimir N. Brovkin, From Vladimir Lenin to Vladimir Putin (Routledge, 2024) 267.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid. 268.
[9] Ibid. 267.
[10] See: Augusto Zimmermann and Joshua Forrester (ed.), Wokeshevism: Critical Theories and the Tyrant Left (Connor Court Publishing, 2023). See, in particular, ‘Introduction’, 17-29.
[11] James Lindsay, ‘Forward’ in Charles Pincourt and James Lindsay, Counter Wokecraft: A Field Manual for Combatting the Woke in the University and Beyond (Independently published, 2021).
[12] Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia (Penguin Books, 2007) 33.
[13] Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime (Vintage Books, 1995) 500.
[14] Ibid.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Ibid 34. This may explain why so many Bolsheviks surrendered to their fate in the purges under Joseph Stalin in the 1930s, even when they were innocent of the crimes of which they stood accused.
[17] Vladimir N. Brovkin, From Vladimir Lenin to Vladimir Putin (Routledge, 2024) 268.
[18] Mark Fulmer, The Proxy War in Ukraine: A Geopolitical Strategy of the Global Elites (Liberty Hill Publishing, 2024) 126.
[19] ‘A perverted religion, outright Satanism: Putin attacks the West while praising Russian values’, Daily Mail, 30 September 2022, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxS9YIBeJbY
[20] Paul Coyer, ‘(Un)Holly Alliance: Vladimir Putin, The Russian Orthodox Church And Russian Exceptionalism’, Forbes, 21 May 2015, at https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulcoyer/2015/05/21/unholy-alliance-vladimir-putin-and-the-russian-orthodox-church/
[21] Ibid.
[22] Ibid.
[23] Tim Costello, ‘Vladimir Putin: a miracle defender of Christianity or the most evil man?’, The Guardian, 6 March 2022, at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/06/vladimir-putin-a-miracle-defender-of-christianity-or-the-most-evil-man
[24] ‘The Real Putin? Epic Speech Reveals All’, Think Again Australia, 15 March 2022, at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/06/vladimir-putin-a-miracle-defender-of-christianity-or-the-most-evil-man#commentshttps://www.bitchute.com/video/zCfVP3LRT4u2/
[25] ‘Putin mocks ‘gender-neutral God’ proposed by Church of England’, Daily Mail, 21 February 2023, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ib79nDamfno
[26] Alexander Etkind, Russia Against Modernity (Polity, 2023).
[27] Ibid.
[28] Paul Coyer, ‘(Un)Holly Alliance: Vladimir Putin, The Russian Orthodox Church And Russian Exceptionalism’, Forbes, 21 May 2015, at https://www.forbes.com/sites/paulcoyer/2015/05/21/unholy-alliance-vladimir-putin-and-the-russian-orthodox-church/
[29] ‘Paul Coyer discusses Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church’, Institute of World Politics, 11 June 2015, at https://www.iwp.edu/past-events/2015/06/11/paul-coyer-discusses-putin-and-the-russian-orthodox-church/
[30] Nina Khrushcheva and Jeffrey Tayler, In Putin’s Footsteps: Searching for the Soul of an Empire Across Russia’s Eleven Time Zones (St. Martin’s Press, 2019) 8.
[31] Rebekah Koffler, ‘Is Russia’s Putin a devout Christian or ha she weaponized religion to advance his personal ambitions?’, Fox News, 27 March 2024, at https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/is-russias-putin-devout-christian-has-he-weaponized-religion-advance-personal-ambitions
[32] Ibid.
[33] Mark Fulmer, The Proxy War in Ukraine: A Geopolitical Strategy of the Global Elites (Liberty Hill Publishing, 2024) 23.
[34] Ibid.
[35] Ibid. 269.
[36] Ibid. 176.
[37] Orlando Figes, The Story of Russia (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022) 283.
[38] Ibid. 268.
[39] Mark Galeotti, A Short History of Russia (Penguin Random House, 2022) 182.
[41] Mark Galeotti, A Short History of Russia (Penguin Random House, 2022) 179-180.
[42] Ibid.
[43] Mark Fulmer, The Proxy War in Ukraine: A Geopolitical Strategy of the Global Elites (Liberty Hill Publishing, 2024) 126.
