Vladimir Putin's Games

While Vladimir Putin has satisfied his immense ego with the spectacle of the Sochi Winter Olympics - which so far have escaped any of the violence feared by many - things have been going to hell next door in the Ukraine where Viktor F. Yanukovych, Putin's puppet, has fled from the capital of Kiev (which was the first capital of what became the Russian empire) in the face of a popular uprising.  And interestingly enough among the things that has shocked the populace is the opulence with which Yanukovych lived  - e.g., private golf course, private zoo, antique car collection, restaurant in the form of a pirate ship - while many Ukrainians struggled to merely survive.  It's a scene that would likely be replayed if everyday Russians were ever allowed to see Putin's many residences. A column in the New York Times looks at Putin's megalomania and what appears to be his attempt to recast himself as a new Tsar and a protector of tradition as a vehicle to remain in power and carter to reactionary regimes around the world, including those using religion to dupe the citizenry and making war on gays. The sole defect of the column is that it gives too little reference to American Christofascists who have jumped on the Putin band wagon . Here are excerpts:

Today the Olympics are on Russian soil, and violence is convulsing another nation in Moscow’s traditional orbit. But the crisis in Ukraine is sending a rather different message. So far, events in Kiev have been a lesson in the limits of Russian influence, and the implausibility of Putin’s claim to offer a rival civilizational model to the liberal democratic West. 

That such a rivalry is Putin’s goal seems clear enough. After a century in which Russia styled itself a revolutionary power fighting the West’s reactionary capitalists, the former K.G.B. man has sought a return to the ideological role his nation played under the czars — as a conservative bulwark against the West’s revolutionary liberals. 

As The Week’s Michael Brendan Dougherty has pointed out, this back flip has been visible across the post-9/11 era. But it’s been thrown into relief by Putin’s recent domestic gambits — the blasphemy trial for Pussy Riot, the crackdown on gay rights, the rhetoric contrasting Russia’s “traditional values” with American and Western European relativism.

Crucially, this rhetoric isn’t just for domestic consumption: it’s also pitched to the developing world. In the British Spectator, Owen Matthews argues that just as it did in the Communist era, “Moscow is again building an international ideological alliance,” with Putin offering himself up as a potential leader for “all conservatives who dislike liberal values,” no matter what country they call home.

But there is a vast difference between Putin’s grand strategy and both its Czarist and its Soviet antecedents. 

The czars sought a “Holy Alliance” to defend a still-extant ancien régime — a rooted, hierarchical system that still governed many 19th-century European societies. But today’s Russia, brutalized by Communism and then taken over by oligarchs and grifters, is not a traditional society in any meaningful sense of the term, and the only thing it has in common with many of its potential developing-world allies is a contempt for democratic norms. In the Romanov era, the throne-and-altar idea still had a real claim to political legitimacy. But there is no comparable claim Putin can make for his own authority, and no similar mystique around his client dictators, be they Central Asian strongmen or Bashar al-Assad. 

A few voices on the American right have praised his traditionalist rhetoric — but only a few. As beleaguered as America’s social conservatives sometimes feel, we’re a long distance from signing up as useful idiots for a thuggish, obviously opportunistic “family values” crusade.

Which is not to say that Putin’s geopolitical approach is all folly. On the contrary, he often plays the great game far more effectively than his European and American counterparts. 

But the weakness of Russia, its government’s corruption and the unattractiveness of its alleged traditionalism all combine to foreclose his grandest ambitions.

This is basically what we’re watching happen in Ukraine. Despite the blunders of the European Union — which courted Kiev without seeming to realize that Russia might make a counteroffer — Putin is struggling to win a battle for influence in a country that both the Romanovs and the Soviets dominated with ease. 

For an interesting parallel to Putinism’s problems, consider what’s happening halfway around the world, in Venezuela, where the laboratory Hugo Chávez built for “Bolivarian Revolution” is descending into the same kind of violence as in Ukraine. 

The lesson in both cases is not that late-modern liberal civilization necessarily deserves uncontested dominance.  But 25 years after the Cold War, from Kiev to Caracas, there is still no plausible alternative.