[In a new collection, Ilya Budraitskis provides a trenchant
analysis of the ideological underpinnings of Putin’s Russia and the
domestic political groups that have opposed his government.]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

PUTINISM’S DEFEATED OPPOSITION  
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Aleksandra Simonova
October 1, 2022
Dissent
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_ In a new collection, Ilya Budraitskis provides a trenchant analysis
of the ideological underpinnings of Putin’s Russia and the domestic
political groups that have opposed his government. _

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_Dissidents among Dissidents
Ideology, Politics and the Left in Post-Soviet Russia_
by Ilya Budraitskis Translated by Giuliano Vivaldi Introduction by
Tony Wood
Verso
ISBN: 9781839764189

The shocking scope and brutality of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine
have prompted legions of journalists, pundits, and academics to try to
explain the conditions, rationale, and possible outcomes of Vladimir
Putin’s war, often by drawing connections back to the Soviet and
imperial periods. In this cluttered and uneven field of interpretation
and polemic, Russian leftist activist, art critic, and historian Ilya
Budraitskis’s new collection of essays, _Dissidents Among
Dissidents, _comes as a much-needed intervention.

Published in English in a highly readable translation by Giuliano
Vivaldi just prior to the invasion, Budraitskis’s book offers
non-Russian speakers a trenchant analysis of the ideological
underpinnings of Putin’s Russia and the domestic political groups
that have opposed his government. Although written before speculation
about a Russian invasion had begun in earnest, Budraitskis’s
examinations of post-Soviet Russian politics help contextualize the
conflict, including Ukraine’s centrality to Putin’s vision of
Russian domestic and geopolitical interests, as well as the inability
of the Russian opposition to either predict or prevent the scale of
the invasion.

Budraitskis suggests that there is a fundamental paradox of Russian
politics under Putin: the desire to be both inside and outside of the
Western geopolitical order. This paradox was not obvious at the
beginning of Putin’s tenure. In the early 2000s, he tried to follow
Boris Yeltsin’s conciliatory diplomatic style, as Russian journalist
Mikhail Zygar argued in _All the Kremlin’__s Men _(2016). At the
time, Putin appeared keen on bringing Russia closer to NATO and
international organizations such as the UN, seemingly out of a desire
to make Russia an equal partner of Western states. In pursuit of this
goal, he had to accept what they framed as the correct model of world
politics, including the expansion of NATO into the former Soviet bloc.
But Putin ultimately felt he was being humiliated by a global
hierarchy that continued to be dominated by Western norms and
interests.

Putin had also inherited the democratic institutions—elections,
separation of powers, and anticorruption policies—that were
implemented in Russia in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In his first
decade in power, he did not object to democracy outright but added
qualifications instead: in 2006, Vladislav Surkov, First Deputy Chief
of Putin’s administration, developed the idea of Russia as a
“sovereign democracy,” meaning that democratic forms had to be
adjusted to Russia’s specific regional and geopolitical position,
thus subordinating democracy to state sovereignty. No outside
institutions or states should impose standards, democratic or
otherwise, on Putin’s regime.

Budraitskis argues that 2012 marked a turning point for this vision of
sovereign democracy. In December 2011, protests exploded in Moscow
over accusations of electoral fraud during the country’s
parliamentary elections, which included allegations of ballot
stuffing. A few months later, the largest protest movement in over a
decade emerged to call for fair presidential elections. Yet Putin
celebrated victory in March with only about 30 percent of the vote
counted. Observers said he had faced no real competition and unfairly
benefited from lavish government spending on his own behalf, as well
as from a change to the constitution implemented by outgoing President
Dmitry Medvedev that was designed to allow Putin to remain in power.
He continued to claim that his political rule was democratic even as
his government suppressed demonstrations and prosecuted protesters,
who he claimed were Western agents.

By 2014, Budraitskis writes, “Russia had abandoned its doomed
attempts to fit into” the Western-oriented model of international
relations, and began to more forcefully claim a right to intervene in
foreign countries and reshape international borders. Budraitskis
argues that Putin modeled Russia’s international stance on Samuel P.
Huntington’s idea of a clash of civilizations—distinct
geohistorical regions whose cultural specificities place them in
inevitable conflict with one another. Russia, Budraitskis writes, has
positioned itself as the center of _Russkiy Mir _(the Russian
world)—a union of territories bound together by a shared culture and
historical mission, and whose conservative Orthodox values stand in
opposition to the liberal West. In a recent speech, Putin argued that
a clash between Russia and the “collective West” has been going on
for decades. The West provoked Russia into starting the “special
military operation” in Ukraine, he declared. Their victory in this
operation would set up “the beginning of a radical breakdown
of the U.S.-style world order.”

Ukraine has long been a key frontier for Putin’s ambitions. In
November 2013, Ukrainians began protesting at Maidan in Kyiv over
President Viktor Yanukovych’s decision to abandon an agreement with
the European Union in favor of closer integration with Russia. The
uprising, which split public opinion in Ukraine, culminated in 2014
with Yanukovych being forced from office—and Russia’s annexation
of Crimea. For Putin, the Euromaidan underscored how the goal of
Ukrainian integration with Europe conflicted with Russia’s
geopolitical interests in the former Soviet Union. The protests also
seemed to mirror internal Russian discontent and the orientation of a
large portion of the Russian population toward Europe—an inclination
that the Russian government has actively suppressed since 2013 as part
of what Budraitskis calls the country’s “conservative turn.”

To understand the ideology of this turn, Budraitskis turns to the
early-twentieth-century Russian philosopher Ivan Ilyin, whom Putin has
referenced in speeches on multiple occasions. An Orthodox and
neo-Hegelian thinker, Ilyin believed that there were universal laws to
which a nation must submit in order to fulfill its destiny. Human
history is about the unfolding of each nation’s Spirit, which a
political leader must be able to comprehend and follow. Violent and
oppressive actions by the state can be justified if they follow the
laws of this Spirit and counteract the forces of Evil (which, for
Ilyin, was largely represented by the liberal decadence of the West).
Putin’s government has invoked this sense of national destiny to
justify the repressive features of the Russian state and the war in
Ukraine.

Budraitskis also addresses the Putin regime’s notoriously
complicated relation to the Soviet past. While the Stalinist period,
especially during the Second World War (called the Great Patriotic War
in official Russian discourse), has been taken as a model for the
current Russian state, the dominant government narrative characterizes
the Russian Revolution as a mistake. For Putin, the 1917 revolution
showed the destructive power that can be unleashed in attempts to
realize radical change. According to the former chairman of the State
Duma, Sergei Naryshkin, the memory of the revolution is why Russia
“highly values stability” today. Putin embraces the conservative
turn under Stalin’s rule, which demonstrated what Budraitskis calls
“the triumph of the ‘reason of the state.’” In particular, the
victory over the Nazis in 1945 serves as proof of the benefits of
authoritarianism. For the Kremlin, the formal political
characteristics of the Russian regime—whether it is monarchical,
socialist, or liberal democratic—do not matter so long as the
hierarchical “nature” of the state persists. The Ukrainian
government is seen as illegitimate in part because it is a descendant
of the 2014 Maidan revolution—and revolution deviates from the
historical destiny of the Russian world.

Budraitskis also comments on how this authoritarian vision relates to
Russia’s neoliberal economic model; writing prior to the Russian
invasion of Ukraine, however, he did not anticipate the potential
contradiction between Putin’s political and economic projects. The
sanctions imposed in response to the war in Ukraine have devastated
the Russian economy, with hundreds of companies abandoning the country
along with thousands of educated Russians. Russia is now largely
excluded from the global financial system and trade with Europe and
North America. Russian political scholar Ilya Matveev has called the
Kremlin a “Bonapartist regime” that supports the interests of
oligarchic capitalists without giving them political power. The war
has destroyed their economic networks and undermined the country’s
potential for growth. If anything, it seems to signal that the health
of the national economy is less important to the government than the
strengthening of Putin’s political power—a sense of priorities
with explosive potential in the longer term.

 
The leading force against Putin’s government and its vision for
Russia has been the country’s liberal intelligentsia. Budraitskis
argues that they have failed to counteract Putin’s regime (and, we
might now add, to stop the current war) in large part because of their
moral view of politics. For Budraitskis, the Russian intelligentsia is
not a public with a clear and coherent agenda (let alone the political
will to realize it). Rather, it is defined by a “style” of
thinking in which those who oppose Putin and his government are
“decent people”—in contrast to the majority of the Russian
population, who avoid political engagement one way or the other.

The failure of the Russian majority to participate in opposition
politics is often interpreted by the intelligentsia as a problem of
the “homo sovieticus.” The pejorative term has been used to
describe the Soviet Union’s conformist citizens, whose passivity in
the face of state power (“inner slavery”) has persisted into the
post-Soviet period. It is the homo sovieticus, rather than the
organization of economic, political, and geopolitical power within
which Russia is situated, that prevents Russia from moving toward a
more liberal politics and civil society.

The same intelligentsia tends to see themselves as the direct
successors of Soviet dissidents. Budraitskis complicates this view in
an essay on the heterogeneity of Soviet opposition intellectuals.
Rather than a monolith with uniformly liberal views, they were a
diverse group with diverging political commitments. In addition to the
well-known dissidents who wanted to move toward Western liberal
values, there were left-wing dissidents who wanted to reform, rather
than dismantle, the Soviet system and maintain a commitment to
socialist values. Perestroika in the 1980s was an attempt at that sort
of reform, but by then it was too late to repair a poorly functioning
government riven with tensions between the conditions of life for most
Soviet citizens and the ideological postulates of the state. 

Instead of using the complex history of Soviet dissidents as a direct
analogy to the present, Budraitskis seeks to explore the roots of a
dynamic Russian oppositional political culture. But the experiences of
Soviet dissidents have become relevant in unfortunate ways as well. In
late 2017, a new law was introduced requiring that nongovernment and
media organizations funded from abroad register as “foreign
agents.” A more recent version of the law has added individuals and
members of the broader public to the list. Once registered,
organizations and individuals are subject to additional audits and are
obliged to mark all their publications with a disclaimer saying that
the materials are being distributed by a foreign agent. In April 2022,
a new version of the law was proposed that would include people
“influenced”—and not just with funding—to the list of
potential agents. While the rhetoric of “foreign agents” invokes
Cold War–era spies, the current laws mark anyone with views
deviating from state propaganda in much the same way that dissidents
were singled out during the Soviet era.

In a recent interview with
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Budraitskis argued that, under this new repression, “politically,
the Russian opposition is destroyed.” Among the broader Russian
public, the dominant attitude remains indifference. Alexei Yurchak, a
professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley,
who wrote a preface to the Russian edition of _Dissidents Among
Dissidents_, has argued that only a small minority of the Russian
public protested against the annexation of Crimea in 2014, and that
many Crimean residents genuinely affirmed the takeover in a referendum
allowing Russia to seize the peninsula with minimal force—an
“occupation without occupation.” That same condition characterizes
contemporary Russia as a whole: while it is often difficult to gauge
the extent of domestic support for Putin’s war, the majority of the
population appears to have at least accepted it with little visible
protest after a small initial burst.

_Dissidents Among Dissidents_ is a deeply personal book. Budraitskis
writes not just as an observer of contemporary Russian politics but as
an active participant in the opposition culture. He has suffered the
consequences of openly critiquing Putin’s regime. In March 2022,
Russian police began an investigation into Russian academics critical
of the state; the Moscow School of Social and Economic Science, where
Budraitskis had been teaching, received warnings about hiring people
with such critical views. Under the constant threat of arrest,
Budraitskis, following in the footsteps of previous generations of
dissidents, decided to leave Russia.

ALEKSANDRA SIMONOVA is a PhD candidate in anthropology at UC Berkeley
and a documentary filmmaker. Her current research deals with issues of
identities, senses of national belonging, and contested memories in
post-2014 Crimea. 

* Russian Federation
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* Vladimir Putin
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* Ukraine
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* Post-Soviet Russia
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* Politics
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