RUSSIAN WORLD The pretense of diversity and the race for imitation

Russia, among the many paradoxes of its history and its nature, cultivates one that is especially striking in times of catastrophe and conflict with the entire universe. It intends to fight to defend its own specific identity, different from that of any other country in the world, while justifying itself with the actions and characteristics of others, which would make those of Russia more pure and credible.

The main contradiction is the accusation of imperialism, which is foisted on the Americans and their European vassals, and makes the continued expansion of Great Russia necessary. It was a classic of the Soviet era and at that time the contradiction was mitigated by the clear ideological opposition. Today, it is a decidedly more forced comparison, based on proclaimed moral, pseudo-religious and anthropological “values”, much more grotesque than the hackneyed rhetoric of the struggle of communism against capitalism, or the Byzantine disputes over the semicolons of the Christian dogmas.

On September 13, the Moscow Duma will meet for its first autumn plenary session, after a very fragmented holiday due to constant calls from deputies to vote on the emergency measures against sanctions and to do so blindly, without further ado . For this reason, the president of Parliament, Vjaceslav Volodin, will propose that all penalties and measures against the “application of anti-Russian sanctions”, a measure that has been debated since April, be summarized in a special law. Volodin assures that the deputies are “studying the experience of Western countries” in similar situations. It was he who proposed to look at other countries to understand what “palliative measures” to take and in case of offense to the constituted power, how to handle the “responsibility of the information media”.

In 2019, his colleague and President of the Federal Council, Valentina Matveenko, had reprimanded Education Minister Sergei Kravtsov for being “obsessed with international assessments of the quality of education in Russia.” The woman, a Putin loyalist, insisted that Russian schools should “live by their own intellect.” Putin himself, in a dialogue with citizens that took place in December 2021, referring to the much-maligned law against “foreign agents”, declared: “This law was not devised by us, but was invented by a state that everyone considers the flower of democracy,” that is, the United States. Putin and others often refer to the unspecified “international experience,” especially to denigrate parliamentary democracy and show the superiority of authoritarian democracy and “not liberal”.

After all, democracy is the value most discredited by “imitations” not only in Russia, which has never digested it in its history, but also in many other countries of the East and West. Perhaps, for having instituted it in unstable circumstances such as the collapse of the Soviet empire, or for having suffered it as an unwanted gift or a form of Western colonization, especially in the Middle East and North Africa.

Imperial Russia itself demonstrated how questionable the importation of foreign models is, when Peter the Great, in the 18th century, opened up Russia to the West. To understand the nature of the new institutions, he was enlightened by one of the founders of the Enlightenment, the philosopher Gottfried Leibniz. Peter’s ministers had the German title of oberprokuroand even the new capital has taken up the German name of Sankt-Petersburg, after rejecting the gloomy “Leningrad” and the Russified “Petrograd”, the least Russian-sounding to the ears. Petersburg, or rather “Piter” as its inhabitants call it, from the Dutch sound of the first attribution, is a supremely Russian city. And it is precisely because it imitates -in this case with great success- other European capitals. After all, even the Moscow Kremlin was built by the Italian craftsmen who built the Castello Sforzesco in Milan. In fact, it was the building that inspired the Bolognese architect-engineer Aristotele Fioravanti, after being summoned by the great prince Iván III, the grandfather of the “Terrible”.

Without “foreign agents”, Russia would not be Russia, beginning with the metropolitans sent by Constantinople to Christianize Kievan Rus’. And probably no country would really be the way it is were it not for the influence of those near and far. The Russian tsars continuously sent specialists, diplomats and spies to the countries they considered more developed, to absorb from them the best of technology, culture, art and social and economic institutions. As Pedro himself said, “we will take the best of the West and then turn our backs on it”, although this prophecy was fulfilled more than a century later, as a reaction to the Napoleonic invasion.

The war in Ukraine and the anti-Western reaction follow precisely this pattern: after thirty years of imitating and assimilating the achievements and well-being of the “historical enemy”, today Putin’s Russia “turns its back” on it, believing that it can handle itself. And the mutual threats of the last few days, related to the gas price ceiling and the suspension of supply, take this contradiction to its most exasperated level.

The Soviet system could at least boast of the peculiarities of the collective economy, flawed as it was and despite its historical defeat. But what could be the authentic spirit of “Putin purity”? Beyond the repression and propaganda, the impression one has is that it is a mere general slowdown in all fields of the economy and social life, apart from the stubbornness in wanting to demonstrate their own reasons with the war . And with this Russia is not gaining anything, not even at the level of internal consensus.

All countries achieve goals that may be useful to others. Estonia is a recognized world leader in terms of digitization of the State, in Great Britain the number of smokers has been greatly reduced, Singapore has one of the best health systems in the world, Austria has managed to organize access to social housing better than others countries, to cite just a few examples. Putin’s Russia has decided to take an imitation of the American law called “FARA”, Foreign Agents Registration Actas the best for itself.

The difference is that in the United States this law applies to a limited group of people – mainly lobbyists and lawyers who represent the interests of foreign citizens and institutions. But no one would dream of suing, say, the left-wing intellectual Noam Chomsky, who tends to be more in tune with Putin than with other Americans. In Russia, on the other hand, any citizen can be sent to jail, which makes the American imitation an extreme variant that is very Russian and original, and certainly not in a good way. Perhaps it resembles Zimbabwe, Uganda and Ethiopia, all countries that have had a “foreign agents” law for decades.

In any case, a country very close to Russia, which has long served as a model on this point, was Nazarbayev’s Kazakhstan – which is also undergoing a restructuring phase – where strict limits used to be imposed on any support that local associations could receive from abroad, whether material or immaterial. The various organizations had to submit very detailed reports, despite the fact that the formal definition of “foreign agent” was never included in Kazakh law. Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan also copied this model from the Kazakhs, and today they look to the Russian experience, both for the good and for the bad, to avoid mistakes and catastrophes.

The West would also do well to pay close attention to Russia, not only to defend itself against its interference in domestic politics and its more or less explicit support for the various pro-sovereignty parties and leaders. The degraded imitation, the resentful and proud rejection, the pretense of superiority are not sentiments that circulate only in Moscow.

In the late 19th century, Japan’s Emperor Mitsuhito sent his right-hand man, Minister Ivakura Tomori, to lead a delegation that studied the United States, Britain, and other European countries for two years. Ivakura took Peter the Great’s “great embassy” at the end of the 17th century as a model, even placing the portrait of the Russian tsar next to that of the Japanese emperor. He was interested not only in foreign experience as such, but also in the assimilation of foreign experience.