The triumphant European tour of Ukrainian President Zelensky is a very clear and forceful response to Russian threats, and not only in terms of military planes and tanks. After embodying the national spirit of a country that thanks to Putin’s war has finally found its own identity, the hero of Kiev’s resistance to the invasion wanted to take on a broader, continental and international dimension, explaining that Slava Ukrainy, “Glory to Ukraine”, the cry he launched in the European Parliament, also means “long live Europe” and the West, long live your “way of life”.
In this expression lies the entire confrontation with the much-touted “traditional values”, in defense of which Putin’s Russia felt compelled to intervene with the “special military operation”. Now it has become clearer that “special” does not refer so much to the “military” dimension as to the ideological and “metaphysical” one, to quote the words of Patriarch Kirill, of whom, precisely in these days, have just been made public. evidence of his professional service to the KGB during the Soviet years. This is certainly not sensational news, since the submission of ecclesiastical hierarchs to political bodies, in Tsarist and Bolshevik Russia, was an inevitable and well-known fact; but the documents that were found in Switzerland – who knows why only now – make it much more feasible to superimpose the profile of the patriarch with that of the president, revealing what the Soviet way of life really consists of.
When Putin evokes traditional values, he paradoxically mixes the principles of orthodox Christianity with those of socialist atheism to decidedly disorienting effect, without really making it clear what he is talking about. And on the opposite side, Ukrainian nationalism constitutes a set of instances ranging from the separatism of ex-Soviet peoples, nations and regions to a European identity that never really asserted itself, except in the “special financial operations” of the common currency and market rules. In reality, the current war stirs two specters, two unfinished identities, whose true contribution to people’s lives will be difficult to determine for a long time to come.
It is easy to simplify all of this as a contrast between East and West, taking the right and left banks of Ukraine’s Dnieper River as the border of the two worlds. In this case, as in other times, the geographical division is certainly misleading: reducing the Europeans to a colony of the Anglo-Saxon world is as foolish as projecting the Russians against the background of the great Asian masses, be they Indian or Chinese It would be more logical to limit oneself to celebrating the new division of the world between Washington and Beijing, considering the rest of the world as accessory and insignificant; but China and the United States are not (yet) really at war, and the Russian war is directed against precisely this dimension of insignificance.
Russia wants to have weight in the world, to regain its lost role as a superpower, Ukraine wants to take a place in Europe and find a new definition of its national identity in a community of united peoples without suppressing reciprocal differences. Both goals are far from being achieved, and it will not be the end result of the war in Donbass that will settle the issue. So, what are the true dimensions where this confrontation takes place?
One of the big issues at stake is freedom, which Westerners understand as an “individual right” and Russians as an “affirmation of reciprocal union.” Russia rejects the defense of minorities, be they ethnic or ethical, ideological or materialistic, and in this it combines social “communism” with spiritual “communion”, the Slavophile sobornost: a people is free if it does not allow itself to be distorted by secondary elements or “strangers”, the much hated “foreign agents” that have constituted the main definition of Russian internal politics in recent years, together with the warlike aggressiveness towards the exterior.
The traditional value of unity does not allow freedom of expression, which no longer refers only to the words disseminated by the media, but more specifically to the expression of the face and body. Putin’s repression, in this sense, is even more radical and ferocious than the revolutionary or Stalinist “red terror”, where “ideological deviations” were execrated. Today in Russia it is enough not to smile during official parades to be considered a traitor. In this, indeed, Russia is more similar to the Asian “style”, as occurs, for example, in the selection to be able to attend the parades at the Turkmenistan festivals, where what matters is the smile and the bearing, otherwise the person is discarded. If there is something that infuriates Putin greatly, it is the ironic and humiliating smile of Navalny when he talks about him, who in turn is already unable to smile, partly due to the excessive botox injections on his cheeks and partly due to the necessary inexpressiveness of his face. the doubles who often stand in for him in public.
The Western response to totalitarian oppression, with the exaltation of freedom of thought and conscience, is actually much less convincing today than it was in the days of the Cold War. At that time, it was a question of maintaining by all possible means the communication channels that could escape the networks of the “single thought”; today it is difficult to contain the avalanche of digital communication that empties any thought of meaning. The Russian polemic, often provocatively limited to “LGBT propaganda”, is directed against the elusive and fluid dimension of the entire “way of life” of the contemporary world, both Western and Eastern. It is no longer enough to fly the flag of rights and freedoms, when there is a risk of falling into the reciprocal mistake of “not truth” that stifles any content, not only of morality or religion, but even of science. and of culture.
Even less understandable is the dialectic between rampant consumerism and happy degrowth, which confuses the planes of confrontation between environmental impulses and social and welfare impulses, and is especially grotesque in the context of the ongoing world war. Russia interprets the Western sanctions as a virtuous conversion to a more sober and autarchic lifestyle, carrying out a ridiculous reconversion of its technological, agricultural and tertiary production that recalls the false community conditions of Soviet society, where what had the most weight it was corruption and privilege. If for no other reason than by reproducing other people’s consumer goods, the Chinese could be teachers for the rest of the world, and if this is the future path of the Russian economy, there will be no way to escape Beijing’s colonization.
No one has exploited the impulses of turbo-capitalism more than the Russians, producing an oligarchic class that transforms energy treasures into excesses of unbridled luxury, as evidenced by the “spaceships” confiscated in European ports from Putin’s billionaires. The principle of this way of conceiving social equality is based on the help of the rich to the poor: the more the oligarch asserts himself, the more a group of beneficiaries and protégés is created around him, to such an extent that this equality can be defined. Russian variant of society as a kind of neo-feudalism. And in this there is really very little difference with the rest of the world, because globalization has frightfully increased social inequalities in all countries and on all continents. And certainly there will be no communion in the decrease, nor happiness to share. The Russians will have to adapt to the marginalized condition of “rogue countries” like Iran and North Korea, eating and drinking the menu served by the Kremlin, and the Europeans will enjoy the few goods to which they will have access with a power purchasing power increasingly reduced, looking from afar at the extremely rich owners of those digital applications with which all that remains is to entertain themselves while waiting for a job, or a retirement, which is increasingly precarious and limited.
This confrontation will be no less dramatic on the issues of demographic decline or the pulverization of social institutions, from the family to school and religion, or on the health controversies of which the Covid years have been a sinister harbinger. And if we want to stick to lighter topics, these days a competition around show and songs is intensifying more and more, like the one at the “Zelensky festival”. Soviet Russians madly loved the songs of San Remo and their performers, from Celentano and the Ricchi e Poveri to Al Bano, who two years ago was still going to sing for Putin’s birthday and now they disown him when he is about to turn eighty.
All Russians over the age of fifty know by heart the lyrics of Toto Cutugno’s “Un italiano vero”, and today they will seek solace in the “Putin concert”, the exaltation of the “true Russian” organized at the Luzhniki stadium in Moscow for the next February 22. Putin will replace the traditional press conference with a message to the nation to celebrate the anniversary of the invasion of Ukraine and Russia’s superiority over Sanremo. The last time the Russian president appeared at the stadium in an expensive Western-made jacket, glorifying the lifestyle of the new world under construction: the war of all against all, and above all against themselves.
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