En marzo de este año, Rusia celebrará elecciones presidenciales. Evento que como los anteriores estará altamente coreografiado y su resultado será predeterminado. El presidente Vladimir Putin, que ha gobernado Rusia durante más de 23 años, dominará la carrera desde el principio. Todos los medios de comunicación de Rusia promoverán su candidatura y elogiarán su desempeño. Sus oponentes nominales serán, de hecho, leales al gobierno alineados para hacer que la contienda parezca competitiva. Cuando se cuenten todos los votos, ganará fácilmente. Sin embargo, aunque las elecciones serán una farsa, vale la pena observarlas.
Esto se debe a que es una oportunidad para que Putin señale sus planes para los próximos seis años y, en relación con esto, pruebe diferentes estrategias de mensajería. Por lo tanto, los analistas pueden esperar que haga dos cosas principales. Una es resaltar la lucha de Rusia contra Occidente. Pero el otro es algo que a los occidentales les resultará familiar en la política interna: denunciar las políticas socialmente liberales o "Woke".
Putin, por ejemplo, hablará mucho sobre valores familiares, argumentando que los rusos deberían tener hogares tradicionales biparentales con muchos hijos. Denunciará el llamado “movimiento LGBT” como una campaña extranjera para socavar la vida rusa. Y protestará contra los abortos, aunque la mayoría de los rusos apoyan el derecho a practicarlos. Los paralelos con la derecha estadounidense no son casuales.
Putin y sus asesores han adoptado las opiniones y la retórica de los agitadores conservadores estadounidenses, como los presentadores del canal Fox News. El Kremlin lo ha hecho porque, al abrazar las guerras culturales, cree que puede ganarse el apoyo de los políticos populistas en Washington y otros lugares. De hecho, Rusia ya ha ganado seguidores internacionales de derecha. Los líderes conservadores de Estados Unidos y Europa, incluido el expresidente estadounidense Donald Trump, han elogiado a Putin. Algunos de ellos han sugerido que están felices de llegar a un acuerdo sobre el futuro de Ucrania.
La retórica y las políticas de extrema derecha de Putin son, por tanto, una forma de arte de gobernar. Al defender estas causas, el presidente parece creer que puede socavar las sociedades occidentales desde dentro. Probablemente piense que así puede derribar el orden internacional basado en reglas. Y probablemente espera poder reemplazarlo con un nuevo sistema global conservador con el Kremlin en el centro.
EL PODER DEL ODIO
Cuando Putin llegó al poder por primera vez, no era un guerrero cultural. De hecho, hasta 2012, el Kremlin se guió por una agenda moderada. Bajo su primer subjefe de gabinete, Vladislav Surkov, Putin se centró en el desarrollo económico. Aunque Surkov apologista del sistema autoritario de Putin, no despreciaba a las personas "transversales", a los inmigrantes ni a las mujeres. En cambio, creía que la mejor base de apoyo para Putin serían los votantes cosmopolitas de clase media, que tienden a ser relativamente liberales socialmente. Pero la teoría de Surkov era incorrecta. Es posible que la clase media rusa haya apoyado a Putin al principio, pero a medida que su gobierno se prolongó y se volvió cada vez más autocrático, este grupo demográfico se volvió crítico con el presidente. Durante su candidatura a un tercer mandato presidencial en 2012, cientos de miles de rusos de clase media salieron incluso a las calles en modo de protesta.
Putin ganó de todos modos. Pero las manifestaciones fueron un punto de inflexión en su forma de pensar sobre el poder. Putin se sintió traicionado, por lo que dejó de lado a Surkov. Su nuevo estratega político principal, Vyacheslav Volodin, era un ideólogo conservador que impulsó a Putin a centrarse en conseguir el apoyo de los pobres de Rusia y su clase trabajadora, considerados más religiosos y conservadores. Como resultado, la retórica y las políticas de Putin comenzaron a alejarse de la economía y la clase media y acercarse a cuestiones culturales, exaltando los llamados valores tradicionales y atacando a un Occidente supuestamente decadente. Uno de los primeros símbolos de esta reversión fue una ley de 2013, aprobada y firmada por sugerencia de Volodin, que prohibía la “propaganda” LGBTQ. En efecto, el proyecto de ley hizo ilegal que los medios describieran las relaciones no tradicionales de manera positiva, y prohibió que personajes homosexuales aparecieran en películas o programas de televisión que pudieran ser vistos por cualquier persona menor de 18 años.
EL PODER DEL ODIO
Cuando Putin llegó al poder por primera vez, no era un guerrero cultural. De hecho, hasta 2012, el Kremlin se guió por una agenda moderada. Bajo su primer subjefe de gabinete, Vladislav Surkov, Putin se centró en el desarrollo económico. Aunque Surkov apologista del sistema autoritario de Putin, no despreciaba a las personas "transversales", a los inmigrantes ni a las mujeres. En cambio, creía que la mejor base de apoyo para Putin serían los votantes cosmopolitas de clase media, que tienden a ser relativamente liberales socialmente. Pero la teoría de Surkov era incorrecta. Es posible que la clase media rusa haya apoyado a Putin al principio, pero a medida que su gobierno se prolongó y se volvió cada vez más autocrático, este grupo demográfico se volvió crítico con el presidente. Durante su candidatura a un tercer mandato presidencial en 2012, cientos de miles de rusos de clase media salieron incluso a las calles en modo de protesta.
Putin ganó de todos modos. Pero las manifestaciones fueron un punto de inflexión en su forma de pensar sobre el poder. Putin se sintió traicionado, por lo que dejó de lado a Surkov. Su nuevo estratega político principal, Vyacheslav Volodin, era un ideólogo conservador que impulsó a Putin a centrarse en conseguir el apoyo de los pobres de Rusia y su clase trabajadora, considerados más religiosos y conservadores. Como resultado, la retórica y las políticas de Putin comenzaron a alejarse de la economía y la clase media y acercarse a cuestiones culturales, exaltando los llamados valores tradicionales y atacando a un Occidente supuestamente decadente. Uno de los primeros símbolos de esta reversión fue una ley de 2013, aprobada y firmada por sugerencia de Volodin, que prohibía la “propaganda” LGBTQ. En efecto, el proyecto de ley hizo ilegal que los medios describieran las relaciones no tradicionales de manera positiva, y prohibió que personajes homosexuales aparecieran en películas o programas de televisión que pudieran ser vistos por cualquier persona menor de 18 años.
La ley no era la única forma en que el nuevo gobierno de Putin El régimen trabajó para estigmatizar a la comunidad "queer". Los medios de comunicación controlados por el Kremlin también comenzaron a tildar a las personas LGBTQ de peligrosas para la sociedad e inherentemente pecaminosas. En agosto de 2013, por ejemplo, Dmitry Kiselyov, presentador del noticiero vespertino de la televisión estatal rusa, exigió que el gobierno prohibiera los trasplantes de corazón de hombres homosexuales fallecidos en accidentes. En cambio, dijo, sus corazones deberían ser quemados. En ese momento, ese vitriolo todavía era inusual en Rusia, por lo que las declaraciones de Kiselyov crearon un escándalo. Pero Putin parecía feliz. En diciembre de 2013, creó una nueva agencia de noticias estatal y nombró a Kiselyov su director.
La promoción de Kiselyov ayudó a simbolizar la naturaleza cambiante de los medios de comunicación rusos. Antes del tercer mandato de Putin, la televisión estatal era aburrida y tranquila. En 2012, sin embargo, las emisoras estatales comenzaron a comportarse como si estuvieran en Fox News, el canal de televisión estadounidense de derecha conocido por generar indignación. Según un alto exfuncionario de la televisión estatal rusa, que pidió permanecer en el anonimato por temor a su seguridad, a los periodistas se les pidió que miraran e imitaran lo que veían en el canal. Kiselyov, por su parte, comenzó a actuar como la estrella de Fox News Bill O'Reilly, famoso por sus airadas diatribas. El hecho de que O'Reilly no fuera fanático de Putin (una vez llamó al presidente de Rusia "el diablo") no preocupaba a los presentadores rusos. Lo que importaba, como me dijo el exfuncionario, era que O’Reilly tenía “las llamas del odio brotando de sus ojos”: sus informativos eran apasionantes, con furia, peleas y gritos. Ahora bien, también lo eran los de Kiselyov.
La emisora estatal no fue el único medio ruso que pidió prestado a Fox News. A finales de 2013, Jack Hanick, productor de Fox News desde hace mucho tiempo, vino a Rusia para ayudar al empresario Konstantin Malofeev a lanzar Tsargrad TV, un canal privado de extrema derecha con vínculos con la Iglesia Ortodoxa Rusa. En la primavera de 2014, Malofeev financió a Igor Girkin, entonces comandante militar ruso, mientras Girkin ayudaba a liderar la invasión rusa del este de Ucrania.
Irónicamente, y al igual que muchos políticos conservadores en Estados Unidos, los líderes de Rusia no son modelos de principios de derecha. Putin, por ejemplo, se divorció de su esposa en 2014. Putin no se ha vuelto a casar, pero parece haber estado involucrado con Alina Kabaeva, ex campeona olímpica de gimnasia rítmica, al menos desde 2008. Se cree que tienen hijos juntos. Muchos de los compinches de Putin también están divorciados. El viceprimer ministro Igor Sechin se divorció de su primera esposa en 2011 y de la segunda en 2017. El alcalde de Moscú, Sergei Sobyanin, se divorció en 2014. Arkady Rotenberg, amigo íntimo de Putin y un importante empresario ruso, se divorció en 2013.
Si fueran tiempos soviéticos, las separaciones han dañado las carreras de estos hombres; El Partido Comunista Soviético se oponía fervientemente al divorcio. Pero hoy las separaciones no importan en absoluto. Rusia ha estado durante muchos años entre los campeones mundiales en materia de divorcio. Su tasa actual (3,9 divorcios por cada 1.000 habitantes) es una de las más altas del mundo, muy por encima del promedio mundial de 1,8. (La tasa en los Estados Unidos es 2,5).
MIEDO Y ASCO
La guerra cultural de Putin no se ha detenido en las fronteras de Rusia. A partir de la década de 2010, por ejemplo, los políticos y propagandistas rusos comenzaron a lamentarse de la afluencia de migrantes y refugiados a Europa, declarando que el continente había perdido su identidad, cultura y espiritualidad en favor de personas de África y Medio Oriente. “De hecho, muchos países euroatlánticos han seguido el camino del abandono de sus raíces, incluidos los valores cristianos que forman la base de la civilización occidental”, declaró Putin en un discurso de 2013. Los europeos, dijo, han sido "incapaces de garantizar la integración de lenguas extranjeras y elementos culturales extranjeros en sus sociedades".
Moscú también ha incursionado en la política estadounidense. Cuando el movimiento Black Lives Matter despegó en 2020, el Kremlin dijo que la causa era una catástrofe para Estados Unidos. “Las propias elites estadounidenses socavan la condición de Estado de su país”, afirmó en un artículo Nikolai Patrushev, secretario del Consejo de Seguridad de Rusia. “Utilizan los movimientos callejeros en su propio interés. Coquetean con gente marginada que roba tiendas bajo consignas nobles”. Patrushev incluso sugirió que había lugares en Estados Unidos “donde los blancos tienen prohibido entrar y las pandillas locales asumirán las funciones policiales”. Tales comentarios fácilmente podrían haber sido escritos por la personalidad de los medios de derecha y ex comentarista de Fox News, Tucker Carlson.
Las diatribas anti-despertares de Moscú, por supuesto, han llegado a incluir a Ucrania. En un discurso de 2022 en el que celebraba la anexión ilegal de cuatro regiones ucranianas por parte de Rusia, Putin admitió que su país estaba luchando para proteger a “nuestros hijos y nietos” de la “desviación sexual” y d el “satanismo”. Desde este punto de vista, Kiev es ahora un vehículo para Occidente, que difunde sus corruptos valores liberales en la legítima esfera de influencia de Rusia, y la agresión de Moscú es en realidad una defensa de la tradición. Es una forma de garantizar que cada niño ruso tenga una “mamá y un papá”, no un “padre número uno, un padre número dos y un padre número tres”, como dijo Putin en septiembre de 2022.
Desde el punto de vista del Kremlin, las personas trans (el supuesto “padre número uno, padre número dos y padre número tres”) son especialmente amenazantes. Como resultado, ahora son objeto de una legislación extremadamente represiva. En julio, Rusia aprobó un proyecto de ley redactado apresuradamente que prohibía la terapia hormonal y la cirugía de reasignación de género. También prohibió a las personas cambiar su identificación de género en los pasaportes, anuló cualquier matrimonio en el que una persona haya cambiado de género y privó a los adultos transgénero del derecho a adoptar niños.
Los homosexuales cisgénero rusos no han sido tan marginados. Pero también han enfrentado una fuerte represión. En noviembre, el Ministerio de Justicia ruso declaró que el “movimiento social internacional LGBT” era una “organización extremista” y lo prohibió. Esta ley podría parecer de poca importancia, dado que no existe tal movimiento formal. Pero en la práctica, la medida ha criminalizado cualquier muestra de apoyo a los derechos de los homosexuales y el acto mismo de ser homosexual en público. Hoy en día, cualquier manifestación exterior de comportamiento "queer" en Rusia puede acarrear una pena de prisión de al menos cinco años.
Las nuevas medidas derechistas de Moscú no están dirigidas sólo a los rusos LGBTQ. El Kremlin también ha lanzado ataques contra las mujeres, en parte promoviendo restricciones al aborto. En un evento público reciente, tanto Putin como el Patriarca Kirill, líder de la Iglesia Ortodoxa Rusa, criticaron el aborto, argumentando que el país necesitaba más rusos nativos para evitar que el país fuera invadido por inmigrantes. Al final del evento, ambos líderes escucharon mientras una madre de diez hijos hacía un llamado orquestado para prohibir el procedimiento. Hasta ahora, nadie ha redactado un proyecto de ley que prohíba el aborto, y la presidenta del Senado ruso, Valentina Matvienko, ha prometido que el país no prohibirá totalmente el derecho a elegir. Pero los gobiernos regionales han comenzado a prohibir que las clínicas privadas ofrezcan abortos. Estas restricciones a las clínicas privadas podrían ampliarse en los próximos años.
Las nuevas medidas derechistas de Moscú no están dirigidas sólo a los rusos LGBTQ. El Kremlin también ha lanzado ataques contra las mujeres, en parte promoviendo restricciones al aborto. En un evento público reciente, tanto Putin como el Patriarca Kirill, líder de la Iglesia Ortodoxa Rusa, criticaron el aborto, argumentando que el país necesitaba más rusos nativos para evitar que el país fuera invadido por inmigrantes. Al final del evento, ambos líderes escucharon mientras una madre de diez hijos hacía un llamado orquestado para prohibir el procedimiento. Hasta ahora, nadie ha redactado un proyecto de ley que prohíba el aborto, y la presidenta del Senado ruso, Valentina Matvienko, ha prometido que el país no prohibirá totalmente el derecho a elegir. Pero los gobiernos regionales han comenzado a prohibir que las clínicas privadas ofrezcan abortos. Estas restricciones a las clínicas privadas podrían ampliarse en los próximos años.
LA INTERNACIONAL DE LA EXTREMA DERECHA
Las políticas de derecha de Putin pueden funcionar bien en casa, ayudando a justificar la continuidad de su gobierno y la invasión de Ucrania. Pero la política interna por sí sola no puede explicar su guerra contra el Woke, y no sólo porque incluye ataques a la inmigración europea y al movimiento por la justicia racial en Estados Unidos. Al contrario de lo que sugiere Putin, es que Rusia no es una sociedad fundamentalmente conservadora.
Según encuestas del Centro Levada, por ejemplo, sólo el uno por ciento de los rusos asiste a la iglesia semanalmente, y más del 65 por ciento de los rusos dicen que la religión no juega un papel importante en sus vidas. Según otras encuestas de Levada, aproximadamente el 65 por ciento de los rusos apoya el derecho al aborto. Mientras tanto, las personas transgénero constituyen sólo una pequeña fracción de la población del país. Antes de que Putin lanzara sus ataques, casi no atrajeron la atención del público. En cambio, las peroratas de Putin parecen estar dirigidas menos a una audiencia interna y más a la derecha en el extranjero. Parecen estar dirigidos a Europa y América del Norte en particular, los dos lugares donde Moscú ha perdido la mayor parte del apoyo durante la última década de Putin en el poder. En ambas regiones, los líderes tradicionales que han aislado a Moscú están luchando contra los políticos insurgentes de derecha que apoyan valores aparentemente cristianos. Cada vez más, estos conservadores populistas están ganando. Y al aceptar su retórica, Putin cree que puede ganarse su apoyo y, con él, encontrar una manera de mejorar la posición internacional de Rusia. Es fácil ver por qué el Kremlin cree que ese enfoque es necesario y por qué tendrá éxito.
Después de que Rusia ocupó Crimea en 2014, Occidente impuso sanciones al país y a Putin le resultó más difícil (aunque no imposible) hacer negocios con sus socios habituales en Europa. Pero la extrema derecha del continente se mantuvo receptiva. La líder de derecha francesa Marine Le Pen, por ejemplo, elogió la anexión. También ha afirmado que Putin “vela por los intereses de su propio país y defiende su identidad”. Los bancos rusos, tal vez no por coincidencia, han otorgado préstamos a su partido. Ha demostrado ser una inversión inteligente: en 2017 y 2022, Le Pen quedó en segundo lugar en las elecciones presidenciales de Francia.
La Le Pen no es la única representante de la política occidental conservadora que ha mantenido una alianza flexible con el Kremlin. El creciente partido de extrema derecha Alternativa para Alemania también ha sido recibido calurosamente por el Kremlin, y muchos de los altos funcionarios de ese partido han hablado con cariño sobre Moscú. Un líder regional, por ejemplo, describió a Putin como un “tipo auténtico, un hombre de verdad con un sano marco de valores”. El primer ministro húngaro, Viktor Orban, a quien gusta criticar las políticas "Woke" y la comunidad LGBTQ, se ha convertido en un socio comprometido de Putin. Orban incluso bloqueó la ayuda de la Unión Europea a Kiev, ayudando a los esfuerzos bélicos de Moscú. Pero ninguno de estos partidos o políticos es tan valioso para Putin como el expresidente estadounidense Donald Trump.
La Le Pen no es la única representante de la política occidental conservadora que ha mantenido una alianza flexible con el Kremlin. El creciente partido de extrema derecha Alternativa para Alemania también ha sido recibido calurosamente por el Kremlin, y muchos de los altos funcionarios de ese partido han hablado con cariño sobre Moscú. Un líder regional, por ejemplo, describió a Putin como un “tipo auténtico, un hombre de verdad con un sano marco de valores”. El primer ministro húngaro, Viktor Orban, a quien gusta criticar las políticas "Woke" y la comunidad LGBTQ, se ha convertido en un socio comprometido de Putin. Orban incluso bloqueó la ayuda de la Unión Europea a Kiev, ayudando a los esfuerzos bélicos de Moscú. Pero ninguno de estos partidos o políticos es tan valioso para Putin como el expresidente estadounidense Donald Trump.
Como candidato y como presidente, Trump elogió repetidamente a Putin y, si Trump vuelve a ganar el poder en 2024, ha sugerido que podría dejar de ayudar a Ucrania. El propio Trump nunca ha citado las políticas de Putin como la razón por la que le agrada el presidente de Rusia; en cambio, ha señalado la supuesta fuerza de Putin, pero los asesores de Trump sí lo han hecho. Steve Bannon, el antiguo estratega jefe de Trump, elogió al presidente de Rusia por ser "anti-despertar". Carlson, quizás el principal impulsor mediático de Trump, pronunció un discurso en Budapest en el que dijo que las elites estadounidenses odian a Rusia “porque es un país cristiano”.
Para Putin, las políticas y la retórica de extrema derecha son un medio eficaz para conseguir apoyo internacional. En esencia, está formando una especie de Internacional de extrema derecha, similar a la Internacional Comunista, que promovió la revolución soviética en la primera mitad del siglo XX. Como ocurrió con la Unión Soviética, que nunca practicó los principios filosóficos del comunismo, no importa que Putin y su entorno violen los principios que defienden. Lo que importa es que esos principios le ayuden a ganar amigos y socavar el orden liberal. Incluso si la visión de Putin no se materializa plenamente, una “internacional de extrema derecha” ayudaría a fortalecer su posición. Espera que esto pueda incitar a los estados occidentales a debilitar las sanciones, por ejemplo, o a reducir el apoyo a Kiev. El resultado podría ser un régimen del Kremlin más duradero. Y para Putin, eso en sí mismo sería una victoria. (Foreign Affairs)
Mikhail Zygar es columnista de Der Spiegel, editor en jefe fundador del canal de televisión independiente ruso TV Rain y autor de Guerra y castigo: Putin, Zelensky y el camino hacia la invasión rusa de Ucrania.
Russia’s War on Woke
Martes, 02/Ene/2024 Mikhail Zygar Foreign Affairs
Russian President Vladimir Putin shaking hands with French far-right leader Marine Le Pen, Moscow, March 2017. Mikhail Klimentyev / Sputnik / Kremlin / Reuters
1 In March of this year, Russia will hold presidential elections. The contest, like ones past, will be highly choreographed, and its outcome is preordained. President Vladimir Putin, who has ruled Russia for more than 23 years, will dominate the race from the beginning. Every media outlet in Russia will promote his candidacy and praise his performance. His nominal opponents will, in fact, be government loyalists lined up to make the contest appear competitive. When all the ballots are counted, he will easily win.
Yet even though the election will be a farce, it is worth watching. That is because it is an opportunity for Putin to signal his plans for the next six years and, relatedly, to test different messaging strategies. Analysts can therefore expect him to do two main things. One is to play up Russia’s struggle against the West. But the other is something that Westerners will find familiar from domestic politics: decrying socially liberal, or “woke”, policies. Putin will, for example, talk a lot about family values, arguing that Russians should have traditional two-parent households with lots of children. He will denounce the so-called “LGBT movement” as a foreign campaign to undermine Russian life. And he will rail against abortions, even though most Russians support the right to have them.
The parallels with the American right are not coincidental. Putin and his advisers have adopted the views and rhetoric of conservative American firebrands, such as anchors on the Fox News channel. The Kremlin has done so because, by embracing the culture wars, it believes it can win over support from populist politicians in Washington and elsewhere. In fact, Russia has already won international right-wing fans. Conservative leaders across the United States and Europe, including former U.S. President Donald Trump, have praised Putin. Some of them have suggested they are happy to compromise over Ukraine’s future.
Putin’s far-right rhetoric and policies are thus a form of statecraft. By championing such causes, the president appears to believe he can undermine Western societies from within. He likely thinks he can thereby tear down the rules-based international order. And he probably hopes he can replace it with a new, conservative global system with the Kremlin at its center.
THE POWER OF HATE
When Putin first came to power, he was not a culture warrior. In fact, until 2012, the Kremlin was driven by a moderate agenda. Under his first deputy chief of staff, Vladislav Surkov, Putin focused on economic development. Although Surkov was an apologist for Putin’s authoritarian system, he did not despise queer people, immigrants, or women. Instead, he believed that the best base of support for Putin would be cosmopolitan middle-class voters, who tend to be relatively socially liberal.
But Surkov’s theory was incorrect. Russia’s middle class may have supported Putin at first, but as his rule dragged on and became increasingly autocratic, this demographic became critical of the president. During his run for a third presidential term in 2012, hundreds of thousands of middle-class Russians even took to the streets in protest.
2 Putin won nonetheless. But the demonstrations were a turning point in how he thought about power. He felt betrayed, so he sidelined Surkov. His new chief political strategist, Vyacheslav Volodin, was a conservative ideologue who prompted Putin to focus on enlisting the support of Russia’s poor and its working class, who were considered more religious and conservative. As a result, Putin’s rhetoric and policies began to shift away from the economy and the middle class and toward cultural issues, playing up so-called traditional values and skewering a supposedly decadent West.
One of the first symbols of this reversal was a 2013 law, passed and signed at Volodin’s suggestion, that banned LGBTQ “propaganda”. In effect, the bill made it illegal for the media to describe nontraditional relationships in a positive fashion, and it banned gay characters from appearing in movies or television shows that might be viewed by anyone under 18. The law was not the only way Putin’s new regime worked to stigmatize the queer community. Kremlin-controlled media outlets also began branding LGBTQ people as both dangerous to society and inherently sinful. In August 2013, for example, Dmitry Kiselyov, the host of Russian state television’s evening news show, demanded that the government ban heart transplants from gay men killed in accidents. Instead, he said, their hearts should be burned.
At the time, such vitriol was still unusual in Russia, so Kiselyov’s statements created a scandal. But Putin seemed happy. In December 2013, he created a new state-owned news agency and named Kiselyov its head. Kiselyov’s promotion helped symbolize the changing nature of Russia’s media outlets. Before Putin’s third term, state television was dull and sedate. In 2012, however, state broadcasters began behaving as if they were on Fox News, the right-wing U.S. television channel known for drumming up outrage. According to a senior former official in Russian state television, who asked to remain anonymous out of concern about his safety, journalists were told to watch and mimic what they saw on the channel. Kiselyov, for his part, started acting like the Fox News star Bill O’Reilly, who was famous for his angry diatribes. That O’Reilly was no fan of Putin—he once called Russia’s president “the devil”—was of no concern to Russian anchors. What mattered, as the former official told me, was that O’Reilly had “the flames of hatred bursting from his eyes”: his news programs were exciting, with fury, fights, and shouting. Now, so were Kiselyov’s.
The state broadcaster was not the only Russian outlet to borrow from Fox News. At the end of 2013, Jack Hanick, a longtime Fox News producer, came to Russia to help the businessman Konstantin Malofeev launch Tsargrad TV, a private far-right channel with ties to the Russian Orthodox Church. In the spring of 2014, Malofeev funded Igor Girkin, then a Russian military commander, as Girkin helped lead Russia’s invasion of eastern Ukraine.
Ironically, and much like many conservative politicians in the United States, Russia’s leaders are hardly paragons of right-wing principles. Putin, for instance, divorced his wife in 2014. Putin has not remarried, but he appears to have been involved with Alina Kabaeva, the former Olympic rhythmic gymnastics champion, since at least 2008. They are widely thought to have children together.
Many of Putin’s cronies are also divorced. Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin divorced his first wife in 2011 and his second in 2017. Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin divorced in 2014. Arkady Rotenberg, Putin’s close friend and a major Russian businessman, divorced in 2013. If these were Soviet times, the separations would have damaged these men’s careers; the Soviet Communist Party was ardently against divorce. But today, separations do not matter at all. Russia has, for many years, been among the world champions in divorce. Its current rate—3.9 divorces per 1,000 inhabitants—is one of the highest in the world, well above the global average of 1.8. (The rate in the United States is 2.5.)
1 FEAR AND LOATHING
Putin’s culture war has not stopped at Russia’s borders. Beginning in the 2010s, for example, Russian politicians and propagandists began to bemoan the influx of migrants and refugees into Europe, declaring that the continent had lost its identity, culture, and spirituality to people from Africa and the Middle East. “Many Euro-Atlantic countries have actually gone down the path of abandoning their roots, including Christian values that form the basis of Western civilization”, Putin declared in a 2013 speech. Europeans, he said, have been “unable to ensure the integration of foreign languages and foreign cultural elements into their societies”.
Moscow has also waded into U.S. politics. When the Black Lives Matter movement took off in 2020, the Kremlin said the cause was a catastrophe for the United States. “American elites themselves undermine the statehood of their country”, Nikolai Patrushev, the secretary of Russia’s security council, said in an article. “They use street movements in their own interests. They flirt with marginalized people who rob stores under noble slogans”. Patrushev even suggested that there were places in the United States “where whites are forbidden to enter, and local gangs will take over the police functions”. Such remarks could easily have been written by the right-wing media personality and former Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson.
Moscow’s anti-woke diatribes have, of course, come to feature Ukraine. In a 2022 speech celebrating Russia’s illegal annexation of four Ukrainian regions, Putin avowed that his country was fighting to protect “our children and our grandchildren” from “sexual deviation” and “satanism”. In this view, Kyiv is now a vehicle for the West, spreading its corrupt liberal values into Russia’s rightful sphere of influence, and Moscow’s aggression is actually a defense of tradition. It is a way to make sure that every Russian child would have a “mom and dad”, not “parent number one, parent number two, and parent number three”, as Putin put it in September 2022.
In the Kremlin’s view, trans people—the supposed “parent number one, parent number two, and parent number three”—are especially threatening. As a result, they are now the target of extremely repressive legislation. In July, Russia passed a hastily drafted bill that banned hormone therapy and gender reassignment surgery. It also prohibited people from changing their gender identification on passports, annulled any marriage in which one person has changed gender, and deprived transgender adults of the right to adopt children.At a Russian Supreme Court hearing on whether to designate the “LGBT movement” as extremist, Moscow, November 2023. Maxim Shemetov / Reuters
Gay cisgender Russians have not been quite so marginalized. But they have faced heavy repression, as well. In November, the Russian Ministry of Justice pronounced the “international LGBT social movement” to be an “extremist organization” and banned it. This law might seem to be of little consequence, given that there is no such formal movement. But in practice, the move has criminalized any show of support for gay rights and the very act of being gay in public. Today, any outward display of queer behavior in Russia can lead to a prison sentence of at least five years.
2 Moscow’s new right-wing measures are not just targeted at LGBTQ Russians. The Kremlin has also launched attacks on women, in part by promoting restrictions on abortion. At a recent public event, both Putin and Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, criticized abortion, arguing that the country needed more native-born Russians to prevent the country from being overrun by migrants. At the end of the event, both leaders listened as a mother of ten made an orchestrated call to ban the procedure.
So far, no one has drafted a bill outlawing abortion, and the speaker of the Russian Senate, Valentina Matvienko, has promised that the country will not totally ban the right to choose. But regional governments have started prohibiting private clinics from offering abortions. Such restrictions on private clinics might expand in the years ahead.
FAR-RIGHT INTERNATIONAL
Putin’s right-wing policies may play well at home, helping to justify his continued rule and the invasion of Ukraine. But domestic politics alone cannot explain his war on woke—and not just because it includes attacks on European immigration and the racial justice movement in the United States. Contrary to what Putin suggests, Russia is not a fundamentally conservative society. According to surveys by the Levada Center, for example, only one percent of Russians attend church weekly, and more than 65 percent of Russians say that religion does not play a significant role in their lives. According to other Levada surveys, roughly 65 percent of Russians support the right to abortion. Transgender people, meanwhile, make up only a tiny fraction of the country’s populace. Before Putin launched his attacks, they attracted almost no public attention.
Instead, Putin’s rants appear to be aimed less at a domestic audience and more at right-wingers abroad. They seem to be targeted at Europe and North America in particular, the two places where Moscow has lost the most support over Putin’s last decade in power. In both regions, mainstream leaders who have isolated Moscow are struggling to fight off insurgent right-wing politicians who support ostensibly Christian values. Increasingly, these populist conservatives are winning. And by embracing their rhetoric, Putin believes he can gain their support and, with it, find a way to improve Russia’s international position.
It is easy to see why the Kremlin believes such an approach is necessary—and why it will succeed. After Russia occupied Crimea in 2014, the West slapped sanctions on the country, and Putin found it harder (although not impossible) to do business with his usual partners in Europe. But the continent’s far right remained receptive. The French right-wing leader Marine Le Pen, for example, praised the annexation. She has also asserted that Putin is “looking after the interests of his own country and defending its identity”. Russian banks, perhaps not coincidentally, have provided loans to her party. It has proved to be a smart investment: In 2017 and 2022, Le Pen was the runner-up in France’s presidential elections.
3 Le Pen is hardly the only conservative Western politician who developed a loose alliance with the Kremlin. The surging far-right party Alternative for Germany has also been warmly received by the Kremlin, and many of that party’s senior officials have spoken fondly of Moscow. One regional leader, for instance, described Putin as an “authentic guy, a real man with a healthy framework of values”. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who likes to rail against “woke” policies and the LGBTQ community, has become a committed Putin partner. Orban even blocked European Union aid to Kyiv, aiding Moscow’s war efforts.
But none of these parties or politicians is as valuable to Putin as former U.S. President Donald Trump. As a candidate and as president, Trump repeatedly complimented Putin, and should Trump win power again in 2024, he has suggested he might stop aiding Ukraine. Trump himself has never cited Putin’s policies as the reason he likes Russia’s president—instead, he has pointed to Putin’s supposed strength—but Trump’s advisers have. Steve Bannon, Trump’s onetime chief strategist, praised Russia’s president for being “anti-woke”. Carlson, perhaps Trump’s foremost media booster, delivered a speech in Budapest in which he said that U.S. elites hate Russia “because it is a Christian country”.
For Putin, then, far-right policies and rhetoric are an effective means of building international support. He is, in essence, forming a kind of Far-Right International, similar to the Communist International, which promoted the Soviet revolution in the first half of the twentieth century. As with the Soviet Union, which never practiced communism’s philosophical tenets, it does not matter that Putin and his entourage violate their espoused principles. What matters is that those principles help him gain friends and undermine the liberal order.
Even if Putin’s vision does not come to full fruition, a “far-right international” would help strengthen his hand. He hopes that it might prompt Western states to weaken sanctions, for example, or to cut back on support for Kyiv. The result might be a more durable Kremlin regime. And for Putin, that in itself would be a win.
Mikhail Zygar is a columnist at Der Spiegel, founding Editor in Chief of the independent Russian television channel TV Rain, and the author of War and Punishment: Putin, Zelensky, and the Path to Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine.
Este artículo se publicó originalmente en Foreign Affairs.
Russia’s War on Woke
Martes, 02/Ene/2024 Mikhail Zygar Foreign Affairs
Russian President Vladimir Putin shaking hands with French far-right leader Marine Le Pen, Moscow, March 2017. Mikhail Klimentyev / Sputnik / Kremlin / Reuters1 In March of this year, Russia will hold presidential elections. The contest, like ones past, will be highly choreographed, and its outcome is preordained. President Vladimir Putin, who has ruled Russia for more than 23 years, will dominate the race from the beginning. Every media outlet in Russia will promote his candidacy and praise his performance. His nominal opponents will, in fact, be government loyalists lined up to make the contest appear competitive. When all the ballots are counted, he will easily win.
Yet even though the election will be a farce, it is worth watching. That is because it is an opportunity for Putin to signal his plans for the next six years and, relatedly, to test different messaging strategies. Analysts can therefore expect him to do two main things. One is to play up Russia’s struggle against the West. But the other is something that Westerners will find familiar from domestic politics: decrying socially liberal, or “woke”, policies. Putin will, for example, talk a lot about family values, arguing that Russians should have traditional two-parent households with lots of children. He will denounce the so-called “LGBT movement” as a foreign campaign to undermine Russian life. And he will rail against abortions, even though most Russians support the right to have them.
The parallels with the American right are not coincidental. Putin and his advisers have adopted the views and rhetoric of conservative American firebrands, such as anchors on the Fox News channel. The Kremlin has done so because, by embracing the culture wars, it believes it can win over support from populist politicians in Washington and elsewhere. In fact, Russia has already won international right-wing fans. Conservative leaders across the United States and Europe, including former U.S. President Donald Trump, have praised Putin. Some of them have suggested they are happy to compromise over Ukraine’s future.
Putin’s far-right rhetoric and policies are thus a form of statecraft. By championing such causes, the president appears to believe he can undermine Western societies from within. He likely thinks he can thereby tear down the rules-based international order. And he probably hopes he can replace it with a new, conservative global system with the Kremlin at its center.
THE POWER OF HATE
When Putin first came to power, he was not a culture warrior. In fact, until 2012, the Kremlin was driven by a moderate agenda. Under his first deputy chief of staff, Vladislav Surkov, Putin focused on economic development. Although Surkov was an apologist for Putin’s authoritarian system, he did not despise queer people, immigrants, or women. Instead, he believed that the best base of support for Putin would be cosmopolitan middle-class voters, who tend to be relatively socially liberal.
But Surkov’s theory was incorrect. Russia’s middle class may have supported Putin at first, but as his rule dragged on and became increasingly autocratic, this demographic became critical of the president. During his run for a third presidential term in 2012, hundreds of thousands of middle-class Russians even took to the streets in protest.
2 Putin won nonetheless. But the demonstrations were a turning point in how he thought about power. He felt betrayed, so he sidelined Surkov. His new chief political strategist, Vyacheslav Volodin, was a conservative ideologue who prompted Putin to focus on enlisting the support of Russia’s poor and its working class, who were considered more religious and conservative. As a result, Putin’s rhetoric and policies began to shift away from the economy and the middle class and toward cultural issues, playing up so-called traditional values and skewering a supposedly decadent West.
One of the first symbols of this reversal was a 2013 law, passed and signed at Volodin’s suggestion, that banned LGBTQ “propaganda”. In effect, the bill made it illegal for the media to describe nontraditional relationships in a positive fashion, and it banned gay characters from appearing in movies or television shows that might be viewed by anyone under 18. The law was not the only way Putin’s new regime worked to stigmatize the queer community. Kremlin-controlled media outlets also began branding LGBTQ people as both dangerous to society and inherently sinful. In August 2013, for example, Dmitry Kiselyov, the host of Russian state television’s evening news show, demanded that the government ban heart transplants from gay men killed in accidents. Instead, he said, their hearts should be burned.
At the time, such vitriol was still unusual in Russia, so Kiselyov’s statements created a scandal. But Putin seemed happy. In December 2013, he created a new state-owned news agency and named Kiselyov its head. Kiselyov’s promotion helped symbolize the changing nature of Russia’s media outlets. Before Putin’s third term, state television was dull and sedate. In 2012, however, state broadcasters began behaving as if they were on Fox News, the right-wing U.S. television channel known for drumming up outrage. According to a senior former official in Russian state television, who asked to remain anonymous out of concern about his safety, journalists were told to watch and mimic what they saw on the channel. Kiselyov, for his part, started acting like the Fox News star Bill O’Reilly, who was famous for his angry diatribes. That O’Reilly was no fan of Putin—he once called Russia’s president “the devil”—was of no concern to Russian anchors. What mattered, as the former official told me, was that O’Reilly had “the flames of hatred bursting from his eyes”: his news programs were exciting, with fury, fights, and shouting. Now, so were Kiselyov’s.
The state broadcaster was not the only Russian outlet to borrow from Fox News. At the end of 2013, Jack Hanick, a longtime Fox News producer, came to Russia to help the businessman Konstantin Malofeev launch Tsargrad TV, a private far-right channel with ties to the Russian Orthodox Church. In the spring of 2014, Malofeev funded Igor Girkin, then a Russian military commander, as Girkin helped lead Russia’s invasion of eastern Ukraine.
Ironically, and much like many conservative politicians in the United States, Russia’s leaders are hardly paragons of right-wing principles. Putin, for instance, divorced his wife in 2014. Putin has not remarried, but he appears to have been involved with Alina Kabaeva, the former Olympic rhythmic gymnastics champion, since at least 2008. They are widely thought to have children together.
Many of Putin’s cronies are also divorced. Deputy Prime Minister Igor Sechin divorced his first wife in 2011 and his second in 2017. Moscow Mayor Sergei Sobyanin divorced in 2014. Arkady Rotenberg, Putin’s close friend and a major Russian businessman, divorced in 2013. If these were Soviet times, the separations would have damaged these men’s careers; the Soviet Communist Party was ardently against divorce. But today, separations do not matter at all. Russia has, for many years, been among the world champions in divorce. Its current rate—3.9 divorces per 1,000 inhabitants—is one of the highest in the world, well above the global average of 1.8. (The rate in the United States is 2.5.)
1 FEAR AND LOATHING
Putin’s culture war has not stopped at Russia’s borders. Beginning in the 2010s, for example, Russian politicians and propagandists began to bemoan the influx of migrants and refugees into Europe, declaring that the continent had lost its identity, culture, and spirituality to people from Africa and the Middle East. “Many Euro-Atlantic countries have actually gone down the path of abandoning their roots, including Christian values that form the basis of Western civilization”, Putin declared in a 2013 speech. Europeans, he said, have been “unable to ensure the integration of foreign languages and foreign cultural elements into their societies”.
Moscow has also waded into U.S. politics. When the Black Lives Matter movement took off in 2020, the Kremlin said the cause was a catastrophe for the United States. “American elites themselves undermine the statehood of their country”, Nikolai Patrushev, the secretary of Russia’s security council, said in an article. “They use street movements in their own interests. They flirt with marginalized people who rob stores under noble slogans”. Patrushev even suggested that there were places in the United States “where whites are forbidden to enter, and local gangs will take over the police functions”. Such remarks could easily have been written by the right-wing media personality and former Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson.
Moscow’s anti-woke diatribes have, of course, come to feature Ukraine. In a 2022 speech celebrating Russia’s illegal annexation of four Ukrainian regions, Putin avowed that his country was fighting to protect “our children and our grandchildren” from “sexual deviation” and “satanism”. In this view, Kyiv is now a vehicle for the West, spreading its corrupt liberal values into Russia’s rightful sphere of influence, and Moscow’s aggression is actually a defense of tradition. It is a way to make sure that every Russian child would have a “mom and dad”, not “parent number one, parent number two, and parent number three”, as Putin put it in September 2022.
In the Kremlin’s view, trans people—the supposed “parent number one, parent number two, and parent number three”—are especially threatening. As a result, they are now the target of extremely repressive legislation. In July, Russia passed a hastily drafted bill that banned hormone therapy and gender reassignment surgery. It also prohibited people from changing their gender identification on passports, annulled any marriage in which one person has changed gender, and deprived transgender adults of the right to adopt children.At a Russian Supreme Court hearing on whether to designate the “LGBT movement” as extremist, Moscow, November 2023. Maxim Shemetov / Reuters
Gay cisgender Russians have not been quite so marginalized. But they have faced heavy repression, as well. In November, the Russian Ministry of Justice pronounced the “international LGBT social movement” to be an “extremist organization” and banned it. This law might seem to be of little consequence, given that there is no such formal movement. But in practice, the move has criminalized any show of support for gay rights and the very act of being gay in public. Today, any outward display of queer behavior in Russia can lead to a prison sentence of at least five years.
2 Moscow’s new right-wing measures are not just targeted at LGBTQ Russians. The Kremlin has also launched attacks on women, in part by promoting restrictions on abortion. At a recent public event, both Putin and Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, criticized abortion, arguing that the country needed more native-born Russians to prevent the country from being overrun by migrants. At the end of the event, both leaders listened as a mother of ten made an orchestrated call to ban the procedure.
So far, no one has drafted a bill outlawing abortion, and the speaker of the Russian Senate, Valentina Matvienko, has promised that the country will not totally ban the right to choose. But regional governments have started prohibiting private clinics from offering abortions. Such restrictions on private clinics might expand in the years ahead.
FAR-RIGHT INTERNATIONAL
Putin’s right-wing policies may play well at home, helping to justify his continued rule and the invasion of Ukraine. But domestic politics alone cannot explain his war on woke—and not just because it includes attacks on European immigration and the racial justice movement in the United States. Contrary to what Putin suggests, Russia is not a fundamentally conservative society. According to surveys by the Levada Center, for example, only one percent of Russians attend church weekly, and more than 65 percent of Russians say that religion does not play a significant role in their lives. According to other Levada surveys, roughly 65 percent of Russians support the right to abortion. Transgender people, meanwhile, make up only a tiny fraction of the country’s populace. Before Putin launched his attacks, they attracted almost no public attention.
Instead, Putin’s rants appear to be aimed less at a domestic audience and more at right-wingers abroad. They seem to be targeted at Europe and North America in particular, the two places where Moscow has lost the most support over Putin’s last decade in power. In both regions, mainstream leaders who have isolated Moscow are struggling to fight off insurgent right-wing politicians who support ostensibly Christian values. Increasingly, these populist conservatives are winning. And by embracing their rhetoric, Putin believes he can gain their support and, with it, find a way to improve Russia’s international position.
It is easy to see why the Kremlin believes such an approach is necessary—and why it will succeed. After Russia occupied Crimea in 2014, the West slapped sanctions on the country, and Putin found it harder (although not impossible) to do business with his usual partners in Europe. But the continent’s far right remained receptive. The French right-wing leader Marine Le Pen, for example, praised the annexation. She has also asserted that Putin is “looking after the interests of his own country and defending its identity”. Russian banks, perhaps not coincidentally, have provided loans to her party. It has proved to be a smart investment: In 2017 and 2022, Le Pen was the runner-up in France’s presidential elections.
3 Le Pen is hardly the only conservative Western politician who developed a loose alliance with the Kremlin. The surging far-right party Alternative for Germany has also been warmly received by the Kremlin, and many of that party’s senior officials have spoken fondly of Moscow. One regional leader, for instance, described Putin as an “authentic guy, a real man with a healthy framework of values”. Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who likes to rail against “woke” policies and the LGBTQ community, has become a committed Putin partner. Orban even blocked European Union aid to Kyiv, aiding Moscow’s war efforts.
But none of these parties or politicians is as valuable to Putin as former U.S. President Donald Trump. As a candidate and as president, Trump repeatedly complimented Putin, and should Trump win power again in 2024, he has suggested he might stop aiding Ukraine. Trump himself has never cited Putin’s policies as the reason he likes Russia’s president—instead, he has pointed to Putin’s supposed strength—but Trump’s advisers have. Steve Bannon, Trump’s onetime chief strategist, praised Russia’s president for being “anti-woke”. Carlson, perhaps Trump’s foremost media booster, delivered a speech in Budapest in which he said that U.S. elites hate Russia “because it is a Christian country”.
For Putin, then, far-right policies and rhetoric are an effective means of building international support. He is, in essence, forming a kind of Far-Right International, similar to the Communist International, which promoted the Soviet revolution in the first half of the twentieth century. As with the Soviet Union, which never practiced communism’s philosophical tenets, it does not matter that Putin and his entourage violate their espoused principles. What matters is that those principles help him gain friends and undermine the liberal order.
Even if Putin’s vision does not come to full fruition, a “far-right international” would help strengthen his hand. He hopes that it might prompt Western states to weaken sanctions, for example, or to cut back on support for Kyiv. The result might be a more durable Kremlin regime. And for Putin, that in itself would be a win.
Mikhail Zygar is a columnist at Der Spiegel, founding Editor in Chief of the independent Russian television channel TV Rain, and the author of War and Punishment: Putin, Zelensky, and the Path to Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine.
Este artículo se publicó originalmente en Foreign Affairs.