What lies behind Russian support for Putin’s war in Ukraine?
- A recent poll shows the Russian president continues to enjoy massive popular support
- This may be less because Russians lack of access to genuine information, but due to the pervasiveness of an ‘expulsion of alien enemies’ narrative
To the astonishment of most of the world, a respected polling organisation in Moscow recently reported an 83 per cent domestic approval rating for Russian President Vladimir Putin. Given the war in Ukraine, Westerners by and large cannot fathom how this could be true.
For example, countless anecdotal reports tell of ordinary Russians rejecting claims that the war is anything other than what Putin says it is and dismissing contradictory evidence as fake news orchestrated by the CIA or other enemies of Russia.
The alien enemies Russians perceive come in the form of military invasions, but they also take the form of alien ideas. Russian novelist Alexander Solzhenitsyn argued that Marxism was an alien enemy that had invaded and almost destroyed Russian civilisation, only to be expelled after seven decades of suffering under Soviet Marxist-Leninist rule. For Solzhenitsyn and other Russian nationalists, such alien ideas pose an existential threat to Russia because it undermines their nation’s unique spiritual mission.
This mission has surfaced in Putin’s public comments over the past decade or so in his increased use of ideas from a few Russian thinkers. One of these is Ivan Ilyin (1883-1954), a philosopher who pushed a brand of Christian fascism that portrays Russia as a pure and naive nation always in danger of being infiltrated and polluted by alien ideas. For Ilyin, the way to thwart this existential threat is to have an all-powerful leader who overcomes all obstacles and leads Russia in sacred mission of becoming a pure, spiritually centred civilisation. To be effective, this leader must be unhindered by the rule of law or judicial and legislative institutions.
Ilyin is just one link in a long historical tradition. A popularised version of this tradition known to most Russians today can be found in claims from the 16th century about “Moscow as the Third Rome”. In this view, after the corruption and fall of Rome and then of Constantinople as the capital of the Byzantine Empire, the centre of true Christianity moved to Moscow, which will never lose this status.
In the short term, the fixation on this sacred mission also casts a new light on Putin’s tendency to double down in Ukraine on massive violence and war crimes rather than follow the dictates of more rational means-ends calculations.
James V. Wertsch is David R. Francis Distinguished University Professor and director emeritus of the McDonnell International Scholars Academy at Washington University in St Louis