Russia as the ‘Noah’s Ark’ for Westerners seeking refuge from the excesses of “Liberal Democracy” and “Transhumanism”
Over the past couple of weeks, I have received several messages from readers of these pages asking for advice with respect to prospects for resettling in Russia with their families. They have each alluded to a presidential edict recently signed by Vladimir Putin offering a warm welcome to foreigners who seek refuge from the unacceptable deviant values being imposed on the citizenry in their home countries by the vanguard of ‘progressive humanity’ who hold power there. Dissemination of LGBTQ+ propaganda among the young, sex change operations for minors without parental consent, teachers in public schools who discuss the students’ sexual lives with them (as Democratic Vice Presidential candidate Tim Walz apparently has done during his years as a school teacher): all of these monstrous new ‘values’ can be left behind, it would seem, by resettling in Russia, where traditional family values and Christian spirituality receive full support from the government, from the Orthodox Church and from civil society.
I have to admit that I have been rather grumpy in my answers to these hopeful and inspired would-be settlers in Russia. I explained that over the past decades Russia has not been at all welcoming to the millions of its own countrymen who were left stranded as second class citizens in the former republics of the USSR following its dissolution, not to mention applicants from other countries and other ethnicities. Only in the recent past has Russia departed from this rule by freely handing out passports to Russian speakers in Ukraine and assisting their resettlement. Accordingly I was skeptical that the well meaning change in visa and emigration procedures for Westerners decided at the top would be duly implemented at the working level of the Russian bureaucracy.
The edict looked to me like a public relations stunt, a whim of someone in the presidential entourage who is well removed from day to day routines of the ministries responsible for issuing visas and processing residence permits. I maintained this view as late as this morning while reading the announcement by Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova that already several thousand Europeans have filed requests to avail themselves of the terms of the Edict.
However, a chance reading this evening of the background to the ideas underlying the edict has changed my thinking about its likely implementation by 180 degrees. What I see here is precisely the putting into law of the vision of Russia as a ‘Noah’s Ark’ for holders of traditional Christian, traditional European values that was formulated back in 2008 as part of the search for a Russian national identity that began with the dissolution of the Soviet Union and that may be described as a still unfinished but substantially built edifice today.
In what follows, I will first quote several paragraphs from the formulation of the ‘Noah’s Ark’ concept for Russia in 2008. Then I will explain something about the book in which I found these paragraphs, about the author of the book and about my likely connection to him and his work. I will close with a remark on what all of this says about the presence or absence of influence on the thinking of Russia’s president Vladimir Putin by those whom the author of the book in question calls Russia’s ‘visionaries.’
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Selected passages on the origins of the ‘Noah’s Ark’ concept to describe Russia’s special mission in the world:
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President of Russian Entrepreneur and current member of the Izborsk Club, Sergey Pisarev, was the first to propose, in 2008, and has been developing ever since the idea that Russia is uniquely capable of becoming a global haven and shelter (the Russian Ark or Ark Russia) for all those who refuse to submit to the dehumanizing pressures of neoliberal (“transhumanist”) ideology.
According to Pisarev, Russia can resolve the stark choice between degradation and creative self-realization by becoming a haven for adherents to traditional moral-ethical and family values. Not unlike Noah’s Ark, “it can save those who want to preserve our civilization, buffeted by the murky floods of baseness, amorality, ‘fake news,’ and cynical brute force. Russia could become a society in which people would live according to natural moral-ethical laws under a social system resembling a naturally standing—not an inverted—pyramid.
Russian civilization’s main difference from and advantage over that of the self-professedly liberal-democratic societies are in Russia’s deep spirituality and traditionality. Russian society can be represented as a securely standing hierarchical pyramid, with God (monarch, president) at the top, the state apparatus as the next lower level, and society, consisting of private individuals, as its base. Western society can be represented by “an inverted pyramid,” based, first and foremost, on the individual in his/her/their/its/them’s relentless pursuit of gain and pleasure. The individual is number one—the be-all and end-all of all social processes; the private individual’s personal rights and freedoms must be served by the state to the exclusion of any spiritual values, except for the thinly spread atomized ones that do not amount to any common good. In the Russian model, society (individuals) supports the state. In the Western model, the state exists to satisfy the individual’s private predilections. Following the 1991 bourgeois counter-revolution, the “liberal-democratic, civilized West” has been particularly active in trying to impose this latter social model on Russia as well. Russia rebels, driving the “free world” round the proverbial bend. The “Russia as the new Noah’s Ark” ideology is a spin-off of this rebellion.
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The source for these passages is Russia’s Visionaries: Direct Speech by Alexander Burak, released in 2020 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing (U.K.) and available from Amazon in a hardback edition. Burak is Associate Professor of Russian at the University of Florida.
As my readers know well, I am perhaps the only American or European commentator on Russia’s current international relations who makes extensive use of Open Sources from among Russian media, and in particular from among the news programs and political talk shows on state television. And given that, unlike the Soviet Union, the Russian Federation is an open society with relatively little censorship (a fact bemoaned by its more aggressive nationalists), you can learn a great deal from what you see in print and without having to ‘read between the lines.’
Among the journalists and pundits, I seem to have the aforementioned field to myself by default, since other commentators lack the language skills to make use of the rich veins of information to be found in the Russian language public domain. And, regrettably, Russian media simply do not seem to appreciate the potential value to their national interest if their leading television programs were placed on the internet with voice over or subtitles in English.
However, Professor Burak set for himself a much more ambitious goal of surveying the whole waterfront of Russia television and radio programs, not just the several leading channels and programs which I consult. His ‘visionaries’ are academics or public intellectuals who appear on some of the programs that I watch as well as on many others. They are not all deep thinkers, to be sure, but they are widely listened to. What he provides in his book are extensive quotations from what they say on television and radio. Hence, his subtitle, ‘direct speech.’ The book is a gold mine for students of Russian social and intellectual history.
I am looking to make a small contribution to his next book, which will be a collection of essays by several authors. The chapter which I am just beginning to write will take Burak’s exploration of the formation of Russia’s national identity into the period of the war in and about Ukraine that began in February 2022 and is still ongoing.
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I have always been skeptical of those who identify one or another person as being a close friend of Vladimir Putin and/or exerting some powerful influence on him. This is a kind of hobby among so-called experts on Russia in the West who generally know very little about the country and still less about its president.
However, sometimes there is a grain of truth in the suggested influences. I for a long time dismissed the intellectual powers and possible influence on Putin of the philosopher-academic Alexander Dugin. Indeed, ten or more years ago Dugin’s Eurasianism looked like innocent quackery. No more. It is indisputable today that some elements of the Eurasianist world view have entered into Russian foreign and economic policies as held and practiced by Vladimir Putin. It would also appear from the recently issued edict on relaxed entry requirements for Westerners seeking to settle in Russia that the ‘Noah’s Ark’ concept has been accepted by Vladimir Vladimirovich himself, and for that reason will be pushed through bureaucratic resistance to achieve realization. Lord knows that Russia is big enough to find attractive space and occupations in its European heartland where infrastructure and quality of life is very high, without sending the newcomers to its more remote and challenging territories East of the Urals.
In this regard, I will be looking more closely for how what is said on the talk shows by the chattering classes not only sets limits to what the country’s president can do but also influences in a more positive way his approach to the business of running Russia.
©Gilbert Doctorow, 2024