A grassroots conservatism? Taking a fine-grained view of conservative attitudes among Russians

ABSTRACT

This article argues that interpreting Russia's conservatism exclusively as a top-down phenomenon has obscured the possibility that there might exist a grassroots conservatism founded on very different bases than the state narrative, and which predates the state's embrace of conservatism. It thus takes a fine-grained view of Russians' conservative values by looking at (1) the existence since the 1990s of a situational conservatism that preceded the state's “conservative turn”; (2) the fact that conservative attitudes are shared by almost all post-socialist countries; (3) the rise of moral conservatism and its limits; (4) attitudes toward the Church, which encapsulate the gap between discourse and practice; and (5) the polarisation of Russian society into conservative and non-conservative constituencies.

KEYWORDS:

• Russia
• Putin regime
• conservatism
• public opinion
• values

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I am grateful to Katharina Bluhm, Pál Kølstø, and Olga Malinova for their comments on the draft version of this article. Some excerpts of this article have been published as part of the conference paper “30 Years After 1991: Is It A ‘New’ Russia?” at the U.S.-Russia Relations: Competition, Deterrence, and Diplomacy, Aspen Institute Congressional Program 22–24 October 2021, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.

2 For the most recent version of the Inglehart-Welzel Cultural Map, see http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSContents.jsp?CMSID=Findings.

3 We define Russia’s Muslim regions as those whose main historical religion and cultural framework has been Muslim, but many of their residents are in fact only nominally Muslims and may not be practicing.

4 I thank Denis Volkov for giving access to this data in the framework of an ongoing research project with Maria Lipman.

Additional information

Funding

The article emanates from the research project “LEGITRUSS: Values-based legitimation in authoritarian states: top-down versus bottom-up strategies, the case of Russia,” funded by the Research Council of Norway, Project number 300997.

Notes on contributors

Marlene Laruelle

Marlene Laruelle, Ph.D., is Director and Research Professor at the Institute for European, Russian and Eurasian Studies (IERES), Elliott School of International Affairs, The George Washington University. Dr. Laruelle is also Director of the Illiberalism Studies Program and a Co-Director of PONARS (Program on New Approaches to Research and Security in Eurasia). She has recently published Memory Politics and the Russian Civil War. Reds versus Whites (Bloomsbury, with Margarita Karnysheva) and Is Russia Fascist? Unraveling Propaganda East and West (Cornell University Press).