Class, culture and political representation of the native in Russia and East Central Europe: Paving the way for the New Right?

Abstract

In the current Russian political landscape, there are no political forces that would fully qualify as part of the New Right. The political regime that took shape during Vladimir Putin’s presidency cannot be described as populist without major reservations (for a range of positions, see Casula, 2013; Matveev, 2017; Oliker, 2017; Laruelle, 2020). After the ideological transformation that it underwent starting in 2011–12, it can be described as conservative and traditionalist, but it still hesitates to fully embrace xenophobic nationalism, so characteristic of the politics of the New Right. What it shares with the New Right is its claim to directly represent the common people, bearers of the genuine national spirit, allegedly incompatible with the principles of liberal democracy and individual rights (Yudin, 2021). My interest in Putinism in the context of the debate on the New Right is driven by more than those similarities. I believe that Russia, as a subaltern empire (Morozov, 2015), offers a unique opportunity to discuss some of the basic structural preconditions for the emergence of the New Right in the former SecondWorld. A country that still strongly identifies with Europe but has always stood apart, Russia has an intellectual class that has for centuries tried to make sense of the double divide: one external, between Russia and Europe, and one domestic, between the elites and the masses. This article focuses on one particularly important manifestation of this interstitial identity – the fixation of the national debate on the figure of the peasant and, more broadly, uncivilised native, who serves as the embodiment of Russia’s uniqueness both for the advocates of Europeanisation and for the proponents of a Sonderweg. I interpret this phenomenon as an outcome of uneven and combined development of global capitalism (see Rosenberg, 2006, 2016 for a contemporary take on the concept). Combination manifested itself in Russia’s internal colonisation, which created a deep cultural divide between the educated class and the common people (Etkind, 2011; see also Hosking, 1997). This divide that is experienced as such until this day, by a society that is much more homogenous than it was as recently as one hundred years ago.