Grupo de análisis FAES
Russia’s new forty-four-page National Security Strategy (NSS), signed by President Vladimir Putin on 2 July, is much more than an update of the previous document adopted in 2015. The main novelty of the 2021 NSS is that it covers not only national security issues, but a whole range of issues, from the economy to the environment, and from traditional values to defence. As in the 2015 NSS, NATO and the US still represent the greatest threat to Russian national security (the word NATO appears on almost every one of the document’s 44 pages), but all considerations of cooperation between Russia and the West have been erased. What is new in ESN 2021 is the assertion that Russia’s ‘cultural sovereignty’ faces an existential threat from the West: that ‘Russia’s traditional spiritual, moral and historical-cultural values are under active attack by the United States and its allies’. Together with “transnational corporations and foreign non-profit, non-governmental, religious, extremist and terrorist organisations”, the strategy document states on page 36, these countries are “exerting informational and psychological pressure on individual, group and social consciousness by spreading social and moral principles that contradict the traditions, convictions and beliefs of the peoples of the Russian Federation”. Thus, ESN 2021 explains how “alien ideals and values” not only destroy the foundations of cultural sovereignty, political stability and statehood, but also cause irreparable damage to the “moral health” of the individual. Thus, the threat is directed simultaneously at the individual and the state. In both cases, it is presented as existential, aimed at destroying identity, whether individual or national.
According to the authors of ESN 2021, Russia must fight against the destabilising influence of the US and its allies, who desperately seek to preserve their disintegrating global hegemony. Western-US hegemony is defined as much in cultural terms as in military or geopolitical ones. What is most striking about ESN 2021 is the consideration that the West is on its way out, seeking ever more serious conflicts. This combination of historical optimism (the imminent end of Western hegemony) and deep concern (as it is losing, the West will strike back with greater ferocity) is the paradigm that Stalin introduced to the Russian revolutionaries of 1917, about the sharpening of the class struggle on the road to socialism, which is supposed to bring about the final defeat of capitalism.
However, according to ESN 2021, Russia’s global role today is not revolutionary but counter-revolutionary, because Russia is predestined to lead the defence of the “true” Europe, traditional values and “cultural sovereignty”, as explained, without using the word “counter-revolution”, in the section entitled “Defence of traditional Russian spiritual and moral values, culture and historical memory”.
The instruments proposed by ESN 2021 to ensure Russia’s security and defence are astonishingly broad. Some relate to the international sphere, in particular to increasing Russia’s role in the global spaces of science, education and information. Other instruments include strengthening family and traditional values; using state-controlled media to promote ‘Russian values’ (specifically RT and ‘Sputnik’); funding ‘patriotic education’ youth clubs; controlling publicly available historical narratives; promoting the Russian Orthodox Church and the Christian religion; and promising to defend the Russian people from external ideas and values.
NSE 2021 is not a strategy for the country’s security, but a tactic aimed at keeping Vladimir Putin’s regime and government in power by mobilising the Russian nation and identity against Western values. However, Russian history shows that, in the past, the Russian state has been extraordinarily strong in resisting external threats (the Mongol invasion, Napoleon and Hitler), but it has collapsed because of its subjects’ loss of confidence in it, as happened with the Tsarist Empire in 1917 and the Communist Empire in 1991.
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