Controversial and valuable in Putin's Valdai speech

Every year President Putin comes out with more and more conceptual, philosophical and meaningful articles and speeches on fundamental political issues. At a recent meeting of Valdai, he continued to share with the public his views on the problems, challenges and trends facing the world in the XNUMXst century.

What did the president say

Thus, Putin said that the world is in the phase of a civilization crisis. From his words, it follows that civilization is based on values ​​that determine approaches and principles. The crisis, therefore, consists in the undermining of values, and the question that it poses to society is what will have to be abandoned, what should be revised or corrected.



The period of the civilizational crisis, according to Putin, began with the collapse of the USSR and the formation of a unipolar world. The era of ideological confrontation was left behind and the search for a new balance began, that is, the painful formation of a multipolar world. A number of objective contradictions arose: climate problems, capitalism problems, problems of technologies artificial intelligence. They are aggravated to the limit and create conditions for a new world war, which has so far been avoided.

The starting points of the crisis, according to Putin, are, first, attempts to question the role of the state in the life of society and the role of state sovereignty in policysecondly, an attempt to solve social problems through a revolution; thirdly, an attempt to impose values ​​from the outside.

To survive the “structural breakdown”, Putin proposes to be guided by “reasonable conservatism”, which is:


On this basis, it is necessary to carry out international cooperation to combat global problems, so that each country is beneficial in its own way.

If you briefly convey the political meaning of Vladimir Vladimirovich's message, it is that the United States, undermining the institution of state in other countries, overthrowing unwanted governments and imposing false values, aggravates the objective problems of climate change, models of capitalism and technological challenges. This is precisely what Putin calls to counteract, relying on a conservative approach.

What is conservatism in general?

The entire history of mankind proves that society develops in accordance with internal objective laws according to the same scenario for all countries and peoples. Any peculiarity of regions, countries, cultures is only a form, an external manifestation of this or that way of life, however, exerting an opposite effect on it. And the way of life is, of course, based on laws economics, because the material factor of the existence of society is primary in relation to the spiritual factors.

For example, there is the United States and there is Iran - two seemingly completely different countries. The first country is very young, emerged in the era of democratic revolutions and is a world hegemon, a world empire. The second country is very ancient, but formed in its modern form as a result of the religious national liberation revolution, defending sovereignty in a complex region. The culture of the Americans and the culture of the Persians are infinitely distant from each other and have a pronounced originality. However, from the economic point of view, both the United States and Iran are market countries, that is, their ways of life are identical in this sense. The cultural characteristics of the American nation (democracy, the American dream, Protestant ethics) strengthen the objective laws of the market economy, and the cultural characteristics of the Iranian nation (statism, ancient traditions, Islam) inhibit the objective laws of the market economy. But both there and there they have a decisive influence on society.

Based on the general direction of the development of society, there are, as it were, three approaches of subjective influence on its objective development.

1. A reactionary approach, the essence of which is to try to turn the wheel of history in the opposite direction. For example, the adherents of the monarchy at one time tried to return to the feudal order, advocated the preservation of the landlord way of life, the return of serfdom, etc., seeing in this a return to Russian spirituality and the originality of the country. And today, for example, the ideologists and practitioners of Islamic fundamentalism here and there are trying to build a caliphate that would live according to the norms and laws of the Middle Ages, avoiding the problems of modern civilization.

2. A revolutionary approach, the essence of which is to try to accelerate the development of society. Revolutionaries, as a rule, focus on destroying everything that, in their opinion, impedes the development of society. For example, they abolished monarchies, class division, abolished the right to private property, carried out agrarian reforms, nationalization, etc. All new emerging demands the demolition of something old - this is how most revolutionaries reasoned.

3. A conservative approach, the essence of which is to preserve society in its current position.

It is easy to see that the reactionary approach is closer to those who have lost or are losing wealth and power, the revolution is closer to the poor, who have neither one nor the other, and conservatism is of interest primarily to the ruling strata and groups. Therefore, it is often said that when a person gains power, he inevitably becomes a conservative.

Based on the different essence of these approaches, each of these trends in political thought is characterized by certain attitudes, values, techniques.

However, Vladimir Vladimirovich proposes not just conservatism, but moderate and reasonable conservatism. That is, he is convinced of the need for a moderate, reasonable conservation of the existing social order.

Controversial and valuable in Putin's speech

Since 2000, the author of the article has been carefully reading all the works, listening to all key speeches of Putin and is convinced that the president writes the texts himself and is quite frank in public. In recent years, as a mature politician, Putin has often raised really significant fundamental questions. However, it is difficult to agree with the fact that our president is a theoretician (a role to which he himself does not pretend).

The largest and, by the way, rather moderate conservative in the world is the military-political leadership of the United States. It is the leaders of the American state who are making every effort to conserve the prevailing in the 1990s. unipolar world order. They are building up military capabilities, applying pressure and overthrowing governments, and undermining peace in various regions, deliberately wreaking havoc in order to maintain the instability most beneficial to US hegemony. And they've been doing it successfully for the past thirty years, so don't underestimate them. Structural changes in world politics and the withering of US hegemony began with the rise of China's power.

And all these faddles of "cultural Marxism" with sex minorities, "anti-racism" and other nonsense are not at all a revolutionary approach, but a banal spiritual decay of society. And if we continue to develop our culture on the basis of "lack of ideology", "civil society" and the sale and purchase of everything, then sooner or later we will slide into a similar ugly manifestation of the human spirit. Comedy club, Grishka Mamurin, Danya Milokhin will not let you make a mistake. And no conservatism, no spiritual braces will help. Russian TV viewers find it hard to believe, but in American society there are no less "spiritual bonds" than we have.

The same goes for the Orange Revolutions. These are not revolutions, but the most natural reactionary attempts to drive individual countries into the stage of classical capitalism of the XNUMXth century. with an absolutely free market and the state as a night watchman.

Therefore, Russia in international affairs is not at all guided by conservatism; on the contrary, it adheres to a completely revolutionary camp that advocates multipolarity and the destruction of US hegemony. As for our internal situation, even Vladimir Vladimirovich admits that the current model of capitalism has exhausted itself. And it is clear from the covid policy of the Russian authorities that we are moving further and further from the classical liberal society. It is precisely this course that needs to be comprehended without mixing in unnecessary conversations about spirituality and to outline further movement forward. True, judging by those perestroika tales about the Bolsheviks, which Vladimir Vladimirovich scares from time to time, because of the fear of at least something revolutionary, even in name, liberal dogmas are still very strong in power.

The most valuable and truly scientifically correct in Putin's words is about strengthening the role of the sovereign state in society and the principle of security above all else. Life itself, torn by contradictions, compels the authorities to strengthen the state and turn its policies in the interests of the people. It is in this direction that we need to focus our efforts.