Putin, liberalism, and the struggle between east and west

Since the outbreak of Russia's war of aggression against Ukraine, president Vladimir Putin has multiplied his references to the danger of the democratic facade of the American-driven liberal system. Putin's recent invective against the liberal order appears as “the other side” of the fight against the West. The chapter intends to start from current events and then move backwards, focusing on certain passages, such as 2019; when Putin defined liberalism as obsolete, 2014; when Putin claimed that the expansion of NATO was both the cause of the Euromaidan revolution, and the annexation of Crimea, 2011; when during the Arab Springs Putin accused the West of being the head of a Global Revolutionary Internationalism, and 2007; when at the Munich conference Putin stated the unipolar world was dead. Western liberalism is not only attacked as for the alleged export of democracy, as an emblem of cancel culture and gender theory, but also as a careless version of the needs of the sovereign state, which for Putin is, instead, the only tool to meet the needs of the multi-polar world. On the one hand, liberalism (in particular the economic liberalism) was held responsible for the political and economic disaster into which Russia plunged in the 1990s, during the time of Boris Yeltsin, on the other hand, there exists in Russia a form of ultra-conservative liberalism rooted in particular in the thought of Ivan Ilyin's call for an "ideologically liberal dictatorship" which claims a Russian state specificity alternative to the European liberal one. After framing the various attacks on Western liberalism and the liberal conservative alternative, the chapter will attempt to suggest some ways to break free from Putin's ideological impasse, particularly by exposing the rhetoric and superficiality that Putin and his team employed in their strategy.