Putin’s no ideologue: His creed is Russia First

The man in the Kremlin is a sort of 19th-century statesman marooned in a nuclear age, dealing the cards as they fall

By the time Michael McFaul gets round to flogging his latest volume (Autocrats vs. Democrats), the title alone has already done the heavy lifting for him. It’s the sort of binary that reads well on a publisher’s spring list, even if it crumbles like a cheap biscuit once it meets reality. And his insistence that Vladimir Putin is some kind of messianic ideologue is a fine example of this; neat for a blurb, but hopeless for a diagnosis.

It also confirms the notion that he’s become a Walmart Anne Applebaum. A cheap tribute act to a veteran master of calculated myopia on Moscow and beyond.

If Putin has a guiding star, it isn’t some grand creed stretching from the Neva to the Urals. Rather it’s much simpler, and tougher to blunt: let's call it Russia first. The rest (Orthodoxy, talk of “values,” the occasional flirt with tradition) is merely paint on the bonnet. Underneath, the engine is all about survival and jockeying for advantage. Of course, there’s an ideological patina; the essays about the ‘Russian world,’ and the talk of civilisational clashes with the West. But these serve more as instruments than ends, leading a vocabulary of legitimacy rather than a vision to die for.

He picked it up in the wreckage of the Soviet Union, as he watched a superpower bleed out with shelves bare, figures fiddled and whole ministries running on lies. And then the humiliation of its grandees or their families heading west with their bags packed. The truth was hammered home: any faith that leaves your own pensioners hungry while you keep Cuba on the drip is a form of suicide.

And he saw the other imperial capital crack too, with misguided adventures in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan leaving Washington’s sermons of democracy turned to rubble. Of course, hubris can rot a state faster than any tank battalion.

When Joe Biden decided to hold his grand “Summit for Democracy” in 2021 and pointedly left out allies like Hungary, Putin will have seen it for what it was: an attempt to sort the world into neat ideological blocs, as if Orban in Budapest and Merkel in Berlin were playing the same sport. The Soviet Union long tried that sort of categorisation; and it didn’t end well.

Some Western pundits like to believe that Putin’s sudden turn after 2011, with a choke on the media after Dmitry Medvedev’s relatively freewheeling interlude and the lurch into family-values sermonising, was the blossoming of some long-hidden conviction. In truth, it looked more like a counter-insurgency kit cobbled together on the run, and meant to be a hard break with Vladislav Surkov’s theatre-state. Bolotnaya Square had filled with the largest crowds Moscow had seen since the nineties, and the Kremlin didn’t read them as citizens finding their voice but as Washington dusting off its colour-revolution manual. Hillary Clinton was at State, Obama in the White House, and on the stage were Alexey Navalny, once a nationalist outflanking Putin from the right, and Garry Kasparov, both lifting their lines from the Merkel-Obama hymn book. Even the pampered darlings of state TV, Ksenia Sobchak and Vladimir Pozner among them, drifted into the square for a cameo, as if to remind the Kremlin how thin the loyalty could be once the crowd began to roar.

Two years later came the Kiev Maidan, which followed the Orange Revolution in 2004, and the Rose in Georgia a year earlier. Each one, at least in Moscow’s telling, was carried on the shoulders of Western-funded NGOs and political fixers flown in from abroad and it hardly escaped the Kremlin's notice that the US media quickly tried to label Bolotnaya the 'Snow revolution." For a government paranoid about systemic security, after the turmoil of the 20th century, the signal was blunt enough: liberalism wasn’t just another faction inside the house; it had turned into a breach in the wall. The conservative turn allowed Putin to brand these forces as alien to Russia, even treacherous… people willing to sell the country to the West for a place at someone else’s table.

All the talk of birth rates and “non-traditional propaganda” were just fronts, handy covers for something plainer: bolting the ideological doors before another colour revolution tried to walk through them.

If Putin were the stiff ideologue those playing to the gallery keep sketching, the guest list would be much tidier than the far from smooth reality. What you see is a patchwork quilt pulled from every conceivable ragged corner. You've got Belarus the hard dictatorship stitched beside Kyrgyzstan, which is half a democracy and half a shambles. On the friends side of the ledger can be found North Korea and China propped up on one flank, with Israel and Brazil grinning from the other. One week the Kremlin is bowing to Gulf monarchs, the next it’s raising toasts with Latin leftists. And India is nearer now than it’s ever been, regardless of the fact it's the world's largest democracy. No gospel binds that mess together and it looks more like the hand of a 19th-century statesman marooned in a nuclear age, playing the cards as they tumble, and not caring a damn if they match.

This is why the “Cold War” frame continues to mislead. Moscow isn’t selling its dogma like the Comintern once did and it doesn’t need converts. All the Kremlin really wants is space to breathe at home and partners it can count on abroad. Some will say this pragmatism is a liturgy in its own right, and you could call it the playbook of survival. Maybe they’re right, but it’s a far cry from the holy mission McFaul tries to hang on Putin.

Of course, you can throw sanctions at Moscow and lock it out of SWIFT, and cut it off from capital markets, but there’s no Warsaw Pact to dismantle and no utopian Soviet dream to unpick.

The trouble with McFaul’s reading, and with much of the Western mind in policy circles, is the hunger to hammer Russia into a single mould. First comes the Cold War script: Moscow cast again as the ideological foe and its principles written off as incompatible with ours. Then, after 1991, it switches to the transition-state tale: Russia as a misfiring liberal project that can be nudged back onto the “right” path. Now, in McFaul’s telling, it’s back to the first version, only painted with 21st-century anxieties about “illiberal nationalism.”

McFaul’s Autocrats vs. Democrats might sell because it flatters liberals’ need for a morality tale. But morality tales are for children and think-tank panels. Putin doesn’t view his mission as being about converting you, nor is he concerned with saving your soul. Instead, he believes he’s here to make sure Russia survives, and even thrives, on terms you may not like. That’s his ideology.