In 2006, President Vladimir Putin said at an economic forum in St. Petersburg that some countries subsist by the power of ideas. “Russia is precisely one of them,” he said. “A country, first of all, that seeks to build a society of justice based on moral values.”

Starting in the spring of this year, the question of morality started appearing in the President’s speeches with noticeable regularity. Putin is a pragmatic man and hides all traces of sentimentality, but as he read out the annual state-of-the-nation address, he suddenly spoke about “the moral values uniting all of us,” which he called “as important a factor of development as political and economic stability.” Toward the end of the speech, he again returned to the issue using expressions that rarely occur in his personal vocabulary. He described the government’s inattentiveness to the problems of average Russians as “immoral.”

Except for some comments about Boris Yeltsin, the address was overtly technocratic and its genre did not need to be dressed up. That is why the four passages concerning morality seemed especially unusual. Notably, Putin aired this topic twice.

A month and a half later, the Russian President took up the issue of justice and moral values again. The fact that the word ‘justice’ is very popular in Russia and imparts an almost sacred sense has long been noticed by historians, philosophers, political scientists, and sociologists. Nevertheless, the allusions to morality in the President’s speeches deserve special attention.

Similar motives appeared in the speeches of Vladislav Surkov, the deputy chief of the presidential administration staff. Additionally, sources claim that, according to convictions in the Kremlin, the next president, whoever he might be, will have to concentrate on society’s moral norms, in addition to the oil and gas sector.

It seems that even the top-rank strata of society have developed a need for morality, together with the more down-to-earth strata. This could partially explain the incredibly high ratings of director Pavel Lungin’s movie “The Island.” Its popularity ratings proved that people crave for moral guidelines and clear notions of good and bad to a greater degree than they crave for religion per se.

MODERN VALUES

What precisely is known about the values of Russia today? What do the people around us, our friends, society and the state encourage? What do we classify as shameful, disgraceful, irresponsible in terms of social behavior, or inhumane, in the final run?

Forming the web of new immaterial relations after two decades of tectonic shocks that the country has lived through is a difficult business. To paraphrase the U.S. researcher Abraham Maslow, the satisfaction of primary needs like housing and food comes first. Next in importance are the natural instincts (for example, security), followed by spiritual values and deeper reflections. But first, one must get down to the business of organizing the household. (It should be noted that many people never get beyond this phase, although it is broader than the mere primeval necessity of survival.)

Add to all of this the completely changed structure of society. It is not that the people lost everything in a blink of an eye and are now regaining the material values, earned by toil in the past. The change has been overwhelming. It affected the criteria of professional and social advance, the notions of what is desirable or respectable, and the hierarchies of goals and tasks. This process of restructuring is still continuing.

The vacuum of ideas, compounded with the insecurity of material status (the Russian market still remains an unpredictable place), makes it impossible to set and fulfill objectives (materialize one’s dreams) or cause aggression or unwillingness to make progress. People have developed the ability to “enjoy the moment,” contrary to what the gurus said about the ability to go beyond the moment to consider distant consequences of current events, since this very ability sets man apart from the animal world.

Famous psychologist Rollo May was guided by the notion of ‘role confusion’ when he spoke about cultural norms, which an individual is unable to observe. This gives rise to frustration, which eventually causes cruelty and conservatism on the part of the individual. These are the mechanisms of self-defense that result from the individual’s mismatch with the world and with other people.

Presently, the economy is growing, people are developing faith in the future and even the pessimists acknowledge that there have been great changes for the better – noticeable in various sections of society. But increasing material standards do not always generate immaterial enlightenment that, in its due turn, produces the common truths responsible for bonding society together and allowing it to move forward. Hence, the resultant movement lacks both vector and meaning.

Public life has provisionally split into two general trends – business and glamour, where the politics is obscure and social project-making is awkward. That is why some people revel in the pleasures of Courchevel, while others get soaked with beer. May each of us get what is affordable. Along with it, all the strata are busy settling in life. Some seek to regain the Soviet-era goodness, even though these memories have witnessed changes over years and induce images totally different from the reality of 20 years ago, which consisted of dreams of a new TV set, a suite of furniture, and long queues in the stores just to buy some sausage.

Today, people enjoy the ability to move from a two-room apartment to a three-room, replacing the Russian-made car with a foreign model, gazing into Japanese- or South Korean-made TV sets and carrying handbags by some impressive French designer.

But Man shall not live by bread alone, as it were. This may partly explain why glamour, overblown to the point of fatuity, blooms in some social classes, while other classes pour out their aggression everywhere – from street scenes to foreign-policy speeches. Just stop for a moment and watch the conduct of your fellow human beings, as hordes of people try to overtake, press or push others, both literally and figuratively. The assertion of one’s own importance through the humiliation of others (often at a subconscious level) seems to be happening all around us.

Theaters, books and parties have turned into tools for escaping the reality. They serve to fill the vacuum that has formed between career-climbing and moneymaking. Even the most successful and pragmatically minded sections of society display this escapism. It reveals an underlying deficit of fundamental things – meanings, heartiness, unification around some idea and, generally, of all things comfortable, kind, reliable, comprehensible and eternal.

“The things that society feels nostalgia for perfectly illustrate what it is craving,” says VTsIOM [Russian Public Opinion Research Center] director Valery Fyodorov. “It craves order, organization, unification factors or even congregating rituals. Beer cannot replace all those things.”

A NOSTALGIA FOR MEANINGS

Social Darwinism is a rather non-inspirational topic. As for the lures of luxurious Courchevel, “not everyone wants to go there,” a top businessman commented recently. Russian society has been living for many years without any kind of moral guidelines, principles or commonly accepted notions of unification. However, the overt use of brute force, lavish money and clout cannot uphold the social system forever. Life will eventually require something that is only found in a different dimension. Perennial values, as one might call it. An alternative option is the irreversible marginalization of society. It is also true, however, that the word ‘society’ scarcely applies to Russians today, since the Russian people mostly exist as suspended and isolated particles toiling their way to the surface or resignedly sinking to the bottom.

Yet social volatility is on the wane today and after almost twenty years people have acquired a new sense of space and time, looking around them and pondering casual rules and meanings. The youngsters of the 1990s have grown to maturity; some have become humbled, while others have shed their crimson jackets [a status symbol of the so-called New Russians in the early years of post-perestroika reforms, especially among the nouveau riche with poor taste – Ed.], learned foreign languages, settled down and started to raise children. But suddenly an eternal problem has sprung up. “The conflicts of generations between fathers and children have existed for ages and won’t vanish in the future,” says Valery Fyodorov. “But there is another thing that has existed for ages, too. It is the set of basic precepts for living that the fathers instructed their children in. Today’s dilemma is what precepts they should teach.”

However correctly society might be developing in a “capitalist” or “bourgeois” vein – call it any way you want – its development still does not create a basis for eternal values and commonly accepted notions.

For instance, there are obvious and well-established biblical commandments, such as, ‘Thou shall not kill.’ These are readily acceptable. But today, commandments such as, ‘Thou shall not steal’ appear rather problematic. Take, for example, a corporation manager who knows that his boss is extorting money. How should he react and how should he view his superior? Not in the sense of direct practical actions, like ‘whistle blowing’ to the upper management, or reporting the theft to the Prosecutor’s Office, but simply in the evaluative sense? Should the boss be admired because he is so shrewd and has panache for such behavior? Or should he be despised because he robs from the corporation and country, and consequently, robs his subordinates – both employees and people? Or should it all be ignored because there is no way to stop such activities anyways and hence a waste of time and effort?

The conduct of drivers on the road provides yet another example on routine Russian life. How do we describe the brazen individual who tries to squeeze his car into the lane in front of you, risking an accident just because he needs to get somewhere in a hurry? Can he act like this merely because he has an important position, is wealthy, and in a hurry? He is a damned scoundrel but stay away from sorting it out with him – you don’t have enough nerves to set every pig down. In the West, drivers flash their high-beam lights, or pour scorn on the driver who ignores the rules of the road. If the transgressor happened to overlook a sign or became lost, his fellow drivers will attempt to politely assist him. But if he violates the traffic regulations simply because he finds it convenient, this is considered inadmissible behavior from the perception of commonly accepted norms. Not the law as such, since the police do not lurk behind every road sign. The uncoded regulations are more important in this case – the transgressor showed disrespect for others by putting his interests above theirs. (Even though people in some parts of Southern Europe often do not bother to use their safety belts, for example, and have a habit of flashing their lights at approaching cars to indicate that road police are checking drivers’ speed, this does not break the universal basic norms of society.) As a European journalist noted recently, traffic regulations are the same for everyone, whether he or she drives a Rolls Royce or an old Skoda.

Today, Russia offers no shortage of examples of opposite behavior. How do we describe situations where government officials ride in luxury cars escorted by a motorcade? Or when adults swill liquor in city parks in plain view of children? Or when people make bonfires in the woods? And how do we explain to children that it is no good to cheat others and build fortunes on other people’s misfortunes? How do we explain that men behave like wolves to other men?

VALUES OF THE INDIVIDUAL AND VALUES OF SOCIETY

At this point, we must draw a line between the values of the individual and values of society. They augment rather than contradict each other, although they are not exact copies of each other. The most vivid example of this is the treatment of extramarital liaisons in the West. Society generally does not chastise people for such affairs anymore, but social morals do not entice everyone to become free-loving roués either. Socially successful and affluent personalities set an example to others, yet this does not mean that get-rich-quick schemes and career leaping are hammered into the heads of children from the cradle. On the other hand, adolescents are stimulated to learn the value of money and experience. It is no accident that teenagers from many well-off families in the West do not shun work during vacations.

Another example of a typical Western approach: it is quite honorable to fight for one’s country and nation. Those who die in combat become heroes, but if one must surrender to save his life, this is acceptable. The value of life is the highest value. He who surrenders remains a hero all the same. (In Russia, however, such an individual will be considered a traitor or a coward at best.)

Finally, there is the purely down-to-earth social aspect. A Friday night relaxation in a pub is a normal thing. People should shake off their tensions, and drinks seem to prove convenient to these ends. But it does not mean that such a retinue of relaxation becomes the norm under every circumstance. Everything has a strict segmentation – the pubs are for drinks, parks for strolls and bikeways for bikes, although they are all meant for relaxation and removing stress.

The West places emphasis on the self-realization of the personality through respect for oneself and for others. On balance, the family, social and economic laws produce an accumulation effect that has prompted other countries to look at the West over the decades (if not centuries) with a certain amount of envy, which sometimes stimulates imitation or kindles hatred.

Russia faces the dual problem of forming both values for society and values for the individual. And what values are there to offer and who (or what) should become their sources and carriers? This is the biggest dilemma of the day.

Historically, it was Russia’s ruling class that produced all of the norms, concepts and motivation for actions and regulations. It is worth recalling, though, that the sages of antiquity also spoke about a class of guardians who carried on the values of society. “What those who have the chief power regard as honorable will necessarily be the object which the citizens in general will aim at,” Aristotle said.

The philosopher lived in an epoch of societies composed of classes, but today’s proponents of Western-style liberal democracy also believe that the state must play a significant role in the formulation of rules and norms. Francis Fukuyama writes in The Great Disruption that a statement on the impossibility of administering the morals is only partly true. Government cannot compel citizens to follow norms that run counter to innate instincts or interests, yet it can (and does) designate more informal norms. The abolition of segregation in the U.S. in the 1960s due to the creation of civil rights laws and franchise played a crucial role in the change of public norms regarding racial issues.

Rollo May produced a formulation that sounds relevant for modern Russia. He referred to Spinoza, who wrote about freedom from fear. Spinoza believes, says May, that the state should relieve every man from fear so that he may live and act with a sense of protection and without doing damage to both himself and his neighbors.

This means that the ruling class bears responsibility, at the minimum, for initializing unifying truths and notions, which will help transform the country from a bunch of chaotic atoms into a real society. The truths and notions will not grow from the bottom, but if they do they will come in the form of a marginalized concept of living that will spoil some and be rejected or ignored by others.

In this respect, North American researchers say there is little hope that the types of endemic mistrust found in southern Italy and Russia will go away on their own anytime soon. The natural abilities of the people in those regions to create order sporadically will not suffice for changing the cultural stereotypes of behavior (Fukuyama). Authoritative Russian thinkers share this idea. “State power has a much greater responsibility than ordinary citizens to observe moral boundaries,” Alexander Solzhenitsyn said recently. “By doing this, it will set an example to follow without coercing people to do so.”

The crux of the matter, however, is that none of the people who have recently expounded on moral norms bothered to clarify what sort of norms they were speaking about, what kind of society they would like to see for Russia in, say, five to eight years from now, and what they classify as ‘moral’ or ‘immoral’ behavior. Putin spoke about “respect for the native tongue, identical culture, identical values, the memories of past generations, and every page of our history.” Frankly speaking, this is an appeal for honoring the national heritage – the traditionalist foundations that certainly should be present in the culture of every nation. But the situation of an open global information society obviously demands something more expansive. What is more, the literal observance of this advice will sooner halt society’s development and thus impair its prospects in global competition than stimulate progress. It is scarcely possible to formulate the concepts of evil or fairness exclusively on the basis of a self-identical language and culture, especially when it comes down to Russia’s multicultural environment. Self-identity is a necessary but insufficient condition.

One more thing Putin spoke about was justice – a notion that arouses some problems, too. Alexander Auzan, for example, the director of the Public Contract Institute, has vehemently refused to use that notion in his lectures in the future because of its rather disjoining connotation. Some politicians claim that justice will still be associated with the “confiscate-and-divide” concept in the next fifteen or so years, although the number of supporters of that idea will diminish along with development of the economy and maturing of the generations of people unlinked to the experience of Soviet-era wage-leveling.

The notion generates other differences. For instance, some believe that a healthy foundation incorporating private property and individual freedoms was laid in the 1990s in spite of all the nightmarish consequences. Then this stage passed and other things emerged, such as the possibility to redistribute private property freely and substitute the freedom of the individual by skills of “playing to rule.”

Others disagree with this, saying that the country is generally moving in the right direction regardless of some major mistakes, since apart from structuralizing of the economy, the assets of the average man in the street (TV set–car–country house–good school–big wages) are also beginning to take hold. But as soon as the man in the street realizes that he owns something that he can lose, and that he has lost his guidelines, he will look at the issue of justice from a different angle. Thus, a surveyor of public sentiments commented: “We understand now where we are. Revolutionary sentiments have vanished, the situation has stabilized, objectives have appeared, the outrageous chaos of the past is gone, and the game has acquired rules. But many of us understand that the rules are wrong.”

Russian society really needs a readjustment across the board in order to eliminate injustices – from labor relations in big corporations and small companies to the habits of road policemen (who assess the rules of the road very selectively), to the way retirement benefits are computed, to heartlessness in the services sector, including inside the government. Let us put the word ‘justice’ aside, though – at least until the moment when it acquires a common meaning for most people. After all, we can find good substitute words for it, like kindness or respect.

But on this point, too, a momentous problem arises. As shown in recent research, people distrust almost everyone, apart from their families and one or two of their closest friends. The level of trust in government institutions is so low that even if the state wants to shout out a note of unification, few will heed or believe it. This means that the state and its separate representatives will first have to correct their own reputations and the reputations of their institutions. Otherwise, any talk about widening the radius of trust will lose all meaning.

The life of Russian society reveals a peculiar feature. A decade ago, the mass media watched closely what cars government officials used, what they wore, and where they spent leisure time. Then, when the state bureaucracy was shaken up by campaigns that forced them into Russian-made cars, it was considered somehow improper to get into BMWs or late-model Toyotas. Even though many inquiries did not delve into morality issues, and sounded hysterical, they attained a certain result – many bureaucrats were cautious not to behave in a manner that could draw scrutiny. But what has transpired today? Government departments and branches have replaced their fleets of corporate cars over the past year, and now it is not considered inappropriate for a government official to ride around in a car that costs $100,000 or more. Compare this figure to the monthly pensions that vary from $100 to $300 a month.

At this point, it would be worth making a note on corruption. This problem began to subside in many countries after decisions were taken to change the attitude of whole sections of the population to corruption. A change of attitude often marks a pivotal point in the development of a society and changes their future from that of ‘negative’ to ‘stable positive.’ Russia badly needs such a change of attitude now. Why? Because no one has any idea how this problem should be treated, especially if you judge from the multitude of actions and events.

The required result will not be achieved without a high level of openness and responsibility.

Scholars of social sciences say that morality is possible in societies where public information circulates freely. Erich Fromm wrote in this connection that “in the absence of information, debates and the power capable of making decisions efficacious, a democratically expressed opinion of the people has no more meaning than the applause at sports competitions.”

Again and again, yet another problem is hidden here, and this problem looks the most dreadful even to those who consider issues of morality quite topical for Russia. It consists in the dangers posed by cartelism that instantaneously voids any word, action or phenomenon of value. As a researcher said, “the best way to discredit any reflections on morality now is to make everyone talk about it and to let parties include it in their election programs.”

Last but not least, the problem of personalities. “There’s much to talk about, but who should do it?” a political scientist said. According to sociologists, the Russians think that even Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Patriarch Alexy II cannot do it. Some expect the surfacing of unusual bright individualities of the Putin-1999 mold (much more in the sense of ability to present something new – and this is what society is waiting for – rather than in the sense of unexpected successorship). Others believe the next president will have to raise the matter all the same and other personalities will take it up after it.

If not, a totally different danger may arise otherwise. As mentioned earlier, society cannot live endlessly with moral ambiguity and social turbulence without producing something from within itself as a natural protection against external shocks. For a while not long ago, xenophobic sentiments were being circulated, and not without involvement of the government. The individuals responsible for spreading these ideas hurried to to stop them when they noticed their snowballing popularity in the masses, which craved for an object to vent their frustration.

Attempts of a somewhat different nature are noticeable today, appealing to the experience of the Church. Unfortunately, they imply allusions to church dogmas rather than the commandments of Christianity. As we turn to God, we run the risk of bumping into the institution of conservatism – let us not say reaction – which is now admitted even by many religious people. But since there is nothing else to turn to, we can expect a somewhat convulsive reversion to the basic elements of traditionalism.

This reverse side of globalization has already transpired in large parts of the globe. A loss of self-identity in today’s universe (which, in Russia’s case, has the form of chaos and incompleteness of self-realization) breeds a desire for something understandable, simple, even totalitarian. A desire for a leader who is capable of cleaning up society and emphasizing lofty goals; a leader who can set the course and personally lead the Crusade. And if the flirting with the topic of conservative values continues, Russia will get a drastically different leader – a Savonarola compounded with the priest Gapon and Rasputin. A reaction-minded revolutionary, as it were.

The soil is still not ready for such an individual to burst onto the scene, but this does not mean it will not appear in the years to come. Eventually, there will be order arising out of chaos, but not in the way that the Nobel Prize winning physicist Ilya Prigozhin interpreted it. This will be an authentically Russian interpretation.

That is why the lower the morals sink and the longer that sinking continues, the tougher the measures that one might offer or demand to rectify the situation. Russian and world history abounds in radical steps, including the ones that aimed to embed new values and morality – from the Crusaders to the Great Inquisition to the Islamic and Socialist revolutionaries. It would be highly desirable to eliminate any form of radicalism in the field of human relations at the present time.