Russian world out, guardian of traditional values — in.
The Russian Presidential Administration’s political bloc has reportedly formulated preliminary “ideological guidelines” for the upcoming 2024 presidential campaign in Russia. The Kremlin plans to promote an “ideology of conservatism” and position Vladimir Putin as the “guardian of traditional values” in the election.
According to Meduza, who talked with a source close to the Kremlin, the Kremlin’s ideologists will rely on the rhetoric of Russia’s “moral superiority” over other countries and present Russia as a “state within itself,” preserving traditions and interacting relatively little with the outside world. The “Russian world” theme is to become part of the “state-in-itself” concept.
The Kremlin’s political bloc has been working on the “conservative isolationist ideology” even before the start of the war in Ukraine in late 2021, aiming to gradually replace the promotion of “Russian world” ideas in the rhetoric of officials and propagandists.
According to Meduza’s sources, the campaign will be built around the “DNA of Russia” project, designed to study “Russia’s worldview,” which is being undertaken by the Kremlin’s political bloc together with the Znanie Enlightenment Society. While the meaning of this is fundamentally unclear, an article by its key actors names some “value constants” peculiar to Russia throughout its history: “communality, a sense of duty and super-goals, existential sustainability, and the priority of the immaterial over the mercantile.”
At a “closed seminar” for employees of other Kremlin departments, regional officials and political technologists, participants were assured that there would be no problems with the results of the presidential election. The organizers of the project claim that there is a “growing demand” for conservatism in Russia, although there is no open and reliable sociological data to support this thesis in any way.
In addition to the 2024 election, the meeting discussed the “development” of the annexed Ukrainian territories and how state-owned companies and Russian businesses should operate there. Representatives of Abkhazia and South Ossetia, two Georgian regions occupied by Russia where puppet governments have been set up, also reportedly attended the event, with the Russian authorities not abandoning the idea of annexing these territories as well as those occupied in Ukraine.
The KPI for the election results was also outlined, with Putin’s results expected to surpass those of 2018, when he “got” 76.69% of the vote with a turnout of 67.54%.
