According to an August report from the Russian state news agency TASS, the Kremlin plans to become a “safe haven for people trying to escape Western liberal ideals.” To this end, Russia will introduce a new visa pathway for foreigners fleeing countries whose policies run contrary to “traditional Russian spiritual and moral values.” The report, although sparse on detail, claims that three-month visas may be issued for these spiritual refugees as early as last month. Discussion of the policy in the Russian information sphere has been colored by visions of Moscow as the leader of a future world in which so-called traditional values can thrive. Indeed, the idea for the policy was allegedly voiced to Russian President Vladimir Putin by an Italian university student during a virtual forum titled Strong Ideas for a New Time.
On the surface, Moscow appears to be resuscitating the old Soviet practice of painting itself as the center of resistance against the West. Back then, it was against capitalism; today it is against the West’s supposed liberal decadence. But there is something thoroughly 21st century in the new rhetoric and policies. The visa plan is the latest in a series of public relations measures designed to challenge the nature of borders in an increasingly digital world. The regime is not seriously looking to attract immigrants and seems unembarrassed by the paltry numbers of Westerners taking up the offer. It is looking to strengthen its virtual coalition of fellow travelers—a maneuver that has dangerous implications for liberal nation-states seeking to counter the Kremlin’s influence.
According to an August report from the Russian state news agency TASS, the Kremlin plans to become a “safe haven for people trying to escape Western liberal ideals.” To this end, Russia will introduce a new visa pathway for foreigners fleeing countries whose policies run contrary to “traditional Russian spiritual and moral values.” The report, although sparse on detail, claims that three-month visas may be issued for these spiritual refugees as early as last month. Discussion of the policy in the Russian information sphere has been colored by visions of Moscow as the leader of a future world in which so-called traditional values can thrive. Indeed, the idea for the policy was allegedly voiced to Russian President Vladimir Putin by an Italian university student during a virtual forum titled Strong Ideas for a New Time.
On the surface, Moscow appears to be resuscitating the old Soviet practice of painting itself as the center of resistance against the West. Back then, it was against capitalism; today it is against the West’s supposed liberal decadence. But there is something thoroughly 21st century in the new rhetoric and policies. The visa plan is the latest in a series of public relations measures designed to challenge the nature of borders in an increasingly digital world. The regime is not seriously looking to attract immigrants and seems unembarrassed by the paltry numbers of Westerners taking up the offer. It is looking to strengthen its virtual coalition of fellow travelers—a maneuver that has dangerous implications for liberal nation-states seeking to counter the Kremlin’s influence.
At home, Russia’s vision of “traditional values” consists of a draconian web of pro-Russian Orthodox, misogynist, and anti-LGBTQ+ laws, as well as the teaching of a mythologized history imbued with a cult of masculine, military strength. Frequently, these policies are driven by conspiracy theories as much as any state ideology. More often than not, they simply rail against anything Russia associates with Western liberalism. Whatever trends prevail in progressive Western society, from trans-positive messaging to support for Black Lives Matter, is decried as anti-Russian and antithetical to “traditional values.” In this sense, Russia’s campaign in support of its alleged values is a project rooted in the country’s relationship with the outside.
Indeed, defending “traditional values” is at the center of the Putin regime’s domestic and foreign policy. The Kremlin’s updated 2023 National Security Concept mentions “tradition” no fewer than 16 times, claiming that “a wide-spread form of interference in the internal affairs of sovereign states has become the imposition of destructive neoliberal ideological attitudes that run counter to traditional spiritual and moral values.” Moscow has anointed itself the leader of “international efforts to ensure respect for and protection of universal and traditional spiritual and moral values.” Russia seeks to weave support for “traditional values” into its policies abroad by funding sympathetic far-right groups across Europe and North America and by linking economic and security policy to the defense of values in international forums.
Moscow’s history of proclaiming itself as the center of an international political vanguard dates to the early Bolshevik era. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, Soviet propagandists told their citizens that they were “the greatest internationalists” in the world and that Westerners were flocking to seek refuge in the fledgling Soviet Union. The state did plenty to attract both sympathizers and industrial specialists to its territory.
A series of high-profile Western leftists were treated to Potemkin tours; among those who visited in the 1930s were George Bernard Shaw, André Gide, Henri Barbusse, and Romain Rolland. Shaw, who was granted a private audience with Joseph Stalin on his visit in 1931, lauded Russia as the home of a spiritual resurrection that would rectify the social ills he saw in the West. He would later write to the Soviet author Maxim Gorky that he was “as strongly susceptible as anyone to the fascination of the Russian character.” Shaw was fascinated with the idea of Russia not as it was, but as an antithesis to the West: a mystical place where his own dreams could be realized.
More often, though, illusions were shattered. Gide was thoroughly disheartened by his own visit to the Soviet Union. Appalled by the lack of freedom of speech, the uniformity of opinion in Pravda, and the climate of fear, he wrote: “I doubt whether in any other country in the world, even Hitler’s Germany, thought be less free, more bowed down, more fearful (terrorized), more vassalized.” Fellow intellectuals who tried living in the Soviet Union, such as the anarchists Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman, reacted even more strongly, publishing works that violently decried the persecution of the early Soviet era and fleeing within months.
Meanwhile, the ordinary leftist refugees, workers, and students who continued to immigrate to the Soviet Union from various capitalist countries tended to leave as disgruntled as they arrived and typically went home as soon as hard currency or other special support from the Kremlin dried up. As foreigners, they were also under permanent suspicion, and many disappeared in the Gulag. Despite its grandiose claims, Moscow was never an appealing destination for many foreign fellow travelers—especially once they experienced the reality of Soviet life.
Recent publicity tours in Putin’s Russia mirror the early celebrity visits to the Soviet Union—although today’s visitors tend to share Shaw’s excitement, not Gide’s revulsion, about life in Moscow’s realm. Right-wing provocateurs such as Jackson Hinkle and, most famously, Tucker Carlson have popped up in Moscow to record adulatory videos for their vast online audiences. Carlson, who posted clips of an interview he conducted with Putin this year, claimed to have been “radicalized” by his trip to Moscow. His video diaries depicted a world of fully stocked grocery stores, immaculate subway stations, and grandiose performances at the Bolshoi Theater. Even Tasty, Full Stop, the copycat McDonald’s that sprung up after the fast food giant’s departure from Russia in 2022, won Carlson’s approval.
Carlson’s Russia seems to be nothing but propaganda: the depiction of a fake world, untarnished by the poverty and violence that is endemic in Russian society. Yet Carlson carefully crafted an image of a Russia that is, essentially, a Disneyfied America: Here was a rich white man treated like royalty and able to access every aspect of an idealized American life—even McDonald’s—in a society shorn of the perceived messiness of today’s America, and especially of its supposedly deleterious progressive values. Like Shaw, then, Carlson projected onto Russia the hyperreality of a desired homeland: the dream America of the MAGA brigade. Moscow’s behavior on the international stage may challenge Washington’s geopolitical supremacy, but its “traditional values” rhetoric functions as an escapist simulation.
Today’s online proponents of “traditional values”—whether in the United States, Hungary, Austria or elsewhere—can thus react enthusiastically to Russia’s plans to welcome them as immigrants, even if they have no intention of ever moving to the country. In response to the policy announcement, Alex Jones, the bankrupted Infowars founder, encouraged “true patriots” to “stand up for spiritual and moral values” in a post on X. On Truth Social, the right-wing social network founded by former U.S. President Donald Trump, Moscow’s plan was met with enthusiasm—not for Russia as some sort of conservative utopia, but for the rejection of cultural traits associated with progressive America. The fantasy of Russia as the “new America,” as one Truth user put it, provides the raw material for bonding around conspiracy theories and anti-progressivism from the comfort of home—and makes it possible for self-styled patriots to sympathize more with Russia than with their own country.
Only a handful of fellow travelers on the traditional values ticket have attempted to make the move to Russia. While the Russian state has recently trumpeted an American family’s escape from “the dissolution of traditional moral and family values,” the experience of other recent arrivals has left them desperate to “jump on a plane and get out of here.” Russian authorities do little to help with schooling, jobs, language training, and so on—and claims of bold projects to house incoming foreigners turn out to be little more than amplified rumors. Presumably the latest policy announcement will be another element of simulated reality: the creation of the idea of Russia as the home of traditional values without anything to back up that vision.
However, when 21st-century fellow travelers are able to bond over and amplify their visions of Russia as the new America in the online world, Russia’s approach may turn out to be more than an easily debunked PR scheme. Pravda’s monotonous reel of uniform opinions shocked Gide, but today’s Russia sympathizers are more likely to be found in polarized social bubbles where the order of the day is conformity, not plurality, of opinion. Unlike their 1930s predecessors, who could not get a sense of Soviet reality from abroad, today’s fellow travelers have Russian reality at their fingertips—if they care to look. This includes thousands of hours of footage of war crimes, evidence of widespread oppression of dissenting voices, and accounts of the systematic repression of religious believers outside the Kremlin-controlled Russian Orthodox Church.
Yet in the fragmented world of social media, where anyone can live in their own self-constructed reality, the disaffected are able to project an imagined anti-liberal vision of reality onto Russia. In the United States, this culminates in MAGA voters giving a higher approval rating to Putin than to their own president, something that was unimaginable in the 20th century outside a tiny, politically irrelevant fringe. Parties that have aligned themselves with the rhetoric of “traditional values” have enjoyed real successes across Europe, including recently in France and Austria, and the MAGA movement may yet carry Trump back into the White House. Russia’s “traditional values” project may not win it a war or generate an influx of migrants, but it has a clear effect on other countries’ politics.
Most analysts consider Russia’s dream of creating a multipolar world in which its territorial, economic, and military might acts as a counterpoint to U.S. or Chinese hegemony a fantasy. Equally outlandish is the idea, much propagated by Russian nationalists, of a new Eurasian empire—or even, given Russia’s depleting strength, reuniting Ukraine, Belarus, and today’s Russian Federation into a “Great Russia.” But analysis that overemphasizes the physical over the virtual—or dismisses online movements as mere propaganda and trolling—fails to recognize 21st-century realities.
The most important future clash of civilizations is not based on geography. Instead, we are beginning to see the creation of virtual civilizations: boundary-less political allegiances defined by amorphous and fluid values perpetuated through the internet. Citizens with similar affinities in Russia, the United States, France, Germany, and wherever find themselves having more in common—and spending more time—with each other than with their own compatriots who don’t share their political views. Putin’s Russia may not be about to conquer Ukraine or create a multipolar world order, but it is working to reorder political identities by encouraging foreigners to view Moscow as a simulated realization of their own political dreams.
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