“Beware of getting to where the Bolsheviks once planned to go: one step closer and you will be there.” The least that can be said is that the President of the Russian Federation does not mince words when it comes to denouncing pervasive progressivism.
It was on October 21, 2021, in Sochi in Crimea – quite symbolic – that the annual meetings of the influential Valdai Club, an international discussion forum dedicated to Russia’s place in the world, opened for a few days with Vladimir Putin in person as the guest of honor.
From the outset, the master of the Kremlin attacked the cancel culture – or culture of the erasure of traditional values - which seems to have contaminated the West:
“Some in Western countries are sure that the aggressive erasure of entire pages of their own history, the reverse discrimination of the majority in the interests of a minority, and the demand to give up traditional notions such as mother, father, family and even the differences between the genders, constitute, according to them, the milestones of the movement towards a social renewal,” he quips.
Before starting to speak about the progressives, he said, “It is their right to profess this, let’s not get involved, let’s just ask them not to go after our house too much.” In essence, the Russian bear, if it feels threatened in its existence and its way of life, will know how to show its claws.
More daring, the parallel that Vladimir Putin draws between current progressivism and communist totalitarianism:
“After the revolution of 1917, the Bolsheviks, relying on the dogmas of Marx and Engels, declared that they would change the existing ways and customs and not only political and economic customs, but also the very notion of human morality and the foundations of a healthy society.
“The destruction of secular values, of religion, and of relationships between people, to the total rejection of the family, all of this was once proclaimed in the name of progress. …It looks like what we are witnessing today: the struggle for equality and against discrimination transformed into an aggressive dogmatism, bordering on absurdity when the works of great authors of the past, such as Shakespeare, are no longer taught in schools or universities, because their ideas are considered backward.”
“In Hollywood, memos are distributed on appropriate storytelling and how many characters of which color and gender should star in a movie. It’s even worse that the agitprop department of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union,” laughs the Russian chief executive.
On gender ideology, Vladimir Putin is even more incisive: “They talk about some monstrous things, like when children learn from an early age that a boy can become a girl, and vice versa. Teachers actually impose a choice on them. They do this while excluding the parents from the process and forcing the child to make decisions that can devastate his or her life.”
“Let’s call a spade a spade: all this borders on a crime against humanity, and this is done under the banner of progress,” declares the president of the Russian Federation, who did not fail to accuse the West more as trying to out do each other.
Vladimir Putin repeats his views in good times and in bad: to guarantee the good of societies, and especially of the Russian House, it is a question of building on a “proven tradition” and implementing an “optimistic conservatism.”
In a recent intervention at the Valdai Club, bringing together nearly 300 Russian and foreign participants from academia, politics, and the media, Vladimir Putin launched an unprecedented charge against the progressive ideologies conveyed by a secularized West.
