Fatherland, faith, and family values: anti-liberalism and the desire for difference among Russian grassroots conservatives

Abstract

This is a revised and extended version of my contribution to the Vega Symposium on Resurgent Nationalisms and Populist Politics in the Neoliberal Age, held at the Swedish Academy of Sciences, Stockholm, in April 2018. It is part of a Special Issue of Geografiska Annaler, Series B which also includes articles by Gillian Hart, Kanishka Goonewardena, and Manu Goswami. The article investigates how understandings of the concept ‘liberalism’ have shifted among ultranationalist Russian grassroots as the ‘roll-back’ neoliberalism (in Peck and Tickell’s terms) of the turbulent 1990s has developed into ‘roll-out’ governance during Putin’s presidency. A moral conservative Russian grassroots mobilization is traced from its origins as a crusade against sexual education in the late 1990s, to a campaign against reforms of the state child protection system initiated in the mid-2000s. In this time span, understandings of ‘liberalism’ as chaos and elimination of boundaries have been superseded by an image of liberalism as totalitarianism, a conception resembling academic criticism of neoliberal governmentality despite the movement’s rejection of the purportedly ‘liberal’ Academy. The principal rejection of ‘liberalism’ is in practice mitigated also by ideals of communitarianism and civic engagement bearing many similarities to Western notions of ‘civic liberalism’.