Wokeshevism: Where Putin is Right about the West

The present war in Ukraine finds its parallel in the parting of ways between Russia and the West in all matters of culture. This found expression in 2021 when Russia’s Vladimir Putin, delivered an important speech at the Valday Club, an annual gathering of intellectuals, philosophers, writers, scholars, journalists, and politicians.[1] There Putin explained the current cultural trends in the West and compared those to the Russian experience. He spoke, for example, about the destruction of monuments in the United States, where the statues of past heroes were torn down, just as the monuments to the Tsars were destroyed in 1917, or monuments to Lenin after 1991. For the Russians that was déjà vu. Twice their old heroes became villains and the result was the politicisation of society and intolerance.[2]

Putin also spoke about feelings of guilt among Westerners concerning slavery. This, he said, has caused them to use reverse discrimination. These it is perfectly fine to deny a job to a white person in favour of a black person, that decision based purely on race. In today’s America race is everywhere. People proudly parade their skin colour and demand advantages based on pigmentation. This, according to Putin, is similar to the Bolsheviks moving out the aristocrats from their apartments and resettling the Bolshevik activists there for the sake of “social justice”.[3] And it is European guilt about the colonial past that makes them open their borders to millions of unskilled migrants from Africa and the Middle East, to the detriment of the native inhabitants.

Putin thus specifically criticised critical race theory, which rejects ‘colour-blindness’. The most famous expression of this concept was Martin Luther King Jr’s dream that his children would ‘one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the colour of their skin but by the content of their character’.[4] Putin said that King’s dream is rejected by critical race theory that argues for race consciousness and recognition of racial categories. He thinks that this is detrimental to social cohesion and the preservation of a more harmonious society. Indeed, Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, the former a historian and the latter a mathematician by background, note the deleterious consequences of this insidious movement that is now so prevalent in the West:  

By focusing so intently on race and by objecting to ‘color blindness’ – the refusal to attach social significance to race – critical race theory threatens to undo the social taboo against evaluating people by their race. Such an obsessive focus on race … is not likely to end well – neither for minority groups nor for social cohesion more broadly. Such attitudes tear the fabric that holds contemporary societies together.^[5]

Putin said that critical race theory is a kind of Bolshevism. The West is going through a process of legitimising discrimination, which Putin refers to as a form of neo-Bolshevism.[6] If one substitutes the word proletariat with race, everything else looks pretty much the same. ‘We, the Russians, have seen it before. The oppressed proletariat (race) shakes off the chains of exploitation and asserts its rights’.[7]

But Putin’s sharpest critique is concerned with the assault on the family in the West. Under the guise of the struggle for tolerance, intolerance has been promoted through so-called “identity politics”. Homosexuality and other forms of LBTQI+ culture are now taught at schools regardless of the preference of parents. The traditional family is under assault. The words ‘father’ and ‘mother’ are being discarded and replaced by ‘parent one’ and ‘parent two’. Christian values are thrown out and anybody who dares to disagree is labelled a racist or a homophobic reactionary. As a consequence, intolerance is officially celebrated and compliance legally enforced.[8]

The vast majority of Russians are against legalising same-sex marriage, or any other form of recasting traditional family. Putin thus commented that Russia is not going to follow this destructive path of the West, which, according to him, is a form of neo-Bolshevism.[9] Interestingly enough, in our edited book Joshua Forrester and I called this new Western movement ‘Wokeshevism’, which is a portmanteau of ‘woke’ and ‘Bolshevism’.[10] ‘Wokeshevism’ thus denotes the woke’s revolutionary zeal of many contemporary Westerners to impose their radical worldview on all parts of society, and to crush any dissent. James Lindsay notes that:

The term ‘Woke’ refers to being ‘awakened’ or ‘woke up’ to the alleged realities of ‘systemic power dynamics’ that order society. These alleged power dynamics are said to create what sociologists call ‘stratifications’ in society, like kinds of upper and lower classes, depending on who has ‘privilege’ and who is ‘oppressed’ by various power dynamics like systemic racism (or white supremacy), systemic sexism (or patriarchy or misogyny), cis-heteronormativity, and so on … The Marxian flavour of this analysis – which sees them as structural and sites of necessary conflict – is also obvious but hard to pin down.^[11]

And what about Bolshevism?

Bolshevism may be characterised by strong organisation, commitment to world communist revolution, and the rejection of objective morality as a form of ‘bourgeois oppression’.^[12] Bolshevism was the political ideology and practice of the Bolsheviks, a radical Communist faction under the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. The Bolsheviks embraced a Marxist philosophy of ‘merciless violence’ that strove for the complete annihilation of every actual and potential enemy. They displayed, according to the late Richard Pipes, ‘a philosophical inability to deal with opinions different from their own except by abuse and repression’.^[13] For these reasons, Pipes added, ‘they should be regarded not as utopians but as fanatics: since they refused to admit defeat even after it stared them in the face’.^[14] The Bolsheviks came to power during the Russian Revolution of 1917. For them, all moral questions were ultimately subordinated to revolutionary needs. Bolshevik leaders identified themselves as a moral and political vanguard, whose messianic sense of calling demanded that its members prove their worthiness to belong to that elite.^[15] As history professor Orlando Figes points out:

Bolsheviks were expected … to be involved in the daily practice of its rituals – its oaths and songs, ceremonies, cults, and codes of conduct – just as the believers of organized religion performed their belief when they attended church. But the Party’s doctrines were to be taken as articles of faith by all its followers. Its collective judgement was to be accepted as Justice. Accused of crimes by the leadership, the Party member was expected to repent, to go down on his knees before the Party and welcome its verdict against him. To defend oneself was to add another crime: dissent from the will of the Party.^[16]

The Russians, of course, have already seen all that and are immune to this new form of Bolshevism. In 2024, when Putin was elected to his (third consecutive) fifth term in office, he refused to debate his Communist challenger. His views, as opinion polls recurrently show, find genuine support from the Russian people. The Russians do not want to emulate the West.[17] Rather, political confrontation with the West has encouraged the idea of separate paths for Russia, breaking economic, political, and cultural ties with the “decadent West”.

To avoid the westernization of Russia and its decadent contemporary values, the activities of the Western-sponsor NGOs are slowly and surely being curtailed in Russia. Any ‘progressive’ organization that receives funds from the West is currently required to declare themselves as foreign agents. Russian pro-Western media outlets are not banned but they have to bear an inscription that they receive funding from the West or they are a foreign-sponsored entity.[18] This is partially in direct response to Western measures against the Russia Today media outlet that was banned in most so-called “Western democracies”.

These measures and President Putin’s criticism of the West’s contemporary culture as a form of neo-Bolshevism reveal that he has made a substantial break with the Westernisers, and all those who collectively are called “Atlantic integrationists”.[19] Instead, the Russian leader is now calling for a “healthy conservatism”, traditional family and Christian morality. From this perspective, Russia is not abandoning the cultural heritage of the West, but it is the West that has abandoned its own Christian heritage in favour of ideological values that mimic Bolshevism. If in the early years of Putin’s rule merging with the West was a goal, now a movement has begun to define Russia’s separate path. Russia wants to be a civilisation in its own right.[20]

Augusto Zimmermann is Professor and Head of Law at Sheridan Institute of Higher Education. He is a former Associate Dean, Research, at Murdoch Law School. During his time at Murdoch, Dr Zimmermann was awarded the University’s Vice Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Research in 2012. He is also a former Commissioner with the Law Reform Commission of Western Australia (2012-2017).

Dr Zimmermann is the editor, together with Joshua Forrester, of ‘Wokeshevism: Critical Theories and the Tyrant Left’ (Connor Court Publishing, 2023). To order your copy, click here

[1] ‘Valdai Discussion Club Meeting’, YouTube, 22 October 2021, at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctLOtI32cWY

[2] Vladimir N. Brovkin, From Vladimir Lenin to Vladimir Putin (Routledge, 2024) 267.

[3] Ibid.

[4] ‘Read Martin Luther King Jr’s ‘I Have a Dream’ Speech In Its Entirety’, NPR (Web Page, 14 January 2022).

[5] Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, Cynical Theories: How Universities Made Everything about Race, Gender and Identity – and Why This Harms Everybody (Swift Press, 2020) 134.

[6] Vladimir N. Brovkin, From Vladimir Lenin to Vladimir Putin (Routledge, 2024) 267.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid. 268.

[9] Ibid. 267.

[10] See: Augusto Zimmermann and Joshua Forrester (ed.), Wokeshevism: Critical Theories and the Tyrant Left (Connor Court Publishing, 2023). See, in particular, ‘Introduction’, 17-29.

[11] James Lindsay, ‘Forward’ in Charles Pincourt and James Lindsay, Counter Wokecraft: A Field Manual for Combatting the Woke in the University and Beyond (Independently published, 2021).

[12] Orlando Figes, The Whisperers: Private Life in Stalin’s Russia (Penguin Books, 2007) 33.

[13] Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime (Vintage Books, 1995) 500.

[14] Ibid.

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid 34. This may explain why so many Bolsheviks surrendered to their fate in the purges under Joseph Stalin in the 1930s, even when they were innocent of the crimes of which they stood accused.

[17] Vladimir N. Brovkin, From Vladimir Lenin to Vladimir Putin (Routledge, 2024) 268.

[18] Ibid. 269.

[19] Ibid.

[20] Ibid. 268.