Putin is getting busy with his alternatives to liberal democratic values. He has now produced a substitute for the idea of political asylum. It’s called “spiritual asylum” and it demonstrates the regime’s caring credentials (*terms and conditions will apply.)
In August, Putin signed a decree, “On providing humanitarian support to individuals who share traditional Russian spiritual and moral values.” This introduced a new type of visa for anyone feeling threatened by Western gender policies. Applicants have no need to demonstrate a knowledge of the Russian language, its history, or its laws.
They do however have to be citizens of countries where this ideology is rampant. In subsequent months, the Russian government approved a list of countries the Kremlin judged are “implementing policies that impose destructive neoliberal ideological attitudes which contradict traditional Russian spiritual and moral values.”
The list now consists of 47 countries, including the United States, the UK, Ukraine, most of Europe, but also Micronesia, New Zealand, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan and Japan.
There was more to come. On January 23, Vladimir Putin announced the establishment of a new government agency to help foreigners who share the Russian notion of traditional values to move and settle.
That new center is to be supervised by the Interior Ministry (migration is within the scope of that ministry) but in fact run by the Agency of Strategic Initiatives, or the ASI. This is one of Putin’s pet projects, launched in August 2011 when he was prime minister. Ever since, the ASI has supervised a number of projects deemed crucial by the Kremlin.
The public face of the new effort is Maria Butina — a Russian gun rights activist who was arrested and jailed in the US in 2018 for failing to register as a foreign agent. She was deported to Russia the following year.
Once home, Butina was rewarded with a plum job as a deputy for Putin’s party in the State Duma and took part in several nasty Kremlin propaganda efforts targeting Western audiences — for instance, in 2021 the ex-con arrived at a prison colony where Navalny was held to make a story for the propaganda channel RT. She taunted the dissident, suggesting was not a proper man, and reportedly exchanged insults. He died as a result of his mistreatment by the state last year.
In her new role, Butina runs Welcome to Russia, the public face of the new visa system. The authorities offer assistance (presumably including interpreters) for those deemed to qualify. There is no pretense — in one of her interviews Butina openly called the new residence permit an “ideological visa.”
This may seem a strange time to advertise Russian despotism to the citizens of free societies but Russia has previously provided a home to refugee waves from the west. The first, and most famous beneficiaries were French aristocrats fleeing the 1789 revolution — it was such people and their compatriots who tutored the Russian nobility to speak French as its first language. Russia invited the French for purely ideological reasons — from a shared fear and hatred of the revolution.
Thus it could hardly be described as part of the European tradition of welcoming liberal-minded foreigners fleeing prosecution at home, as the French authorities did for Poles fleeing foreign repression throughout the 19th century. It was the French who first introduced to Europe a constitutional right to safety from foreign rulers. Article 120 of the 1793 Constitution promised “asylum for foreigners banished from their fatherland for the cause of liberty.”
After the Russian Revolution, Soviet Russia presented itself as a safe haven for the world’s persecuted, but the Kremlin had a refugee strategy only in the period before World War II, when the country’s leaders still believed in communist ideology. The most famous examples were thousands of American workers recruited to move to Soviet Russia after the Great Depression; Spaniards, and Spanish kids specifically, evacuated from Franco’s Spain, and European communists fleeing Hitler.
During the Cold War, when communism was becoming an empty slogan, the country took in some Westerners, but only a few: either defectors or confused people, usually families, like Arnold Lockshin’s family, which moved to the Soviet Union in 1986 from the US. Before that Lockshin had lost his job at a cancer research facility in Houston, blaming supposed FBI interference because he and his wife believed in socialism.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Russian attitude to asylum seekers from the West became even more awkward; Putin would give Russian passports to celebrities like the famous French actor Gérard Depardieu and the American martial arts actor Steven Seagal, and welcomed former NSA contractor Edward Snowden to poke the Americans, but each case was treated individually and there was no guiding government strategy.
Now that has clearly changed. Butina’s program will seek to present Russia as an alternative to the “immoral and liberal West.”
It is quite clear that the effort belongs more to propaganda than to immigration policy — Butina made it clear that no Russian passports would be given to the new refugees, and there would be no financial assistance in moving to Russia.
It is also clear that this propaganda operation is aimed at the Western audience rather than at Russians — Butina runs her public campaign on her X account in English and gives interviews primarily to foreigners — mostly to French nationals who settled in Russia — and those interviews are subtitled in French and English.
She claims the new effort has scored some success — 3.500 foreigners have reportedly moved to Russia since 2021, a third from Germany, and there have been several applications since the introduction of the spiritual visas — mostly from France.
Vladimir Putin has no coherent ideology, but he has developed a few phrases to catch the public eye. Russia now has a “sovereign” rather than a functional democracy, “traditional” rather than liberal values, and now “spiritual” instead of political asylum. Quite what this amounts to is a mystery.
Irina Borogan and Andrei Soldatov are Non-resident Senior Fellows with the Center for European Policy Analysis (CEPA.) They are Russian investigative journalists and co-founders of Agentura.ru, a watchdog of Russian secret service activities.
Europe’s Edge is CEPA’s online journal covering critical topics on the foreign policy docket across Europe and North America. All opinions expressed on Europe’s Edge are those of the author alone and may not represent those of the institutions they represent or the Center for European Policy Analysis. CEPA maintains a strict intellectual independence policy across all its projects and publications.
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