This article explores the historical roots of Russian conservatism by analyzing the evolution of Russia's Westernized, Enlightenmentminded nobility to a conservative segment of Russian society in the early nineteenth century. The events of 1789 and 1812 were critical junctures that made the Russian nobility painfully aware of their own deep level of Westernization. The article first describes the reverberations of the French Revolution among the Russian elite. It also discusses the internal and external scrutiny of Russia's relations with France under Napoleon, which made Russian conservatism a contingency. It then describes the evolution between 1789 and 1812 of a corpus of conservative ideas ranging from traditionalism to ardent patriotism and xenophobia. Napoleon's 1812 campaign against Russia overshadowed the generational gap and diverging political and literary preferences among the elite. The reaction to it illustrates the intrinsic duality of the Russian elite: culturally Westernized, yet politically conservative. Yet the influence of several Western defenders of the ancien régime on Russia's conservatives shows that the essentially conservative Russian identity as propagated by Putin these days originally might have been more pan-European than purely Russian.
Since 2013, Russia has put forward a socially conservative norms and values paradigm that challenges the European Union’s (EU’s) normative pull in Eastern Partnership countries like Ukraine – especially when it comes to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Intersex (LGBTI) policies. The adoption of legislation on ‘propaganda of non-traditional sexual relations to minors’ that same year and the homophobic discourse relating to the situation reinforced the link between state violence and homosexuality as a tool for geopolitical othering in Russia. Notwithstanding Ukraine's normative isomorphism towards the EU, the difficulties surrounding LGBTI activism since the signing of the Association Agreement illustrate that also in Ukraine the risk of extra-judicial violence and geopolitical othering remains. Yet at the same time, Ukraine's normative isomorphism towards the EU prevents policymakers from state violence towards and geopolitical othering, thereby effectively setting their state policies apart in an ever divergent path from their Russian neighbour.
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