MOSCOW, December 12. /ITAR-TASS/. Russia is enjoying an ever bigger support in the world as it defends traditional conservative values in spite of the highly contradictory dynamics of contemporary development, President Vladimir Putin said Thursday in the annual state-of-the-nation address to both houses of parliament.
“Global development is growing more and more contradictory and dynamical at the same time,” Putin said. “Russia’s historical responsibility is growing in this context - not only as a key guarantor of global and regional stability but also as a state that defends its original values persistently, including the values it cherishes in international relations.”
“The intensity of military, political, economic, and informational competition in the world isn’t subsiding – on the contrary, it is continuously getting stronger and other influence-wielding centers are watching closely the increase of Russia’s strength,” Putin said.
“We Russians have always taken pride in our country but we don’t seek the title of a superpower, which is understood a claim to global or regional hegemony,” he said. “We don’t lay eyes on anyone’s interests and don’t obtrude our patronage on others.”
“We will be laying claims to leadership by defending international law and pressing other countries to respect the national sovereignty, self-reliance and self-identity of different peoples,” Putin said.
“This willingness is absolutely objective and easy to explain for a state like Russia given its great history and culture, and centuries-old experience gained by various peoples living in a single country, and this is something opposed to the so-called tolerance,” he went on.
“Norms of morality and appropriateness are undergoing revision in many countries today, while national traditions and the differences between nations and cultures are getting blurred,” Putin said.
“Society is now faced with a demand to recognize not only the right of every person to freedom of consciousness, political outlooks and private life but also to recognize mandatorily the equality - strange as it might seem - of good and evil, which are the notions of opposite meanings,” he said.
“This destruction of traditional values from top to bottom entails highly deplorable aftermaths for whole societies and, on top of that, is fundamentally undemocratic because it is translated into life on the premises of abstract ideas and contrary to the will of the majority, which doesn’t accept such changes and enforced revisions,” Putin said.
“We know that ever more people in the world are supporting our stance on the defense of traditional values that constituted the spiritual and moral foundations of civilization - traditional family, genuine human life, religiosity, lofty spirituality, humanism, and global diversity -- for thousands of years,” he said.
“Quite naturally, that’s a conservative position but if one recalls the world of the Russian religious philosopher, Nikolai Berdiayev, the essence of conservatism lies in impeding the movement down and backwards into chaotic darkness and primeval conditions, and not at all the movement forwards,” Putin said.
The past few years have shown graphically the situations where the attempts to impose ostensibly more progressive models of development on to other countries ended up in throwbacks, barbarianism and bloodletting, he said.
“That’s how it happened in a number of states in the Middle East and North Africa,” Putin said. “This drama was also replayed in and around Syria.