Putin Sounds Drum Roll for a Russia Newly on the March

Russia is on the march, and the man in the lead is Vladimir V. Putin.

For the first time since the Soviet collapse, a new sense of national purpose is building in this country, a vision of Russia as a strong state whose fate does not depend on the West. And while he cannot claim to have initiated it, Putin, now Russia’s acting president, has become its incarnation.

“[Putin] is a symbol behind whom many people march. There is no doubt I am in the first rank,” Maj. Gen. Vladimir Shamanov, commander of Russian forces in western Chechnya, the republic where Moscow is fighting separatist rebels, said recently.

“All Russians are sick of the fact that Russia is humiliated, insulted, asking for handouts,” he said. “We have it bad today, but let us be patient, and tomorrow will come and it will get better. We will go with Putin, and tomorrow will come.”

If such language sounds vaguely religious, it only emphasizes that Putin is offering his fellow Russians a kind of belief system: a faith in Russia’s future.

“It is too early to bury Russia as a great power,” Putin wrote in a political treatise released just days before Boris N. Yeltsin resigned and handed him the reins of power. “All troubles notwithstanding--the country will have a worthy future.”

In his treatise, Putin listed four principles at the heart of his vision for Russia: patriotism, a strong state apparatus, social solidarity and belief in Russia as a great power. He promised to restore his country’s sense of identity and purpose, what Russians call a “national idea.”

“I am convinced that reaching the necessary level of growth is not just an economic problem,” he wrote. “It is also a political problem and in a sense--I’m not afraid to use this word--an ideological problem. That is, an idea problem, a spiritual problem, a moral problem.”

Since the Soviet collapse, Russians have deplored their loss of a national idea. The confusion over national identity even shows in little things: Russia’s national anthem still has no words. The national flag has not been formally adopted by parliament. Yeltsin even convened a committee of cultural leaders to come up with a national idea, but they made no apparent progress.

Putin appears to have succeeded where they failed.

“Putin has hit it just right--he appeared at the right time in the right place and started saying the right things,” said Viktor A. Kremenyuk, director of Moscow’s USA-Canada Institute. “And the people who have been for years harboring resentment and disappointment that their once-great world power has been relegated to the status of a Third World country responded to his call.”

The word Putin used for “great power” is derzhava--a powerful country that can stand on its own and need answer to no one.

“Russia was and will remain a great power,” Putin wrote in the treatise, posted on the government’s Web site. “This is ordained by its inherent geographical, economic and cultural characteristics.”

He also said Russians need a strong centralized government.

“It will not happen soon, if it ever happens at all, that Russia becomes a second edition of, say, the United States or Britain in which liberal values have deep historic traditions,” Putin said. “For Russians, a strong state is not an anomaly or something to be resisted. Quite the contrary. They see it as the source and guarantor of order and the initiator and driving force of change.”

Putin insisted that there is no conflict between centralized state control and a market economy. But he denounced “abstract models and schemes from foreign textbooks,” saying market forces should be introduced only gradually, carefully--and with an eye to Russia’s special characteristics.

While his treatise is not openly anti-Western, it does indicate that Putin is inclined to deal with the West only on his own terms.

“Putin is a derzhavnik. He has the mentality of those people who share the idea that Russia must be strong and rely on itself in solving its problems,” said Yuri I. Skuratov, who served as Russia’s prosecutor general while Putin was head of the KGB successor agency. “For people like Putin, all contacts and cooperation with the West are an unpleasant necessity, something that they simply have to do, nothing more.”

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization appears to have played a major role in the development of this new Russian national identity. The alliance’s decision in March to bomb Yugoslavia--a traditional ally of Moscow--sent Russia into paroxysms of anger and despair over its impotence and irrelevance on the world stage.

In retrospect, the campaign in Yugoslavia now appears to have been a turning point, the moment when Russians became convinced that the West was no longer a friend.

Putin wasn’t in power then. But when he became prime minister a few months later, in August, he was able to capitalize on the pent-up frustration and channel it into a new war--this one against militants in Chechnya.

Few Russians are chagrined these days by Western criticism of the Chechen war. On the contrary, many Russians--especially the military--seem to relish the West’s discomfort, seeing it as a kind of payback for Yugoslavia as well as a chance to redeem the honor they lost in the first Chechen war, which ended with Moscow’s defeat in 1996.

“I will tell you directly and openly: For me, this war is above all to restore the trampled-upon honor of my motherland,” said Shamanov, the commander in Chechnya.

It is too soon to tell how Putin’s principles will evolve into actions if he is elected president in March. And it is too soon to tell if Russians will tire of marching to the beat of their new drummer.

But for now, Putin is naming the tune. Call it the new national anthem.

“For perhaps the first time in the past 200, 300 years, we face a real threat of becoming a second- or third-rate state. To avoid this, we need an enormous concentration of the nation’s intellectual, physical and moral forces,” he concluded in the treatise. “Nobody will do it for us. Everything depends on us--on our ability to assess the threat, unite and gird ourselves for the long, tough work ahead.”