Throughout his presidency, Putin repeatedly invoked Russia as an ancient, powerful, and divinely ordained state going back a thousand years, a civilization separate from the West, neither Communist nor a western liberal democracy. That message echoes Solzhenitsyn’s famous commencement address at Harvard in 1978: “Any ancient deeply rooted autonomous culture, especially if it is spread on a wide part of the earth’s surface, constitutes an autonomous world, full of riddles and surprises to Western thinking.
普京在其整个总统任期内不断把俄国引述为一个古老、强大以及神灵保佑的国家，其历史有一千年，其文明有别于西方，既非共产主义亦非西方自由民主国家。这一论点回应了索氏1978年在哈佛大学毕业典礼上著名的演讲。他说：“任何根基深厚的古老、独立的文化都构成一个独立自治的世界，特别是当它跨越地球表面的大片土地的时候。这种文化对于西方思维而言充满了谜团和惊奇。一千年以来，俄国一直就属于这一类型”。