How the Duma Chairman Volodin brakes the U.S. siege by parliamentary diplomacy

On December 12-13, 2022, the Russian parliamentary group had made an official visit to Ankara, paying its tribute at the Atatürk’s Mausoleum and holding talks with its colleagues from the Great National Assembly of Turkiye (TBMM). As a culmination, Vyacheslav Volodin, the leader of the delegation and the chairman of State Duma (the Russian parliament), stood with a joint statement with his Turkish counterpart, TBMM’s speaker Mustafa Şentop, and met  the President of Turkiye Recep Tayyip Erdoğan afterwards.

Amid tensions over Greece, Cyprus and Northern Syria, this trans-Eurasian trip was barely covered by the Turkish media — but in fact it was a sensation. After February 24, 2022, when Russia started a military operation to protect its critical secure zones — an event labeled as ‘illegal aggression’ by the country which has erased Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Libya from the face of Earth during last 25 years — the U.S. desperately attempts to siege and isolate the only world actor that dares to neglect the Western-centered order and to play its own game.

My Turkish reader can compare this situation with the end-1910’s, when the West, following the Ottoman fault in the WW1, cynically excluded the Turks from the world political system and tried to surround them by a cordon sanitaire of Western puppets. The final aim was to dissolute this old country as its independent policy posed threat for the Western dominance over the strategic Eastern Mediterranean region. On the contrary, the first foreign partner to recognize the new Turkish Republic and to provide it military aid was the that-time Soviet Russia.

Same way — back to our story hundred years later — lots of external contacts of the Russian authorities have been cut by the West since that earthquaking February 2022. But there is a term ‘second-track diplomacy’: when people or their representatives, such as national-elected members of the parliament, are building the bridges with old or new allies abroad.

And the Duma’s head, Vyacheslav Volodin, effectively uses this special path to endorse the Russian interests. You would ask, who is this 58-year-old man calling the U.S. ‘an Empire of Sodom’  in his almost-750-thousand-subscribers telegram channel and fighting against Western ultraliberal values at Okhotny Ryad (the residence of State Duma)?

In the 1990s, in the early times of the Russian democracy, Mr. Volodin has passed all the rungs of the political ladder: from a member of the city council in his provincial city of Saratov to the member at the all-Russian Parliament. And now, decades after, he managed to turn from one of its 450 deputies into the State Duma chairman. For every political observer including me, the question would be: How? Possibly, one reason is Volodin’s unquestionable loyalty to the Russian leader Vladimir Putin. But what else?

I recall October 2019: as a journalist, I accompanied a similar official visit of the Russian parliamentary delegation, also led by Volodin, to Turkiye. We flew from Moscow to Istanbul onboard IL-96, imagining ourselves Cold War pilots who threatened America. Indeed, with its four engines, this Russian-made wide-body  air giant can reach another hemisphere; such a number of engines is more reliable, but has high fuel consumption. It is less efficient against two-jets Boeings or Airbuses from the USA and the EU. That’s why some Russian experts suggested to stop the developing of national aircrafts — because we would always be able to exchange our oil and gas for the Western technical miracles.

At that time, more than three years ago in Istanbul, an interparliamentary security conference was supposed to take place. I write ‘was supposed’, because besides deputies from Russia, Turkiye, Pakistan, China and Afghanistan — the delegation from the main regional power, Iran, had cancelled its visit at the last minute. Perhaps because Turkiye had just initiated its military operation in Northern Syria: an action Tehran strictly opposed to. Thus, an intention to mount a security platform — which might have become a regional alternative to the U.S.-led NATO — was good, but not completely successful.

Despite some changes, the schedule of that Volodin’s trip — as well as of all his others — was extremely tight. No city-viewing excursions, only workgroups and meeting local authorities, and whoa — our absence from Moscow lasted less than 24 hours.

As the time passes, some metaphors come true. On February 23, 2022 — just a day before the Russian operation over Ukraine had begun — our IL-96 had reached Cuba, an island in another hemisphere. With the parliamentary visit to the Moscow’s old ally at the counter-Western axis, the State Duma’s airplane reflected the policy of the best days of the Soviet Union, when it used Cuba as its aircraft carrier at the American backyard.

Next day, February 24 had come. Dozens of Western countries immediately unleashed tremendous anti-Russian campaign. Looking through newsfeeds, some of the members of our delegation became frightened. But Volodin had no doubts: he continued our route and after two hours we landed in the Central American state of Nicaragua, another old Soviet ally. In the national parliament, Volodin stood with a strong speech explaining the reasons of the Russian actions — such as that the real inspirer of the Ukrainian conflict was Washington who has been supplying Ukraine with weaponry for years — and entire Central America was listening to him.

You can question this narrative, but you will agree that it was courageous to make such a manoeuvre in view of the U.S. which is likely to attack everybody whom the White House proclaims as a ‘threat to democracy’.

With this global war episode, I recall another: the peace. As a parliamentary correspondent, I am at the briefing room where Volodin conducts his informal talks with the journalists of top media to explain the upcoming steps of State Duma. According to the rules, all electronic devices are prohibited, so I have to count only on my memory and my hand-written sketches — it reminds the times of the classical Russian literature. But such a non-recordable set allows all of us to speak more frankly.

‘I have skills in architecture. In two nights, I designed a project of a nursing house, and then it was built by charitable money’, Volodin says. He is reluctant to speak about his charity in public: about the schools for gifted children or people’s sanatoriums which he has built in poor parts of Russian oblasts (regions).

And now, in mid-December 2022, our parliamentary delegation had visited Turkiye again. An official statement on the Ankara meeting between Erdoğan and Volodin was laconic: the latter had passed the Turkish president a welcome-word from Russia’s Vladimir Putin. What was behind it? We can only guess. Nevertheless, it is obvious that Moscow builds an alternative Eastern Alliance against the West — and Volodin’s parliamentary diplomacy is on the edge of this policy. 

The author is an Adjunct Professor at the Higher School of Economics (St. Petersburg, Russia)