From “Munich-2007” to “Valdai-2023”: sixteen years that changed Russia and the world

October 5, 2023, at the 20th anniversary session of the Valdai International Discussion Club Russian President Vladimir Putin delivered a speech that many experts believe to be a continuation of what he had said at the Munich Security Conference on February 10, 2007. Over the past 16 years, the key theses that the President voiced in Munich (that “the unipolar world did not take place” and that “Russia is a country with a history that spans more than a thousand years and has practically always used the privilege to carry out an independent foreign policy. We are not going to change this tradition today”) have acquired real outlines and concrete forms. The future of Russia as a sovereign civilization-state, which is part of a multipolar world, has become obvious, natural and inevitable, as the President stated at the Valdai Forum in 2023. As an illustration of this thesis, the article examines in detail the results of the election campaigns that took place in Russia on September 10, 2023 and convincingly confirmed that the majority of voters support the current course of foreign and domestic policy implemented by the head For citation: Ilyin V.A., Morev M.V. (2023). From “Munich 2007” to “Valdai 2023”: Sixteen years that changed Russia and the world. Economic and Social Changes: Facts, Trends, Forecast, 16(5), 9-31. DOI: 10.15838/esc.2023.5.89.1 of state. The article presents our calculations based on official data of the Central Election Commission of the Russian Federation; we carry out an in-depth comparative analysis of the results of the regional elections of 2018 and 2022, and analyze voting results in the context of regional centers; we also consider factors that influenced voter turnout. This makes it possible to identify new and more in-depth features of public sentiment, according to which a significant part of voters demands that the current elites (political, economic, cultural) be brought in line with the national socio-political agenda related to the goals of the special military operation and the positioning of Russia as a civilization-state. In general, the analysis has shown that both inside Russia and in the international political arena, there are still a lot of forces desperately clinging to the “old” world order and hindering the natural course of the changes taking place. This suggests that the process of transformation of Russia and the whole world, which in fact began 16 years ago, has not yet been completed and, apparently, this task is postponed for 2024-2032 - the period that may become the next presidential term for Vladimir Putin. At the same time, the successful achievement of all the goals of the special military operation was and remains the main prerequisite for the implementation of Russia’s transformation.