Introduction for Ideology and Meaning-Making under the Putin Regime

INTRODUCTION

Any major political actor controls reality through the imaginary.

GEORGE BALANDIER, Le pouvoir sur scènes¹

HOW DID THE RUSSO-UKRAINIAN WAR become possible, and what role did ideology play in enabling it? This book reclaims the study of ideology as an unavoidable component of the tools we use to render the world intelligible: ideology is a collective language constitutive of social life. The book thus hopes to contribute to the political science debate on the interaction between ideas and policy decisions, as well as to the field of political theory by taking a deep dive into the Russian case study. The trend among Western observers to look at Russia’s ideological construction as purely artificial, irrational, and unsustainable limits our capacity to comprehend both the resilience of the regime and its appeal to part of Russian society—and to some constituencies abroad. The Russian regime does offer an ideological construction that has internal plausibility and coherence—whatever one thinks of its contents. To capture it, one must take a careful and granular look at how concepts are deployed and operationalized, their place in the ideological structure offered by the regime, their inner articulation, their evolution, and their promoters. That is the aim of this book.

The first two pillars of governmentality—the material and the ideational—have long resulted in a cocreational regime in which a large part of the population, whether actively or passively, supports the directions the Kremlin dictates to the country. In spring 2021, a survey asked a nationally representative sample of Russian citizens: “Does Russia need a state ideology?” Seventy-nine percent of respondents said yes, 14 percent said no, and 7 percent were unsure.² One may, of course, wonder how self-censorship affects this approval, and interrogate the gap between attitudes and behavior, but at least in their public expressions, a majority of citizens do share the regime’s language. What, then, is this ideology that the population appears to support?

Much ink has been spilled in an effort to pin down Russia’s ideological characteristics. One can identify several schools of thought. A first argues that ideology is not a salient component of the regime’s construction, contending that the latter has been purely instrumental and opportunistic.³ Yet the Russian regime has been profoundly and genuinely engaged in a political project for the country: The terrible evidence of going to war against Ukraine, even at the price of destroying a large part of the elite revenues accumulated in the West, confirms that the Kremlin is animated not solely by kleptocratic strategies but also by a set of beliefs regarding the best path for the future of the country.

Providing a more nuanced analysis while maintaining that the regime has no ideology, Sergey Guriev and Daniel Treisman contend that the Kremlin is, first and foremost, a skilled propaganda operator.⁴ Andrey Makarychev prefers to present these ideological articulations as void of “ideological authenticity” and amounting to mere “moral rhetoric.”⁵ However, it is problematic to decry elites’ supposed hypocrisy: ideology does not require deep-seated beliefs among citizens so much as the reproduction of certain practices and rituals. The connection between the ideas a politician espouses professionally and their personal ideology is complex, and there is always a pragmatic calculation that a policy decision or a declaration will secure success for the one making it.

A second school contends that ideology reveals the very nature of the regime and a decision-making process that is animated mainly through it. It sees Putin’s regime as a totalitarian, fascist, neo-Stalinist institution motivated by militarism, revanchism, nationalism, and imperialism. In this view, deeply entrenched ideological convictions explain all of Russia’s actions on both the international and the domestic fronts. Charles Clover’s Black Wind, White Snow, Marcel van Herpen’s Putin’s Wars, and Michel Eltchaninoff’s Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin are good representatives of this insistence on Russia’s ideological “grand design.”⁶ This analysis has skyrocketed in the Western media since the full-scale Russo-Ukrainian War, with narratives about Russia’s immanent belligerence presented as an atemporal feature that cannot be changed until it is totally destroyed. A central argument of that school relates to the use of the label fascist.⁷ The most prominent voice expressing this view, Timothy Snyder, contributes to promoting terms such as rashizm (a portmanteau that combines fascism and Russia) coming mostly from the Ukrainian media world.⁸ Mikhail Epstein prefers to employ schizofascism,⁹ a notion that Snyder shares, as he sees the conflict between Russia and Ukraine as a situation of “actual fascists calling their opponents ‘fascists’”¹⁰—that is, where Russia accuses Ukraine of its own sins.

A third school, to which I belong, claims that ideology is an important but not exclusive part of the regime’s governmentality toolkit. It advances a more nuanced view that reads ideology not as a binary opposition—that is, as either a cynical cover for material interests or a set of immutable deep beliefs—but as a context-sensitive process of meaning-making. This interpretation encompasses three levels of analysis. First, the regime’s ideological construction has evolved slowly, with gradual sedimentation, and chronology therefore matters over the quarter-century of Putin’s reign. Second, the regime’s relationship with Russian society is much more than simply authoritarian: it is cocreational, based on an implicit social contract with the population that is continuously renegotiated and limits the authorities’ options. The regime’s ideological construction should, therefore, be read as part of the nation-building process and not simply as a search for an immediate political status quo. Third, the internal configuration of the regime has long resembled a conglomerate of competing opinions. This manufactured discursive chaos has reluctantly moved toward a more cohesive—and repressive—ideology: the scope for improvisation, along with the bottom-up dynamic underpinning the cocreational nature of the regime, has largely, but not entirely, been erased.

A rich field of English-speaking literature on Russia’s ideological construction has sprung up over the years. Without delving into great detail, one can mention a well-developed but now aged literature on Eurasianism built in the 1990s and 2000s.¹¹ A more recent subfield focuses on Russian conservatism, with seminal works by Paul Robinson, Mikhail Suslov, Glenn Diesen, Kristina Stoeckl, Dmitry Uzlaner, and David Lewis.¹² State language has been studied in depth by Olga Malinova.¹³ The centrality of memory wars and the cult of the Great Patriotic War have been investigated by several scholars, among them Jade McGlynn, Nina Tumarkin, and Nikolay Koposov.¹⁴ On the foreign policy side, Russia’s vision of the world stage and its interpretation of its changing status have been explored in depth by Andrey Tsygankov, Richard Sakwa, and Andrej Krijkovic, to name just a few.¹⁵ The place of the Russian Orthodox Church in coauthoring some of the state language alongside the regime—in both its domestic and international aspects—has been studied in several works.¹⁶ Messianism and the notion of a Third Rome have also been subject to their fair share of studies.¹⁷

These great works do not necessarily engage with the question of the regime’s ideology as a whole, nor do they try to define it. Three landmark books do try to do so. In The Code of Putinism, Brian Taylor explains insightfully that “Putinism is more like ‘Thatcherism’ or ‘Reaganism’ than like ‘Marxism’—it is not a fully developed, all-encompassing ideology, but a system of rule and a guiding mentality, a personality and an historical moment.”¹⁸ Elena Chebankova’s Political Ideologies in Contemporary Russia argues that the Russian state limits itself to balancing among different political ideologies that exist in society.¹⁹ Mikhail Suslov’s Putinism: Post-Soviet Russian Regime Ideology, on the contrary, sees Putinism as a state ideology with some forms of coherence.²⁰ In addition to these, one can also mention Gulnaz Sharafutdinova’s Red Mirror: Putin’s Leadership and Russia’s Insecure Identity, which uses social identity theory to explain the popularity of Putin;²¹ Cheng Chen’s Return of Ideology, which compares Russia and China;²² and Bo Petersson’s The Putin Predicament, which posits the regime’s ideological eclecticism.²³

To these works can be added lively discussions and analyses from Russian colleagues in the form of classic academic literature, op-eds or blogs, and social media posts. Even in a context of a drastically reduced scope for expressing themselves freely and/or while grappling with the challenges of emigration, scholars such as Ilya Budraitkis, Ivan Fomin, Ilya Kalinin, Ivan Kurilla, Andrey Kolesnikov, Maria Lipman, Andrey Melville, Alexander Morozov, Nikita Savin, and Ilya Veniavkin, among others, continue to study the regime’s ideological evolution, bringing nuances, insider expertise, and a more grassroots perspective that remain invaluable.

In the early 2000s (if not before), Russia became the first European country of size to experience a massive backlash against liberalism precisely because it had experienced an authoritarian liberalism, both political and economic, that had deeply shaken the foundations of the societal order in the 1990s. Simultaneously, Russia’s international prestige had decreased, with the post–Cold War order relegating the country to second-class status. While the regime mainly responded to the decline of the country’s international status, the citizenry reacted mostly to the violence of political and economic liberalism—a top-down and bottom-up encounter that has produced “Putinism.” What was originally a situational ideology rapidly reconnected with older roots, namely a long conservative tradition anchored in nineteenth-century intellectual thought and forms of moral conservatism and anti-Westernism dating back to the Soviet era that could easily be reframed for this new context.

The Putin regime has since been able to stay in tune with the evolution of the international scene, inspiring those who challenge the liberal hegemony in all its aspects: political, societal, economic, and geopolitical. It has taken the lead in denouncing a crusading US universalism during the neocon era; in defending authoritarian sovereignty against external interference in the so-called Global South; and in criticizing progressivism in national, family, sexual, and gender matters and in defending a Christian/Western/white civilization that is supposedly under attack.²⁵ Based on a strategy of niche soft power, the regime has microtargeted some specific audiences (e.g., Western far-right and some far-left groups, Christian and Muslim traditionalists, the Latin American left and right, pan-Africanist movements), speaking to some well-identified constituencies whose features predispose them—at least theoretically—to Russia’s grand narratives. This strategy has emerged from the Kremlin’s awareness of its limited outreach capacity compared to US soft power, both financially and in terms of its potential to export Russian culture and brands worldwide.²⁶

As we will see later, the Russian regime has exploited all the contradictions of the West, both as a geopolitical hegemon and as a normative model, to promote transgression and subversion. The rebellious aspect of this ideological export is nothing new: since the nineteenth century, Russia has been exporting revolutionary ideologies—from Populism and leftist terrorism to Communism—to challenge what has been seen as Western hegemony. What the Russian regime offers today in terms of ideology is immeasurably less structured doctrinally than Communism, but it is better adapted to today’s postmodern conditions of ideological bricolage and fluidity. Underestimating Russia’s status as a brand representing rebellion or resistance to “the world as it is” is mistaken, as we have seen with Western miscalculations regarding Moscow’s capacity to retain its partners in the non-Western world. Yet there also have been limits to that soft power: Tucker Carlson’s long interview with Putin in February 2024 demonstrated that shared values between American Trumpists and the Russian leadership are not enough to produce explicit political and policy cooperation based on well-articulated ideological arguments.²⁷

The book interprets Russia’s ideological construction as a reordering process aimed at the decontestation of fluid semantic spaces, to follow Michael Freeden’s language.³⁰ This is why the book title links ideology with meaning-making and not with propaganda. Propaganda is the communication strategy used to spread meanings. I focus here on the creation of meanings, not on how they spread—mass media strategies are not part of my research and already have been well studied by colleagues.³¹ While writing this book, I remain concerned with the risk of a retrospective surrationalization of ideology and take seriously the bias of logocentrism—that is, of overemphasizing words and seeing in them a fundamental expression of an external reality. I do recognize that the regime’s ideological construction has been in many ways nondiscursive. Indeed, approaches that solely try to seize, define, and then typologize the regime’s doctrinal content partly miss the point: it remains important not to stress doctrine over worldview, textuality over pop culture, content over style, and solitary eccentric thinkers over structure without considering the toolkit of behaviors, habits, and technologies of governmentality.

In this book, I argue that the Putin regime does have an ideology—aggregated from multiple repertoires and doctrinal stocks—but cannot be restricted to it: as a regime, it pursues a set of governmentality practices that may not always articulate well with the ideological realm. This means that ideology may or may not inform the decision-making process: sometimes it does precede and inspire it, sometimes it is called upon to provide a posteriori legitimation, and sometimes there is no direct link between the two. Ideological production can therefore be proactive or reactive. If the authorities do have a consistent and coherent global view of their political project, based on a set of beliefs, a mental apparatus, this does not imply that ideology systematically informs every decision but rather that there has been a process of mutual reinforcement between decision-making and ideology. As Jade McGlynn neatly explains in the realm of memory policy, “Russia does not prioritize the political threat posed by external actors’ embrace of antithetical narratives where there is no apparent political will to use the memory to challenge Russian geopolitical ambitions and/or identity.”³²

To explore Russia’s ideological construction, I borrow from political science, political philosophy, history, cultural studies, and critical geopolitics. In the tradition of strategic empathy—looking at issues through the perspectives of others, especially when they are strategic adversaries³³—I study Russia’s ideological construction based on emic notions, those used by the regime itself. As such, I do not attempt to project a Western interpretative framework onto Russia: this is why the book explores “civilization,” “patriotism,” “conservatism,” “Eurasia,” and other concepts, as opposed to external interpretative tools like “imperialism,” “nationalism,” and “militarism,” even if I obviously articulate them in my analysis. Similarly, I do not attach any label of authenticity: I do not seek, for instance, to decide whether the regime merits the title of “conservative” or is usurping it, as that would suppose an identifiable essence to the concept, but rather to study how references to conservatism are used and have evolved.

Methodologically, the book is based on multiple approaches, mostly qualitative but also quantitative, ranging from content and discourse analysis to big data. It is based on a two-decade-long study of the ideological field, reading Russian publications, interviewing Russian experts, and conducting annual fieldwork. It encompasses large corpora of presidential speeches, official documents, and ideological texts produced by actors and institutions in “orbit” around the Kremlin.

To complement what is mostly a qualitative study, I looked in a more systemic way at presidential speeches from January 2000 to December 2023, as available on the website of the Presidential Administration, kremlin.ru.³⁴ This is not the first time a scholar has proposed taking a quantitative approach to the regime: Olga Malinova has been working with granularity on several aspects of presidential speeches;³⁵ Oksana Drozdova and Paul Robinson have examined Putin’s rhetoric over the years;³⁶ Alicja Curanović has used the approach to look at the issue of messianism;³⁷ and Adriana Cuppuleri looked at 7,000 speeches and statements from the Russian president and the minister of foreign affairs.³⁸ However, it is the first time, to my knowledge, that the quantitative evolution of several key strategic narratives and repertoires over the twenty-four years of Putin’s reign has been explored.

This approach brings with it several methodological and epistemological issues. First, the corpus of about 12,500 presidential speeches includes those given by Dmitry Medvedev during his presidency (2008–12); while the speeches given by Vladimir Putin at this time, when he was prime minister, are not included. Second, it is a matter of debate whether one should look at the absolute number of instances that the president uses a given term in speeches or assess this discourse in a more proportional way. I decided to go with a simple numbering of occurrences. Third, the semantic space has shifted over time, with the result that the same term may be deployed over the years but be understood differently. Fourth, a quantitative approach is problematic in that it gives the same value to texts of different natures. But it is easy to guess that an address to the nation has more political and symbolic weight than a small speech to inaugurate a new institution, and that Direct Line—a heavily scripted annual live TV program in which Putin spends several hours answering citizens’ questions³⁹—has a different narrative logic than a long, uninterrupted monologue in front of the Duma.

Speeches can indeed be constructed with different strategies in mind: Ivan Fomin has shown, for instance, that content diverges depending on whether the goal is “ideological proclamation (when the regime declares its core values), ideological indoctrination (when the regime seeks to promote its ideology explicitly), declarative justification (when the regime presents decisions for implied silent popular approval), and mobilizing invocation (when the regime seeks people’s active participation).”⁴⁰ Despite these limitations, the corpora still offer fascinating insights. Indeed, Western experts tend to stress certain Putin quotations without looking at the whole picture of his speeches or of the entirety of state language, hence the need for a more quantitative approach that allows patterns to emerge and avoids singling out nonrepresentative components.

Yet this book is not Putin-centric—far from it. The Russian president is obviously a central piece of the whole political architecture, but this book does not try to “get inside Putin’s head” and does not pretend Putin is a deep political thinker. Instead, it places the Russian president in the broader context of different strains of strategic culture, ideological interest groups, and intellectual history; looks at figures who embody more moderate or more radical versions of the presidential narrative; and stresses the diversity of actors, structures of production, and discourses around him.

The book focuses on the “Putin regime”—a reductive but convenient terminology that encompasses the more than two decades of Vladimir Putin’s rule. It also uses “Russian regime” to describe a broader period that includes the Yeltsinian decade of the 1990s in those cases where I see continuity with the Putin years. To describe a political system as a “regime” implies that it is a nondemocratic system with no political alternation. While this is true of Putin’s Russia, I use “regime” in a more neutral way, seeing it as interchangeable with “government,” “authorities,” or other problematic terms such as “the Kremlin.” But I do differentiate between the Presidential Administration as the core of the system; the government as its bureaucratic organ; the Duma and Federation Council; and myriad institutions that belong, whether integrally or peripherally, to the various ideological ecosystems.

The book looks at ideological construction as conducted by the political mainstream. This includes the many groups and entrepreneurs of influence that find themselves “in orbit” around the Kremlin but excludes people, institutions, and narratives that are seen by the regime as in opposition, either liberal or ethnonational. I also distinguish between the Russian establishment and Russian elites. The establishment is the political and intellectual mainstream, those who have some official status in state structures, while elites are all those with financial or social-cultural capital—a much more diverse group that includes oligarchs and intellectuals, some of whom disagree with the regime and are now repressed by it.

The first part of the book provides a comprehensive overview of the Russian regime’s ideological production. It explores it in a structuralist way, looking at its ecosystems and main mechanisms of engineering ideational content (chapter 1). It retraces the gradual sedimentation of ideology by a Kremlin long reluctant to formalize too much doctrinal content, preferring to play with a multiplicity of floating signifiers and ensuring shared social practices (chapter 2). A second part investigates the meaning of “the West”—an eminently polysemic term—in Russia and how the regime went from borrowing from the “West” to challenging it, decoupling from it, and eventually fighting against it (chapter 3). To position Russia in relation to the West, the regime has recrafted a narrative of Russia as the Second Europe, the Byzantine one (chapter 4). It has also engaged in a colossal process of securitizing national history and space (chapter 5), as well as rediscovering Russia in its historical continuity and its imperial and White past, in particular with regard to its obsession with Ukraine (chapter 6).

The third part of the book researches the regime’s counterrevolutionary script, formulated around three notions: civilizationism to refute a universalism associated with Western normativity (chapter 7); conservatism to deplore what is seen as excessive, degraded, and morally corrupt Western liberalism (chapter 8); and katechon, translated as bulwark, shield, or gatekeeper of order against chaos, a more eschatological and reactionary understanding of the counterrevolutionary script (chapter 9). The fourth part delves into the regime geo-imaginaries, shaped by Russia’s spatial realities and the tradition of seeing itself as a pivot of a broader space, be it Eurasia (chapter 10), the Russian world (chapter 11), or as the leader of the anticolonial resistance against Western neo-imperialism (chapter 12). The conclusion briefly explores the content-manufacturing aspect of the regime and how Russian society accepts, cocreates, adapts, or rejects this intense ideological engineering.

Notes

1. Georges Balandier, Le pouvoir sur scènes (Paris: Balland, 1980), 15.

2. The Russian agency VTsIOM carried out the survey, which was commissioned by Pål Kolstø and Helge Blakkisrud, principal investigators of the University of Oslo’s research project “Values-Based Legitimation in Authoritarian States: Top-Down versus Bottom-Up Strategies—The Case of Russia.” The project was funded by the Research Council of Norway (project no. 300997). The dataset is currently scheduled to be released to the broader research community in 2025 through the LEGITRUSS website: https://www.hf.uio.no/ilos/english/research/projects/value-based-regime….

3. Karen Dawisha, Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004).

4. Sergei Guriev and Daniel Treisman, Spin Doctors: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2022).

5. Andrey Makarychev, “The War in Chechnya in Russian Cinematographic Representations: Biopolitical Patriotism in ‘Unsovereign’ Times,” Transcultural Studies 12, no. 1 (2016): 115–135.

6. Charles Clover, Black Wind, White Snow: The Rise of Russia’s New Nationalism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016); Marcel H. van Herpen, Putin’s Wars: The Rise of Russia’s New Imperialism (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014); Michel Eltchaninoff, Inside the Mind of Vladimir Putin (London: Hurst, 2018).

7. On this debate, see Marlene Laruelle, Is Russia Fascist? Unraveling Propaganda East and West (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021).

8. Timothy Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (New York: Tim Duggan Books, 2018); Timothy Snyder, “Ukraine Holds the Future: The War between Democracy and Nihilism,” Foreign Affairs, October 2022, https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ukraine/ukraine-war-democracy-nihilism-t….

9. Mikhail Epstein, “Schizophrenic Fascism: On Russia’s War in Ukraine,” Studies in East European Thought 74, no. 4 (2022): 475–481.

10. Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom, 145.

11. Among a rich literature, see Marlene Laruelle, Russian Eurasianism: An Ideology of Empire (Woodrow Wilson Press / Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008); Andreas Umland and Anton Shekhovtsov, “Is Dugin a Traditionalist? ‘Neo-Eurasianism’ and Perennial Philosophy,” Russian Review 68 (2009): 662–678; Andreas Umland, “Aleksandr Dugin’s Transformation from a Lunatic Fringe Figure into a Mainstream Political Publicist, 1980–1998: A Case Study in the Rise of Late and Post-Soviet Russian Fascism,” Journal of Eurasian Studies 1 (2010): 144–152; Anton Shekhovtsov, “The Palingenetic Thrust of Russian Neo-Eurasianism: Ideas of Rebirth in Aleksandr Dugin’s Worldview,” Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions 9, no. 4 (2008): 491–506; Anton Shekhovtsov, “Aleksandr Dugin’s New Eurasianism: The New Right à la Russe,” Religion Compass 3/4: (2009): 697–716; Dmitry Shlapentokh, Ideological Seduction and Intellectuals in Putin’s Russia (Cham, Switz.: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).

12. Paul Robinson, Russian Conservatism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019); Mikhail Suslov and Dmitry Uzlaner, eds., Contemporary Russian Conservatism: Problems, Paradoxes, and Perspectives (Leiden: Brill, 2019); Glenn Diesen, Russian Conservatism: Managing Change under Permanent Revolution (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021); Kristina Stoeckl and Dmitry Uzlaner, The Moralist International: Russia in the Global Culture Wars (New York: Fordham University Press, 2022); David Lewis, Russia’s New Authoritarianism: Putin and the Politics of Order (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020).

13. Among the most recent works, see Olga Malinova, “Constructing the Collective Trauma of ‘The Hard 1990s’ as a Disregarded Tool of Legitimation for Putin’s Authority,” Nationalities Papers: The Journal of Nationalism and Ethnicity 50, no. 3 (2022): 619–623; “Legitimizing Putin’s Regime: The Transformations of the Narrative of Russia’s Post-Soviet Transition,” Communist and Post-Communist Studies 55, no. 1 (2022): 52–75; “Symbolism and the Transformation of the National Historical Narrative in Post-Soviet Russia,” in Routledge Handbook of Russian Politics and Society (London: Routledge, 2022), 377–387; “Framing the Collective Memory of the 1990s as a Legitimation Tool for Putin’s Regime,” Problems of Post-Communism 68, no. 5 (2021): 429–441; “Politics of Memory and Nationalism,” Nationalities Papers: The Journal of Nationalism and Ethnicity 49, no. 6 (2021): 997–1007.

14. Jade McGlynn, Memory Makers: The Politics of the Past in Putin’s Russia (London: Bloomsbury, 2023); Nina Tumarkin, “The Great Patriotic War as Myth and Memorym,” European Review 11, no. 4 (2003): 595–611; Nikolay Koposov, Memory Laws, Memory Wars: The Politics of the Past in Europe and Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017).

15. Andrey Tsygankov, Russia’s Foreign Policy: Change and Continuity in National Identity (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2019); Richard Sakwa, Russia against the Rest: The Post–Cold War Crisis of World Order (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); Andrej Krickovic and Igor Pellicciari, “From ‘Greater Europe’ to ‘Greater Eurasia’: Status Concerns and the Evolution of Russia’s Approach to Alignment and Regional Integration,” Journal of Eurasian Studies 12, no. 1 (2021): 86–99.

16. Among many others, see Stoeckl and Uzlaner, The Moralist International; Dmitry Adamsky, Russian Nuclear Orthodoxy: Religion, Politics, and Strategy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2019); Katja Richters, The Post-Soviet Russian Orthodox Church: Politics, Culture and Greater Russia (London: Routledge, 2012); Irina Papkova, The Russian Orthodox Church and Russian Politics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011); Alicja Curanović, “Russia’s Mission in the World: The Perspective of the Russian Orthodox Church,” Problems of Post-Communism 66, no. 4 (2019): 253–267.

17. The most comprehensive being Jardar Østbø, The New Third Rome: Readings of a Russian Nationalist Myth (Stuttgart: Ibidem, 2016).

18. Brian Taylor, The Code of Putinism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 2.

19. Elena Chebankova, Political Ideologies in Contemporary Russia (Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2020).

20. Mikhail Suslov, Putinism: Post-Soviet Russian Regime Ideology (London: Routledge, 2024).

21. Gulnaz Sharafutdinova, The Red Mirror: Putin’s Leadership and Russia’s Insecure Identity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020).

22. Cheng Chen, The Return of Ideology: The Search for Regime Identities in Postcommunist Russia and China (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016).

23. Bo Petersson, The Putin Predicament: Problems of Legitimacy and Succession (Stuttgart: Ibidem, 2021).

24. Marlene Laruelle, “Introduction: Illiberalism Studies as a Field,” in Marlene Laruelle, ed., Oxford Handbook of Illiberalism (Cambridge, MA: Oxford University Press, 2024), pagination not allocated.

25. Eliot Borenstein, Plots against Russia: Conspiracy and Fantasy after Socialism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019); Ilya Yablokov, Fortress Russia: Conspiracy Theories in the Post-Soviet World (New York: Polity Press, 2018).

26. Marlene Laruelle, “Russia’s Niche Soft Power: Sources, Targets, and Channels of Influence,” Russie.Nei.Visions 122, April 2021, https://www.ifri.org/en/publications/notes-de-lifri/russieneivisions/ru….

27. Marlene Laruelle and John Chrobak, “The Carlson-Putin Interview, or the Limits of Dialogue between the Western Far Right and Russia,” PONARS Eurasia Policy Memo, no. 881, March 2024, https://www.ponarseurasia.org/the-carlson-putin-interview/.

28. Anna Gryzmala-Busse, “Why Comparative Politics Should Take Religion (More) Seriously,” Annual Review of Political Science 15 (2012): 421–442.

29. Jan-Willem van Prooijen and Karen M. Douglas, “Conspiracy Theories as Part of History: The Role of Societal Crisis Situations,” Memory Studies 10, no. 3 (2017): 323–333.

30. In his seminal work, Freeden sees ideology as a process of decontestation offering “temporary stabilities carved out of fundamental semantic instability in the social and political worlds.” Michael Freeden, “The Morphological Analysis of Ideology,” in Michael Freeden, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Political Ideologies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 119.

31. Vera Tolz and Stephen Hutchings, Nation, Ethnicity and Race on Russian Television Mediating Post-Soviet Difference (London: Routledge, 2015). For Russian media’s international outreach, see Stephen Hutchings, Vera Tolz, Precious Chatterje-Doody, et al., Russia, Disinformation, and the Liberal Order: RT as Populist Pariah (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2024).

32. Jade McGlynn, “Illiberal Memory across Borders,” Journal of Illiberalism Studies 3, no. 3 (2023): 44.

33. Claire Yorke, “Is Empathy a Strategic Imperative? A Review Essay,” Journal of Strategic Studies 46, no. 5 (2023): 1082–1102.

34. Presidential speeches were collected through the the RuBase data (https://hcss.nl/rubase/), which had cleaned up presidential speeches from all other documents released by the Presidential Administration. There were three possible scenarios: 1. A single-word-expression with only one possible form. In that case we simply counted documents where this form was mentioned. 2. A single-word-expression with several possible forms. In that case we counted a document if we found one of the forms in the document. 3. A two-word-expression with only one possible form. In that case we simply counted documents where this form was mentioned.

35. Olga Malinova and N. V. Karpova, “Deputaty Gosudarstvennoi dumy kak aktory rossiiskoi politiki pamiati,” Politicheskaia nauka no. 1 (2023) 113–138; Olga Malinova, “Russian Identity and the ‘Pivot to the East’: An Analysis of Rhetorical References to the American and Chinese ‘Others’ in Political Elite Discourse,” Problems of Post-Communism 66, no. 4 (2019): 227–239; Olga Malinova, “Ritorika politicheskogo lidera kak indicator znachimostly Drugogo: Analiz ssylok na SShA I KNP v vystupleniakh prezidentov RF (2000–2015),” Polis. Politicheskie issledovaniia no. 2 (2016): 21–37.

36. Oksana Drozdova and Paul Robinson, “A Study of Vladimir Putin’s Rhetoric,” Europe-Asia Studies 71, no. 4 (2019): 1–19.

37. Alicja Curanović, Russian Foreign Policy: Destined for Greatness! (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2021).

38. Adriana Cuppuleri, “20 Years of LIO Contestation(s): A Computational Text Analysis of Russia’s Foreign Policy Discourse (2003–2023),” SCRIPTS Working Paper no. 38 (2024).

39. Georgy A. Borshchevskiy, “‘Direct Line with Vladimir Putin’ in the Mirror of Sociology and Axiology,” Sotsiologicheskie issledovaniia 11 (2022): 54–65.

40. Ivan Fomin, “Two Statisms of Putin’s Ideology: From Proclamation to Mobilization,” forthcoming, https://papers.ssrn.com/abstract=4624081.