The war in Ukraine created an entirely new political reality for the Kremlin and prompted the enshrining of a revamped ideological foundation for Russian President Vladimir Putin’s rule. According to a presidential decree, this ideology is rooted in “traditional spiritual and moral values.” These ideas are fleshed out in a new history textbook for high schoolers and a compulsory new course for all first-year college students entitled “The Fundamentals of Russian Statehood.”
The Putin regime today is essentially a type of hybrid totalitarianism that combines mature authoritarianism with totalitarian practices. This model requires a certain degree of self-justification. The political system can better affirm itself and its reason for existing in the first place if it can find the proper words to artificially describe the ideological reality it has created. The harsher the regime, the harsher the words. The more repressive practices are introduced, the more active the industry of inventing, producing, and implementing the building blocks of its ideology in the public consciousness.
This article examines the historical origins of the worldview that the Russian government is imposing on the country. It is essentially a modern adaptation of the “Russian idea,” which has deep roots in the intellectual discourse of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Putinist ideology is a combination of the formulation developed by Count Sergei Uvarov in his role as a top adviser to Czar Nicholas I in the 1830s (“orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality,”) along with aspects of the government’s official view of nationality, Slavophile philosophy, Stalinist imperial ideology, and eclectic ideas drawn from the Russian nationalist movements of the 1960s and 1970s.
Contemporary Russian ideology can best be described as nationalist-imperialist since it combines both imperial aspirations and nationalism. This ideology has translated into a concept of “Russia’s DNA” that seeks to underscore Russia’s exceptionalism and supposed special path.
In June 2023, a trio of enormous flags—each one half the size of a soccer pitch—were hoisted up 175-meter-tall flagpoles on the shore of the Gulf of Finland on the outskirts of St. Petersburg. Waving side by side were the 165-year-old Russian imperial flag in black, yellow, and white; the Soviet Union’s flag featuring a hammer and sickle; and the modern Russian tricolor. Crowning this bizarre display was the tallest skyscraper in Europe, Gazprom’s Lakhta Tower, which is a perfect symbol of the state-capitalist model of Putin’s regime. The historical roots of such philosophical eclecticism run deep.
History Repeating
The Russian state’s model of existence has long dictated both the political order and its ideological support and justification. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Russia’s primary exports came from the pelt trade. Historian Alexander Etkind provided a fascinating description of how this industry operated. “Those ensuring the security of proprietors tend to take control of their property... The group that is trading a resource and the group that protects the state meld into one indistinguishable entity.”1 The analogy with the present day is hard to miss: the production, transportation, and storage of a key commodity, be it pelts or oil, has to be protected—including from the population at large. Hence the obsession with security as a counterbalance to freedom and the creation of an ideology that justifies this model’s existence.2
The key characteristic of the country’s economic well-being—that is, a dependence on exports of raw materials as opposed to finished goods that are further up the value chain—has influenced both the structure of the political system and its ideological concepts. This is the source of the “eternal hypertrophy of state,” as the Russian philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev explained in the mid twentieth century.3 The logic of internal colonization convinced Russia’s rulers that “it was necessary to take over Russia’s expanses and protect them.”4 By extension, the state had to insulate itself from external influences for the sake of its obsession with security.
Russian messianism and the idea of Russian exceptionalism, which have their roots in the centuries-old concept of Moscow as the Third Rome, also come from a long-standing tradition. Another Russian philosopher, Gustav Shpet, wrote that “in boastfully naming itself the Third Rome, [Russia] emphasized its fatherlessness without realizing it. It became Christian, but without any classical tradition or historical cultural succession.”5
The Third Rome ideology wasn’t just a theological concept, however. Berdyaev wrote that “the ideology of Moscow as the Third Rome facilitated the strengthening and power of the Moscow-based state and czarist autocracy, rather than the flourishing of the Church and greater spiritual life.”6
Amid the current conflict, the role of a lost Byzantium that, in Putin’s worldview, has slipped away from the empire, is played by Ukraine.
In 1833, Czar Nicholas I’s influential education minister Count Sergei Uvarov came up with a formulation for state ideology that encompassed both religion and the political system. “Orthodoxy, autocracy, and nationality” was both an imaginary construct (no less imaginary than the Soviet-era ideology of “scientific communism” or the Putin regime’s new “Fundamentals of Russian Statehood” course) and a tool for managing people’s minds and keeping them in check. It is no coincidence that the idea of “nationality” was official: in other words, it was formulated by the state and imposed from above.
Another element of Russian patriotism that originated in the nineteenth century is the idea of a purifying war. It has manifested itself in various forms of nationalist imperialism over different historical time periods, but especially before and during World War I.
An associated—and truly archaic ideological building block—that has been reanimated by the war in Ukraine is that of a heroic death for the homeland. Both Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, and pop singer Shaman have embraced this idea. In Shaman’s hit “Let’s Rise!,” Russian teens are told:
“Let’s rise, as long as God and the truth are on our side,
We’ll say thanks for granting us victory.
For those who found their heaven and are no longer with us,
Let’s rise and sing a song.”
Wars have often served to compensate for the Russian inferiority complex, which stems primarily from the country’s economic backwardness. Quite often, however, the wars only exacerbated the feeling of national humiliation, ressentiment, and a thirst for revenge, especially after Moscow’s defeats in the Crimean and Russo-Japanese Wars.
In today’s Russia, it is possible to trace the roots of the current conflict between nationalist-imperialists and liberals to the standoff between the Stalinists and anti-Stalinists, which was itself a by-product of the famous nineteenth-century debate between Westerners and Slavophiles.
Zionists and Anglo-Saxons
On the eve of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov reportedly said: “[Putin] has three advisers: Ivan the Terrible. Peter the Great. And Catherine the Great.” Yet there is little evidence that Putin has embraced very much of these famed figures’ ambitions for modernizing the country. As for their repressive traits, Putin has only assimilated Peter the Great’s phrase about “returning and reinforcing” ancestral Russian lands. If truth be told, Putin has only one adviser: Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.
Certainly, in terms of the language of hate and the tone of the discussion about Russian greatness and superiority, the country has descended to the depths of the late Stalin years in the late 1940s and early 1950s. As Evgeny Dobrenko, a scholar of Stalinist ideology, noted, politics is history inverted in the present.6 Putin’s regime feeds on the decomposing corpses of the past while absorbing the malignant radiation of Stalinism that lies just beneath the surface. Stalin also drew on the past for legitimacy, including through cinematic portrayals of Russian history. On September 13, 1943, he neatly summarized historically and nationalistically motivated ideology in a series of notes he jotted down on the script for Sergei Eisenstein’s film Ivan the Terrible: “Not a bad depiction of Ivan the Terrible as a progressive force of his time, and the oprichnina [the regime of state terror that Ivan pursued] as his expedient instrument.”7
Another relic of the Stalin era is a reliance on a pantheon of historical heroes. This approach emerged during World War II, when the regime put aside Marxist-Leninist dogma in favor of greater emphasis on the country’s patriotic history. Stalin’s regime started constructing the pantheon in anticipation of the war. Prior to Ivan the Terrible, Eisenstein shot another patriotic film about a historical figure: Alexander Nevsky, which premiered in December 1938. The titular medieval warrior-prince has remained an official hero ever since. During the war in Ukraine, Nevsky has been turned into a symbolic means of marking conquered territory, thanks to the authorities’ decision to erect a Nevsky monument in Mariupol, the destroyed Ukrainian port city. Never mind that Nevsky had no connection whatsoever to this city; the princely brand name symbolizes Russia’s centuries-old confrontation with the West and harkens back to the era of the Teutonic Knights.
Even the vocabulary of the late Putin period reflects the lexicon of the late Stalinist period, with its attacks on “anti-patriotic groups.” In 1949, “rootless cosmopolitan” became a notorious official term for adversaries of the Soviet people. In 2014, Putin coined the term “national traitor,” which existed alongside the government’s earlier efforts to target so-called foreign agents via legislation and other forms of harassment.
Under Stalin, “kowtowing to the West” (primarily to the United States) was a fundamental character trait of the enemy within. “Zionists” also emerged as a shadowy force during the same time period. In fact, Stalin’s regime put Jews in the same role as Putin’s regime puts Ukrainians today: conduits of everything bad in the world. Following Hamas’s shocking October 7 terrorist attack on Israel, Russian officials have energetically embraced the Palestinian cause. Just like clockwork, classic forms of Soviet-era antisemitism also returned to Russia with a vengeance. Without it, Russian hybrid totalitarianism was somehow incomplete.
The spirit of official antisemitic propaganda during the late Stalin era can be seen in an emblematic article entitled “Zionism at the Service of Anglo-American War Agitators.” Its authors wrote, “The atrocities committed by the Jewish fascist Zionist gangs against peaceful Arabs exceeded the wrongdoing of the murderers in Hitler’s ranks.”9 This phrase was ultimately edited out of the draft article by the chief Soviet ideologist, Mikhail Suslov, but the technique is recognizable: using harsh and vulgar language, the writers shamelessly project the qualities ascribed to the worst enemies in the country’s history onto today’s enemy. Hence, the current government of Ukraine is described as Nazi. While the current Israeli leadership has not been denounced in quite such terms, criticism from senior Russian officials, including Putin himself, has been quite harsh.
Meanwhile, the messages pushed by the Putin regime’s leading ideologists increasingly resemble caricatures. Security Council head Nikolai Patrushev, a longtime close associate of Putin’s, has asserted, among other things, that: “Some people in America claim that Eastern Europe and Siberia will become the safest place in the event of the possible eruption [of the Yellowstone Volcano in the western United States]. This is apparently the answer to the question of why the Anglo-Saxon elites are so keen to take ownership of this heartland.”
Indeed, the less credible the information, the more willing Putin’s ideologists are to use it. Patrushev has also accused Finland of having plans to destabilize Karelia, a vast region that spans both countries. “To destabilize the sociopolitical situation in the Republic of Karelia and provoke disorder, Western intelligence services are actively working to incite separatist sentiment, especially among the youth,” Patrushev has claimed.
Meanwhile, Sergey Naryshkin, the director of the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service, and other officials have repeatedly alleged that “the Polish leadership is increasingly intent on instituting control over the Western territories of Ukraine by deploying its troops there.” According to Putin, Polish leaders “hope to form some coalition under the NATO umbrella and directly intervene in the Ukraine conflict so they can then grab a better piece for themselves . . . It’s well known that they also have designs on Belarusian territory.”
The pattern is as self-serving as it is clumsy and implausible. Senior Russian officials have routinely asserted that Moscow’s ideological and political opponents believe that a country’s might is determined by its territorial size. All of this may look like empty political talk, but such claims serve several purposes all at once. They are simultaneously a means of delivering ideology, the instruments that are used to define and create it, and integral elements of the regime’s underlying ideology. In the hands of the Kremlin, ideology under Putin is both a political strategy and the product of its employment.
Anti-Americanism of Spirit
In the late 1960s, the Molodaya Gvardiya (Young Guard) journal served as a hub for Russian nationalists of the time. Its editors published a series of articles presenting the ideology of Russian national-imperialism. The themes of these articles are part of the roots of the Putin-era state ideology that is being systematized today.
The archetypal figures operating in this genre were the writers Mikhail Lobanov and Viktor Chalmayev. The connections between the ideological clichés of the Soviet era and today can be seen in the utterances of Chalmayev, who—at the ripe old age of ninety—called Ukraine a failed state in 2022.
Lobanov, for his part, published a policy article of sorts in Molodaya Gvardiya’s April 1968 issue entitled “The Enlightened Petit Bourgeoisie.” Lobanov targeted Russian nationalists’ main adversary—well-educated urbanites—and presented them as the main danger to what today is known as “the Russian world” (Russky Mir).
Urbanization and the Soviet regime’s gradual rapprochement with the West during the détente period of the 1970s was naturally greeted with dismay by Stalinists and members of the so-called Russian party. The Russian party was an umbrella group incorporating magazines, newspapers, the Russian Society for the Protection of Historical and Cultural Monuments, dissident nationalists, and supporters of nationalism at various levels of the government and Soviet Communist Party. Adherents could be found in the Culture Ministry of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic, the Central Committee of the Komsomol (the Communist youth organization), and in the Central Committee of the Communist Party. These traditionalists opposed the advance of an urban, uniform, “soulless” civilization that they largely associated with the West. Instead, they advocated for the communal consciousness and way of life of the Russian peasantry, ideas that were presented as being closer to nature.
In the articles of Lobanov and Chalmayev, the enemy of the Russian patriot is the petit bourgeois who prizes only material things. Such a person is incapable of loving their fatherland. According to Lobanov, “A nation has no fiercer enemy than the temptation of bourgeois prosperity. It’s tantamount to paralysis for the nation’s creative genius... Sooner or later, we’ll see a collision of these two irreconcilable forces: moral originality and Americanism of spirit.”
Today’s ideologists have regurgitated nationalists’ statements almost word for word in their attempts to explain and justify the rationale behind the war in Ukraine and the ongoing hybrid war between Russia and the West. In the August 1970 issue of Molodaya Gvardiya, Sergei Semanov, one of the most vigorous chauvinists and anti-Semites of the Russian party, attacked the liberal camp (like the journal Novy Mir, or New World) and speculated on the idea of the unity of the people and the state, which has also found a second life today. Fragments from his article could be inserted into the speeches of the leaders of today’s Russia almost word for word, such as when he said: “Of course, some would like to break this organic unity of our people with our socialist state. Well, it is known where these ingratiating ‘voices’ come from. The dark forces of the world are persistently trying by any means to weaken our state, to sow discord and enmity among the Soviet peoples. That is why the monolithic nature of our multinational Fatherland and the friendship of our peoples must be preserved and protected as the apple of our eye.”10
Naturally, the Molodaya Gvardiya articles generated a response from the opposing camp. On the pages of Novy Mir, the prominent literary critic Alexander Dementyev used official Soviet discourse to skillfully dismiss the incoherent ramblings of the patriotic nationalists. That magazine’s editorial board had long understood with whom it was dealing. Deputy editor Alexei Kondratovich wrote in his diary in December 1968, “Chauvinism in the guise of Soviet patriotism has become the official ideology in our country. If you are not a chauvinist, you are cosmopolitan—hence an enemy.”11
Dementyev also listed the main ideas of the Russian party, which are fully present in the dominant ideology of today: “In the articles of our critic [Chalmayev], Russia and the West are contrasted no less starkly than in the writings of the traditionalists and Slavophiles. Russia, as a thousand-year-old organism, has retained its spiritual beauty both under the Tatar yoke and under the pressure of bourgeois morals, material gain, soullessness, and rationalism; the West, on the other hand, has become аn ‘opulent anthill’ ruled by new barbarism, vulgarity, cheap prostituted culture, the power of a full stomach, and comfort. It’s a place where the soul has become synonymous with the stomach.”
The nationalists responded to Novy Mir’s criticism with a manifesto in Ogoniok magazine that was signed by eleven traditionalist writers and entitled “What Is Novy Mir Protesting Against?”12 They didn’t mince words, denouncing Novy Mir’s position as “cosmopolitan.” Kondratovich wrote in his diary: “And so cosmopolitism has raised its ugly head. It’s been a while... That’s it. The indictment’s ready. Like the ones we used to know. You live and wait for history to repeat itself. We are going back a long way: back to Stalin.”13
This was a real ideological war. No one could stop the traditionalists, who retained their positions at official Soviet media outlets and government agencies and enjoyed the protection of figures in high positions in the Soviet hierarchy. Ultimately members of the Russian party were successfully co-opted by the Soviet system and forced to serve the regime’s needs. Yet the nationalist-imperialists had served their function and proved useful in crushing the remains of the liberal opposition. Their doctrine was also useful. As the historian Alexander Yanov described it, “They brought the struggle between ‘socialism’ and ‘capitalism’ into the sphere of spiritual confrontation: the Russian soul was up against the bourgeois spirit personified by ‘Americanism.’”14 In those circles, Stalinism perfectly coexisted with nationalism. Many saw the connection between the two as obvious, calling Stalinists “black-hundredists,” a reference to Russia’s early-twentieth-century ultranationalist movement.15
Five New Foundations
With the first signs of despotism under Putin, ideology came back with a vengeance, giving rise to ideas like “sovereign democracy,” a concept that emerged in 2005 to justify the increasingly heavy hand of the state. The rise of such ideas marked the start of the fetishization and absolutization of “sovereignty,” which provided a justification for Russia’s current descent into autarky.
The Putin regime has put in place a permanent government and highly personalized style of semi-totalitarian rule. Such a regime requires the enshrinement of basic ideological precepts and historical justifications for its despotism, all of which must also be spread to the masses. That explains the introduction of various indoctrination tools for schoolchildren and university students. These include revamped history and social studies textbooks for schools and the newly required course “Foundations of Russian Statehood” at the university level. A better name for this course would surely have been Scientific Putinism, which would help citizens see the parallel to the lectures on “scientific Communism” that their forebearers were forced to attend in Soviet universities.
Today the Russian nation is undergoing an identity crisis. It is unfolding against the backdrop of an unprecedentedly bitter conflict with the West. (To put it differently, the Russian nation has been forced into a conflict with itself.) And as always happens during periods of confrontation with the West, Russia opts for a negative form of self-identification that relies on familiar slogans, such as: “We are not the same as everybody else!” “We have a special DNA!” “We are fighting godlessness and the enemies on our country’s Western borders!” “We have to defend ourselves by reclaiming our ancient territories and ‘liberating’ them!’” In short, the best defense of the beleaguered Russian nation is offense.
The key kernel of state ideology under Putin is all too simple. It is repeated constantly by the regime’s most important talking heads, regardless of whether they hail from the security services or civilian government agencies. Everyone from Patrushev to the First Deputy Chief of Staff of the Presidential Administration Sergei Kiriyenko insists: “Those trying to go to war against Russia today have a clear goal. They no longer conceal it. They want Russia to cease to exist.”
The Putin regime is grooming a new generation of ideologues, including political strategist Andrei Polosin, a close associate of Kiriyenko’s. This group of political technologists has come up with what they call a “pentabasis,” essentially a five-point list of foundational ideas that is long on quasi-spiritual gobbledygook. These ideas include “the edification of the individual,” “love for one’s family,” “unity for society,” “order for the state,” and “a mission for the country.” The list is supplemented with four so-called value constants consisting of Russia’s “special path” (a repackaging of the German concept of Sonderweg), “messianism” (a deliberate exaggeration of the nation’s role), “superadaptivity,” and “communalism as the antithesis of individualism.” Students of Russian history surely will recall that communalism was a concept that was artificially encouraged by the authorities during the Russian imperial period. “It’s easier to shepherd the entire herd than an individual member of that herd,” as the famed Russian prime minister Sergei Witte once put it.16 Communal living significantly inhibited Russian modernization and curtailed the civil rights of 80 percent of the population.17
If these foundations sound somewhat nebulous, that is because they are. The regime’s predilection for manipulating and distorting the teaching of history is a more useful instrument. Putin’s state ideology is intended to feed on the past and exploit historical memories and concepts to reshape and manage the mass consciousness of Russia’s citizenry. This is an analogue to what happened during Count Uvarov’s time. As the historian Andrei Zorin notes, “[The past was called upon to replace a dangerous and uncertain future for the empire, while Russian history and the institutions of Orthodoxy and autocracy rooted in it happened to be the only repository for nationality and the last alternative to Europeanization.”18
These conceptual approaches are easily discerned in the notorious new history textbook for tenth and eleventh graders that was introduced and authored by the controversial former culture minister turned presidential aide Vladimir Medinsky and rector of Moscow State Institute of International Relations Anatoly Torkunov. The approaches are also incorporated into the two “Foundations of Russian Statehood” university textbooks. The Putin regime’s ideology primarily manifests itself through historical discourse. That is precisely why it was so important for the authors of these textbooks to affirm that there is only one “correct” understanding of history. Putinism’s historical policy is not just built upon censored memories, of course. There is another crucial element: forgetting the darker pages of Russia’s national history.
Having failed to chart a workable path for Russia’s future and having lost a race with the so-called global West and a rising global East centered on China, Putin’s regime is unable to abandon its leadership ambitions. Instead it is directing all of its energy into clawing its way back to a storied past. The Russian system under Putin has stopped playing catch-up when it comes to long-overdue tasks connected to modernization. It has started pursuing demodernization, a stage of development that has culminated in the “special operation” in Ukraine.
Putin presumably was once perfectly comfortable with the idea of building a retro-style utopia. Unfortunately for him, that goal has by now morphed completely into a terrifying dystopia made up of scraps from the darkest chapters of Russia’s past. Such a basis for Russian statehood and its role on the international stage look even more preposterous in the twenty-first century. The Kremlin’s penchant for embracing a nationalist imperial ideology has once again lived up to its self-destructive reputation.
Notes
1Alexander Etkind, Internal Colonization: Russia’s Imperial Experience (Moscow: New Literary Review, 2016), 110 (in Russian).
2Etkind, Internal Colonization, 138.
3Nikolai Berdyaev, The Russian Idea: Main Problems of Russian Philosophy of the 19th and Early 20th Century. On Russia and Russian Philosophical Culture. The Philosophers of Russian Post-October Foreign Lands (Moscow: Nauka, 1990), 46 (in Russian).
4Berdyaev, The Russian Idea.
5Gustav Shpet, An Outline of the Development of Russian Philosophy I (Мoscow: ROSSPEN, 2008), 66 (in Russian).
6Berdyaev, The Russian Idea, 60.
7Evgeny Dobrenko, Late Stalinism: The Esthetics of Politics, Volume 1 (Moscow: New Literary Review, 2020), 234 (in Russian).
8Dobrenko, Late Stalinism, 228.
9Dobrenko, Late Stalinism, 222.
10Sergei Semanov, “On Relative and Eternal Values,” Molodaya Gvardiya, issue 8 (1970), (in Russian).
11Alexei Kondratovich, Novy Mir Diary, 1967–1970 (Moscow: Sovetsky Pisatel, 1991), 337 (in Russian).
12“What Is Novy Mir Protesting Against?” Ogoniok, issue 30 (1969), (in Russian).
13Kondratovich, Novy Mir Diary, 1967–1970, 425.
14Alexander Yanov, “The Russian Idea and the Year 2000,” Neva, issue 10 (1990): https://archive.org/details/B-001-028-251-1990-09-PDF/page/n79/mode/2up, 160 (in Russian).
15Nikolai Mitrokhin, The Russian Party: The Russian Nationalist Movement in the USSR, 1953–1985 (Moscow: New Literary Review, 2003), 339 (in Russian).
16 Mikhail Davydov, The Price of Utopia: The History of Russian Modernization (Moscow: New Literary Review, 2022), 148 (in Russian).
17Davydov, The Price of Utopia, 146.
18Andrei Zorin, Feeding the Two-Headed Eagle: Literature and State Ideology in Russia in the Late 18th to Early 19th Centuries (Мoscow: New Literary Review, 2001), 372 (in Russian).
