Authors

Marlene Laruelle¹;  ¹ The George Washington University,

Discussion

The Russian regime does have a consistent and coherent global view of its political project for Russia, based on a set of beliefs, a mental apparatus that has evolved over the years but stayed true to its core principles, and which is shared by a large part of the population. To be operationalized, this mental apparatus is translated into ideological metanarratives and repertoires, inspired by different and even conflicting doctrinal stocks.

This doctrinal pool has rarely been produced in-house by the Presidential Administration; rather, it has been outsourced to contemporary ideologues, entrepreneurs of influence, and institutions that compete for resources and recognition. What the Kremlin has excelled in is producing myriad ideologemes or topoi – short, catchy notions that have populated the public space, especially television, promptly flourishing and vanishing, giving the impression of a cacophony. Yet the chaos of ideologemes should obscure neither the coherence of the mental apparatus, nor the roots of the displayed repertoires in intellectual history.
As much as the war is a dramatic evolution in the state-society relationship, in the ideological realm, the change is more of scale than of nature: the full-scale invasion of Ukraine has constituted one more step in the gradual sedimentation and radicalization of Russia’s ideological construction. In this paper I analyze the five key structural trends of wartie Putinism: 1. the search for bigger coherence, 2. the calcification of tropes in state language, 3. the radicalization of narratives (including the permeability between  official language and the far-right ecosystem and the primordialization of Russian (and Ukrainian) identity), 4. the search for better mechanisms of indoctrination toward youth, and last but not least, 5. the bureaucratization of ideological production with a growing role of the Presidential Administration and of some key academic institutions.