After more than a year since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the issue of Russia’s state ideology is still lacking a coherent approach by Western scholarship, which rather tend to perceive it more like a “simulacra of ideology”, as Bryan D. Taylor(2018) put it, and not as a properly formed, cohesive body of ideas. In my opinion this is a strategic mistake, which actually fails to account for current Russian political standpoints and developments, both internally, and on the world stage, and thus providing analysts with a limited framework for understanding and predicting future directions of Russian politics.
In my paper I plan to show that the Russian state ideology – Putinism – has moved/evolved from a developmentalist national-conservatism stance/standpoint into a revisionist neo-imperial ideology aiming at challenging the western-dominated world order. Thus, I am planning to answer the following questions: what are the core dimensions of the contemporary Russian state ideology? What were, during the Putin years, the main developments/evolutions within this hegemonic discourse?
Therefore, in my paper I plan to explore various thinkers and texts in order to refine a clearer image regarding Russia’s state ideology and the ways in which it evolved overtime.