The Putin power model is heading into the March 2024 presidential election heavily reliant on two unstable mainstays: passive conformism and fear—the latter amplified by the sudden death of the jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny a month before the vote. While there is no doubt over the election’s outcome, the presidential campaign is already exposing the myth of complete consolidation around an irreplaceable president. Vladimir Putin may be winning in the short term, but he is strewing mines beneath the country’s future. Apparently resigned to the motto “après nous, le deluge,”1 the regime is unable to define its goals and is exhausting the long-term supply of political, economic, demographic, and psychological resources.
The All-Pervasive State
In his novel A Hero of Our Time, the nineteenth-century Russian writer Mikhail Lermontov depicted “the vices of our entire generation” in one man, the story’s (anti)hero. Two years into Russia’s “special military operation” in Ukraine, today’s “hero of our time” is a passive conformist who does not want to see or hear the obvious. To excuse the inexcusable and explain the inexplicable to themselves, ordinary people are adopting the fetal position,2 abdicating responsibility for everything, and defending themselves from the world with propaganda clichés imposed from above. They declare the archaic and unthinkable to be entirely moral and, indeed, the only possible outcome. In the world of these conformists, there is no collective guilt or even collective responsibility: they cannot influence anything, so they are not guilty of anything. Their position is “this war is unnecessary, but it wasn’t us who started it.”3
In the last two years, the Putin regime has rebuilt every element of itself to adapt to a permanent state of war: in propaganda and everyday life, in the political model of unifying the behavior of the elites and ordinary people, in the education and justice systems, and—crucially—in the economy.
Like any drawn-out conflict, Russia’s war has seen the return of a violence unusual for the post-industrial era, along with histrionic and archaic concepts of heroic deaths. The general public has little choice but to keep adapting. This is no longer an authoritarian regime that requires only silence from the people, but a semi-totalitarian regime (hybrid totalitarianism)4 that demands complicity. People must pay their dues to the state by sacrificing their loved ones in the trenches, attending mass rallies in support of the war, and performing socially approved activities, from reporting a colleague (or a student, teacher, or neighbor) for expressing opposition to the war to self-censorship manifested in actions such as a preventive refusal to sell books by authors whom the Kremlin has labeled “foreign agents.”
The totalitarianism of this new type of regime is not yet entirely total. Not everyone will be sent to the trenches, and in exchange for this show of mercy by the state, the average person promises to confirm the legitimacy of the country’s long-irreplaceable leader. This was the formula of the social contract between society and the state—at least during the second year of what the Kremlin terms its “special operation” against Ukraine. The cost of buying illusory peace of mind for people in Russia is a ballot paper dropped into the box on polling day. By voting for Putin, people are counting on securing “stability” and freedom from the risk of death at the front. There is no guarantee that the state will uphold its end of the bargain, but the public prefers not to think about the alternative. For now, this contract suits both parties: both the authorities and the obedient majority that has espoused learned indifference5.
The people who will vote in March to refresh Putin’s legitimacy—and at the same time for the legitimization of his war—are primarily those who depend on the state, either socially, economically, or politically. In addition, the electoral majority includes many older people who are not at risk of being drafted into the army.
The all-pervasive totality of the state has saturated the media, movies, and theater. It is permeating the book market, changing the rules of the Russian language by abolishing feminine gender-specific job titles as a sign of sympathy for LGBT rights, and has even turned its attention to nightclubs. The banning of books by best-selling writers including Boris Akunin, Dmitry Bykov, and Lyudmila Ulitskaya, and attempts to limit access to abortion are different strands of the same thing: biopolitics, the desire to control individual life plans and a person’s private existence, the nationalization of their body, thoughts, and soul. The body will go where the military recruitment office commands it; ideas will be expressed in history exams in accordance with the new school history textbooks; and ideologically correct behavior will be instilled in people by banning students from quoting books by “foreign agents” in their essays.
This is a society of crowds and group narcissism: we are the most united, the most consolidated, the best. The “grandiose self” of power (to use the philosopher Alexander Rubtsov’s term)6 transformed in 2022–2023 into a collective “grandiose we,” in which the conformist part of society is delighted with itself.
Previously, it was “us and them”: the ordinary people versus those running the country and earning a fortune from resource rent. Now the structure has gone from being vertical to horizontal: “we” now means all Russians, including Putin and the authorities, while “they” are the West and Ukraine. Naturally, the enemy is depersonalized. Enemies are not really people, and for this reason, they can be fought, humiliated, and killed.7
A Rule of Negatives
This is a regime of negative identification (“we are not like them”) and negative consensus (“we should follow our own special path rather than the well-traveled road of civilization, because we are different and extraordinary”), and it developed long before February 2022.8 Putin is waging an existential battle with the West over Russia’s distinct identity. To define that identity, it needs an ultra-conservative ideological mantle. This identity asserts itself in archaic terms (size of territory) and using archaic methods (expansion and aggression).
In the terminology of the U.S. political scientist Francis Fukuyama, Putin and his regime are consumed by megalothymia: the need to be recognized as superior to others.9 The narcissism of the leader is now transforming into group narcissism among the nation’s obedient majority. “Group narcissism has important functions,” wrote the German psychologist Erich Fromm in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973). “In the first place, it furthers the solidarity and cohesion of the group, and makes manipulation easier by appealing to narcissistic prejudices. Secondly, it is extremely important as an element giving satisfaction to the members of the group and particularly to those who have few other reasons to feel proud and worthwhile.”10;
Fromm’s explanation of the mechanics of mass sentiment typical of totalitarian regimes goes a long way toward elucidating why Putin and his initiatives have the support of the masses: “One’s own group becomes a defender of human dignity, decency, morality, and right. Devilish qualities are ascribed to the other group; it is treacherous, ruthless, cruel, and basically inhuman.11 Defensive aggression becomes stronger than ever, especially at a time of war. This type of aggression is a very convenient tool for the authorities, particularly in a situation where their popularity is stagnating (as was observed in 2020–2021).
The “special operation” began with the logic of “our people [supposedly, ethnic Russians in Ukraine] are under attack,” and continues on the pretext of rebuilding the world order. The road to this world (dis)order lies through war, because the current Russian regime lacks the soft power to bring it about any other way. After the “special operation” began, soft power, like the regime, took on a negative character: Putin’s Russia is not like the West (another aspect of negative self-identification) and therefore imagines itself as the leader of another illusory contrivance: the “global majority.”
Still, in his own way, Putin brought about the end of “the end of history”: Fukuyama’s concept of the lasting establishment of liberal universalist values in the world following the fall of communism. The Bulgarian political scientist Ivan Krastev argues all that remains from the title of Fukuyama’s book The End of History and the Last Man is the last man and a persistent feeling that the foundations of the established and seemingly stable world are being destroyed.12 It is precisely this alarming turbulence that allows Putin to demonstrate his power: having been defeated in terms of modernization and building something new, he now hopes to prove himself in the opposing field of destructive expansion and demodernization.
Revolution and Autocoup
Causing such turbulence—smashing the foundations of the world order in a semblance of some kind of revolution—is nothing new, of course. In the Russian vocabulary of today, the word “revolution” has distinctly negative connotations: revolutions nowadays are always of the “color” variety and destroy “stability.” Nevertheless, what is happening to the country—and the world—at the height of Putin’s rule, almost a quarter of a century after he entered the open political arena, is nothing short of a revolution. Only it’s a conservative, reverse revolution.
The establishment of the Franco dictatorship in Spain was characterized in traditionalist ideology terms as a “national revolution and crusade.”13 Events in Germany in the 1930s were defined in precisely the same way. In his diaries and letters during that period, the German writer Thomas Mann often referred to this concept, including in a letter to his friend Albert Einstein on May 15, 1933: “It is my deepest conviction that this whole ‘German Revolution’ is indeed wrong and evil. It lacks all the characteristics which have won the sympathy of the world for genuine revolutions, however bloody they may have been. In its essence it is not a ‘rising,’ no matter how its proponents rant on, but a terrible fall into hatred, vengeance, lust for killing, and petty-bourgeois mean-spiritedness.”14 This kind of “revolution” brings a unification—imposed by the authorities—of consciousness and action, which at that time was referred to as “Gleichschaltung” (“homogeneity,” “leveling,” the widespread involvement of the public in the dominant ideology, unified politics and administration with restrictions on the rights of those to whom the new rules do not apply).15
In 2020, Russia underwent another event comparable in scale to a revolution: the referendum to change the constitution and reset the clock on presidential terms, allowing Putin to run again this year and potentially remain in power until 2036. Some commentators described that development as a coup—something that might seem impossible, since Putin and his team already held power. Yet there is a precedent for just that: the August 1991 coup in the Soviet Union was also set in motion by people in the corridors of power, though it was directed against the head of state. Arbitrarily changing the constitution to extend the government’s time in office in defiance of legal, political, and (perhaps most importantly) moral norms, is a classic autogolpe, or autocoup.
Indeed, it was that bizarre referendum in the summer of 2020 that conclusively shaped the regime that initiated the “special operation” on February 24, 2022. Voting for amendments to the country’s basic law was effectively another kind of “election” on allowing the president—reelected just two years earlier—to remain in power until 2036.
The Putin regime, which, like everything totalitarian, appears powerful and formalized, is in fact losing its institutional basis. Laws—even those that are part of the system of authoritarian repression—are applied arbitrarily. Officials and law enforcement officers act according to what decisions they imagine one single person would make in their place: the system effectively consists of an army of miniature Putins. Instead of the foundations of statehood growing stronger, they are being destroyed. Instead of institutions being formed, they are being eroded and deinstitutionalized. Laws might exist, but the state, investigative bodies, and courts can use them to exercise extralegal control and violence.
The German lawyer Ernst Fraenkel, whose work The Dual State was published in 1941, described a similar phenomenon in which alongside the “normative state” that officially remains in place, there exists a “prerogative state” that uses violence at its own discretion, with no regard beyond lip service for the usual normative system.16 This “dual” approach to identifying the “enemy” and fighting them was even voiced by a senior Russian law enforcement officer in one case: “These people [a student who had criticized the ‘special operation’] are our enemies. They may not be committing a crime directly, but our targets are people like them. And that target is the same for the security agencies, the police, and prosecutors.17
This disregard for the law is nothing new, either. The justification is: not only are we not like others, we are also living in extraordinary “wartime” conditions. Having conceived of this negative identity, Putin and his elite set about imposing it on society. The “special operation” is nothing less than a battle for a new, artificial identity, affirmed through repressive domestic laws and territorial expansion that flies in the face of international law. Meanwhile, the common cause designed to cement that identity manifests itself in the most ridiculous ways: people find unity in shared activities such as weaving camouflage netting, and that is described in all seriousness as an “all-people’s movement.”18
A New Language
Describing and excusing this military-patriotic reality requires a new language: naturally one of heroic pathos, and accusatory in tone. This social dialect is also forged by the logic of negative identity, and accordingly disparages “traitors,” “bad apples,” and “foreign agents,” involuntarily imitating the language of the “fight against cosmopolitans” of the late 1940s and early 1950s. The rationale for toughening legislation on “foreign agents” follows the same pattern of that time, as illustrated by the words of Andrei Zhdanov, the ideologist of late Stalinism: “The plan to defeat us on the battlefield failed. Now imperialism will focus with increasing persistence on an ideological offensive against us.”19 Compare this statement with an excerpt from a presidential address in 2023: “However, they too realize it is impossible to defeat Russia on the battlefield and are conducting increasingly aggressive information attacks against us.”20
The problem is that this aggressive new language is not just used for propaganda purposes. It is also used for the practical application of prosecution. The charges against the human rights activist Oleg Orlov for “discrediting the armed forces,” for example, included “ideological hostility to traditional Russian spiritual, moral, and patriotic values21—a fantastical formulation that has no basis in law.
The new language doesn’t just allow those using it to show that they are loyal citizens. It also enables them to expose their own enemies, such as in the January 2024 struggle for power within the Philosophy Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, when a group of adherents of “sovereign philosophy” accused their colleagues of “kowtowing to the West,” again repeating leitmotifs from the Stalinist narrative of the late 1940s.22 The notion of “adulation of everything foreign” was first mentioned in 1946, while the label “cosmopolitans” began to enter verbal circulation in the same decade. The latter term was made official by an article in Pravda dated January 28, 1949, in which an “anti-patriotic group of theater critics” were declared to be “carriers of something deeply disgusting for and hostile to the Soviet person, rootless cosmopolitanism,” destroying “the ideological monolithic nature of Soviet society.”23 Frequently encountered motives are monolithicity, consolidation, unity, and the purging of those who have not joined the general mass.
“The special military operation united our society in an unprecedented way and facilitated its purging [author’s italics] of people who did not feel part of being Russian, of Russian history and Russian culture,” Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said at a press conference on January 19, 2024.24 Such discourse is again more typical of the late Stalin period than the later, comparatively “vegetarian” period of “developed socialism”: there was hardly any talk after the late Stalin era of “purging,” a hallmark of twentieth-century totalitarian regimes and their ideologists. In 1933, for example, the German political and legal theorist Carl Schmitt wrote about the “purging” of “alien elements” from public life.25 In the Russian narrative, expressions such as “the existential nature of threats”26 and “existential confrontation” have become popular. In The Concept of the Political, Schmitt wrote: “The enemy, in a very intense sense, is existentially different and alien. In extreme cases, existential conflicts with them are possible.27
In this discourse, the source of the conspiracy against Russia is the West. Sergei Naryshkin, head of Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Service, said in an interview: “The Westerners thought that they could handle Russia in the same way, and even more or less openly threatened us with a revolution and the overthrow of the legally elected government.”28 This rejection of any kind of Western influence is as old as the hills. It prevailed among church leaders back in the sixteenth-seventeenth centuries (as Dmitry Travin, a researcher of the history of Russian modernization, notes, at that time “enlightenment remained a deadly dangerous business29) and was seen again in 1917, when conservative patriots started rumors that the revolution was the work of “liberals and State Duma deputies provided with manuals on the subject by Lord Buchanan” (the British ambassador).30
Any authoritarianism that has found the words to formulate an ideology and is inclined to transform into some kind of semi-totalitarian or neo-totalitarian system aspires if not to remake its people, then at least to put forward an imaginary anthropological model. For the Putin regime, that (literal) poster child is a tough-looking young man on a billboard in military uniform, calling on people to go and fight for their country. It’s an archetype that differs little from the classic totalitarian heroes of twentieth-century dictatorships: the posters and images are frighteningly identical. The lordly poses adopted by popular “patriotic” singer Shaman, meanwhile, with his white-blond Aryan looks and clad in black leather, are more reminiscent of the 1930s. He is a perfect living example of totalitarian art.
Shaman uses the medium of pop songs to convey a negative identity to the masses (“I am Russian in spite of the whole world”) and the cult of heroic death: “For those who have found their heaven and are no longer with us / Let’s rise and sing a song.” Patriarch Kirill uses religious means to convey the same idea to his flock: “The Church recognizes that if someone—driven by a sense of duty, by the need to fulfill their oath—remains faithful to their calling and goes to carry out what their duty tells them, and if in doing so that person is killed, then they undoubtedly are committing an act equivalent to a sacrifice. They are sacrificing themselves for others. And therefore we believe that this sacrifice washes away all the sins that a person has committed.”31
The new man upholds “traditional values” and applauds dying for the Motherland. He has many children, because large families provide the state with multiple new soldiers and military-industrial complex workers for successfully crushing enemies—both domestic and foreign. The enemy is another classic trope of the autocratic genre, be it “enemy of the people,” “rootless cosmopolitan,” or “foreign agent.” Based on this criterion, and on the annihilated memory of Stalin’s repressions, the current regime can be described as neo-Stalinist.
In the second year of the war, many public or quasi-public figures in fields such as culture and education decided for themselves that this harsher-than-ever regime is more or less here to stay. Accordingly, it’s not enough to adapt to it; you must also surrender—i.e., openly support Putin and the war. This feeling has become particularly acute during the presidential election campaign, when for many, public support is a guarantee they will be able to continue their professional career and avoid the risk of being declared an enemy. It is partly a consequence of fatigue from uncertainty. Similar processes took place in 2014, when even many of those who had taken part in the anti-Putin protests of 2011–2012 decided that there was no reason to oppose the collective euphoria over the annexation of Crimea, and that they should just join the jubilant masses. It’s easier to survive this way.
Paleomodernity and Parasites
Putin embarked on this war to change the world order and force the world to live by his rules. To do that, he needed to keep his country and the sphere of its geopolitical influence in a state of “paleomodernity,” to use the term of the cultural scientist Alexander Etkind. This “paleomodernity” is based on declining types of energy that require “resource colonization, settler imperialism, and war capitalism,” which go a long way toward explaining the readiness of Putin—a firmly old-school figure—to embark on territorial expansion.32 Old Russia developed inorganically, due to internal colonization, and the need to protect the imperial colonized territories where the all-important oil and gas deposits were found formed a defensive mentality among the elite and a cult of their own security. Ultra-conservative national-imperialist ideology is used as justification for this cult. Putin and his team are a product of this “paleomodernity.” The world is moving forward toward, in Etkind’s terms, “gaiamodernity,” which involves a transition to other types of energy (and energy saving) to ensure that after us, there will be no global deluge.
In defending his own vision of the world, Putin is protecting the outgoing model of its development, which requires a totalitarian and imperial political framework. His war is a battle with the future for the past: a battle without a clearly defined strategic goal. Paralysis in setting goals and neglect of Russia’s future human capital are inherent to the fundamentally tactical policy of the Russian regime.
In another of his works, Nature’s Evil, Etkind explains the logic of the formation of a Putin-type state, which now generates a permanent threat of external expansion. Instead of institutions that are engaged in the production of labor and knowledge, a security apparatus emerges that is necessary to protect transport routes and cashflows. At the same time, a bureaucratic system develops that redistributes flows of materials while keeping a portion for itself.33 During the “special operation,” the state began to use raw material rents to manufacture weapons and buy manpower for the fighting and the loyalty of the section of the population involved in the war, either directly or indirectly. Meanwhile, an ever-decreasing part of that rent is allocated to human capital, such as healthcare and education (excluding the indoctrination of new generations with the ideology of Putinism).
Over the quarter century of his rule, Putin has created a parasitic elite that depends not on the country’s population, but on the state and the distribution of rent, hence the acceptance of Putin’s “special operation” and attitude of “après nous, le deluge.” By making a significant part of the country’s population dependent on state funds and government jobs, the regime has produced a critical mass of controlled and indifferent people whose aim is simply to survive rather than develop, and therefore not to think seriously about the future. The new middle class is made up not of entrepreneurs or creative professionals, but of a growing number of siloviki (security service officials) and bureaucrats whose income and social status depend entirely on the state.
As the psychologist Alexander Asmolov has observed, the ideology of security needs a permanent crisis. It is impossible to relax; the feeling of instability and trouble—and the fear of a world war—are permanent, but everyday life, with the exception of areas next to the Ukrainian border, outwardly proceeds as if there were no war at all. For most Russians, the fighting is no more than an unpleasant background to their existence. The normality of a permanent crisis and background war, and preparation for instant mobilization from a demobilized state has made much of the Russian population amazingly adaptable to stressful circumstances. But that means those circumstances generate indifference, because indifference is also a defense mechanism: a way of social survival in a situation where the horizon for making life plans is very short.
It is impossible to predict how long this survival model may persist. The regime believes that time is on its side, which means that the “special operation” can be continued, especially since it will gain additional legitimacy after the Russian people once again vote for Putin—and, accordingly, for his permanent war. Nikolai Patrushev, head of Russia’s Security Council and one of the autocrat’s closest allies, has warned that “the United States, NATO, and their satellites are using Kyiv’s Nazi regime and various kinds of mercenaries to wage a proxy war against our people and country that the Anglo-Saxon world will not stop even with the end of active hostilities in the conflict in Ukraine.34
This means Putin is prepared to continue. At home, the regime has all the tools it needs to keep waging war on the second front: the war against its own civil society. Nevertheless, resistance to the regime continues, and there is demand for an anti-war and anti-Putin initiative. That much became obvious when even amid the complete suppression of everything living inside the country, two independent anti-war presidential candidates appeared: Yekaterina Duntsova (from nowhere) and Boris Nadezhdin (from the distant liberal past). These two figures, and in particular, the collection of signatures needed for Nadezhdin’s bid to run for the presidency, became a barometer of demand for a democratic alternative. Denied the opportunity to take to the streets to protest, people lined up across the country in freezing temperatures to add their signatures in support of the only anti-war presidential candidate (following Duntsova’s exclusion). Nadezhdin was also ultimately barred from running, but the episode showed that the Kremlin had not taken him seriously, which means that either its analysis had not registered the demand for an alternative, or it simply didn’t believe that it could even theoretically manifest itself in such circumstances of complete repressive control over the social and political field. People kept quiet, but as soon as the opportunity arose to flip off the regime, they did so.
The death in an Arctic prison colony of the jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny on February 16 sent shockwaves through the remnants of Russia’s civil society, but given the harsh reprisals people now face, no protest activity per se was possible. The only way people could express their position was to go and lay flowers at monuments to victims of political repression, in tribute to the man who had represented a clear alternative to Putin. The authorities quite rightly saw this as an act of resistance, and prevented people from getting to those memorials, once again demonstrating the direct line of succession from Stalin’s regime.
In the days following Navalny’s unexplained death, there was much discussion over whether it was a turning point in political history. The answer is no. There have already been many such moments: the annexation of Crimea in 2014; the constitutional amendments of 2020 to allow Putin to remain in power and Navalny’s poisoning with a nerve agent that same year; the closing down in 2021 of Memorial, an NGO devoted to preserving the memory of victims of Stalinist repression; and of course the start of the “special operation” in 2022.
The Kremlin sought to make society monolithic and consolidated, but it has merely fostered double-thinking and a learned evasive indifference. It’s possible that there are enough resources for the next few years to keep afloat a regime living by the principle “après nous, le deluge.” But an existence perched upon bayonets and police batons cannot ever be comfortable. Nor can national consolidation around the leader on a negative premise—hatred of the civilized world and distancing from it—ever be anything approaching stable.
Notes
1 “After us, the flood”: a phrase attributed to Madame de Pompadour, mistress of King Louis XV of France.
2 Andrei Kolesnikov, “As War Rages, Russian Society Has Assumed the Fetal Position,” Carnegie Politika, February 20, 2023, https://carnegieendowment.org/politika/88938.
3 Denis Volkov and Andrei Kolesnikov, “Alternate Reality: How Russian Society Learned to Stop Worrying About the War,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, November 28, 2023, https://carnegieendowment.org/2023/11/28/alternate-reality-how-russian-society-learned-to-stop-worrying-about-war-pub-91118.
4 Kolesnikov, “How Putin’s ‘Special Military Operation’ Became a People’s War,” Carnegie Politika, April 10, 2023, https://carnegieendowment.org/politika/89340; Kolesnikov, “Hybrid Totalitarianism?” [in Russian], Gorby, November 16, 2023, https://gorby.media/articles/2023/11/16/gibridnyi-totalitarizm; Kolesnikov, “Hybrid Totalitarianism” [in Russian], The New Times, April 12, 2022, https://newtimes.ru/articles/detail/211258.
5 Volkov and Kolesnikov, “Alternate Reality.”
6 Alexander Rubtsov, Narcissus in Armor: Psycho-Ideology of the “Grandiose Self” in Politics and Power [in Russian] (Moscow: Progress-Tradition, 2020).
7 Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1973).
8 Kolesnikov, “Frozen Landscape: The Russian Political System Ahead of the 2018 Presidential Election,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, March 2018, https://carnegieendowment.org/2018/03/07/eng-pub-75722.
9 “Isothymia is the demand to be respected on an equal basis with other people, while megalothymia is the desire to be recognized as superior.” Francis Fukuyama, Identity: The Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment (London: Profile Books, 2018), xiii.
10 Fromm, Human Destructiveness.
11 Ibid.
12 Ivan Krastev, “We’re Behaving as Though We’re the Last People on Earth,” in conversation with Andrei Kolesnikov [in Russian], Gorby, no. 5, January 2024, 60.
13 Alexander Baunov, The End of the Regime: How Three European Dictatorships Ended [in Russian] (Moscow: Alpina Publisher, 2022), 21.
14 Letters of Thomas Mann, 1889–1955 (University of California Press, 1975), 170.
15 Martin Heidegger, Ponderings II–VI: Black Notebooks 1931–1938 (Studies in Continental Thought) (Indiana University Press, 2016).
16 Ernst Fraenkel, The Dual State: A Contribution to the Theory of Dictatorship (Oxford University Press, 2017); Jan-Werner Muller, Contesting Democracy: Political Ideas in Twentieth Century Europe (Yale University Press, 2011).
17 Laura Keffer, “Deputy Prosecutor General Alleges Attempts by Opponents to Destabilize Situation in Far East” [in Russian], Kommersant, January 31, 2024, https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/6479845.
18 Elena Yakovleva, “‘Russia Is Holding Very Good Cards,’ VTsIOM Head Valery Fyodorov Is Sure That Time Is On Our Side” [in Russian], Rossiiskaya Gazeta, January 15, 2024, https://rg.ru/2024/01/15/vremena-goda.html.
19 Solomon Volkov, The Bolshoi Theater. Culture and Politics. A New History [in Russian] (Moscow: Elena Shubina Editorial Office, 2018), 397. The quote itself is well known from the memoirs of Dmitry Shepilov (The Kremlin Scholar: A Memoir of Soviet Politics Under Stalin and Khrushchev) with regard to September 1947.
20 Presidential Address to Federal Assembly, February 21, 2023, http://en.kremlin.ru/events/president/news/70565.
21 Emilia Gabdullina, “From Mitigating to Aggravating” [in Russian], Kommersant, January 31, 2024, https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/6479612.
22 Kolesnikov, “From ‘Mutabortsy’ to ‘Kowtowers to the West’” [in Russian], The New Times, January 17, 2024, https://newtimes.ru/articles/detail/246021.
23 Gennady Kostyrchenko, Stalin Against the “Cosmopolitans”: Power and the Jewish Intelligentsia in the Soviet Union [in Russian] (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2009), 130.
24 “The SMO Has Purged Russia of People to Whom Russian Culture Is Alien, Says Lavrov” [in Russian], RIA Novosti, January 18, 2024, https://ria.ru/20240118/svo-1922069168.html.
25 Emmanuel Faye, Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism Into Philosophy in Light of the Unpublished Seminars of 1933–1935 (Yale University Press, 2009).
26 Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s remarks at a meeting with permanent members of the Security Council of the Russian Federation, Moscow, March 31, 2023, https://www.mid.ru/ru/foreign_policy/news/1861005/?lang=en.
27 Faye, Heidegger.
28 “Sergei Naryshkin: The West Won’t Succeed in Fomenting Revolution in Russia” [in Russian], RIA Novosti, January 26, 2024, https://ria.ru/20240126/naryshkin-1923440074.html.
29 Dmitry Travin, The Russian Trap (St. Petersburg: European University in St. Petersburg, 2023). James Billington provides many examples of the rejection of Western influence throughout Russian history that are strikingly similar to today in his classic book The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1966).
30 Vladislav Aksenov, The War of Patriotisms: Propaganda and Mass Mood in Russia During the Collapse of the Empire [in Russian] (Moscow: New Literary Review, 2023), 412.
31 Anastasia Larina, “Patriarch Kirill Promises Those Killed in the ‘Internecine War’ in Ukraine Will Be Forgiven Their Sins” [in Russian], Kommersant, September 25, 2022, https://www.kommersant.ru/doc/5581307.
32 Alexander Etkind, Russia Against Modernity (Polity Press, 2023).
33 Etkind, Nature’s Evil: A Cultural History of Natural Resources (Polity Press, 2021).
34 “Patrushev: The West Won’t Stop Its Proxy War Against Russia Even After the ‘Hot Phase’ in Ukraine” [in Russian], TASS, January 29, 2024, https://tass.ru/politika/19844097.
