Regime Ideology of Putinism in Historical Perspective

• In Event: The Evolution of the Putin Regime's Ideology

Abstract

In this talk I will consider the present-day Russian regime ideology in the historical context by comparing it with the “Triad” (Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality), developed by Sergei Uvarov in 1830s, and with the Soviet-time Marxism-Leninism. I will reconstruct debates about the need for a regime (official) ideology in the post-Soviet period with the special focus on the most recent developments, associated with the initiatives of educational and propagandistic society “Znanie”, working group “Russia’s DNA” and Presidential Administration. I will specifically look into their brainchild, the concept of “Pentabasis” (five fundamental qualities of the Russian civilization) and two available university textbooks Bases of the Russian Statehood, inspired by this concept. My argument is that the regime ideology today is solving the same task as Uvarov’s “Triad”: it is trying to harmoniously unite social engineering with the conservative assumption that only organic change is acceptable. Both “Triad” and “Pentabasis” reconcile these two contradictory principles by resorting to populism and claiming that the only successful social engineering comes down to distilling the core of the national identity, protecting it from foreign influences, and implementing it in political practice. By extension, production of the regime ideology in today’s Russia is the treadmill of endless uncovering of the hidden “genuine identity” of an imaginary subject, be it the Russian world, Russian civilization, or Larger Eurasia.

Author

• Mikhail D Suslov, U of Copenhagen (Denmark)