If Not a Nemesis, a Mirror?

Chris Featherman looks at Marlène Laruelle’s “Ideology and Meaning-Making Under the Putin Regime.”

By Chris FeathermanJune 4, 2025

• Politics

• Cultural Studies

AMID THE HORROR and hope documented in The New York Times’ “2024: The Year in Pictures” sits Nanna Heitmann’s photograph of a wounded Russian soldier in Bakhmut, Ukraine. From its caption, we learn it was taken in an underground field hospital set up in an old winery, and the scene is at once modern and medieval. In the background, we see a Christmas tree draped with tinsel and hand-drawn holiday cards stuck to a wall that gives way to a brick arch and whitewashed stone. Closer are onlookers’ faces, some austere and oblong in the sour light, others full and bearded like unhelmeted linebackers. Two women in the middle ground, far right in the frame, gaze at the soldier’s body. The closer one wears a white T-shirt, partially obscured by her unzipped vest, with a central logo that appears to say, in English, “FEELING.” Awaiting, it seems, some data point from the medics, she holds a pen and clipboard above the soldier’s unshod left foot, which points, according to the angle of Heitmann’s camera, perfectly upright, pale but tense with life, perpendicular to his prostrate body, which is naked except for a scrap of cloth laid across his groin.

In Understanding a Photograph (2013), art critic and novelist John Berger contends that “the sight of any single thing or event entrains the sight of other things and events.” In Heitmann’s photograph, this coherence, for me, forms around the soldier’s body. Dominating the foreground, his figure spans nearly the entire frame, and his outstretched right arm, pricked by an IV line, drags me into the scene. His fingers are soiled and profane, distorted by the camera lens, though his arm otherwise seems proportional. If he were to draw it against his body, as if at attention, it would reach to a point on his hip predicted by common limb-to-body ratios. Whether it was this arm or its match that ultimately was amputated, along with a leg, as was reported, we can only guess.

For when Heitmann’s shutter clicked, he was integral, intact, his recumbent body resembling, against my wanting, that of Christ’s taken down from the cross to be buried, a moment rendered perhaps most famously in Caravaggio’s Deposition (ca. 1600–04) though the aura and assemblage of figures in Heitmann’s photograph might better evoke the entombment scene in The Seilern Triptych (ca. 1425), attributed to the Flemish master painter Robert Campin. So vivid to me are these associations that I can only see the open pair of medical scissors, splayed centrally at the bottom of the frame, as cruciform.

These allusions—coherences whose visual similarities I find as uncanny as their symbolic discontinuities—betray not my sympathies in a brutal conflict, but rather a failure at description. For my seeing is really a distortion. As literary theorist and cultural critic Roland Barthes writes in “The Photographic Message,” “to describe is […] to change structures, to signify something different from what is shown.” In my reading of Heitmann’s photograph, that something is not the soldier’s literal agony, a denotative refrain that war is hell, or an easy tug to one side in the unjust, uneven battle fought aboveground from where the soldier lies.

For Barthes, these associations form the image’s connotative message, its second meaning, overlapping the narrower, denotative first. It’s an imbrication that creates what Barthes called the photographic paradox, a tension between the objective and the subjective, the informational and the symbolic. Barthes believed this tension resolved into myths, embedded in everyday culture, that reflect, shape, and justify certain social realities—a way of seeing dialogically linked to a way of thinking. Or as poet and essayist Lia Purpura puts it, perhaps more simply, in her 2006 book On Looking, “one sees what one expects to see.”

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The source of such expectations, for many, is ideology. Karl Marx famously likened ideology to a camera obscura, distorting and inverting our views of the social world. For French philosopher (and Barthes’s contemporary) Paul Ricœur, this inversion creates an opposition, “the sphere of representations, ideas, and conceptions versus the sphere of actual production […] the imaginary versus the real.”

Historian and political scientist Marlène Laruelle sees ideology less dialectically. In her new book Ideology and Meaning-Making Under the Putin Regime, she defines it as “a context-sensitive process of meaning-making,” one that in contemporary Russia, she convincingly and expertly shows, occurs in an ecosystem of political discourses, aggregated across structural layers, where belief and signification intersect with the legitimation of state-level actions and policies. Analyzing state language, particularly Vladimir Putin’s agenda-setting annual addresses, as well as the discourses and documents of political elites, establishment influencers, and leaders of the Russian Orthodox Church, Laruelle shows how, through the process of ideological sedimentation—a gradual deposition and accumulation of views and beliefs—the Putin regime has moved from a more fluid, pragmatic governmentality “toward a much more rigid ideological structure.”

Yet Putin, Laruelle argues, is no ideologue. Rather than being restricted to core ideological beliefs in the way that Marxism-Leninism legitimated, at least outwardly, actions and policies in the Soviet Union, the Putin regime, she argues, “pursues a set of governmentality practices that may not always articulate well with the ideological realm.” Instead, Laruelle shows that Putin holds an instrumental view of ideology and its role in his decision-making process: “sometimes [ideology] does precede and inspire it, sometimes it is called upon to provide a posteriori legitimation, and sometimes there is no direct link between the two.”

What links ideology and Putin’s decision-making, then, is his mission to restore Russia to world power status. This entails fortifying Russian national identity, Laruelle claims, as trinary, with Europe as the yardstick, modernization beyond Westernization, and Russian history and culture at the core. Central to this process is a need to “unlearn the West” as both exemplar and adversary. Beyond mere counterhegemony, these anti-West desires, as Russia scholar Rachel S. Salzman also notes, have long been evident in how Russia has defined its sovereignty, prioritizing the well-being of the state over that of citizens. More recently, this need can be seen in state-level calls for Russia to be a bastion of traditional family values against contradictory, universalist Western norms. Though reactionary, such calls index a conservatism, as Laruelle points out, that has deep roots in Russian philosophy while forming “the ideological cornerstone of the regime.”

Threaded through this trinary identity, Laruelle says, is faith, including the biblical notion of the “katechon.” An eschatological belief rooted in Orthodox theology, the katechon, she explains, is a force that forestalls Judgment Day and constructs Russia as a gatekeeper, “the shield, restoring order in the face of an Antichrist embodied by a West that is destroying itself and others.” Long present in Russia, katechonic discourses have become clearly legible in official language. They construct Russia as a Third Rome, linking the 16th-century Tsardom of Muscovy and the October Revolution to contemporary far-right Russian intellectuals, the military, and Orthodox theology. They also underpin arguments for both a powerful church-army symbiosis and the broader concept of the Holy Rus’, “a sacred land” that includes Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine.

These beliefs extend and complicate the regime’s proactive legitimation for invading its neighbor. To the narrative of “Russians as a nation divided by contemporary borders,” it weds a view of Putin—and, by extension, Russia—as a protector and defender of Christendom. It is also a logic in which Russian irredentism—restoring to Russia land it believes is its own—both obscures, as Laruelle notes, its local imperialism and coheres with moral exceptionalism. In its most conservative expression, this exceptionalism takes on, as Laruelle’s analysis persuasively shows, the messianic, with Russia constructed discursively as a savior who “will rescue Europe from its own liberal demons.”

Of Russia, Laruelle says that “having learned from the West, it now seeks to teach the West a lesson.” So, perhaps we might see this complex ideological construction of Russia—shield, teacher, savior—as Putin’s retort to 20th-century Western epithets that branded the Soviet Union as an evil empire. Or is it just a complex marketing strategy for Putin’s mission to make Russia great again?

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For curator and critic Lyle Rexer, a photograph “often leads us outside of, around or behind the immediate subject of the picture to ask questions about what is being shown, how it came to be in front of us and why we and others are looking at it.” These are questions I ask about another photograph from the Ukrainian-Russian war, one I am tempted to read, maybe recklessly, as an inversion of Heitmann’s.

Taken roughly two years earlier by Lynsey Addario in Irpin, hundreds of miles west of Bakhmut, it shows a mother and her two children, along with a family friend, killed by a Russian mortar. They were fired upon as they fled with other refugees towards Kyiv, their limp bodies strewn at a crossroads near an orthodox church, a monument to World War II, and a stork’s nest. Their sprawl is one of deprivation, exhaustion. Their scant, spilled luggage marks both the arresting incompleteness of their journey and the larger moral and social collapse their murder represents—perhaps in the way, as novelist and critic Geoff Dyer argues, the tipped felt hats of men asleep on Skid Row sidewalks did in Great Depression documentary photographs.

But in Addario’s image, I do not see destitution. I see death. I see symmetry in the way a son folds his empty hands like his mother. In her coat, I see a shade of white, flaxen and creamy, that I have seen in the coat and clothes of my wife’s oldest friend from Vilnius, Lithuania. In the way the younger child has fallen, her face hidden, I see a desire to be held. And on her older brother’s face, I see that his wire-framed glasses, still snug and square across a widening nose, are the same blue as my teenage son’s.

Yet if, as Rexer also argues, photographs interrogate “the desires, prejudices, and socio-economic situation of audiences themselves,” then what I also see in Addario’s photograph are my beliefs and myself—alive and indignant, distant and horrified. And while Addario’s photograph bears witness, its circulation also draws me into a double bind of indignation: the opportunity to project my fears—in this case, for the lives of my own family—onto one whose suffering I have no direct means to alleviate or change. And so, as Berger also argues, Addario’s photograph, like other images of atrocity, confronts me not solely with the agony of others but also with the limits of my own freedom.

Looking through this state, I see the oppositions between Heitmann’s and Addario’s photographs deepen: the former’s centralized, painterly perspective versus the loose, agitating immediacy of the latter. The medics and onlookers in Heitmann’s photograph, drawn closer to the wounded soldier by a shallow depth of field, outnumber him 12 to one. In Addario’s, the ratios are even: four live bodies to four dead ones, the main road stretching orthogonally in the background, the horizon tilted like a trend line. The flecks of primary colors—the royal blue of the younger child’s jacket; the red of rumpled clothing and blood; the yellow on the curb, in the crosswalk sign, and in the identifying strips on the medics’ uniforms—make Heitmann’s muted palette appear jaundiced, sick.

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Both Heitmann’s and Addario’s photographs attest, in their own ways, to what Laruelle calls “the terrible evidence of going to war against Ukraine.” While her mission as a political scientist is to illuminate, not adjudicate, one wonders what she sees as the wider geopolitical implications of the Putin regime viewing its aggressions toward Ukraine as part of “a ‘liberation war’ waged by Holy Rus’ against the empire of the ‘collective West.’” Or put another way, how does she expect us to make sense of Putin’s legitimation for, say, the bombing of Sumy on Palm Sunday? Is it imperialist or irredentist, sanctioned or sanctified—or simply all the above?

And given the preposition in her book’s title—Ideology and Meaning-Making Under the Putin Regime—readers might also wonder how Russian non-elites take up and recirculate this meaning-making. Yet, as political scientists Maria Snegovaya and Jade McGlynn point out, it can be challenging to assess Russian society’s uptake of the regime’s narratives, given the “difficulties ascertaining that the Russian public is sincere in embracing these beliefs rather than simply complying with perceived importance to conform and to be good citizens.” Which is to say nothing of the censoring and self-censoring that, as has elsewhere been shown, occurs in authoritarian regimes.

This lack of ground-level perspectives somewhat diminishes Laruelle’s use of a sociocognitive theory of ideology, one that views it as “present in the everyday discourse, interaction, and practices of members of the ideological group and not only among politicians.” Similarly, I wonder how that methodological choice squares with her decision to consciously exclude from her analysis the discourses of “people, institutions, and narratives that are seen by the regime as in opposition.” And if, as Snegovaya and McGlynn wonder, one can even “talk of ideology given a fairly chaotic assortment of ideational narratives and malleability of the core narratives spread by the regime,” what does Laruelle think specifically binds meaning-making in Putin’s discourse, “aggregated from multiple repertoires and doctrinal stocks”?

If nothing else, Laruelle perhaps could have said more on how we should reconcile the Putin regime’s highly visible illiberalism with her view of Russia “not as the nemesis of the West but as a micro-world, in that it contains the central contradictions of today’s world order.”

So, if not a nemesis, then a mirror?

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“What persuades men and women to mistake each other from time to time for gods or vermin,” wrote cultural theorist Terry Eagleton, “is ideology.” A mistake I tend to make when looking at photographs is wanting to see them (to steal a phrase from Rilke) as locked rooms, questions to be answered with my eyes. As when I look at anything and want to see everything, to see what Barthes called the third meaning. Supplementary to the denotative and connotative, this is the undirected and visceral reading—personal, inarticulate, immune to the narrative impulse. It’s both the right angle and the cruciform, compression and depth of field.

And if, as Rexer claims, photographs “delimit narrow swatches of time and space and hold them open for re-experiencing,” it’s the mistake I also make in wanting to unlock Addario’s photograph and ask the man striding past the fallen family, eyes front, exactly what he sees ahead. It’s the mistake of wanting to follow Heitmann underground into the Bakhmut field hospital and read what’s written on those hung-up Christmas cards, to find out what wishes they declare to their recipients.

It’s the same folly that compels me to ask Laruelle, with her knowledge of ideological meaning-making in Putin’s Russia, what she sees in Heitmann’s and Addario’s photographs. In what contexts would, say, the notion of the katechon distort the image of the injured Russian soldier into a messiah, defending the “metaphysical entity” of the Holy Rus’? To what sensitivities would a murdered Ukrainian family quantify the risk of turning and fleeing west?

Yet if looking, as Purpura argues, “is a practice, a form of attention paid, which is, for many, the essence of prayer,” could Laruelle tell me whether looking away—especially in neoliberal economies of attention—is sacrilege or resistance? Should I see “the central contradictions of today’s world order” in the wounded Russian soldier’s body, the way his arched back and drooped hips suggest both agony and limbo, mercy and retreat?