Russia’s Media-Ideological Complex

Michael David-Fox reviews Mikhail Suslov’s “Putinism—Post-Soviet Russian Regime Ideology.”

By Michael David-FoxOctober 7, 2024

• Philosophy & Religion

• Politics

FOR WELL OVER a decade, Russia under Vladimir Putin has been cobbling together a radical new ideology that defies easy classification in terms of any well-established political ideologies, such as conservatism or fascism. Putinism lies on the far right of the political spectrum even as it borrows heavily from the legacies of Soviet communism and imperial Russia before 1917. Anyone who wants to understand Putin’s Russia must now consider this new ideology’s contours, its appeal, and the lineages of its key concepts, as well as the competing cliques of 21st-century ideologues behind it.

The return of ideology took place chaotically yet intensively over the course of the 2010s, under the noses of an inattentive majority of professional Russia-watchers. Most experts believed that Putin’s dictatorship was all about power and money, and not also about ideas. More precisely, they understood the frequently contradictory barrage of beliefs and theories generated in Russia as a kind of “postmodern” mélange, ephemeral dust picked up by the state and thrown in the eyes of domestic and international audiences for short-term, opportunistic gain. Even as the world remained obsessed with Putin and interpreted all of Russia through him, Putinism as an ideology was disparaged or dismissed.

Not so long ago, the emergence of Putinism not just as a political system but also as an official ideology seemed highly improbable. Long before the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, most Russians were thoroughly tired of the ritualistic slogans and boring saturation of Marxism-Leninism, the USSR’s elaborate, text-based doctrine. Because almost everyone was fed up with the obligatory mantras of the old regime, politicians’ oft-repeated notion that post-Soviet Russia needed a new “national idea” became something of a joke.

Although ideologies are quite capable of papering over contradictions, the outlooks of the antidemocratic camps of the 1990s that evolved as they moved into the mainstream of the new Putin dictatorship after the 2000s seemed too wildly divergent to weld together under a single banner. They ranged from acolytes of the fascistic Right and outright fascists (“browns”), adherents of Russia’s suppressed prerevolutionary conservative canon (“whites”), neo-Stalinists and Soviet superpower nostalgists (“reds”) to religious intellectuals and clerics from the camp of what has come to be called political Orthodoxy. Significant divisions emerged between Russian ethnonationalists and revanchists yearning for a new imperial entity akin to the USSR.

All the same, a certain logic gradually bridged this seemingly incompatible multiplicity of political and ideological ecosystems. As political elites in Russia’s increasingly hard-line dictatorship turned back to some of the practices of the Brezhnev and, more recently, even the Stalin period, the need for a new official creed was no longer mocked but unquestionably assumed. New types of 21st-century ideologues—spin doctors, media entrepreneurs, clerics, politically ambitious scholars, pseudo-historians, culturologists, and fanatical intellectuals—eagerly circled in and around the regime and its media.

In the 21st century, the nature of ideology itself has changed. The all-encompassing grand narratives and the modern, utopian doctrines that emerged in the 19th century no longer have traction. Ideology has turned into a less textual, more emotional set of concepts and memes revolving around identity. Putinism, therefore, has come to center on broad-based, flexible notions such as Russia as a unique “state-civilization,” a community destined by history and geography to confront the degenerate, liberal individualism of the West.

Mikhail Suslov, author of the first comprehensive academic study of this ideology, Putinism—Post-Soviet Russian Regime Ideology (2024), describes the new official creed as identitarian and communitarian—a flexible yet increasingly streamlined set of concepts focused on Russia’s territory, history, and spirituality. It is messianic in that it strives to transform the global order, but unlike Marxism, it advances no universal, future-oriented utopia.

Suslov’s book describes the construction of an ideological big tent, still incompletely welded together over a long period of trial and error by a set of jockeying authoritarian factions and interests. This edifice of less than perfectly interlocking concepts appears as a largely novel, homegrown product. There is no Karl Marx of Putinism. It is not a doctrinal import like Marxism that was domesticated by adepts such as Lenin and Stalin long before it became a ruling doctrine. This may explain why so many Russia-watchers did not focus on it until it could no longer be ignored. But if the emergence of an official ideology had not become obvious by the regime’s policing and propagation of political ideas during years of crackdown leading up to the invasion of Ukraine in 2022, that world-historical geopolitical gamble—altering Russia’s entire trajectory irrevocably—made it plain that the ideas saturating Russian airwaves and dominating its bookstores and classrooms were much more than mere window-dressing.

Suslov has an advantage over the political scientists and pundits who have begun to discuss Putinism as an ideology: he was trained as a historian, with a strong command of Russian intellectual history and the history of modern ideologies from the 19th century on. His book is based on 1,500 texts, most of them books, written from 2000 to 2023 by Russian political operatives, intellectuals, think-tank figures, politically prominent businessmen, and a generation of scholars of Russia’s conservative canon, many of whom have become political activists.

The Putinist ideological establishment hardly works like the top-down, highly centralized Institute of Marxism-Leninism. Rather, in keeping with Russia’s new political economy, the construction of the new ideology has often been outsourced to ambitious entrepreneurs both inside and outside the state. Although the periodic interventions and outlook of the dictator have been crucial, Putin is not even the main philosopher of Putinism (although he fancies himself his own court historian). As one can infer from this work, the heavy lifting has been done by a new kind of media-ideological complex.

As Suslov traces the major strands of Putinist ideology from the 1990s on, it becomes clear that the interacting neo-Soviet left and far-right extremes of the 1990s took about two decades after the Soviet collapse to move squarely into the mainstream. What Suslov calls the “watershed moment” or “landslide event” in the evolution of the regime’s ideology occurred from 2009 to 2012. This shift, which might be called the advent of mature Putinism, occurred when the regime was radicalized. Turning away from its early “liberal-conservative” orientation of the 2000s, which still paid lip service to individual rights and organic change, it lurched toward a communitarian, radically anti-Occidentalist, illiberal populism that at once posited the unchanging stasis of Russia’s identity as a civilization and the malleability of society and politics in the face of an all-important state. The centrality of geopolitics and the concept of a Russian or Eurasian civilization in the new creed is the corollary to the massive investment in history politics that has become so overt in Putin’s war against Ukraine.

Despite the widespread acceptance of the common label, therefore, Putinism is not “conservative” in any sense resembling the classic connotations conservatism acquired after the French Revolution—a commitment to organic, preservationist, nonrevolutionary change. Putinism is also not “nationalist.” While dividing us and them, friends and enemies, and Russia and the West lies at its core, perhaps the most central ambiguity the ideology has had to address concerns the nature of “Russianness.” The Russian Federation is multinational and has never become a nation-state. This regime’s ideology cannot only revolve around ethnic Russians but needs also to include non-Russians at home even as many of its intellectual activists yearn for imperial expansion abroad. Suslov emphasizes how the new ideology has been shaped by the particular political and ideological legacies of two “peripheral” empires, one Romanov, the other Soviet. One might add that it has been shaped even more by the debilitating loss of empire in 1991.

This is why the concept of “civilization” has become so central to Putinism: Russian, or, as some prefer, “Eurasian” civilization can encompass nonethnic Russians at home and the diaspora that ideologues call the “Russian World” abroad. What Suslov terms the “civilisationism” at the heart of Putinism makes Russia great again: rather than dwelling on Russia as underdeveloped or lacking in technology or democracy, the civilizational turn sidesteps metrics of development and any implications of inferiority.

Putinism, Suslov also argues, is not fascist. He is largely following the leading scholarly analyst of the Russian Right, Marlène Laruelle, who holds that Putinism lacks one key determinant of fascism: the idea of the regeneration of the nation. But since the panoply of interwar fascist movements has long vexed scholarly definitions, and any 21st-century fascism would hardly be identical to the 1930s, the terminological issue is, to a great extent, a political one. In 2018, Timothy Snyder dubbed the émigré Russian theorist Ivan Il’in “Putin’s philosopher” and the key to Russian fascism. Suslov not only shows convincingly that the rehabilitated Il’in has been used in strikingly different ways in post-Soviet Russia, but he also suggests that the émigré Right Hegelian’s “ideal social order belongs to the large and loosely connected family of right-wing communitarian projects, to which fascism also belongs.”

Il’in, moreover, is only one in a succession of philosophical precursors that the media-ideological complex has glorified in its search for a new canon. Another is the late Soviet writer Alexander Zinov’ev, whose biography and virulently anti-Western, geopoliticized views (he called the Soviet collapse a CIA special operation) are more amenable to many than the aristocratic émigré Il’in. The most relevant philosophical precursor for Putinism, Suslov argues in one of the book’s most interesting sections, is the tradition launched by the 19th-century Slavophiles. Suslov calls their critique of imitative Westernization, constructing an irreconcilable dichotomy between the spirits of Russia and the West, the “original sin” of Russian political philosophy and “amazingly relevant” to understanding Putinism today.

The author, who completed his study in 2023, pays too little attention to the mutations of Putinism since the invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Specifically, he underplays militarism as a key component of Putinism that emerged years before the war. The book, for example, mentions a 2023 “warmongering” proposal for a preemptive nuclear attack that was penned by geopolitical scholar Sergei Karaganov. But it does not explore the pervasiveness of militarism within the camps it covers or its overt tensions with the ideology’s self-representations of Russia and Eurasia as a bulwark of peace and moral justice.

Suslov himself, who now teaches in Copenhagen, is part of a large academic and intellectual diaspora created by the Putin regime. In his analytical book’s most personal passage, he writes that “Putinism not only stole my motherland from me, it also defiled everything that is dear to all Russians; it spoils everything it touches, from Pushkin to the victory in the Great Patriotic War.”

Foreign policy specialists and realist experts on international relations who view Russia through the prism of a great power game of chess may not quite realize what the advent of a new official ideology has done to Russia. Russia now is not just another corrupt, authoritarian regime but, in Suslov’s words, the world’s “major challenger to the basic principles of the liberal-democratic canon.”