Introduction: Cultural and Political Imaginaries in Putin’s Russia (original) (raw)
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The Symbolic Politics of the Putin Administration
Identities and Politics During the Putin Presidency: The Foundations of Russia's Stability / Ed. by Philipp Casula, 2009
This article deals with the use of symbols by the Putin administration and its deliberate strategy of creating a new national identity as part of the re-articulation of a hegemonic discourse in the Russia of the 2000s. After a decade of dislocation and state neglect of the symbolic universe, Putin started his presidency by shaping Russian identity according to his own preferences -and many Russians agreed with his approach, while others simply preferred any fixation of identity over the symbolic chaos and uncertainty. On his way towards achieving that goal, Putin's moves included establishing state control over TV and history textbooks, and frequent appeals to the memory of the Second World War and especially the victory in Stalingrad, while avoiding the use of symbols with great potential for controversy (such as the rehabilitation of Cossack ataman and Nazi collaborator Pyotr Krasnov, renaming Volgograd "Stalingrad", or returning the statue of Dzerzhinsky to Lubyanka Square).
Ever since the year 2000 and the following control of the public sphere in Russia, we have observed the re-politicization of art and literature. Political self-reflectiveness of aesthetic actions and artifacts to some extent links the new art with late Soviet nonconformist culture, that was forced to position itself discursively against the public canon, either by not participating in the official discourse, by performative reflections or by open counterdevices. In a situation in which political debates are only possible to a limited extent and the criticism of the ruling circles cannot develop a broader impact, aesthetic activities-as so often in Russian history-take on the role of an alternative public realm. "'There is no legitimate parliament, no right to take to the streets and no independent courts. In these circumstances, laughter is the only means we have to highlight problems in our society,' says Viktor Shenderovich, a well-known satirist and opposition activist" (Bennetts 2016). Moreover, artists critical of the regime had already been facing harassment long before the striking restrictions on
Putinism beyond Putin: the political ideas of Nikolai Patrushev and Sergei Naryshkin in 2006–20
Post-Soviet Affairs, 2023
This essay adds to previous research of Putinism an investigation of the political thought and foreign outlooks of Russia’s Secretary of the Security Council Nikolai Patrushev and Head of the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) Sergei Naryshkin, with a focus on their statements between 2006 to 2020. The paper outlines Patrushev’s and Naryshkin’s thoughts regarding the United States, Ukraine, and the idea of multipolarity/polycentrism. We then introduce Patrushev’s critique of liberal values and color revolutions, and Naryshkin’s statements on the memory of World War II and Western institutions. The salience of these altogether seven topics is interpreted with reference to three classical topoi in Russian political thought: the Slavophile vs. Westerners controversy, the single-stream theory, and the civilizational paradigm. Our conclusions inform the ongoing debate on whether to conceptualize Putinism as either an ideology or a mentality.
Vladimir Putin: Soviet Tsar? by Hugues HENRI
The war in Ukraine has seized international public opinion by its brutal irruption and its generalized violence against Ukrainian society. This invasion provoked the awareness of Vladimir Putin's inordinate will to power, which burst into the open after the underestimation of his plan to invade this neighboring country for many months prior to the outbreak of the war on February 24, 2022, despite the warnings of the Anglo-Saxon intelligence services. How to explain this lasting ignorance of Putin's warlike intentions without asking the questions of who this man is, how he came to these irrational and inhuman extremes? How did the Russian political system allow the accession to supreme power of a man who was labeled as "gray" at the beginning, especially after his training in the KGB, where his GRU department officials decided to bar him as "unsuitable for the functions of a KGB agent" because of his inability to dominate his deep negative impulses and his thirst for domination by any means? What were the ingredients and origins of his progressive pathological drift? Can we still deduce what he thinks of the situation created by the invasion of Ukraine, a "special operation" badly thought out with regard to a people and a country denied in their essence, and now transformed into a total war of attrition? It is difficult to give an opinion on such a conflict and its future outcome, but on the other hand, it is possible to deepen the analysis of Putin's personality through his acts, his postures, to better understand him, this is what this article proposes, without claiming to go beyond and cover the global geopolitical situation.
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Civil Szemle, 2023
The article is an investigation into the historical process of nation building in Russia and its impact on shaping state ideology during the Putin era. To this respect, I am planning to argue for a reassessment of current understandings of Russia’s political regime and ideology, by abandoning the simplistic view of an authoritarian regime dominated by a strong man figure using a simulacrum of ideology to legitimate his position and political decisions, and to place Putinism into perspective, as an organic development of a mainly pre-Soviet era Russian ideological and collective identity discourse.
Putin And Political Theory Matthew Slaboch
EuropeNow
This is part of a series on the Ukraine crisis. Remembered by his compatriots as the "Russian Socrates," Grigory Skovoroda (1722-1794) merits distinction as the founder of Russia's autochthonous philosophical tradition. That an entire millennium separated the trial and death of the better-known Athenian thinker and the birth of philosophy in Russia is noteworthy for two reasons. First, this fact points to the comparatively late development of academic philosophy in Russia. Second, it highlights the gulf that separated Russian and West European cultures into the eighteenth century. With respect to the first observation, we can safely say that the time during which Skovoroda lived was not markedly different from prior eras; despite his arrival on the scene, philosophy in Russia would remain, in the words of James Edie, James Scanlan, and Mary-Barbara Zeldin "uniquely non-academic and non-institutional."[1] Regarding the second point, the shift from the seventeenth to the eighteenth century was a watershed moment: this marked the start of an ongoing period during which Russians became better acquainted with "Evropa.