An important book will be published next month by Stanford University Press, authored by Marlene Laruelle from the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies (IERES) at George Washington University, titled Ideology and Meaning-Making under the Putin Regime. This book examines ideology as a core component of the tools we use to make sense of the world, analyzing the ideological production of the Russian regime and the ways it operates in both domestic and foreign policies. The book rejects the clichés of experts that portray the Russian regime as merely a product of Putin’s grand Machiavellian designs, providing a critical lineage of ideology in contemporary Russia.
While the book does not center on Putin, he remains a fundamental part of the entire political structure. It does not attempt to “sneak into Putin’s mind” or claim that he is a profound political thinker. Instead, it places the Russian president in a wider context of various strands of strategic culture and ideological interest groups, examining figures that embody more moderate or extreme versions of the presidential narrative, and emphasizes the diversity of actors, production structures, and discourses surrounding him.
The book focuses on the “Putin regime”—a reductive yet suitable term that encompasses over two decades of Vladimir Putin’s rule. It also uses the term “Russian system” to describe a broader period that includes Yeltsin’s decade in the 1990s when continuity with Putin’s years is observed. According to the author, Putin’s regime relies on three mechanisms of governance to ensure its political dominance: material (redistributing welfare, at least partially), ideological (generating consensus), and repressive (suppressing dissenting voices).
Putin has crafted a smart policy of material support for the social classes that make up his main electoral base, pioneering a sophisticated legitimacy strategy based on values. For many years, the third pillar of repression was minimal compared to the other two: authorities particularly targeted political opposition members, activists, and those who spoke on forbidden topics such as his wealth and relationship with Chechen leader Ramzan Kadyrov and high-level corruption. However, Putin’s policy has been careful to allow the vast majority of society to live without fear of political repression. This situation has gradually changed to the extent that it is now challenging to discern the degree to which fear contributes to Russian society’s capitulation to the existing social and political regime.
The first two pillars of governance—material and ideological—have long resulted in a shared creative system in which a significant portion of Russian society actively or passively supports the directives imposed by the Kremlin on the country. In her analysis of the nature and characteristics of ideology in Russia, the author asserts that the Russian regime is deeply and genuinely engaged in a political project for the country: strong evidence for going to war against Ukraine, even at the cost of destroying a significant portion of elite revenues amassed in the West, confirms that the Kremlin is not only driven by kleptocratic strategies but also by a set of beliefs about the best path for the country’s future.
Ideology is an important but not exclusive part of the regime’s governance toolkit. It presents a more nuanced perspective that reads ideology not as a binary opposition—either as a cynical cover for material interests or a set of fixed deep beliefs—but as a sensitive contextual process of meaning-making. This interpretation encompasses three levels of analysis:
- The ideological construction of the regime has developed slowly, with gradual sedimentation; thus, the timeline is critical over the quarter-century of Putin’s rule.
- The regime’s relationship with Russian society is much more than a mere authoritarian relationship; it is a participatory one, based on an implicit social contract with Russian society that is constantly renegotiated and that limits the authorities’ options. Therefore, we should read the regime’s ideological construction as part of a nation-building process, not merely a search for the immediate political status quo.
- The internal composition of the regime has always resembled a cluster of competing viewpoints; this artificially constructed discursive chaos has reluctantly moved toward a more coherent and repressive ideology, although the space for improvisation, along with the bottom-up dynamics that support the participatory nature of the regime’s creation, has largely but not completely diminished.
Despite the abundance of Western studies on Russia, few address the ideology of the regime as a whole. Three notable books attempt to do so. In his book The Law of Putinism, Brian Taylor deeply explains that “Putinism is more akin to ‘Thatcherism’ or ‘Reaganism’ than to ‘Marxism’—it is not a fully developed and comprehensive ideology but rather a system of governance, a guiding mentality, and a historical moment.” Elena Chibankova claims in her book Political Ideologies in Contemporary Russia that the Russian state is limited to balancing the various political ideologies present in society. Mikhail Suslov’s book Putinism: The Ideology of the Post-Soviet Russian Regime views Putinism as a state ideology with some semblance of coherence. Additionally, one might reference Gulnaz Sharafutdinova’s The Red Mirror: Putin’s Leadership and Russia’s Insecure Identity, which uses social identity theory to explain Putin’s popularity, Cheng Chen’s The Return of Ideology, which compares Russia and China, and Paul Lovecraft’s Russian Democracy, which assesses Russia against China. Meanwhile, Peterson’s book The Putin Dilemma posits the selective ideology of the regime.
From the perspective of Russia as a lens for transformations in the global ideological model, Russian ideological production cannot be understood merely as a manifestation of Russia’s exceptionalism or “incomprehensibility,” a notion well articulated by many Russian schools of thought that seek their unique path. The tendency of Western experts to present the Russian president as the principal villain and ultimate other of the West obscures many links between Russia’s development and the rest of the world.
The author argues that it is incorrect to view Russia as an enemy of the West but rather as a microcosm that contains the central contradictions of today’s world system. Far from any “end of ideology,” the liberal democratic framework that has long been considered the primary compass by which to judge other normative constructions is now facing challenges and erosion.
In the early 2000s, if not earlier, Russia became the first major European nation to experience a backlash against liberalism precisely as it underwent a form of authoritarian political and economic liberalism that deeply shook the foundations of social order in the 1990s. At the same time, Russia’s international prestige declined, as the post-Cold War regime fell to a second-tier state status. While the regime primarily responded to the decline of the country’s international standing, citizens largely interacted with the violence of political and economic liberalism—a top-down and bottom-up encounter that produced “Putinism.”
What originally began as a circumstantial ideology quickly reconnected with older roots, a long-standing conservative tradition anchored in 19th-century intellectual thought and moral conservatism, alongside anti-Western sentiments dating back to the Soviet era, which can easily be reframed for this new context. Since then, the Putin regime has managed to keep pace with the evolution of the international landscape, inspiring those who challenge liberal hegemony in all its facets: political, social, economic, and geopolitical.
It has taken the lead in condemning the U.S.’s crusading globalism during the era of neoconservatives; defending authoritarian sovereignty against external intervention in the so-called global south; critiquing progressivism in national, familial, and gender matters; and defending the Christian/Western/white civilization allegedly under attack. Building on a specialized soft power strategy, the regime has targeted specific audiences (for example, the Western far-right and some extreme left groups, traditional Christians and Muslims, leftists and rightists in Latin America, and African nationalist movements), speaking to well-defined electoral circles that are at least theoretically receptive to Russia’s grand narratives.
This strategy arose from the Kremlin’s recognition of its limited ability to communicate compared to American soft power, both financially and in terms of its capacity to export Russian culture and brands worldwide. Subsequently, the Russian regime exploited all contradictions in the West, both as a geopolitical dominant force and as a normative model, to bolster defiance and challenge. Notably, the rebellious aspect of this ideological export is not new: since the 19th century, Russia has exported revolutionary ideologies—ranging from populism and leftist terrorism to communism—to contest what was perceived as Western hegemony.
Today, what the Russian regime offers in terms of ideology is far less systematically doctrinal than communism but is more adaptable to the postmodern conditions of overlapping and fluid ideologies. The author argues that it is mistaken to underestimate Russia’s stature as a brand representing rebellion or resistance “against the world as it is,” as seen with the West.
This book proposes a critical reconstruction of the intellectual genealogies of the regime: to understand the ideological construction of Russia in all its diversity and homogeneity, analyzing its ability to capture its internal cohesion alongside its contradictions, ambiguities, and omissions. In this book, I argue that the Putin regime possesses an ideology—comprising an arsenal of multiple resources and doctrinal stocks—but it cannot be confined to them: it is a system seeking a set of administrative practices that may not always align well with the ideological sphere. This means that ideology may or may not play a role in decision-making: at times, it precedes and inspires it; other times, it is called upon to provide subsequent legitimacy; and at other times, there is no direct link between the two. Thus, ideological production can be either proactive or reactive.
If the authorities maintain a coherent and consistent worldview for their political project based on a set of beliefs and a mental apparatus, this does not mean that ideology systematically shapes every decision; rather, there is a process of mutual reinforcement between decision-making and ideology.
The book addresses ideological construction as practiced by the prevailing political current, which includes many influential groups and businessmen who find themselves “in orbit” around the Kremlin, but it excludes individuals, institutions, and narratives seen by the regime as oppositional, whether liberal or ethnonationalist. It also distinguishes between the Russian establishment and Russian elites. The establishment refers to the prevailing political and intellectual current, those with some official standing within state structures, while the elites encompass all those with financial or socio-cultural capital—a more diverse group that includes oligarchs and intellectuals, some of whom may disagree with the regime and are now suppressed by it.
The first part of the book provides a comprehensive overview of the production of ideology in the Russian regime. It explores it structurally, examining its ecological systems and main mechanisms for engineering intellectual content (Chapter 1). It traces the gradual sedimentation of ideology by the Kremlin, which has long hesitated to formalize much doctrinal content, preferring to navigate the floating polysemy ensuring shared social practices (Chapter 2). The second part investigates the meaning of “the West”—a remarkably multifaceted term—in Russia and how the regime transitioned from borrowing from “the West” to challenging it, separating from it, and ultimately combatting it (Chapter 3). To relate Russia to the West, the regime has reframed the narrative of Russia as the second Europe, the Byzantine Europe (Chapter 4). In Chapter 5, the author expands on the historical dimension of securing the Russian national space, as well as rediscovering Russia’s historical continuity and imperial white past, particularly regarding its obsession with Ukraine (Chapter 6).
The third part of the book examines the regime’s counter-revolutionary scenario, which is framed around three concepts: civilization to counter globalism associated with Western norms (Chapter 7); conservatism to condemn what is viewed as excessive, degrading, morally corrupt Western liberalism (Chapter 8); and the catchone concept, translated as a fortress or shield or guardian of the regime against chaos, which is a Russian understanding of counter-revolution (Chapter 9). The fourth part explores the regime’s geographical imagination, shaped by Russia’s spatial realities and a tradition that sees itself as the center of a larger space, whether it be Eurasia (Chapter 10), the Russian World (Chapter 11), or as a leader of anti-colonial resistance against new Western imperialism (Chapter 12).
In conclusion, the author briefly presents the aspect of content production by the regime, how Russian society accepts this intensive ideological engineering, engages in its creation, adapts to it, or rejects it. This book represents a valuable contribution to the scholarly discussion on the interaction between ideas and policy decisions, placing the current Russian regime in the broader context of strategic culture, ideological interest groups, and intellectual history. It offers a fundamental insight into how the Russian-Ukrainian war escalated to a point of necessity and the role ideology played in enabling its outbreak.
