Political theories, which are constantly upgrading and changing, are the foundation for creation of national and state ideologies. World powers strive towards spreading their own national interests ...through encouraging other countries of the world to accept their ideologies based on their own political theories. The geopolitical variability, not only regarding the spatial, but also the temporal factor, impacts the creation of new theoretical explanations and assessments. Liberalism as a dominant political theory in all its forms is no longer primary and present as it was in the beginning of the twenty first century. In the East emerges a new view and a new alternative to contemporary liberalism. The NeoEuroasian geopolitical vector is creating conditions for a more influential role of Russia in the contemporary world. After the crisis in the end of the previous and the beginning of this century, Russia stabilized its economy and formed a new state system which influenced it to become a strong competitor to the US in the geopolitical space. According to Vladislav Surkov, Putinism is the future of the Russian power, and sovereign democracy is the paradigm of its influence. In conclusion, this contemporary Russian political theory is in its beginning, not only within but also outside the Russian borders, searching for its path as the model of future, representing the manner for fulfilling the Russian foreign policy goals and interests. In this research, we will use the methods of analysis, synthesis, hypotethicaldeductive method, document content analysis, as well as comparative method.
Woran und warum glauben wir? Und wie hängt unser Glaube oder Nichtglaube mit den gesamtgesellschaftlichen Sinnkrisen zusammen, denen wir uns immer wieder ausgesetzt sehen – von der Krise der ...traditionellen Werte über die Krise des globalen Liberalismus bis zur Krise der Demokratie? Auf Grundlage von anthropologischen, psychoanalytischen und literarischen Konzepten von Pierre Legendre, Slavoj Žižek und Vladimir Nabokov erarbeitet Marina Laurent ein theoretisches Design, anhand dessen diese Krisen begreifbar werden. In Untersuchungen putinistischer Bedrohungen, populistischer Bewegungen sowie der gesellschaftlichen Implikationen einer datengesteuerten Ökonomie macht sie deutlich: Die Herausforderung, die sich uns heute stellt, besteht nicht darin, mehr Treue und Glauben gegenüber unseren Werten und Idealen zu üben, sondern die uneingestandenen und widersprüchlichen Glaubensinhalte, die diese Ideale gleichzeitig untermauern und unterwandern, ans Licht zu heben und zu hinterfragen.
The issue of preserving the integrity of Russia is of interest both in Russia itself and in other States. Statehood remains the object of close attention, both of our friends and opponents. The ...disintegration and disappearance of Russia was predicted by J. Kiez. Brzezinski did a lot for the destruction of Russia. It is impossible to list all those interested. But Russia, under various names, was recovering from difficult times, remaining one of the significant players in geopolitics. The purpose of the article is to identify the cause of stability in Russia. The publication aims to analyze ways to preserve the territorial integrity of Russia, identify the reasons for its decentralization, identify threats to the integrity of the Russian state, and identify the place of Siberia in Russia. The conclusion of the article is that Russia has a significant margin of safety, and the inhabitants of Siberia consistently identify themselves as an integral part of the Russian people
In Weak Strongman: The Limits of Power in Putin's Russia, Timothy Frye provides an invaluable antidote to the Western preoccupation with the Russian president. Vladimir Putin, he convincingly argues, ...operates in a political context that constrains his options as he seeks to maintain indispensable elite support and avoid destabilising popular discontent. Understanding that context is critical, and Frye contends that the best way to do so is to look at other so-called 'personalist autocracies', such as Viktor Orbán's Hungary, Recep Tayyip Erdogan's Turkey or Nicolás Maduro's Venezuela. But Frye overstates his case and errs in dismissing the role Russia's unique history, geography and culture have played in shaping Russian behaviour and Putin's choices. Indeed, Putin operates within a political tradition whose core features have endured for centuries across multiple regimes. Contrary to Frye, understanding the historical continuity of the Kremlin's strategic calculus is essential to making sense of Russia today.
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The essay provides a take, by a historian, on the 2022 Ukraine war. It draws attention to the fact that, over the past 20 years, terms such as “game-changer” or “turning point” have been frequently ...employed to characterize important junctures. However, 2022 is qualitatively different from all of these, as it represents the antithesis to 1989 and marks the end of an entire era. From the leadership perspective, one immediate effect of a turning point is the reckoning with the past that it entails. It forces a rethink on past behavior. And this collective cognitive rewiring triggers the questioning of the legacy of leaders associated with the now discredited course of action. Taking the example of the crisis of conscience currently underway in Germany, the essay cautions against scapegoating that relies on retrospective selection bias; suggesting instead, that the focus of attention should be shifted to the collective cognitive blinders that prevented the numerous Cassandras, who understood the genuine nature of Putinist aggression, from being listened to. The essay then turns its attention to the proliferation of historical analogies and comparisons, arguing that this tells us less about the event and more about the fact that our compasses have gone haywire. As corollaries of our profound disarray, they even prevent us from gaining a better understanding of the phenomenon. This is addressed in the final part, which includes reflections on Putin as a leader, Putinist followership, as well as the challenges Western leaders are likely to face in the future.
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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.
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Two decades before the war against Ukraine, a “special operation” was launched against Russian historical memory, aggressively reshaping the nation’s understanding of its history and identity. The ...Kremlin’s militarization of Russia through World War II propaganda is well documented, but the glorification of Russian medieval society and its warlords as a source of support for Putinism has yet to be explored. This book offers the first comparison of Putin’s political neomedievalism and re-Stalinization and introduces the concept of mobmemory to the study of right-wing populism. It argues that the celebration of the oprichnina, Ivan the Terrible’s regime of state terror (1565–1572), has been fused with the rehabilitation of Stalinism to reconstruct the Russian Empire. The post-Soviet case suggests that the global obsession with the Middle Ages is not purely an aesthetic movement but a potential weapon against democracy. The book is intended for students, scholars, and non-specialists interested in understanding Russia’s anti-modern politics and the Russians’ support for the terror unleashed against Ukraine.
In this article, I explore the interconnection between Putin's politics of re-Stalinization, historical memory, and a specific version of the post-Soviet neo-medievalism. I show that re-Stalinization ...is a mass movement that is grounded in the unprocessed memory of Soviet crimes and atrocities. The popular myth of the “Great Patriotic War” and the myth of Stalinism as the Golden Age exploited by Putin's memory politics became a gold mine for Putin's kleptocracy. I argue that re-Stalinization and the Kremlin-sponsored ideology of Eurasianism represents two interrelated trends of a complex ideological process. Eurasianism combines Soviet denial of individuality with the idea of a state-dependent patriarchal society and Russian historical messianism. It glorifies the reign of Ivan the Terrible and Stalin. The ‘medievalist’ discourse of Eurasian ideologists, which advocates a return to the medieval society of orders, on the one hand, and the Gothic monsters populating post-Soviet film and fiction, on the other, creates a political language that expresses new attitudes to people in post-Soviet Russia. They depict a new social contract that reconsiders the modern concept of citizenship, and creates a social basis for the criminalization and militarization of Russian society.
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The article presents the translation of a separate chapter from the book of the American anthropologist, historian and political scientist Peter Eltsov, «Long Telegram 2: Neo-Kennanite Approach to ...Russia», which caused a strong resonance in Russia. In his book, the author gives recommendations to the American establishment about the policy towards Russia, predicting its potential collapse due to internal factors, which are argued in the published text
The article contains a reply to the critical comments by Alexey Sushko on the translation of the separate chapter from the book «Long Telegram 2: Neo-Kennanite Approach to Russia» by the American ...anthropologist, historian and political scientist Peter Eltsov. Replying to the comments of Alexey Sushko, the author additionally explains some key ideas of his book
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