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This article proposes the concept of 'imperism' as an analytical tool apt to describe political processes in Putin's Russia and beyond. Imperism denotes an ontological orientation, or nomos (the term derives from theories of religion and politics by Berger and Schmitt), that undergirds a plurality of civic positions, informs policy, and fundamentally casts imperialness as a political entity's normal, desirable state. Russia's imperist nomos shall be explored in its key dimensions, including cosmology, authority, sociology, and aesthetics. However, imperism's analytical purchase is not limited to the Russian case. In particular, this paper considers the merits of this category vis-à-vis an array of related but distinct concepts: imperialism, authoritarianism, fascism, nationalism, and irredentism. On those grounds, it will be argued that Putinist Russia's military adventurism manifests a peculiar, imperist form of imperialism; that the Putin regime, albeit hard to categorise, appears to share an imperist nomos with historical fascisms; and that imperism's ultimate scope exceeds that of nationalist irredentism. The paper ends with a reflection on the advantageous epistemological potentialities of imperism as a category. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The geopolitical positioning of Central Asia as the centre of the 'Eurasian Heartland' has been the subject of extensive debates in academic and policy circles over the last three decades. However, the mainstream geopolitical narratives on Central Asia tend to focus on grand-level geopolitical players and discourses, thereby reducing the region and its populations to passive entities without any agency. Not much has been said about how these grand-level narratives are reflected and operate within the micro-level, everyday spaces, relationships and experiences of ordinary people. This paper addresses this lacuna by examining the everyday, micro-level discourses and experiences of geopolitics amongst Uzbek migrant workers in Russia and their left-behind families in Uzbekistan – a form of 'everyday geopolitics'. The paper is based on a transnational ethnography of Uzbek migrant workers in Russia and in their home village in Uzbekistan, conducted between January 2014 and November 2019. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contrary to expectations, Russia failed to overrun the Ukrainian defense despite its apparent preparations for the 2022 invasion. This paper delves into the unexpected outcome, attributing it to the Russian army's inadequate combat effectiveness. It, in turn, was triggered by President Vladimir Putin's coup-proofing strategies, namely granting large payrolls and funding for the military; tolerating lucrative dealings and corruption; establishing military fiefdoms; counterbalancing; rotation and purges of politically disloyal officers; and micromanaging military campaigns. Cumulatively, these policies curtailed military autonomy, accelerated promotions of inept loyalists, limited interbranch cooperation, provoked high attrition rates, and spread norms of coercion toward military personnel, making the Russian army's performance suboptimal during combat. Discussing the issue, the article advances four plausible explanations for why Putin resorted to coup-proofing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The treatment of Jews by the state and society in Russia is an important measure of Russia's civic and political character. The evidence presented in this paper indicates that Russian Jews now enjoy the greatest freedom from antisemitism in modern Russian history. The explanation for the decline of antisemitism is found in two categories: the political and the societal. At the level of "high politics," the post-Soviet Russian state has abandoned Soviet policies that promoted or condoned the persecution and discrimination of Jews. This development was preceded and reinforced by the bottom-up growth in Russian society of a more tolerant attitude toward Jews. The first two sections of the paper explain the decline in antisemitism at elite and mass levels in Russia, underscoring mutually supportive institutional, political, and socio-cultural changes. The final part of the paper suggests that public expressions of antisemitism may re-emerge due to the weakening of the factors that have thus far restrained this prejudice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Russia's aggression against Ukraine is perceived by many as simply an adventuristic endeavor of Vladimir Putin and the result of his desire to maintain his personal power in Russia itself and extend his influence beyond its borders. Proponents of such views try to explain Vladimir Putin's appeal to Russian chauvinism and its ideologues as purely situational and populist, and present the current regime in Russia as opportunistic and lacking a clear ideology and ideological goals. This paper however argues that Vladimir Putin's policy towards Ukraine, including the war unleashed against it, stems from his doctrinal views, which have been unequivocally outlined by him over the years in various speeches and articles, but ignored by the world due to a flippant attitude towards them. These views have not only a historical dimension, but also an ethnological one, as they are based on a certain and very specific understanding of Russian and Ukrainian ethnicities, which is an arbitrary combination of primordialist and constructivist arguments. Along with the presentation of these views themselves, the article demonstrates the discrepancy between the propaganda myths resulting from them and the actual facts about Russian and Ukrainian political and ethnic history. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Electoral authoritarian political systems have a hybrid nature, possessing very significant authoritarian features alongside elections that can produce openings for political change. The risks that elections pose to regimes are diminished if they can build winning coalitions involving voters beyond their core of loyal support. This paper considers how the construction of voter coalitions might be conceptualized in the Russian electoral authoritarian context, with reference to the case of the 2020 vote on constitutional reform, which was conducted with the primary aim of extending President Vladimir Putin's term in office. Using data from a national survey of Russians conducted immediately after the vote, our analysis indicates that the regime's success, even taking into account allegations of widespread fraud, was the result of its offer of additional constitutional amendments that were able to target voters beyond Putin's core support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the Russian television series Dekabristka, a biopic based on the true story of Zinaida Levitskaia, who falsified court reports to release 410 prisoners from Gulag labor camps. By employing melodramatic devices of Manicheanism and patriarchal gender norms, the series succeeds in creating an affective safe space for broad audiences to revisit past national traumas. At the same time, it participates in the larger practice of films and television series set in the World War II-era that has dominated Russia's mediascape since the early 2000s. Continuing these films' motifs of unproblematized heroes and a return to conservative values, Dekabristka uses already familiar cultural norms and succeeds in bringing new perspectives into the national narrative. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With humor, which has long been known as a coping mechanism in extreme crises, punning memes, armed with words and images, have become weapons of 'mass disruption' influencing the hearts and minds of a target audience. This invites the examination of how memes detailing Russian-Ukrainian war employ verbo-visual puns as a strategic tool of information warfare to counter president Putin's military aggression and misleading political messaging. This article1 proposes an interdisciplinary template for the analysis of puns drawing on multimodal social semiotics, cognitive linguistics, critical discourse analysis and crisis communication analysis. The data sampled for this research comprises 87 memes about Russian-Ukrainian war that employ verbo-visual puns with 6 cases described in this paper. The article proposes a taxonomy, in which verbo-visual puns can be classified in accordance with mechanisms that are used to classify wordplay (homonymy, polysemy, and paronymy). Evidence is thus provided to show that this typology is applicable to the taxonomy of multimodal signs as well. The results of this research reveal cognitive and semiotic triggers of puns as well as their potential to serve as a tool generating public reaction to Russia's military aggression in Ukraine and reaching the intended goals of crisis communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do young Russians relate to World War II and the violence of the wartime period? This article explores the degree to which societal and elite-driven narratives about history converge in the context of a crucial historical anniversary. We demonstrate that the memory of World War II serves as an integrative historical event for an abstract, temporally transcendent idea of Russia. Our analysis draws on focus groups conducted among young people of different political orientation in June 2019, survey data targeting urban youth, conducted over three consecutive years (2018–2020), and cultural artifacts such as film and literature. There is significant overlap between the views that young people express about victory and commemoration and the prevailing cultural, political, educational, and historical discourses. However, there is significant controversy when it comes to the actual ways in which the current political regime remembers the victory, the role of Stalin, and how to understand violence against the civilian population. The shared historical view that the Putin regime has created therefore remains contested. Disagreement limits the extent to which memory can be a foundation for today's political Russia as young respondents differentiate between their support for an abstract ideal of Russia and the existing political system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

CONTEMPORARY RUSSIAN THOUGHT. WE NOTICE THAT MANY OF THE EVENTS WITH A NEOEURASIAN IDEOLOGICAL SUBSTRATUM OCCUR FROM THE BEGINNING OF THE THIRD MILLENNIUM AND WITH THE COMING TO POWER OF VLADIMIR PUTIN. IT SEEKS TO POSITION RUSSIA AS THE UNDISPUTED GEOPOLITICAL PIVOT BETWEEN THE WEST AND THE EAST. THE PAPER PRESENTS SOME STATEMENTS MADE BY THE RUSSIAN PRESIDENT, EVALUATED BY THE IDEOLOGUE ALEXANDER DUGHIN, AS MARKING THE BEGINNING OF A NEW GEOPOLITICAL APPROACH. CERTAIN RECENT MOMENTS IN THE POLITICAL AND MILITARY FIELD OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION SUPPORT THE HYPOTHESES OF THIS PAPER, REFLECTING VERY WELL CHARACTERISTICS OF THE CONCEPT OF NEO-EURASIANISM. IN THE AUTHOR'S OPINION, THE EMERGENCE OF NEO-EURASIANISM IN RUSSIA IS DETERMINED BY THE NEED TO DEFINE AND CONSOLIDATE THE SPHERES OF INFLUENCE. IT IS MAINLY MOTIVATED BY ETHNOCENTRIC SENTIMENTS TO EXTEND ITS SPHERE OF INFLUENCE BEYOND POLITICAL BORDERS AND TO FOSTER FEELINGS OF PROTECTION AND SECURITY. NEO-EURASIANISM MEANS THE CONSTRUCTION OF A FOREIGN POLICY CONSENSUS BASED ON POLITICAL CULTURE AND NATIONAL AWARENESS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After years of upheaval in Russia, Putin's arrival on the political stage constituted an important turning point for the country, as the new President successfully rebuilt a strong central government and gained the support of the Russian people. This paper lays out Putin's domestic and international strategies for rallying distinct and seemingly conflicting forms of nationalism: 'ethnic' and 'imperial' nationalism. The paper shows that at the domestic level, Putin branded his regime as the ultimate representative of ethnic Russians, building a quasi-nation-state that gave voice to traditional, conservative Russian nationalists. Yet by targeting specific international interests, Putin simultaneously revived Russian imperial nationalism in ways that complemented, rather than antagonized, ethnic nationalist interests. Ultimately, I argue that Putin has gained Russians' support in part by mobilizing diverging, and inherently conflicting, nationalist trends. Yet the President's persisting popularity masks a troubling failure to cement long-term support for the Russian state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Russian elections have been severely compromised by allegations of fraud, which makes public opinion polls an important source of information about popular support for Vladimir Putin and his policies. Putin's high ratings as well as the wide use of polls by his administration suggest that his rule is essentially democratic. This paper challenges this view by discussing the specific conception of democratic representation behind polling practices. Far from being a perfect mode of representation, opinion polls are capable of manufacturing the political reality they represent. The paper demonstrates how Russian authorities use polls to replace referenda and to legitimize the results of elections and thereby exposes the representational machine that turns polls into an efficient tool for governance, maintaining the hegemony and promoting de-politicisation. The distinction between partial and total representation, drawn from Ernesto Laclau's work, serves to illuminate the cases when polls and official election returns actually diverge and shows how the legitimacy of a regime is secured by the politics of representation that leaves a significant part of the Russian population unrepresented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the impact a Russian amended law concerning state secrets is having on science publishing by Russian scientists. It states President Vladimir Putin used a decree in May 2015 expanding the scope of a law requiring scientists get permission from the Federal Security Service prior to publishing results which could have industrial or military applications. It reports Russian universities are requiring scientists seek approval to the publication of any findings without exception.

The role of geopolitics in European Union (EU) foreign policy has been the focus of much media, political, and scholarly commentary. This literature has interrogated the topic from a number of perspectives, critically exploring, for example, the construction and embodiment of EU foreign policy, the geopolitics of regional cooperation within the EU, and the role of geopolitical imaginations in the creation of the EU. Far less literature, by contrast, has explored how the EU is viewed as a geopolitical actor by other entities. This paper begins to do this, by exploring how ideas of the EU have become an enduring geopolitical conception in post-Soviet Russia. It traces their evolution from the early 2000s, when Russia sought to emulate EU norms and values as part of a broader Westernising tendency in its foreign policy. Narratives about the EU were reworked in the context of the so-called 'colour revolutions' between 2003 and 2005, and have subsequently been revitalised since Vladimir Putin returned to the presidency in 2012. In these contexts, this paper critically scrutinises the evolution of the EU's role within Russian practical geopolitical discourse and this role's relations to other claims and visions of what it means for Russia to be a great power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The beginning of the twenty-first century has witnessed the emergence of balancing responses to the US hegemony, among which Russia’s foreign policies stand out as corresponding to what is understood as ‘hard balancing.’ Why is the United States being balanced against? This paper categorizes the existing theories of non-balancing into six conditions that together guarantee the absence of balancing and demonstrates that the current unipolar system can satisfy only one of them. This eases the systemic constraints and makes balancing possible. The paper then presents three cases of balancing with reference to President Putin’s foreign policy. It argues that even though in terms of relative military capabilities unipolarity still holds, the emergence of counter-hegemonic balancing is indicative of important changes in the nature of post-Cold War American domination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can one explain the recent fascination with sport as a tool of government policy in Russia?  This paper argues that sports policy in Russia is an essential part of policies to encourage nationalism and one which borrows heavily from the Soviet past.  Based on the analysis of meeting transcripts available on the Kremlin website and other materials, this paper argues that there are five key mechanisms by which the Kremlin uses the Soviet sport legacy to promote nationalism. This use of sport has implications for the popular reception of Putin’s regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes the process of renegotiation of the informal contract between the regional and federal elites of Russia after the economic crisis. We use the database of Center of Public Procedures' "Business against Corruption" to show that, after 2011, regional elites in Russia lost the pre-existing opportunity to extract rents from businesses in return for favorable election results for Vladimir Putin and United Russia. We also analyze the connection between the level of corporate raiding in various Russian regions and the political competition, tenure, and ties of their governors. We show that there are two distinct models for fighting raiding in a region: an authoritarian model for suppressing negative signals and a competitive model with the creation of a new consensus among the elites. Although both models are similar in terms of the absence of negative signals, they have very different consequences in the business context of an area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is widely recognized that unified oppositions present a bigger threat to dictators than divided oppositions. In this paper, we use micro-level data on opposition protests in Putin-era Russia to examine the factors that facilitate co-operation among different opposition forces. In particular, we focus on what leads so-called systemic opposition parties – those who have been granted some institutional accommodation by the regime – to join forces with non-systemic opposition forces. We propose a novel permutation-based method for analyzing protest coordination using event count data and find that coordination is most likely on issues of fundamental importance to the systemic opposition's base supporters. We also find that state co-optation reduces the extent of coordination. These findings illustrate the politically precarious position of "loyal" oppositions under autocracy; they must simultaneously show fealty to the state and maintain some measure of credibility as an opposition party that cares about its supporters' demands. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vladimir Putin's regime has struggled to restore Russia's great power status. The discourses that have emerged around Russian energy wealth play a particularly significant role in this struggle and shape Russia's identity in international relations. These multiple and contradictory understandings of energy resources are encapsulated in the two dominant discourses: the energy superpower and the raw-material appendage discourses. This paper examines these discourses and then demonstrates how they shape Russia's energy diplomacy toward the European Union (EU). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Russia's post-1991 nation-building project has been torn between competing interpretations of national identity. Whereas the other former Soviet republics opted for nation-building centered on the titular nation, Russia's approach to national identity was framed by the fact that the RSFSR had been defined not as a designated national homeland but as a multi-ethnic federation. This, coupled with Russia's definition as the legal successor of the Soviet Union, suggesting continuity and a history of uninterrupted statehood, has enabled a range of rivaling understandings of how to define the "nation." Focusing on top-down official nation-building, this article examines how, against a backdrop of shifting political contexts, structural constraints, and popular attitudes, the Kremlin has gradually revised its understanding of what constitutes the "Russian nation." Four models for post-Soviet Russian nation-building are identified – the ethnic, the multi-national, the civic, and the imperial. Over time, the correlation of forces among these has shifted. The article concludes that, despite some claims of an ethno-nationalist turn after 2014, the Kremlin still employs nationalism instrumentally: National identity has undoubtedly become more russkii- centered, but, at the same time, the Kremlin keeps the definition of "Russianness" intentionally vague, blurring the boundaries between "nation" and "civilization." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to analyze differences between Russian opinion leaders on the basis of Russian elite studies conducted in 2008, 2012 and 2016. We divide elites into two groups – supporters and opponents of official regime foreign policy – based on their attitudes toward the official governmental positions on Russian–US relations and examine their attitudes over the past decade (2008–2016). Analyzing the attitudes of elites who strongly support the official agenda versus those who are more oriented toward the West will help determine whether there has been wholesale elite consolidation around President Putin's policy agenda or whether any significant scepticism about current Russian foreign policy remains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The consistency and effectiveness of Russia's assertive foreign policy has earned Putin, both domestically and internationally, the image of a powerful and ambitious leader with a strategic plan to re-establish the Russian empire and defend Russia's core national interests. Speculation among scholars and practitioners regarding the existence of such a "strategic plan" makes Aleksandr Dugin's conspiratorial neo-Eurasianism project an especially appealing subject of research. This paper explores key ideas of Dugin's neo-Eurasianism, as described in his Foundations of Geopolitics, and tests them empirically with data from the Survey of Russian Elites: 1993–2016 using a Bayesian Structural Equation Modeling approach. Its main finding is that the theory has limited utility for understanding elites' foreign policy perceptions and therefore its influence should not be overstated. Moreover, there is no evidence that Dugin's theory is more salient in the post-Crimean period than in the pre-Crimean period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper applies the model of opinion formation developed by John Zaller to the study of anti-American attitudes in the Russian elite. It examines the relative weight of political predispositions (interests, values, and experiences) versus immediately accessible "considerations" that depend on the flow of information in elite discourse. Based on survey data from 1995–2016, we find that two key political predispositions (identification as a Westernizer or Slavophile and service in the military and security agencies) are highly significant in the Yel'tsin period, when debates about Western intentions toward Russia were robust and the Kremlin's messaging was diverse. By contrast, anti-American sentiment in the elite has become more uniform in the Putin era, which we attribute to an increasingly fervent anti-American narrative on state-controlled television. In a period of clear and unequivocal messaging emanating from Kremlin-controlled media, these signals have surpassed civilizational identity and service in the force structures in importance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Should Russia become part of the West, or follow an Eastern path? This has been a centuries-old discussion among Russian intellectuals. For Westernizers in Russia, the "West" symbolized progress, freedom, democracy, civil society, normality, and a nation-state. Their opponents saw the West as representing moral decadence in the beginning, and later capitalist exploitation. This paper attempts to lay out the foundations and the evolution of the 200-year-old discussion of Russia's place in the world. It briefly examines the period of Muscovite Russia, where the foundations of the authoritarian state tradition were laid and further strengthened. The paper then focuses on the period of Peter the Great's reign, in which educated Russians became increasingly acquainted with Western European culture and started having doubts about Russia's status in the face of perceived European superiority. Trying to summarize how the international and internal developments of the 1800s and 1900s have affected the debate about Russia's place between East and West, the paper then examines the current state of discussions in Russia under Putin's leadership and finally attempts to make predictions for the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of the war between Ukraine and Russia in the Donbass and the earlier crisis over Crimea, this paper examines four speeches by Vladimir Putin to identify and map populist elements in his discursive and formal strategies of justifying and creating a specific form of conflict. The analysis shows how this populism goes beyond the people/establishment dichotomy and is based on complex notions of enmity and alliance, a very broad definition of the Russian nation, a new division of the political space, and the introduction of new symbols of unity and the reaffirmation of old ones beyond the borders of today's Russia. This casts a new shadow over Russian foreign policy in the post-Soviet space. Clarity is sought on questions about the Ukrainian conflict, but it is also hoped new elements will be brought to the existing literature on populism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When I cracked open Marlene Laruelle's new book, Is Russia Fascist? , I immediately wondered, who really thinks Russia is fascist? I was aware of Timothy Snyder's study of Russian President Vladimir Putin's glorification of the debatably fascist political theorist Ivan Ilyin, but fascist? Really? But Laruelle quickly shows in the introduction that this is not a canard or a straw man. Many reputable scholars and public intellectuals have drawn parallels between the Putin regime, its actions, and European fascism, including Snyder, Zbigniew Brzezinski, Alexander Motyl, Vladimir Inozemtsev, Gary Kasparov, Anna Politkovskaya, Madeline Albright, and Hillary Clinton. The term "fascism" has become part of the Western discussion on the nature of the Putin regime, even more so since Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the wake of Russia's illegal annexation of Crimea, US president Barack Obama infamously called Putin's Russia "a regional power [...] threatening some of its immediate neighbours, not out of strength but out of weakness. [...] The fact that Russia felt it had to go in militarily and lay bare these violations of international law indicate[d] less influence, not more." Obama's words reportedly angered Putin, who had long striven to convince the West, and primarily the USA, to treat Russia as a geopolitical equal. Being considered a regional power fundamentally denied equality with superpowers such as the USA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]