Across Europe , military leaders are dreaming of war with Russia. Nato’s defence chief, Giuseppe Cavo Dragone, has called for a pre-emptive, ‘defensive’ strike (whatever that means); the German defence minister, Boris Pistorius, said in the autumn that it might have been ‘the last summer of peace for Europeans’. France’s chief of the defence staff, Fabien Mandon, laid out the stakes of rearmament more clearly than most: the coming war will force the country to ‘accept the loss of its children’ (for which it is being prepared through the introduction of voluntary national service); in a speech in September, he connected the rearmament project to the defeat of ‘relativism’, the enemy within. Meanwhile, Trump likes to warn Europe that insufficient militarism and a lack of border vigilance have left it facing ‘civilisational erasure’.
But why, let alone how, would Russia invade France or Germany? The answer is much the same as it was in the 18th or 19th century: because it is barbaric (that is, non-European), tyrannical (that is, opposed to liberal democracy) and expansionist (that is, inherently warlike). Where Poland was once the helpless victim of the Russian Empire, today Ukraine is being savaged by the Russian Federation. The remedy, too, is little changed: we must create ‘a barrier behind which the nations of Europe can enjoy the security of their rights, their commerce and their civilisation’. The line belongs to Charles-Louis Lesur, writing just before the Grande Armée’s failed invasion of Russia in 1812, but it could be used to describe today’s European military strategy.
Each side still sees the other as expansionist and tyrannical. As the political scientist Marlène Laruelle shows in her new book, Putin and his supporters increasingly believe that Russia’s purpose is to serve as a katechon, a nuclear bulwark against the menace of Euro-Atlantic liberalism and its push for hegemony and homogenisation. The West, as Russia sees it, is an ‘anti-civilisation’ determined to destroy traditional values and overthrow legitimate authority. In fact, Putin and Mandon are in agreement about the value of military sacrifice as a cure for liberal decadence.
In the 1990s, as Russians cast about for a new ideology to replace Marxism, Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilisations (1996) became an unexpected success. Though his Western critics condemned the book as reductive, determinist and Eurocentric, Russian readers found it far more congenial than Francis Fukuyama’s End of History (1992). Fukuyama saw no future for a Russia shorn of its Marxist legacy except as part of the generalised victory of liberal democracy. Huntington, though hardly a promoter of what he called ‘Orthodox’ civilisation, did at least acknowledge Russia’s distinctiveness and resilience. If Russia could no longer be the spearhead of worldwide revolution, it could at least fight to preserve its own separate character.
As Paul Robinson points out in his new study, the ‘civilisationism’ that Huntington promoted and that drives Putin’s thinking today has been a staple of Russian political thought since the 19th century, though in the past it competed with other ideologies (Robinson has written overviews of liberalism and conservatism in the Russian context). Unlike nationalism, civilisationism is not principally concerned with political self-determination: one may want, as many Eastern European nationalists do, to defend political statehood within the framework of European liberal civilisation. The inverse is trickier. In theory, a civilisation may incorporate many independent states, though in practice civilisationists tend to argue that they are led by hegemonic imperial entities such as the US, China or Russia itself. That makes civilisationist thinking well suited to great powers that don’t have a realistic shot at universal hegemony.
At its core, civilisationism rejects the socialist and liberal view that all societies must eventually arrive at a shared destiny, whether an internationalist utopia or a universal liberal-democratic world order. Claims to universality are seen as merely the expression of the will to power of a single civilisation, its ideological weapon for dominating the others. Instead of a shared historical trajectory, then, history is portrayed as unfolding through multiple independent paths of development in which civilisations compete for dominance. The Russian ideological lexicon describes this as ‘multipolarity’, an alternative to the arrogant ‘unipolarity’ of the US-led international order of the 1990s.
Russia did not pioneer these ideas, which were first sketched out by Johann Herder in the 18th century and developed by writers as diverse as François Guizot in the 19th century and Oswald Spengler in the early 20th century. But Russian philosophers had a unique point of view: the experience of more than a century of enforced Westernisation, starting in the era of Peter the Great, which had transformed their empire’s intellectual and economic landscape without significantly narrowing the perceived gulf between Paris and St Petersburg. Some Russian thinkers believed Westernisation hadn’t gone far enough; others thought it needed to be rolled back to the way it was before Peter’s time, whatever that meant. Yet until the final decades of the 19th century, even Slavophile sceptics of Westernisation imagined that a fully re-Slavicised Russia would ultimately renew and redeem a decaying European culture rather than having to find its way entirely on its own.
It was the philosopher Nikolai Danilevsky who, in Russia and Europe (1869), dared to suggest that what he called ‘Slavdom’ and ‘Romano-German’ civilisation had nothing to do with each other, and followed different historical paths. Far from being subsumed (as the Westernisers wanted), or synthesising into some new and greater entity (as the earlier Slavophiles did), Slavdom was bound to struggle with Romano-German civilisation. If the West won, Slavdom would become a vassal, but if it lost, the outcome would be a world that at last recognised civilisational diversity.
Danilevsky was little known in his lifetime (he died in 1885) but in recent years he has become one of the most popular philosophers in official circles in Russia. Putin has quoted him in several speeches, most notably in his October 2022 speech at the Valdai Discussion Club, his most comprehensive ideological statement since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Danilevsky was placed alongside Dostoevsky and Solzhenitsyn in a trinity of thinkers who shared a hostility to Western arrogance, an insistence on Russian distinctiveness and a belief that liberalism was leading humanity towards disaster. Russia’s campaign against Ukraine since 2014, then, could be framed not only as a pre-emptive strike against Nato encroachment but more expansively as a defensive move against an overweening civilisation unwilling to recognise its proper boundaries. This is the reason Putin shares with centrist journalists a preoccupation with ‘cancel culture’, which he sees as the latest weapon of Euro-Atlantic anti-civilisation.
Such a narrative may seem compelling to the Kremlin, but on the ground it has clear weaknesses. What of ‘Slavdom’, for instance? Today there are as many or more Slavs outside Russia’s sphere of influence as within it, and it is far from clear that the latter are better off. Marxism offers more obvious rewards to the worker who sheds their false consciousness than civilisationism does to the Pole or Ukrainian who ‘returns’ to their ‘proper’ civilisational fold. And civilisational goals seem to be mutable: if Trump’s ‘America First’ national security strategy is ‘largely consistent’ with Russian views on multipolarity, as the Kremlin announced in December, where is the conflict? Clearly, the intellectual robustness of civilisationism is not sufficient to explain its rhetorical prominence.
In Ideology and Meaning-Making under the Putin Regime, Laruelle attempts to show the way civilisationism works through institutional structures. She has for decades resisted the mainstream of her field, which tends to consider Russia as a ‘mafia state’ or, increasingly, a ‘fascist dictatorship’. Far-right ideology plays a major role in Russia today, of course. But unlike the Soviet Union, where the Communist Party developed and disseminated its ideological platform through a dense, centralised network of institutions, Russia is constitutionally banned from having a state ideology. Even the constitutional amendments that in 2020 allowed Putin to run for additional terms did not reverse this.
The ideological landscape in contemporary Russia is closer to the neoliberal ‘marketplace of ideas’, albeit one managed by the presidential administration along with subsidiary institutions such as political parties and the Russian Orthodox Church. In the 1990s, Gleb Pavlovsky, who is sometimes called Russia’s first ‘political technologist’, imported the characteristic features of modern liberal-democratic politics – from campaign ads to push-polling and spin-doctoring – to protect Boris Yeltsin’s ruling clique from the electoral consequences of shock therapy, corruption and Yeltsin’s own decline. Once United Russia and the presidential administration emerged as a consolidated party of power, Pavlovsky was sidelined and replaced by Vladislav Surkov, who created a network of openly or secretly state-funded media organisations, civil society bodies and political parties to manage and channel popular discontent.
By the time Surkov himself fell from grace, the system he and Pavlovsky had established was far-reaching. Successful ideological entrepreneurs are rewarded with access to the media, leadership of parastatal think-tanks and sometimes even elected office. The churn is constant, even during moments of apparent ideological consolidation. The greatest rewards go to those who, like the now ubiquitous talk show host Dmitry Kiselev, can speak not only to the demands of the moment but anticipate which way the political winds are blowing.
The result is a managed simulacrum of a diverse ideological space, though one from which liberals have been excised, at least at the level of public political debate. Among the survivors are right-wing social democrats associated with the Communist Party of the Russian Federation, who advocate greater welfare-state protections and display a patriotic nostalgia for the Soviet Union and a hostility to immigration; nationalist Z-patriots, who want total mobilisation for an all-out conflict with the West; and religious conservatives linked to the Russian Orthodox Church or Muslim organisations. These groups share a common enemy – the liberal West – but not necessarily a common vision for a future Russia. Their interpretations of the past vary widely; for instance, as Laruelle points out, the Russian Orthodox Church is one of the few organisations still allowed publicly to criticise Stalin-era repressions.
In Russian Eurasianism (2018) Laruelle argued that the career of the ‘Eurasianist’ Aleksandr Dugin, the best-known ideologue of contemporary civilisationism, exemplifies the unpredictability of this landscape. His post-Soviet career began alongside Eduard Limonov in the fringe National Bolshevik Party, which blended (with no little provocation) elements of communist and fascist symbolism. Dugin gradually built closer connections with the Russian military, which funded the work that led to his Foundations of Geopolitics (1997). This esoteric, ideologically syncretic book recast the Cold War as the latest incarnation of an age-old civilisational struggle between ‘thalassocracies’ – empires of the sea – and land-based ‘tellurocracies’. Despite the vagueness of its conclusions – rather than giving policy recommendations it invoked the ‘nomos of Fire’, a force untameable by Euro-Atlantic ‘water’ – it became a bestseller. During the first decade of Putin’s rule, Dugin attempted fruitlessly to parlay this success into a new political party, the Eurasia Party. Russia’s rightward turn after the suppression of the 2011 election protests gave him another opening and by 2014 he had emerged as one of the leading spokesmen for the Novorossiya project, which called for the annexation of southern and eastern Ukraine and mass mobilisation against the West. The Kremlin decided that this was going too far and Dugin lost his academic job. Only since his daughter’s assassination by Ukrainian intelligence in 2022 (Dugin himself was almost certainly the intended target) has he been able to regain some of his former standing. Yet despite the broad popularity of his civilisationist ideas with the regime, Dugin’s unpredictability and unwillingness to parrot official narratives has undermined his usefulness to Putin.
Unlike 20th-century communism or fascism, contemporary Russian ideology does not have a clearly articulated manifesto or creed, but has been formed through successive smaller ideological conflicts. Thus the statist ordoliberalism of the early Putin era was followed by a conservative geopolitical turn emphasising the ‘Eurasian Union’ and the ‘Russian World’, which in turn has been followed by the more eschatological militarism and social conservatism of the last five years. This idea of Russia as a nuclear-armed Orthodox bulwark against Western liberalism is the most developed example of this trend. Yet the past never quite goes away: in wealthy Moscow, for instance, the ‘system liberal’ mayor Sergei Sobyanin has worked hard to maintain the impression that little has changed since 2011. Putin holds all these contradictions together. When he dies or retires, it will unleash an ideological reckoning of the sort not seen in Russia since 1991.
But what of the millions of ordinary Russian citizens (and their sympathisers in nearby countries) who are the intended audience of all this ideological production but play little part in formulating it? Since the Cold War, Western observers have relied on three models for conceptualising the mind of the ordinary Russian. The first holds that they are brainwashed true believers. This narrative, derived from a mixture of political despair and class prejudice, is popular among the dissidents of Russia’s own educated elite. The second, no less simplistic perspective is that they secretly yearn for freedom but are too oppressed by the secret-police jackboot to liberate themselves; this view has become less appealing since 2022, as evidence of widespread discontent with mass wartime casualties and growing repression has largely failed to materialise. Most of the Russians who yearn for liberal democracy have already emigrated.
More persuasive than either of these is a model that sees Russians as cynical operators, willing to say in public whatever is demanded of them while acting to maximise their own advantage. In this view, Putinism promises material gain in exchange for political compliance. This might help to explain the regime’s durability under the unprecedented stress of the Ukraine war: for many families, especially in the provinces, the jobs and payouts associated with military service and production have brought redistribution on a greater scale than anything since the Soviet period (though this appears to have reached its limits). Yet this theory is also unsatisfactory. The neoliberalism of the Putin era has encouraged an entrepreneurial mindset, but most people in Russia, as anywhere, think of themselves as being driven by something deeper than acquisitiveness. If your unemployed husband volunteers for the front and is killed by a Ukrainian drone, the death bounty, however large, won’t make the sacrifice feel worthwhile.
The work of the ethnographer Jeremy Morris offers a corrective to these simplified models. Where most social scientists, especially in the West, rely on shaky opinion polling and qualitative interviews to gauge Russian attitudes, Morris is a true participant-observer. He started travelling to Russia in the late 1990s, first visiting and then spending extended periods living in a town near Kaluga, an industrial centre not far from Moscow. He got to know many people there, and watched them navigate the crisis and partial recovery of the post-Soviet era. Long-standing relationships like these are vital today, when the fear of outsiders runs high.
He describes people who are hemmed in on every side. Making a living has been made more difficult by the disappearance of Soviet welfare models and by the decay of social and material infrastructure in an environment rife with corruption, in which the state increasingly demands political compliance, but often without any material rewards. In this context, to invoke Soviet times, as people in Morris’s town often do, is not a nostalgic or reactionary gesture but an appeal to recognisable values: the desire to help one’s community; the aspiration to social fairness and equality; the memory of shared suffering and sacrifice in the Second World War.
Many of Morris’s informants resent being lectured about the evils of the West, though they rarely see themselves as Navalnyite liberals. Sometimes genuinely patriotic, they also mock the propaganda about the annexation of Crimea and the war in Ukraine. Civilisationism holds little appeal when the state they live in is not a communitarian Slavic utopia but a shambolic mess that barely bothers to secure communal goods and tells them to expect nothing in the way of social provision. Yet they see little hope of fundamental economic or political change. Instead, they tighten their belts, take on more gig work and try to do what they can to protect small islands of community, even if these take the form of collecting donations for soldiers fighting in Ukraine. Such projects are ‘pro-war’, but also express a deep dissatisfaction with the way the regime has treated its troops and for many imply a desire for peace.
Morris can be accused of underestimating the appeal of hardline chauvinism; even if his own informants don’t have such views, there is plenty of evidence that other Russians do, and not simply to curry favour with the regime. But his understanding of the contradictions of civilisational warfare as it is actually lived makes him right in a broader sense. It allows us to see how similar ordinary Russians are to ordinary Ukrainians, who want their own country to remain free and independent and who must also contend with widespread economic precarity amid official corruption and the lawlessness of military recruiters. In Western societies, too, people from many ideological camps feel alienated from increasingly dysfunctional political systems and betrayed by politicians who are out of touch with the realities of a fracturing social world.
The chimera of civilisational conflict seeks to paper over these problems by evoking a shared ideological project. But individual Russians will not benefit if Slavdom finally defeats Euro-Atlanticism; neither will Europeans derive much advantage if their dream of a permanently contained Russia is attained at the cost of a militarisation that undermines the central achievements of their societies. In Russia, as in the West, the main beneficiaries will be the people who know how to speak the language that power wants to hear.