5. Putinism as a Culture in the Making

In addition to the current Russian population, long-dead historical figures are co-opted by Putin’s Kremlin, as well, albeit in a different fashion. For example, Putin has taken to rebuilding the estate of novelist Ivan Turgenev as a monument to Russian national pride, despite the overwhelming evidence that Turgenev would likely despise today’s Russia and its ideological fantasies. After all, according to director of the Turgenev family estate Elena Levina, the famous writer and thinker “never idealized anything and described the reality that he saw,” and he freely expressed his belief that Russia was part of Europe and should not pursue its own Russian way. These views do not fit into the Putinist narrative whatsoever; yet Putin’s Kremlin and indoctrinated Russian audiences alike nevertheless choose to partake in certain fabricated stories that distort the pasts and images of even the most outspoken Russian figures. In this way, Putin and his Kremlin successfully annex iconic cultural personalities from the past in order to conceal and/or deny their adamant rejection of any form of nationalism. Andrew Higgins, “Turgenev Dissed Russia but Is Still Lionized as Literary Star by Touchy Kremlin,” New York Times, 11 March 2019.

Brian Whitmore, “Putin vs. Putin,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 2 September 2016.

For more on the subject of Zhdanovism, see Vladimir Tismaneanu, The Crisis of Marxist Ideology in Eastern Europe: The Poverty of Utopia (New York: Routledge, 1988) and Katerina Clark and Evgeny Dobrenko with Andrei Artizov and Oleg Naumov, Soviet Culture and Power: A History in Documents, 1917–1953 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).

Arkady Ostrovsky, The Invention of Russia: From Gorbachev’s Freedom to Putin’s War (New York: Viking Press, 2015), p. 307; Naeem Inayatullah and David L. Blaney, International Relations and the Problem of Difference (New York: Routledge, 2004), p. 42.

Wendy Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (New York: Zone Books, 2010), p. 21; Richard Lourie, Putin: His Downfall and Russia’s Coming Crash (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2017), pp. 78–79.

Official Internet Resources of the President of Russia, speech by Vladimir Putin, “Poslanie Prezidenta Federal’nomu Sobraniju,” 4 December 2014.

Timothy Snyder, “Fascism, Russia, and Ukraine,” The New York Review, 20 March 2014; for more details on this subject in the Soviet Union, see Serhii Plokhy, The Last Empire: The Final Days of the Soviet Union (London: Oneworld Publications, 2015), pp. 406–407.

Mark Kramer, “Russian Policy Toward the Commonwealth of Independent States: Recent Trends and Future Prospects,” Problems of Post-Communism, Vol. 55, No. 6 (2008), p. 4; Gleb Bryanski, “Putin, Medvedev praise values of Soviet Union,” Reuters, 17 November 2011; Vladimir Putin, “Novyj internacionnyj proekt dlja Evrazii – budushhee, kotoroe rozhdaetsja sevodnyja,” Izvestia, 3 October 2011.

Official Internet Resources of the President of Russia, speech by Vladimir Putin, “Vystuplenie i diskussija na Mjunhenskoj konferencii po voprosam politiki bezopasnosti,” 2007 Munich Conference on Security Policy, 10 February 2007.

Speech by Vladimir Putin in 2007, cited in Teaching History and the Changing Nation State: Transnational and Intranational Perspectives, ed. Robert Guyver (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), p. 195. This speech promoted a Kremlin-approved history textbook which portrays Stalin as a great leader and justifies his terror as an “instrument of development.” The book, written by nationalist historian Alexander Filipov, was published in 2007 under the title, A Modern History of Russia: 1945–2006: A Manual for History Teachers.

Levada Center, “Foreign Agents,” Levada Center: Yuri Levada Analytical Center, 17 December 2015.

Leon Aron, “Don’t Be Putin’s Useful Idiot,” American Enterprise Institute, 21 December 2016.

Maxim Shevchenko, “My ne Evropa? I slava bogu!” Moskovskii Komsomolets, 10 February 2011; Ostrovsky, The Invention of Russia, p. 312; Snyder, “Fascism, Russia, and Ukraine”; Sergei Glazyev, Genocide: Russia and the New World Order, trans. Rachel B. Douglas (Leesburg: Executive Intelligence Review, 1999), p. 14.

Whatever “overcoming the West” really entails seems to vary from day to day. It might mean debunking Western democracy as a façade, proving Russia as a superior culture, or something else.

Official Internet Resources of the President of Russia, “Vystuplenie i diskussija na Mjunhenskoj konferencii.”

Official Internet Resources of the President of Russia, “Poslanie Prezidenta.”

Levada Center, “Western Lifestyle,” Levada Center: Yuri Levada Analytical Center, 16 October 2015.

Official Resources of the President of Russia, speech by Vladimir Putin, “Obrashhenie Prezidenta Rossijskoj Federacii,” 18 March 2014.

Emilio Gentile, Politics as Religion, trans. George Staunton (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 139; Anthony Smith, “The ‘Golden Age’ and National Renewal,” in Myths and Nationhood, eds. Geoffrey Hosking and George Shöpflin (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 48.

Timothy Snyder and Thomas Carothers, “The Road to Unfreedom” (presentation at Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington, DC, 18 May 2018).

George Shöpflin, “The Functions of Myths and a Taxonomy of Myths,” in Myths and Nationhood, eds. Geoffrey Hosking and George Shöpflin (New York: Routledge, 1997), p. 29; Ilya Prizel, “Nationalism in Postcommunist Russia: From Resignation to Anger,” in Between Past and Future: The Revolutions of 1989 and Their Aftermath, eds. Sorin Antohi and Vladimir Tismaneanu (Budapest and New York: Central European University Press, 2000), p. 351.

Weimar Germany, or the Weimar Republic, is the unofficial term used widely to describe the German government established following its defeat in World War I and the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II. This government was in power between 1919 and 1933, ending once Adolf Hitler democratically became Chancellor. Weimar Germany suffered a slew of difficulties since its creation. The Treaty of Versailles, which ended World War I and called upon Germany to make massive concessions and financial reparations for its brazen attempt to ruin European civilization, left many Germans seething under a sense of national humiliation. Not only had their imperialist and supposedly superior empire lost the war, but they also literally had to pay for the destruction they wreaked, too. Rather than force Germany into submission, though, these punishments were demonized by nationalist Germans who had not learned the vital lessons of World War I. Hyperinflation and economic disaster especially were harnessed by fascists like Adolf Hitler to gain notoriety for their rabidly millenarian visions of utopia and their re-ignition of violent nationalism across the German population. A rejection of European values, resistance to democratic transition, economic hardship, fabricated threats of internal enemies, belief in a superior German race, and imperialist views combined at the hands of right-wing extremists to galvanize a barbaric movement that culminated in World War II. Stephen E. Hanson and Jeffrey S. Kopstein, “The Weimar/Russia Comparison,” Post-Soviet Affairs, Vol. 13, No. 3 (July–September 1997), pp. 252–283 and Walter Laqueur, Putinism: Russia and Its Future with the West (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2015).

Hanson and Kopstein, “The Weimar/Russia Comparison.”

Roger Cohen, “Russia’s Weimar Syndrome,” New York Times, 1 May 2014. For more on the ideas of Weimar Germany and Weimar Russia and how they relate to one another, see Alexander Yanov, Weimar Russia and What We Can Do About It (New York: Slovo-Word Publishing House, 1995).

Andrey Makarychev, “Putin’s Russia: Bare Life, Emptiness and Biopolitical Regulations,” PONARS Eurasia, 20 February 2013.

Prizel, “Nationalism in Postcommunist Russia,” p. 336.

McFaul, From Cold War to Hot Peace, p. 36; Michael Cox and Peter Shearman, “After the fall: nationalist extremism in post-communist Russia,” in Politics of the Extreme Right: From the Margins to the Mainstream, ed. Paul Hainsworth (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2016), p. 232.

Garrels, Putin Country, pp. 58–59; Michael Stuermer, Putin and the Rise of Russia (New York: Pegasus Books, 2009), p. 117.

Alicja Cecylia Curanović, “Relations Between the Orthodox Church and Islam in the Russian Federation,” Journal of Church and State, Vol. 52, No. 3 (Summer 2010), p. 539.

Garrels, Putin Country, pp. 134–153; Lourie, Putin: His Downfall, p. 86.

Judah, Fragile Empire, p. 149; Stuermer, Putin and the Rise of Russia, p. 125.

Pomerantsev, Nothing is True, pp. 48 and 119; Garrels, Putin Country, p. 124.

Judah, Fragile Empire, p. 149; Stuermer, Putin and the Rise of Russia, p. 118; Garrels, Putin Country, p. 122.

Mark Gevisser, “Life Under Russia’s ‘Gay Propaganda’ Ban,” New York Times, 27 December 2013; Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom, p. 52; Garrels, Putin Country, p. 55.

Oushakine, The Patriotism of Despair, p. 126; Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 182.

Aleksandr Zinovyev, Homo Sovieticus (London: Polonia, 1984), p. 8; see also Russian émigré writer Mikhail Heller’s Cogs in the Wheel: The Formation of Soviet Man (Westminster: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1988).

Yuri Levada, Sovetsky prostoy chelovek: Opyt sotsial’nogo portreta na rubezhe 90-kh (Moscow: publisher unknown, 1993). Cited in Masha Gessen, The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia (New York: Riverhead Books, 2017), p. 59. For a more detailed yet digestible discussion of Levada’s homo sovieticus and how his term reflected reality, see Gessen, The Future is History, pp. 59–66.

It should be noted that there are, of course, some groups that refuse to conform in such a manner, such as the Russian NGO called The Union of the Committees of Soldiers’ Mothers of Russia. Members of groups like this one protest against the Kremlin for unfairly sending their children off to fight under terrible conditions and for what they understand to be trivial reasons. Unfortunately, their numbers are few, and the Russian government has increased its efforts to counter their protests over the past few years, particularly since the invasion of Ukraine. The aforementioned NGO has been labeled a “foreign agent” and some of its leaders have been harassed and detained in an effort to delegitimize their complaints, and thus keep the Russian government looking heroic and morally correct, in the eyes of the rest of the indoctrinated citizenry. Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, “Russian ‘Soldiers’ Mothers’ Activist Detained,” Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, 18 October 2014.