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A key question for the contemporary world: What is Putin's ideology? This book analyses this ideology, which it terms "Putinism". It examines a range of factors that feed into the ideology – conservative thought in Russia from the nineteenth century onwards, Russian and Soviet history and their memorialisation, Russian Orthodox religion and its political connections, a focus on traditional values, and Russia's sense of itself as a unique civilisation, different from the West and due a special, respected place in the world. The book highlights that although the resulting ideology lacks coherence and universalism comparable to that of Soviet-era Marxism-Leninism, it is nevertheless effective in aligning the population to the regime and is flexible and applicable in different circumstances. And that therefore it is not attached to Putin as a person, is likely to outlive him, and is potentially appealing elsewhere in the world outside Russia, especially to countries that feel belittled by the West and let down by the West's failure to resolve problems of global injustice and inequality.

"What is Putin's ideology? is a key question for the contemporary world. This book analyses this ideology, which it terms "Putinism". It examines a range of factors which feed into the ideology--conservative thought in Russia from the nineteenth century onwards, Russian and Soviet history and their memorialisation, Russian Orthodox religion and its political connections, a focus on traditional values, and Russia's sense of itself as a unique civilisation, different from the West and due a special, respected place in the world. The book highlights that although the resulting ideology lacks coherence and universalism comparable to that of Soviet-era Marxism-Leninism, it is nevertheless effective in aligning the population to the regime, flexible, and applicable in different circumstances. And that therefore it is not attached to Putin as a person, is likely to outlive him, and is potentially appealing elsewhere in the world outside Russia, especially to countries which feel belittled by the West and let down by the West's failure to resolve problems of global injustice and inequality"--

The article analyses representations of history in today's Russia as part of the ideology for expressing central political concepts underlying the Putinist regime. Mainstream interpretations of history build on a populist vision of Russia as a community with a stable, unchangeable core of identity. In this ideological context, history serves as the canvas on which the 'authentic' Russian identity manifests itself. The present research article examines representations of history by focusing on the concepts of 'historical sovereignty', 'unity of history', and the role of elites in history. It finds that regime ideology in today's Russia relies on a sizable infrastructure that involves producing historical knowledge for the purpose of securitizing history and making it an instrumental element in the populist (conservative-communitarian) ideology. Sources for this study come from the network exhibition 'Russia – My History', contextualized through content analysis of the key producers of ideology in Putin's Russia.

This paper documents and analyzes the building blocks of the Orthodox cultural canon and cultural policy. The author argues that in spite of the Church's attempts to renegotiate its status in (post-) secular society, the Orthodox cultural products have restricted access to the nation-wide market, partially due to the lack of theoretical reflection on culture, and partially because of the Church's unsettled accounts with Russian history of the 20th century. This produces an effect of increased reliance on the state's restrictive measures in the cultural sphere.

This article analyzes contemporary Russian textbooks on geopolitics, whose number soared spectacularly around and after 2000. Steeped in Eurasianism and pro-Kremlin conservatism, these textbooks marked an important – although much troubled – tendency to modernize the language of Russia's self-representation along the lines of "Westernized" rationalism, nation-state political subjectivity, and the rhetoric of authenticity. At the same time, geopolitical discourses in textbooks fail to identify the real source of authenticity and agency in a democratic community. Nevertheless, in the epoch of "presentism" the state's attempts to instrumentalize the geopolitical rhetoric of authenticity are severely limited by the fluidity of the Russian space and by the ideological character of geopolitical theorization itself.

В статье анализируются современные российские учебники по геополитике, количество которых растет быстрыми темпами начиная примерно с 2000 г. Пропитанные духом евразийства и прокремлевским консерватизмом, эти учебники отражают стремление модернизировать язык саморепрезентации России в соответствии с принципами "запад-нического" рационализма, субъектности национального государства и риторики аутентичности. В то же время, дискурсы геополитики в учеб-никах не в состоянии определить реальный источник аутентичности и субъектности в демократическом обществе. Попытки государства инструментализировать геополитическую риторику аутентичности в эпоху "презентизма" натыкаются на ограничения в виде пластичности социального пространства России и идеологического характера самого геополитического теоретизирования.