Putinism as a culture in the making

pp. 113-152

in: Käte C. Langdon, Vladimir Tismaneanu, Putin's totalitarian democracy, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020

Abstract

Langdon and Tismaneanu analyze the unique narrative production of national identity that characterizes Putin's Russia. This chapter exposes the core elements of such narrative production, namely the security imaginary, an animating Soviet nostalgia, anti-Westernism, ultranationalism, national victimhood, Russian exceptionalism, historical revisionism, biopolitics, racism, chauvinism, corruption, kleptocracy, imperialism, and militarism. The authors then explain how the Kremlin (and society) manipulates these concepts to inform one another, to further indoctrinate Russian citizens into the Putinist ideology, and to call upon each of them to support their supposedly superior nation-state in its messianic mission for global greatness. This chapter as a whole illustrates how Putinism operates as an ideology and influences the masses to behave in certain pre-described ways that continuously reinforce the Kremlin's authoritarian policies.