Putin the Ideologue

With the war in Ukraine heading into what will seemingly be a bloody winter for both Russia and Ukraine, there is one person who does not appear to have suffered on the home front: Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose approval rating has remained at a steady high even as casualties from the conflict continue to mount. Putin’s political resilience may come as a surprise to many who assumed that Western sanctions, alongside the human toll of war, would kindle societal opposition to the war and fragment Russian elites, eventually opening the door to Putin’s ouster. But these accounts focus overwhelmingly on the socioeconomic factors underpinning Putin’s grip on power and overlook another key factor that helps explain the Russian leader’s survival: ideology. The Kremlin has succeeded in crafting a worldview that explains why Russians must endure war-related challenges and allows them to make sense of their circumstances. This ideology has become an enduring feature of Putin’s regime.

Many analysts have missed Putin’s ideological drive having assumed that the regime would have little need for it. Rather than building authentic support among the public, the Kremlin could wield such tools as patronage and surveillance technology to control Russian society. Ideology, this thinking goes, can even hem in modern autocrats: leaders can be more flexible in the methods they use to maintain power if they don’t have to adhere to a rigid worldview. Some observers have also pointed to the opportunism behind Putin’s domestic and foreign policy, to the inconsistencies of Moscow’s messaging, and to the plasticity of the narratives spread by Russian propaganda as evidence that Putin holds no coherent ideology, other than one that advances his goals of personal enrichment and power.

In recent months, however, the Kremlin has released a series of documents that seek to codify state ideology. In January 2022, for instance, Putin released a special presidential decree that introduced a list of Russia’s spiritual and moral values. In 2023, the Kremlin updated the Fundamental Principles of Legislation on Culture, a document that regulates Russian cultural heritage and national patrimony, to advocate for a common Russian worldview and establish a cultural consciousness for the nation. Moscow has overhauled the country’s education system as part of that same ideological effort, standardizing modern history textbooks to fit the official propagandist line, requiring that every Russian school have a counselor to facilitate the civic and patriotic upbringing of students, instructing all schools to hold a flag-raising ceremony every week, and other such measures. These steps constitute a widespread effort to inculcate a top-down ideology, anchored by a vision of Russia as a distinct civilization.

This recent ideological push is just the latest phase of the Kremlin’s sustained, decades-long campaign to cultivate specific ideological narratives across Russian society. Since he came to power in the first decade of this century, Putin has made consistent and increasing investments in education and memory politics—the shaping of mythologized understandings of the past for political purposes—to promote a particular vision of Russian identity. The Kremlin has ramped up its ideological campaigns during periods of perceived external and internal challenges to the regime, including the “color revolutions” that rocked the post-Soviet world in the early years of the century, waves of domestic protest in Russia, and Putin’s 2014 annexation of Crimea. And over the past decade, the Kremlin has deepened its efforts, moving beyond narrative promotion toward directed public engagement with this ideology, such as funding and establishing youth movements, historical memory initiatives, social clubs, camps, battle reenactments, tourist attractions, and country-wide “Russia—My History” exhibitions (which have been lambasted by professional historians). All told, these efforts reflect something like a coherent worldview, in which an embattled yet inherently great Russian civilization must fight to the last to restore its rightful place in the world. The Russian state and, importantly, its leader, must lead the Russian people to victory. The existence and prevalence of the Kremlin’s ideology have significant implications for U.S. foreign policy—and for Washington’s efforts to counter Putin’s international adventurism.

PUTIN’S ILLUSIONS

The core elements of Putin’s ideology are internally consistent, even if they are not codified in any one text. The first tenet is the imperative of a strong, stable Russian state. Echoing themes from both the tsarist and Soviet eras, this principle holds that the Russian state embodies the historical essence of the nation, which for centuries has persevered in multiple forms: the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and Putin’s Russia. It is the state, the narrative goes, that guarantees Russia’s great-power status and that guards the country’s traditional values and ways of life. Without the state, there is no Russia.

Statism connects to another component of Putin’s ideology: the safeguarding of Russian exceptionalism and the cultural conservatism that preserves it. This element promotes a near-messianic vision of Russia as a state-civilization, borrowing heavily from fascist theories that have circulated for over a century and emphasizing a civilizational and even racial aspect of Russian identity. Russia is not just a modern political entity—it is a civilization, a historic people who possess a unique culture rooted in a traditional set of values and a love of the state. This framework is made plain in Russia’s newly adopted Foreign Policy Concept, which refers to Russia explicitly as “a distinctive state-civilization” with a “historically unique mission” to ensure the development of humanity. This narrative gives ideological ballast to Russia’s efforts to challenge the existing global order and to its invasion of Ukraine as the defense of an imperiled Russian civilization.

Worries about the possible collapse of Russian civilization are another pillar of the regime’s ideology. This narrative is able to draw from public anxieties that are somewhat legitimate given the country’s turbulent history. The unraveling of the Russian Empire in 1917 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in the 1990s undergird public fears of political chaos and humiliation. The chief aggressor, in the Kremlin’s telling, is the West, whose desire is to destroy Russia; the main threat to the Russian state-civilization is outside intervention. This story reaches as far back as the seventeenth century, when Polish-Lithuanian forces occupied Russia during a political crisis known as the Time of Troubles, and extends through the 1812 French invasion of Russia under Napoleon and the 1941 German assault on Russia under Hitler to NATO expansion and “color revolutions” in the post-Soviet world. These events amount, per the Kremlin’s narrative, to a centuries-long project on the part of Western invaders to create and then exploit a weakened Russia, to plunder its wealth, and to wipe out its culture and replace it with alien values.

Fundamental to the Kremlin’s ideology building is the weaponization of memory and mythmaking around World War II, known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War. World War II dominates the Kremlin’s anti-Western narrative, in which the West is implicated in the history of Nazi aggression, a fiction informed by the Soviet belief that Nazism was part of a broader anti-Soviet conspiracy in the West. According to the Kremlin, the Soviet Union singlehandedly defeated Hitler and rid the world of the Nazi plague. This warped historical narrative has helped justify Putin’s aggression in Ukraine, which he claims is run by resurgent Nazi forces that enjoy backing from the West. To once again wipe out the Nazi threat, Putin claims, Russia must remember its sacred victory in the Great Patriotic War. This storyline bolsters the Kremlin’s efforts to instill a sense of permanent war with the West and to forge an unconditional, top-down national unity, without which Russia will once again fall victim to external besiegement.

These ideological strands together constitute a simple and understandable theory of how the world works. Putin himself has been laying ideological groundwork for decades, working to unify Russian opinion in support of the regime. And the Kremlin’s indoctrination effort is not only paying off; as the war in Ukraine continues, it is also accelerating.

THE HOUSE RUSSIA LIVES IN

Several factors are helping the Kremlin consolidate and intensify its ideological campaign. First, many of the narratives spread by the regime draw on attitudes that are already deeply entrenched in Russian society. In the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse, Russian society experienced something of an ideological void. Putin seized the opportunity; where liberals largely failed to come up with a collective pro-Western Russian identity, Putin simply adopted many of the quasi-Soviet and tsarist themes that were already familiar in Russia, including Russia’s great-power status, cultural exceptionalism, and anti-Westernism. Putin’s version of Russian identity proved palatable in part because of a Russian predisposition toward “blind and militant” patriotism: the belief that one should support one’s country regardless of whether it is right or wrong, that the nation can pursue its interests even at the expense of others, and that coercion trumps compromise or negotiation.

Second, the malleability of Putin’s ideology helps the regime accommodate change, smooth over discrepancies, and appeal to different constituencies without undermining its core message. Unlike Chinese President Xi Jinping’s Marxist-Leninist ideology, for instance, Putin’s worldview is not spelled out in philosophical texts but absorbed through signs, symbols, and popular culture, making it accessible to less intellectual and less literate groups. In the absence of one definitive party line, Russians do not need to give their complete assent to Putin’s ideology. They can give partial assent, or simply live in its ambiance. Rather than trying to make everyone a true believer in one fixed idea, Putin’s propaganda offers a menu of options. Russians can select the messages that most resonate for them—and that best rationalize the Kremlin’s actions. Amid fluid news cycles, they can do so without ideological friction.

Third, although observers often claim that this ideology lacks a forward-looking vision for Russia, the Kremlin does in fact provide such a vision, fueled by a potent and effective combination of nationalism, resentment, and nostalgia. The Kremlin’s offer is essentially to make Russia great again: Russia’s future, the Kremlin suggests, will be better because it will look more like the past, with the country restored to its former glory and international status. From this vision follows Moscow’s claim to an assertive global role, in which a declining West and an emerging multipolar order will enable the return of Russia (and its partner, China). Russia’s mission in this new order, the Kremlin promises, is to free other countries from U.S. cultural colonization and hegemony.

Fourth, the share of the Russian population willing and able to counter these ideological trends is shrinking rapidly. Even before Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, consistently pro-Western liberals constituted only seven to eight percent of Russian society. Younger Russians, who tend to be more liberal and pro-Western, have lower rates of political participation. Since Putin launched his assault on Ukraine in February 2022, liberals have been actively fleeing the country; of at least 800,000 Russians who have since left Russia, many are younger, more antiwar, and more pro-West than the average Russian. Coupled with a protracted war of conquest and mounting state-led indoctrination efforts, these demographic and political trends foreshadow a Russian public poised to embrace these beliefs even more staunchly—and to grow even more distrustful of Putin’s critics and ideological opponents.

A CASE OF RUSSIAN IDENTITY

The Kremlin’s ideology is not invincible. The regime’s ideological ventures have vulnerabilities, particularly if the war in Ukraine drags on. First, the Kremlin’s narratives, while popular, are also thin and performative, and therefore may not sustain the sacrifices demanded by war. Russians tend to endorse state-promoted narratives as long as they do not interfere with their personal well-being and may grow tired of all the sacrifices that are being asked of them. The incursion of war into day-to-day life may already be shifting the tide. Polls have shown, for instance, a decline in support for the war among Russians residing in the regions neighboring Ukraine, which are the areas most likely to be affected by military raids and drone attacks.

Nor does the Kremlin have a monopoly on ideology in today’s Russia. The absence of the state in much of public life, especially the lack of a social and economic safety net, have given rise to new forms of community activism and mutual aid that could eventually evolve into political forces in their own right. The failed mutiny by Wagner paramilitary company leader Yevgeny Prigozhin in June also demonstrated the possibility of an alternative right-wing challenge—one fueled by a frustration with Russia’s flawed performance on the Ukrainian battlefield and a demand for a more boundless approach to war. There is still room for ideological challengers. Should the war exact an unacceptable toll on the population or should Russia be defeated by Ukraine, these alternatives might succeed where the regime’s ideology-building efforts fall short.

Nonetheless, the overall outlook remains gloomy. The flexibility of Putin’s ideological machine, the simplicity of its narratives, and Russians’ susceptibility to history-inflected mythmaking suggest that this outlook is here to stay and may even become further entrenched in Russian society. Despite its flaws, Putin’s ideological campaign has successfully cultivated support within the Russian public. The worldview it inspires will serve as a bulwark against future challenges to his regime. And as Putin’s war of aggression in Ukraine has shown, the Kremlin’s configuration of geopolitical and civilizational thinking can be radically destabilizing outside of Russia’s borders.

U.S. policy should reflect the existence of a Russian ideology. Russia’s Kremlin-inspired worldview is not something that can be eroded or overturned from Washington. Policymakers can, however, use it as a window into the Putinist regime and into the relationship between state and society in contemporary Russia. As a well-honed tool for justifying the Kremlin’s actions to the Russian public, this ideology is modestly predictive of Moscow’s behavior—of its intent to wage a long war in Ukraine and to push back against Western power and influence on a global scale. If an ideologically mobilized Russia cannot be transformed from without, its aggressive actions will have to be contained—something that the United States is already helping to do in Ukraine and throughout Europe.

The United States also should not confuse Russia writ large with the Kremlin’s ideology. Throughout World War II, the United States maintained a distinction between Nazi Germany and German culture—giving safe haven and citizenship, for example, to critics of Hitler’s regime, including the German writer Thomas Mann. Today, the United States should fund diaspora communities and institutions that harbor different views of Russia’s past and of Russia’s future, and it should do what it can to project the journalism, the debates, the books, and the culture of this “other Russia” back into Putin’s Russia. These efforts would constitute a longer-term investment in an ideologically diverse Russia and would help remind Russians that there are alternatives to the reigning ideology—that, in other words, another Russia is not impossible.