Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 followed to the letter the program prescribed for years by the Izborsky Club, a think tank created in 2012 comprising conservative elites advocating the restoration of Russia's imperial, great-power status as part of a cultural and military confrontation with the West. Today, the Izborsky Club’s ideologues such as Alexander Dugin and Alexander Prokhanov are the war’s chief ideologues.

While these Russian hawks were marginal in the 1990s, the regime has increasingly relied on them to justify an authoritarian consolidation around strong state power, enforce social discipline based on traditional values and pursue a revisionist foreign policy. In my PhD research, I have tried to understand why, despite the prohibition of a state ideology in the Russian Constitution of 1993, Russian hawks have risen to political prominence as one of the major sources of legitimation used by the regime.

This question addresses a central political science debate on how to assess the influence of ideas on policy decisions. In the Russian case, scholars have pointed to the ruling elite’s genuine support of conservatism and imperialism.¹ Others, on the contrary, have exposed the regime’s lack of adhesion to ideological values and principles, pointing to the Kremlin’s mere cynical use of ideology as an instrument that hides pragmatic goals, such as legitimizing the ruling circle holding onto power and attracting international support for Russia among conservative political audiences.²

To understand the place of ideology in contemporary Russian politics, I have examined the public careers of the Russian hawks over the past 30 years, focusing on the evolution of their social and material interactions with policymaking elites. My research shows that, starting from the mid-1990s, the ruling elites resumed Soviet practices of state sponsorship of ideology production. Unlike in Soviet times, however, the current regime does not rely on an institutionalized ideological apparatus, but rather on transactional relations with networks across intellectual and political milieus.

In this regard, I build on the literature that has argued that, despite the centralized and patrimonial nature of the Russian political system, the Russian state functions as a network state in which the power of informal networks matters more than institutions in terms of influencing political decisions and organizing the distribution of economic resources.³ However, whereas most models of Russia as a network state see the networks as displacing ideology – drawing actors away from collectivities based on abstract concepts and into collectivities based on personal connection and material exchange – I put forward the concept of “idea networks” to highlight that ideology is one the dimensions, alongside material factors, that determine the construction of elite groups.

In lieu of the binary opposition between theories of ideology as pure commitment to norms versus positivist views of ideology as a cover for material interests, I follow in the footsteps of authors who have restored the significance of ideology as a form of symbolic language constitutive of social life. As Karl Mannheim explains, ideology is a collection of shared meanings and evaluative interpretations dependent on group existence and rooted in action. It is a collective language that contains a “crystallization of the experiences of a certain group” and defines membership in that group.⁴ More recently, Michael Freeden has linked the study of ideological recombination with the processes of mutation of groups from which ideologies emerge.⁵

Instead of looking at ideology as a purely discursive thought-product of individual authors, my approach stresses the social and relational aspects of ideology as a variety of group language that has meaning in relation to the ideology of other groups. In this respect, while the literature on Russian ideology has often spotlighted Alexander Dugin, I decided to highlight the role of Russian hawks as an elite group bound by a set of common ideas, interests, beliefs, attitudes, experiences and emotions that have set them against other elite groups. The production of ideology by Russian hawks has played a key role in defining and substantiating the identity and contours of their group.

Analysis of the public careers of Russian hawks shows that they have been increasingly able, starting from the 2000s, to compete against more liberal groups for access to state-sponsored resources such as media visibility, honorific status and financial support.

At least until February 2022, the regime has been committed to the principle of “managed pluralism” and thus the maintenance of a certain degree of ideological polarization within the ruling elite. To evidence this claim, I show that state support for Russian hawks has gone through cycles, going up and down, and that it severely contracted ahead of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

While a core ideological substratum consolidated over the years in official speech around concepts such as strong state power and multipolarity of the world order, further ideological content remained variable. Different idea networks were promoted or demoted through the distribution of state resources depending on how it would contribute to maintaining policy flexibility in a changing strategic environment. This variation can explain the major changes in Russia’s foreign policy and most importantly the evolution of the Kremlin’s Ukraine policy whereby the preference went from diplomatic negotiations to resolve the Donbas conflict in 2014 to a fully revisionist use of force in 2022.

Therefore, as I see it, ideology plays a structuring role in the Russian political system, as it forms the collective language constitutive of elite groups whose competition, administered through authoritarian control by the executive power, shapes the set of policy options available to the leader. In this respect, I depart from strictly realist approaches, which only consider material interests and capabilities as explanatory variables in policy choices. However, I also highlight what classic constructivist approaches may not be so good at seeing – the interactional and competitive process through which idea-producers seek policy influence.

On the one hand, the rise of the Russian hawks resulted from the strategy of cultural influence that they deployed to gain recognition of their ideas and move from the margins to the center of the public sphere. On the other hand, their ascension was fostered by their top-down co-optation by decision-makers seeking legitimizing and mobilizing resources for the regime’s distinction from Western liberalism.

The hawks’ strategy of media mobilization: A successful culture war (1991-2005)

The group of Russian hawks was formed at the end of the Soviet Union, when nationalist intellectuals and conservative members of the Soviet political establishment came together to criticize the liberalization led by Mikhail Gorbachev. The political unity of this coalition was welded into the Communist Party of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic (RSFSR), created in 1990 to compete with the reformist-dominated Communist Party of the USSR. The RSFSR’s Communist party’s chief ideologist, Gennady Zyuganov, proposed an alliance of “national-patriotic” forces against the liberals. At the same time, the intellectual Alexander Prokhanov founded the newspaper Den (Day) to serve as a media spearhead for this community, which he referred to as gosudarstvenniki (“supporters of the state”). Den brought together a broad spectrum of intellectuals who shared the goal of maintaining the Soviet Union as a military superpower in confrontation with the West.

Defeated and marginalized with the collapse of the USSR, the national-patriots nevertheless represented an active opposition to Boris Yeltsin's government, deploying both direct action strategies and a strategy of regaining cultural hegemony. Den, replaced by Zavtra (Tomorrow) in 1993, became the social and doctrinal factory of an ideology advocating the restoration of Russia as a strong imperial state that would combine the traditional and religious values of the Tsarist era with Soviet military and technological might. Some of the most popular Zavtra contributors included Zyuganov, the monarchist Orthodox clerics Father Dmitri Dudko and Metropolitan Ioann, the Eurasianist thinker Alexander Dugin, the National-Bolshevik writer Eduard Limonov, neo-Nazi nationalists like Alexander Barkashov and Islamic traditionalists like Geydar Dzhemal and Shamil Sultanov. This eclectic group was bound by their rejection of post-Soviet democracy, economic liberalization, the Westernization of Russian society, and US dominance of the international order.

While Zavtra authors railed against their exclusion from the public sphere, they were still directly engaged in the construction of the post-Soviet political order. Indeed, through their abundant publications, they contributed to structuring post-Soviet political cleavages by shaping the binary opposition between two groups: the “conservatives” and “patriots,” on the one hand, and “traitors,” “democrats” and “liberals” on the other.

In addition, their delegitimization and demonization of the ruling elites helped feed popular stereotypes about post-Soviet politics, such as the corruption and criminalization of politics, the theft of the country’s resources by mighty oligarchs, the influence of tycoons on the regime and the manipulation of popular opinion by media corporations. In this language, they painted the patriotic opposition as the group that represents Russian society’s grievances and collective traumas.

Although they remained in opposition, starting from the mid-1990s, some of the Russian hawks’ cornerstone political ideas gained traction within the regime’s official discourse. During the October 1993 crisis, Yeltsin’s unconstitutional decision to dissolve the legislature and his authoritarian resort to armed force to defeat the opposition challenged the liberal democratic ideals claimed by his party Democratic Russia and marked a conservative turn in his rule. Ironically, the crushing of the national-conservative opposition was followed by an effort to assimilate some of their ideas – justifying strong state power and promoting a national ideology and the celebration of Russia’s cultural and religious traditions. In particular, the launching of the First Chechen War in 1994 coincided with the Russian government’s effort to build a new official state patriotism to combat separatism. In 1996, Yeltsin’s decision to establish a commission to define “the Russian idea” and to “think about what national ideal, what national ideology is the most important for Russia” grappled with one of the long-term concerns of the conservative opposition.⁶

At the end of the 1990s, the hawks’ ideas attracted an even wider audience. In 1998, the country’s default, together with the devaluation of the ruble and the ensuing financial crisis, led to the resignation of then-Prime Minister Sergei Kiriyenko and bolstered the Russian people’s opposition to capitalist economic reforms. Subsequently, in 1999, anti-Western attitudes became predominant in Russian public opinion in reaction to NATO’s expansion to include Hungary, Poland and the Czech Republic and to NATO’s military operations against Serbia without a United Nation mandate.

As reported by figures from the polling and research institute Levada Center, in 1999 75% of Russians agreed with the statement that “the U.S. is taking advantage of Russia’s troubles to turn it into a second-class country,” while 60% were confident that “the U.S. wanted Russia to break into several parts.” Criticism of the West even grew significantly in important liberal media outlets such as Izvestia and Segodnya. In addition, the military campaign against Chechnya launched by then-Prime Minister Putin in September 1999 drew unanimous support and fostered a “patriotic ecstasy” among the various political parties represented in the Duma.⁷ In this context, the campaign for the presidential elections held in March 2000 resulted in what the scholar Sergei Prozorov has described as the dispersion of conservatism as the “hegemonic discourse” in Russian politics.⁸

Although Putin was positioned as the direct heir to Yeltsin, his first term as president in 2000-2004 selectively departed from Yeltsin’s legacy. Political scholar Harley Balzer has put forward the concept of “managed pluralism” to qualify the Putin regime’s balance between authoritarian and liberal principles, which Balzer interprets as an endeavor to limit “the diverse cultural influences accompanying globalization while still reaping economic benefits from the international economy.”⁹

This context of general backlash against the West and the legacy of the 1990s provided a favorable environment for the circulation of national-patriotic discourse, which even started reaching a segment of the liberal intellectual elite. A case in point is the editorial volte-face of the Ad Marginem publishing house. Known in the 1990s for publishing Russian translations of French Theory philosophers such as Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Jacques Derrida, the editors decided, staring from the 2000s, to turn to ultra-nationalist Russian authors such as Limonov and Prokhanov. In an interview for Zavtra, Ad Marginem’s founder and director Alexander Ivanov explained that his initial “excitement with the West” had grown “into a subsequent monstrous disappointment.” Ivanov held capitalism and consumerism as responsible for the “decline in interest for Russia.” He associated the “need to play by Western standards” with Russia’s loss of self-identity and “dignity.” Ivanov’s about-turn is indicative of the new, more populist understanding of left-wing identity in Russia at that time, which shifted from emulating Western liberalism to promoting the country’s “own history,” “self-reliance” and specific “path of intellectual and cultural development.”

In addition, in the early 2000s, a new generation of hawkish intellectuals entered the Russian public sphere and began to formulate an updated version of Russian conservatism. Born in or close to the 1970s, these “Young Conservatives” had studied philosophy and history at Moscow State University (MGU) in the 1990s and shared an interest in religious Russian philosophy, political conservatism, nationalism and traditionalism. Prominent members of this group include Vitaly Averyanov (1973-), Egor Kholmogorov (1975-), Konstantin Krylov (1967-2020), Boris Mezhuev (1970-) and Mikhail Remizov (1978-).

Although they did not share their forerunners’ nostalgia for the past and ambition of restoring the Soviet Union, they did concur with their rejection of globalization and ambition to restore Russia’s great-power status based on both the country’s civilizational identity and technological might. In contrast to the older generation, however, the

Their combination of learned discourse, scholarly references and polemical style made for a new type of intellectual with tools that differed from the older generation’s use of radical rhetoric. Between 2000 and 2005, they became some of the most visible intellectuals thanks to their use of the Internet and social networks. Influential members of the liberal intellectual elites, such as Gleb Pavlovsky (1951-2023) and Stanislav Belkovsky (1971-), contributed to their rise on the public scene by recruiting them as authors and editors for their online political outlets, the Russkii zhurnal (The Russian Journal) and Agentstvo politicheskikh novostei (APN; Agency of Political News), where intense debates about society and politics were held among a community of intellectuals across a wide ideological spectrum.

In 2005, the Young Conservatives gathered as a group of 70 signatories to author the “Russian Doctrine,” a document setting out a full-fledged ideology of conservative modernization, which they called “dynamic conservatism.” Advocating authoritarian economic and technological development based on Russia’s traditional historical and religious values, the “Russian Doctrine” inspired the subsequent adoption of programmatic documents by some of the most authoritative conservative political and religious organizations. Metropolitan Kirill, who would later become Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church, publicly praised the “Russian Doctrine” and recommended taking the document for “practical use.” He suggested using it as an “organic part” of a nationwide dialogue on the “core values of Russia.”

The hawks inside the regime’s market for ideology (2005-2012)

In the aftermath of Ukraine’s 2004 Orange Revolution and the 2005 mass protests in Russia against the monetization of social benefits, the Kremlin fomented an ideological counter-reaction to ward off domestic revolutions based on the legitimation of strong state power.¹⁰ This conservative inflection of the regime’s party was mainly orchestrated by Vladislav Surkov, the deputy head of the Presidential Administration and the chief ideologue of the ruling United Russia party. In the first half of 2006, Surkov theorized the concept of “sovereign democracy” as Russia’s model of government. It was intended to be both a buffer against destabilizing “color revolutions” inside Russia and an assertion of Russia’s great-power status within the global economy.

At this time, United Russia was primarily concerned with ideological indoctrination of the youth and started relying on the two generations of Russian hawks for social and ideological support against liberal and nationalist oppositional forces. Dugin and Prokhanov were invited as guest lecturers to address the pro-government youth movements Nashi (Ours) and Molodaya Gvardiya (Young Guard).¹¹ Their public careers and media visibility subsequently took off. In 2008, Dugin became a professor of philosophy at Moscow State University. He and Prokhanov became regular guests on major TV talk shows dealing with society and politics. Meanwhile, the Young Conservatives were tasked with running a think tank within United Russia, the Russian Club, to feed the party with ideas and recommendations on how to formulate a pro-government response to the rise of anti-Kremlin ethnic nationalism.

The years 2007 and 2008 laid the foundations for the regime’s rhetorical embrace of some of the hawks’ key ideas. Three significant turning points in this direction can be identified in Putin’s policies and discourse by the end of his second term. First, the Kremlin adopted protectionist measures and state investment policies that the hawks had been advocating, as opposed to the principles of a free market. Second, Putin put forward the concept of “spiritual security,” which was one of the core concepts advocated in the “Russian Doctrine.” During one of his public addresses in 2007, Putin compared Russia’s traditional religions with its nuclear arsenal as the two pillars of the country’s security. Finally, Putin took a clear anti-Western turn in foreign policy at the 2007 Munich Security Conference, when he expressed his dissatisfaction with the post-Cold War world order and condemned its US-centered unipolar character.

Despite the conservative consolidation initiated during Putin’s second term, the ruling elites remained ideologically mixed.

Upon coming to power as president in 2008, Dmitri Medvedev kept the hawks at arm’s length. His reformist approach, critical of the centralization of power, relied on expert groups outside state institutions. The Institute of Contemporary Development (Institut sovremennogo razvitiya, INSOR), which was headed by the liberal economist Igor Yurgens and at which Medvedev was the board of trustees chair, became the leading center for consulting and policy recommendations. As Edwin Bacon has highlighted, INSOR’s reports focused on modernization and advocated Russia’s full integration into the West through comprehensive democratic reforms and cooperation with Western powers, including Russia’s membership in NATO.¹²

In the winter of 2011-2012, mass demonstrations triggered by election fraud and the rejection of Putin’s candidacy for a third presidential term led to an unprecedented degree of polarization within the ruling elite. In contrast with liberals such as Minister of Finance Alexei Kudrin, who played an active role on the tribune at the December protests calling for fair elections, the siloviki, along with the ruling elites associated the security services, supported the regime’s authoritarian consolidation and its contestation of what they perceived as the West’s hand in spreading color revolutions.

This context provided a major opportunity for the first- and second-generation hawks to organize a massive collective action to counter the protesters’ demands for reforms, which they viewed as portending the collapse of the country. When a third wave of demonstrations took place on February 4 on Bolotnaya Square, the conservatives held a parallel meeting on Poklonnaya Hill with around 140,000 participants under the banner of the “anti-Orange coalition.” In September 2012, under the leadership of Prokhanov and the Young Conservative Vitaly Averyanov, the Poklonnaya Hill participants converted their contextualized group mobilization into a permanent institution, the Izborsky Club, which became the largest representative group of conservative ideologues in today’s Russia.