Russia's Political Culture
An in-depth research project that scrutinizes Russia’s political culture and ideological production, and maps its actors, institutions, and societal relevance
ABOUT
Russia’s Political Culture
Political culture is central to any explanation as to why the Russian authorities decided to go to war against Ukraine. This project explores the Kremlin’s ideological ecosystems, made of institutions, funders, patrons, identifiable symbolic references, influence entrepreneurs, and media platforms.

Even if the space for competing ideological projects has shrunk, the regime is still agitated by many different vested interest groups, including grassroots illiberal movements, who are all involved in ideological engineering and indoctrination processes. This project also explores the genealogy of this ideological production and its historical roots, for instance by tracking influence of “White” (tsarist) ideology in today’s Russia.
WHAT WE DO
Read our latest publications

Why Does Putin Need Rublev’s The Trinity?

by

Aleksander Blekher

Religion scholar Alexander Blekher discusses the transfer of The Trinity by Andrei Rublev, one of the most famous Russian icons, to the Russian Orthodox Church, comparing the Christian veneration of icons with divine objects in pagan cults.
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How the ‘90s Have Become a Source of Inspiration for Pop Artists

by

Maria Engström

Maria Engström looks at the cultural recycling of the 1990s in contemporary Russian popular culture which works with mass things, trashy, insignificant and previously rejected, such as the shabby Khrushchevka housing, bad music, all kinds of kitsch, and dubious political ideas.
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The Kremlin’s Theory Of Ideology:

A Very Short Introduction

by

Ilya Budraitskis

The Putin regime needs ideology not in the sense of a coherent worldview, but as a technology of domination that works as a set of performative practices.
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Great Patriotic War Narratives in the Russian Orthodox Church

by

Boris Knorre

How Church leaders and ordinary conservative clergy interpret the victory in the Great Patriotic War, combining the secular Soviet with the pre-revolution Church.
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Isolationism, a broad Eurasian partnership, and a left tinge

by

Mikhail Suslov

A journey through the new Russian Foreign Policy Concept, its sources and component parts, and what it tells us about the Kremlin’s policy thinkers and their ideological trajectory.
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A patriotic word, a gun and a ruble: Is Putin’s ideology persuading Russians to fight in Ukraine?

by

Ivan Fomin

Why the Russian public cannot be mobilized for the war with ideology alone, forcing the regime to turn to economic incentives and promises about people’s welfare to recruit soldiers for its war.
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White Russians and the International Far Right
What links White Russian émigrés, Nazi Germany, Western intelligence agencies, Prussian aristocratic families, some clerics of the Russian Orthodox Church, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine? This international research project hopes to answer this seemingly eccentric question by rebuilding the history of a key theme of 20th-century history: the fight against the Soviet Union.
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White Russian media project
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Vlasov archives
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Entangled Far Rights.

A Russian-European Intellectual Romance in the Twentieth Century

by

Marlene Laruelle 

An exploration of the European far right’s Russophile tendencies across the 20th century beyond anti-Communist narratives.
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From Heidegger to Dugin and Back

by

Marlene Laruelle, ed.

with contributions by Emmanuel Faye, Michail Maiatsky, and Richard Wolin

How the Black Notebooks have dramatically reshuffled the deck of Heidegger studies, and how Dugin has been reading and reinterpreting Heidegger’s philosophy.
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Stakeholders, Hangers-On, and Copycats: The Russian Right in Berlin in 1933

by

Oleg Beyda and Igor Petrov

Who were the Russian emigrants who welcomed the taking of power by the National Socialists and what were their motivations for collaboration?
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 White Émigrés and International Anti-Communism in France (1918–1939)

by

Nicholas Lebourg

An history of the White Russian émigré community’s contribution to the global anti-Communist struggle in France, based on declassified archives from the French police and intelligence services.
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Vasily Shulgin (1878–1976): The Grandfather of Russian Nationalism

by

Giovanni Savino

The life of Vasily Shulgin, the living embodiment of tsarist Russia and the White cause in the Soviet Union, passing on the memory of a bygone era to new generations of Russian nationalists.
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From the White Armies to Nazi Collaboration: Alexei von Lampe (1885-1967)

by

Giovanni Savino

Alexei von Lampe (1885–1967) played a critical role in White Russian history as a link between the old White guard and the Nazi regime, as well as with the collaborationist Russian Liberation Army led by General Vlasov.
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Contact
Feel free to write or call us
+1 (202) 9946340
russiaprogram@gwu.edu

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