This antagonistic relationship vis-à-vis the West forms a central piece of the Russian ideological puzzle. Kolesnikov understands this ideology as the old conviction that a “spirit-less” West seeks “to enslave and dismember the highly spiritual, sovereign Russia” has been revived, alongside Russia’s renewed ambition to reclaim its status as a “great power” and to reshape the international order into something approaching a bipolar world at least, if not a multipolar one.

Kolesnikov’s account of ideology is largely genealogical. Moving beyond the banal analyses of Putin’s regime as merely cynical, he sees contemporary Putinism as hardly a novel or original doctrine but an assemblage pieced together from disparate strands of Russian and Soviet thought. “Putin’s regime,” Kolesnikov writes with his typical poeticism, “naturally feeds on the juices and cadaverous poison of the past, absorbing the malignant radiation of poorly buried Stalinism.” The objective coherence of this ideological bricolage is less important than its political function: the state gradually constructs an internally consistent worldview in which Russia stands as a uniquely spiritual civilization under permanent siege from a decadent West.

It is this transformation that leads Kolesnikov to describe contemporary Russia as a “hybrid totalitarian state,” one that has not recreated Stalinist totalitarianism in full but has moved beyond mere authoritarianism by seeking to organize public life around a single imperial ideology. Without this ideology, Kolesnikov writes, “there would have been no war in the first place.”

fuck russia, fuck putin