Putin’s Russia remains exactly as ideologically eclectic as it was under Yeltsin and in Putin’s early years. When Moscow’s situational, thoroughly mendacious, alogical propaganda gets equated with an “ideology,” a tornado starts in my head.
Where, in their rewritten constitution or in the textbooks, is there even one unifying idea? One that most Russians, if not all, could sign under?
“Traditional values”? The list runs to 18 items, they contradict one another, and human rights and freedoms sit among them, by the way.
“Loyalty to Putin and the Moscow center”? A good half of the Z crowd has long and insistently hated the Moscow regime and Putin personally, and would break into dance the moment the obituary was read.
“Orthodoxy”? That has nothing to do with actual Russia: Russians en masse are either atheists or hypocrites poorly mimicking Christians. Real Christians there amount to fractions of a percent, tenths if you are generous.
“Hatred of the West”? It is proclaimed. Underneath it sits a deep love: look at the consumption standards of the elite and of ordinary Russians alike, and at their attention to life in Europe and the US, distorted by propaganda but attention all the same.
Authoritarian regimes resembling Putin’s, bankrupt states where every institution has been captured by mafia and bandits, exist in abundance. But a cultural analogue, where a single pot holds ice cream, borscht, pelmeni, pickle brine, fried cockroaches, vodka, and watermelon, does not exist anywhere.
And yet both the authors of this eclecticism and their shallow critics remain convinced that Russia and Putin have an “ideology.”