Putin’s War in Ukraine ‘Final Confirmation’ His Regime is an Ideological One, Suslov Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Jan. 4 – In a new book, Putinism – Post-Soviet Russian Regime Ideology (Routledge, 2024), Mikhail Suslov, a Russian professor at the University of Copenhagen, argues that Putin’s war in Ukraine represents “the final confirmation” that his regime is an ideological one. Were it not, the Kremlin leader’s actions there make little sense.

            According to Suslov, Putin’s ideology is eclectic and has been formed not as an intellectual project but rather in the course of the practical problems the Kremlin leader has had to address during his years in power. It rests on three key ideas: identity conservatism, right-win populism, and communitarianism (holod.media/2024/01/05/chto-takoe-putinizm/).

            “Putin is not an intellectual,” the analyst says. “He hasn’t sat down at his desk for days at a time as Lenin did in 1917 and hasn’t written books devoted to ideology.” But as a dictator who can oust from office in Russia anyone who doesn’t agree with him, there are a whole team of people who try to capture what he thinks and then present it to him for their own benefit.

            The war in Ukraine confirms all this because it involves all the key ideas of Putinism, Suslov continues. Behind it are the ideas that Russia is engaged in a confrontation with the Western world and that it is a messianic country “freeing the entire world from Western hegemony.”

            There is no contradiction here with the idea that Russians and Ukrainians are one people. For Putin, Ukraine is occupied by the West and thus is “not an opponent but rather the field of battle, not a subject but a place where Russia is clashing with the forces of the West,” the Denmark-based Russian scholar says.

            Because Putinism is not a fully articulated ideology, there are some fundamental contradictions in it, Suslov argues. On the one hand, there is the problem of identifying who is sovereign and who is not. But on the other – and this is much more “fundamental” – there is the clash between its particularism and its insistence on universalism.

            Putinism would like to become “a universal ideology for all,” much as Marxism-Leninism to a certain extent succeeded in doing. But Putinism’s adepts have a somewhat strange view: They insist that what is universal is that there is no universalism, that each nation will proceed along its own course.

            That is attractive to some because it argues for the rejection of universalist Western values, but it raises the question of how all those who do so can cooperate for very long. Far from all Russians accept it, and those abroad who do disagree with one another about the future because each has its own vision.

            “Putinism is more than Putin,” Suslov says, and as such it can’t be defeated on the field of battle alone. It is an ideological battle cry and must be defeated not only on the battlefield but in the war of ideas because the particularism of Putin and his opposition to the West appeals to so many in various parts of the world.

            Some mistakenly think that Putinism’s lack of an image of the future is the rock on which it will die; but that is a mistake because the lack of such a vision works for this ideology since it suggests that each will choose its own future and that giving peoples that kind of freedom to choose is what it is all about.

            The West and Russians who support democracy and human rights can defeat Putinism as an ideology “if they believe in their own values” and are prepared to work to defend them fully. “Unfortunately,” Suslov points out, “in the West far from all are prepared to go very far to defend their values.”