History has Replaced Ideology as Chief Political Argument in Russia, Erlikh Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Mar.  1 – In recent decades around the world and especially in the Russian Federation, ideologies have discredited themselves by their failures, Sergey Erlikh says; and so they have been replaced by references to history as the chief political argument leaders use to justify their actions and attract support.

            The editor of Historical Expertise, a journal based in Moldova devoted to tracking this development, has demonstrated this by pointing to how history has replaced ideology in the Putin regime in particular when it comes to Putin’s justification of the war in Ukraine (novayagazeta.eu/articles/2026/03/01/istoricheskaia-propaganda-v-rossii-shizofrenichna).

            According to Erlikh, Putin sees himself as a great historical actor and like many officers of Andropov’s KGB, he manifests a genuine “nostalgia” not for the Soviet Union but rather for the Russian Empire. Thus, he is “more a White Guard” thana neo-Soviet; and it is no accident that in his office hangs a portrait of Nicholas I.

            To function as a politician, the historian continues, a leader has to base himself on a common identity and such an identity must in the view of Putin and those like him be based on a common past – an approach that works more easily for such leaders than the construction of identity based on the pursuit of a common future, as the Bolsheviks initially tried to do.

            In his pursuit of this common past, however, Putin and his regime suffer from a certain “schizophrenia.” They are most interested in the tsarist past while the population is more responsive to memories of World War II. That leads the current Kremlin leader to push one identity in order to promote another, even though this creates problems, Erlikh says.

            This schizophrenia is also reflected in the inability of the Putin regime to finally make a choice between “the image of empire and the image of a Russian nation state,” the historical says. That has been easier for the Kremlin because “a modern state-nation” was never developed in tsarist or Soviet times.

            Indeed, he continues, those who are called ethnic Russians are “the most non-ethnic people and are above all an imperial people.” That people, as the American psychologist James Wertsch has shown (istorex.org/post/джеймс-верч-извне-национального-сообщества-легче-увидеть-иные-моменты-плохо-заметные-изнутри), views its existence as a peaceful people who have constantly had to repel alien enemies who seek to destroy it. 

            Today, in Russia in particular but also in other countries including the US, “the powers are losing the state nation. They cannot solve contemporary challenges like the environmental catastrophe and the growth of social inequality. Therefore politicians use these threats which create in society a similar atmosphere.”

And he concludes: “If we do not oppose this insane reaction, however, then, will die not tens of thousands but tens of millions.”