Ideology of War, the Mutations of Putin’s Regime

George Herbert Walker, Jr. Lecture

After the beginning of a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Russian regime has undergone a significant transformation, which involves not only the most brutally suppression of any dissent, but an attempt to establish the full ideological unity of society. What are the components of this ideology? Through which institutions is it approved? How is it related to militaristic mobilization and how effective is it? And does the ruling class of Putin’s Russia believe in its own ideology? In my lecture, I will offer answers to these questions, which also require a necessary digression into Russian history of the last two decades.

Ilia Budraitskis is a Visiting Scholar with the Program in Critical Theory, UC Berkeley. Before 2022, he had worked as an associate professor at the Moscow school for Social and Economic sciences. His articles on Russian politics, culture and intellectual history were published in academic journals such as Radical Philosophy, New Left Review, Slavic Review and South Atlantic Quarterly, and in the media outlets such as Jacobin, London Review of Books, EFlux, Le Monde Diplomatique and OpenDemocracy. Budraitskis’s essay collection Dissidents among Dissidents: Ideology, politics and The Left in Post-Soviet Russia was published by Verso in 2022.