Dissecting Putin’s regime ideology

Does the Putin regime have an ideology? This question has attracted renewed attention since Russia’s February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Some scholars claim that the war is directly linked to the Putin regime’s ideological aspirations to restore Russia’s greatness and challenge the West internationally, while others argue that contemporary regimes in the “Putinist mold” have limited need for ideology and use wars instrumentally for survival purposes rather than messianic aspirations. In this paper we will, first, review arguments pro and contra ideology under the Putin regime and identify existing gaps in such literature: definitional ambiguity, conflation of concepts of totalitarianism and ideology, overfocusing on ideal types of ideology, and so forth. Second, we will offer operationalizable metrics against which the ideology is measured: coherence of ideological repertoire, temporal consistency, elite commitment, codification, indoctrination, internalization, and futuristic vision. This paper finds that the current Putin regime checks most of the ideological boxes (even if it has not necessarily always been the case historically). Lastly, we will conclude by discussing the implications of our findings to the analysis of contemporary autocracies.