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Since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russia has been marginalized at the edge of a Western-dominated political and economic system. In recent years, however, leading Russian figures, including former president Vladimir Putin, have begun to stress a geopolitics that puts Russia at the center of a number of axes: European-Asian, Christian-Muslim-Buddhist, Mediterranean-Indian, Slavic-Turkic, and so on. This volume examines the political presuppositions and expanding intellectual impact of Eurasianism, a movement promoting an ideology of Russian-Asian greatness, which has begun to take hold throughout Russia, Kazakhstan, and Turkey. Eurasianism purports to tell Russians what is unalterably important about them and why it can only be expressed in an empire. Using a wide range of sources, Marlène Laruelle discusses the impact of the ideology of Eurasianism on geopolitics, interior policy, foreign policy, and culturalist philosophy.
Originally published in 1969 and representing a quarter of a century’s work of one of the USA’s most respected scholars in Soviet affairs, this volume discusses the question of what happens to an ideology in power, by focusing on the evolution and uses of Marxism in Soviet practice. As well as analyzing totalitarian behaviour, the author offers advice for Western policy from analysis of the past.
In the realm of political discourse there is a distinct gap in understanding between Russia and the West. To an outsider, the ideas that animate the actions of Russia's ruling elite, opposition, and civil society - from the motivations driving Russia's political actors to the class structure and international and domestic constraints that shape Russia's political thinking - remain shrouded in mystery. Contrary to the view that a bleak discursive uniformity reigns in Vladimir Putin's Russia, Political Ideologies in Contemporary Russia shows that the country is engaging in serious theoretical debates across a wide spectrum of modern ideologies including liberalism, nationalism, feminism, and multiculturalism. Elena Chebankova argues that the nation is fragmented and the state seeks to balance the various ideological movements to ensure that none dominates. She shows that each of the main ideological trends is far from uniform, but the major opposition is between liberalism and traditionalism. The pluralistic picture she describes contests many current portrayals of Russia as an authoritarian or even totalitarian state. Offering an alternative to the Western lens through which to view global politics, Political Ideologies in Contemporary Russia is a major contribution to our understanding of this world power.
Law, Rights and Ideology in Russia: Landmarks in the destiny of a great power brings into sharp focus several key episodes in Russia’s vividly ideological engagement with law and rights. Drawing on 30 years of experience of consultancy and teaching in many regions of Russia and on library research in Russian-language texts, Bill Bowring provides unique insights into people, events and ideas. The book starts with the surprising role of the Scottish Enlightenment in the origins of law as an academic discipline in Russia in the eighteenth century. The Great Reforms of Tsar Aleksandr II, abolishing serfdom in 1861 and introducing jury trial in 1864, are then examined and debated as genuine reforms or the response to a revolutionary situation. A new interpretation of the life and work of the Soviet legal theorist Yevgeniy Pashukanis leads to an analysis of the conflicted attitude of the USSR to international law and human rights, especially the right of peoples to self-determination. The complex history of autonomy in Tsarist and Soviet Russia is considered, alongside the collapse of the USSR in 1991. An examination of Russia’s plunge into the European human rights system under Yeltsin is followed by the history of the death penalty in Russia. Finally, the secrets of the ideology of ‘sovereignty’ in the Putin era and their impact on law and rights are revealed. Throughout, the constant theme is the centuries long hegemonic struggle between Westernisers and Slavophiles, against the backdrop of the Messianism that proclaimed Russia to be the Third Rome, was revived in the mission of Soviet Russia to change the world and which has echoes in contemporary Eurasianism and the ideology of sovereignty.
This thoughtful book describes the range of nationalist ideas that have taken root in Russia since 1856. Drawing on a wide range of archival documents and unparalleled interview material from the post-Soviet period, Tuminez analyzes two cases_Russian panslavism in 1856-1878 and great power nationalism in 1905-1914_when aggressive nationalist ideas clearly influenced Russian foreign policy and contributed to decisions to go to war. Yet not all forms of nationalism have been malevolent, and the author assesses competing nationalist ideologies in the post-Soviet period to clarify the conditions under which a particularly belligerent nationalism could flourish and influence Russian international behavior.
There is no question that tensions between Russia and American are on the rise. The forced annexation of Crimea, the downing of Malaysia Airlines flight 17, and the Russian government's treatment of homosexuals have created diplomatic standoffs and led to a volley of economic sanctions. Much of the blame for Russia's recent hostility towards the West has fallen on steely-eyed President Vladimir Putin and Americans have begun to wonder if they are witnessing the rebirth of Cold War-style dictatorship. Not so fast, argues veteran historian Walter Laqueur. For two decades, Laqueur has been ahead of the curve, predicting events in post-Soviet Russia with uncanny accuracy. In Putinism, he deftly demonstrates how three long-standing pillars of Russian ideology: a strong belief in the Orthodox Church, a sense of Eurasian "manifest destiny" and a fear of foreign enemies, continue to exert a powerful influence on the Russian populous. In fact, today's Russians have more in common with their counterparts from 1904 than 1954 and Putin is much more a servant of his people than we might think. Topical and provocative, Putinism contains much more than historical analysis. Looking to the future, Laqueur explains how America's tendency to see Russia as a Cold War relic is dangerous and premature. As the situation in Ukraine has already demonstrated, Russia can and will challenge the West and it is in our best interest to figure out exactly who it is we are facing—and what they want—before it is too late.
Life in the modernist era not only moved, it sped. As automobiles, airplanes, and high-speed industrial machinery proliferated at the turn of the twentieth century, a fascination with speed influenced artists—from Moscow to Manhattan—working in a variety of media. Russian avant-garde literary, visual, and cinematic artists were among those striving to elevate the ordinary physical concept of speed into a source of inspiration and generate new possibilities for everyday existence. Although modernism arrived somewhat late in Russia, the increased tempo of life at the start of the twentieth century provided Russia’s avant-garde artists with an infusion of creative dynamism and crucial momentum for revolutionary experimentation. In Fast Forward Tim Harte presents a detailed examination of the images and concepts of speed that permeated Russian modernist poetry, visual arts, and cinema. His study illustrates how a wide variety of experimental artistic tendencies of the day—such as “rayism” in poetry and painting, the effort to create a “transrational” language (zaum’) in verse, and movements seemingly as divergent as neo-primitivism and constructivism—all relied on notions of speed or dynamism to create at least part of their effects. Fast Forward reveals how the Russian avant-garde’s race to establish a new artistic and social reality over a twenty-year span reflected an ambitious metaphysical vision that corresponded closely to the nation’s rapidly changing social parameters. The embrace of speed after the 1917 Revolution, however, paradoxically hastened the movement’s demise. By the late 1920s, under a variety of historical pressures, avant-garde artistic forms morphed into those more compatible with the political agenda of the Russian state. Experimentation became politically suspect and abstractionism gave way to orthodox realism, ultimately ushering in the socialist realism and aesthetic conformism of the Stalin years.
"What is Putin's ideology? is a key question for the contemporary world. This book analyses this ideology, which it terms "Putinism". It examines a range of factors which feed into the ideology--conservative thought in Russia from the nineteenth century onwards, Russian and Soviet history and their memorialisation, Russian Orthodox religion and its political connections, a focus on traditional values, and Russia's sense of itself as a unique civilisation, different from the West and due a special, respected place in the world. The book highlights that although the resulting ideology lacks coherence and universalism comparable to that of Soviet-era Marxism-Leninism, it is nevertheless effective in aligning the population to the regime, flexible, and applicable in different circumstances. And that therefore it is not attached to Putin as a person, is likely to outlive him, and is potentially appealing elsewhere in the world outside Russia, especially to countries which feel belittled by the West and let down by the West's failure to resolve problems of global injustice and inequality"--
This book studies the cultural, societal, and ideological factors absent from popular discourse on Vladimir Putin’s Russia, contesting the misleading mainstream assumption that Putin is the all-powerful sovereign of Russia. In carefully examining the ideological underpinnings of Putinism—its tsarist and Soviet elements, its intellectual origins, its culturally reproductive nature, and its imperialist foreign policy—the authors reveal that an indoctrinating ideology and a willing population are simultaneously the most crucial yet overlooked keys to analyzing Putin’s totalitarian democracy. Because Putinism is part of a global wave of extreme political movements, the book also reaffirms the need to understand—but not accept—how and why nation-states and masses turn to nationalism, authoritarianism, or totalitarianism in modern times.
A key text for advanced students of Russian politics and a radical new perspective on a world power.