It is unclear how these people acquired a coherent ideology. What happened? Modern political science has been unable to understand the shift from one situation to another.
All discussions about Putin’s ideology have a methodological problem stemming from how the concept of “ideology” is understood. The definition of ideology as a holistic system of views has been blindly taken from books on political theory. Scholars are trying to reconstruct this system of views, with some concluding that there is nothing holistic – only postmodernism and an ideological market – and others, having reread everything from Dugin, Zinoviev and Gumilev, concluding that there is a holistic system, claiming to have found its basis.
But ideology is not a spiritual superstructure on top of material circumstances. It is what organizes those material circumstances, working on the level of the everyday. Ideology is how we see society, what guides our decisions, meaning every person has an ideology; it is not necessarily pulled out of books.
In a certain sense, everyone is an intellectual, since everyone has an idea of the world around him and his place in it. On the one hand, it is based on his life experience and, on the other, takes the form of the images, ideas and concepts that are conventional and most widespread in society.
Ilya Matveyev and I are working on a book on the causes of the Russia-Ukraine war, trying to address these methodological problems. Starting the war was an ideologically motivated decision. It is impossible to explain rationally what happened in 2014 and 2022 as realism in international relations. The decision to intervene militarily in Ukraine was rational, but in its own special way of looking at the world. [We address] the question of how Russia went from cynicism to ideology through a more complex theoretical understanding of what ideology is and how it works.
If it was not ideology, then what shaped Putin and his entourage? What is this material reality?Material reality is the reality that accompanied Putin and his group throughout their lives, namely the late-Soviet semi-criminal world combined with the ideology of the security services. The answers to the basic anthropological questions of what a human being is and what his nature is had already crystallized in the heads of these people in the 1980s.
Subsequent intellectual influences were embraced because they affirmed this anthropological framework internalized from [the days of] gangster capitalism.