Mentor
Ivan Fomin is the head of the Ideas for Russia initiative. He also teaches at the Boris Nemtsov Program in Russian Studies at Charles University. His research is focused on political semiotics, Russian political discourse, and Putin’s regime’s ideology. He has worked at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow but left Russia after the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine. He was a Russia Research Initiative fellow at George Washington University, a fellow of the Fedor Stepun Program at Ruhr University Bochum, and a visiting scholar at Johns Hopkins University SAIS. He also contributed to research projects at INION RAN Center for Advanced Methodologies, Nicolaus Copernicus University, and Jagiellonian University. His publications have appeared in Communist and Post-Communist Studies, Demokratizatsiya, European Journal of International Relations, and International Theory. He holds a Candidate of Sciences degree in Political Science.
Project description
Does Putin’s regime have an ideology? And if it does, what is it? The 2014 Crimea annexation and the 2022 overt invasion of Ukraine indicated a shift in the Kremlin’s discourse towards more explicitly ideological messaging. However, Russia experts still disagree on whether Putin’s regime has a full-fledged ideology.
This project approaches the set of ideas employed by Putin’s regime as a “thin ideology”: a configuration with a narrow ideological core and a highly flexible periphery. More specifically, its ideology can be described as “thin statism”. It lacks a detailed doctrine but revolves around a relatively stable core in which the state functions as a central value.
To better understand the various ideological configurations employed by Putin’s regime, the project will distinguish between three versions of statism, based on values with which the statist core is combined. (1) Radical statism prioritizes the state as the ultimate value and demands that citizens make sacrifices for its interests and security. (2) Prosperity statism values the state as a means to ensure the welfare of its citizens. (3) Nationalist statism values the state as a means of pursuing and protecting the nation’s interests. All three statisms are to some extent used to justify Russia’s policies. However, they do so in different ways and are organized into distinct constellations to serve different purposes on various occasions. (In more detail, the approach is explained in “Two statisms of Putin’s ideology”.)
The project will examine how the statist ideological core is combined with other ideas and values to better suit different settings. In particular, the study will investigate how the ideological constellations in use vary with the regime’s goals—for example, whether it seeks to secure passive compliance, mobilize voters, or justify military escalation or de-escalation.
The study will analyze statist discourses across a wide variety of political genres and semiotic modes, from Putin’s speeches and official texts to classroom propaganda and pro-Kremlin popular culture artifacts. The selection of specific texts and genres will be made in collaboration with the interns.
Requirements:
A background in Russian studies, (multimodal) discourse analysis, content analysis, semiotics, or political philosophy is not strictly required, but will be an advantage.
B2-level Russian proficiency is expected. Students with lower or no Russian-language competence may still apply, but should provide an explanation of their anticipated role in the project in light of these language limitations.