The Russian Regime Follows a Volkish-Imperial Ideology
In many analyses of the Ukraine war, the specific ideological dimension of Vladimir Putin's Racket regime remains underexposed.
By Udo Wolter, jungle.world 
(2022-05-05)
Many on the left, and not only those with an anti-imperialist bent, continue to attribute the striving for a new division or re-division of the world into geopolitical zones of influence primarily to NATO and the EU, while the aggression of Vladimir Putin's regime is at least seen as having a reactive dimension.
Previous contributions to the debate in this newspaper [jungle.world] have criticized such a view, interpreting the war rather as a reaction to internal crises of the authoritarian Russian model of rule. Putin's specific authoritarianism was also placed in a general tendency toward authoritarianism, which originated in the course of the global capitalist crisis process and had arrived in the capitalist heartland at the latest with the U.S. presidency of Donald Trump; among the losers of capitalist competition, this tendency took on particularly regressive forms.
Against this backdrop, the contrast in values and systems between West and East, which is now being invoked again, becomes recognizable as an ideological imagination, since this idea does not depict the contrast between universal freedom and human rights on the one hand and their absence on the other, but rather conceals the connection between the two models.
> The war of aggression against Ukraine is armed identity politics from the right with a nuclear option.
However, if authoritarian rule formations are primarily short-circuited with political-economic crisis dynamics, the specific ideological implications of Putin's authoritarianism remain underexposed. To understand what is at stake in this war, it is necessary to take a comprehensive look at the connection between rule and ideology in Putin's system. This presents itself first as a mafia-like racket-rule with Putin the autocrat at its head. State and legal institutions were systematically eroded under Putin in favor of personal exercise of power.
This system is supported by a volkish-imperial ideology whose missionary claims not only refer to imperial myths that go back to the Soviet Union. Its representatives also draw on the thinking of the so-called Conservative Revolution and the anti-modernism of Martin Heidegger. In the left here, this has so far been discussed, if at all, in terms of Putin enthusiasm in the New Right.
At the center of this thinking is often seen the "neo-Eurasian" ideology of Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin, who became a prominent figure in Russian public opinion, especially after the annexation of Crimea in 2014. He "consciously inherits the thinking of the German 'Conservative Revolution' and opposes modern thinking with a concept of time that is no longer linear but cyclical, as well as with a doctrine of radically different ways of being and a 'sacred geography,'" Micha Brumlik described in 2016 central elements of Dugin's radically anti-universalist-identitarian and anti-modernist thinking.
The extent of the direct influence on Putin of Dugin, who likes to present himself as a cross between a woodsman and Rasputin, remains disputed, however. Putin refers to the counter-revolutionary and fascist Russian thinker Ivan Ilyin (1883-1954), whose writings the presidential administration had distributed among governors and top officials in 2014. Opposition Russian intellectuals and experts on Eastern Europe point out that Putin's missionary worldview is shared by large sections of the political-military ruling class and nationalist think tanks. So-called oligarchs in Putin's close circle are also ideologues, for example Konstantin Malofeyev. The latter not only organized neo-Right European networking meetings with Dugin as a star guest, such as in Vienna in 2014, but also played a role in the annexation of Crimea and the secession of the "people's republics" in the Donbass - some of the separatist leaders there had previously been associates of Malofeyev. An avowed monarchist and Russian Orthodox fundamentalist, he went on record in a 2016 interview with the Austrian magazine Profil, saying, "There are no Ukrainians because we are all Russians," and making homophobic remarks about the "sodomite" EU.
Similarly, in his war speeches of February 21 and 24, Putin denied Ukraine's historical right to exist, accusing "the so-called collective West" of trying to "destroy our traditional values and impose on us their pseudo-values that corrode us, our people, from within, (...) attitudes that they already aggressively impose in their countries and that lead directly to degradation and degeneration." The homophobic ticket here apparently functions similarly to the anti-Semitic topos of Jewish-influenced cultural modernity.
In the Guardian, philosopher Jason Stanley analyzed the anti-Semitic implications of the worldview contained in Putin's war propaganda, according to which Russia is the victim of a "conspiracy by a global elite to instrumentalize the vocabulary of liberal democracy and human rights to attack the Christian faith and the Russian nation." Historian Bill Niven also analyzed ideological statements by Russian government officials on the website "Contemporary History," which he described as "anti-Semitic conspiracy theories."
Another cornerstone of Putin's thinking and that of his entourage is a definition of the enemy schooled in Carl Schmitt. Volker Weiß described this in his book "The Authoritarian Revolt" with the motif of the "enemy in space and form" in New Right thinking. In Putin's version, the space in question is a historically grown Russian sphere that is to be defended against Western influence and alleged plans for dismemberment and is determined not only geostrategically, but above all by cultural-identitarian thinking in imperial categories. The figure of the enemy is an imaginary West that threatens to dissolve Russian identity as an external and internal danger. This is defined by allegedly traditional values of culture, religion and binary-hierarchical gender order, which are threatened by the universal principles of human rights and individual freedoms marked as "Western.
How closely internal and external enemy definitions are linked is shown by Putin's angry speech on March 16, in which he spoke out against a "fifth column" of "national traitors" who "cannot live without foie gras, oysters and so-called gender freedoms" in the West and are "not with the Russian people. It is no coincidence that the same homophobic cipher for the threat to the traditional order of values by social-cultural modernization is used here as in his war speech against the external enemy quoted above. The addressees of this tirade were only superficially Western-liberal-minded oligarchs who refuse to be loyal to Putin, but ultimately the entire democratically-minded and intellectual opposition – the "Russian people" would "spit out" this "scum" in an act of "self-purification" like a fly that accidentally got into its mouth.
The double definition of the enemy, internally and externally, meets the logic of the Racket: As in a mafia gang, one owes absolute loyalty to the godfather; betrayal is severely punished. For Putin, turning to the liberal West is such a betrayal. It is also why, since he first became president, he has cracked down on Western-liberal oligarchs like Mikhail Khodorkovsky as well as human rights groups and civil society opposition, all of whom he says are "foreign agents." That is why, in 2014, he began to wage war on Ukraine, which, through its orientation toward the EU initiated by the "Orange Revolution" and the Euromaidan, in a sense lacked the loyalty it owed to Russia and committed treason.
This is about much more than ideological tinsel with which a kleptocracy decorates itself for legitimation purposes. Putin and his ruling class are obviously obsessively driven by narcissistic affronts to an imperial Russian self-image, caused by the dissolution of the Soviet Union as well as the previous decline of the tsarist empire. Universalist principles attributed to the "collective West" are blamed for both; Putin wants to redeem Russia from this ignominy and lead it to old and new greatness. This worldview means no less than that Putin and his entourage hate the emancipatory-enlightenment moments of modernity in a manner similar to militant Islamists or, precisely, the right-wing extremists in the West who are oriented toward the so-called Conservative Revolution. Seen in this light, the war of aggression against Ukraine is armed identity politics from the right with a nuclear option.