As Russia continues its war against Ukraine, scholars work to explain the origins of the conflict and predict its potential outcomes. This necessitates a deep understanding of how the Vladimir Putin regime operates, including its development and relationships with actors beyond the Kremlin. Marlene Laruelle’s book, Ideology and Meaning-Making under the Putin Regime, provides such understanding through a nuanced examination of the regime’s ideological evolution, spanning not only Putin’s time in power, but also drawing connections to ideological debates from Russia’s imperial, Soviet, and Boris Elʹtsin eras.

Laruelle proposes that ideology is an important component of establishing order that shifts in relevance depending on context. According to her, the Russian regime has maintained continuity of its core ideological beliefs, “Russia should not collapse;” Russia is a “unique great power;” and “the state embodies the Russian nation” (19), but with flexibility in their interpretation and in construction of ideological narratives. She argues that “there is now an official ideology, eclectic and contradictory though it may be, which is in a hegemonic position” under wartime Putinism (71).

To trace the “sedimentation” of this ideology, Laruelle relies on qualitative analysis of government and ideological texts from “actors and institutions in ‘orbit’ around the Kremlin,” while building on two decades of interview and fieldwork research (8). Decentering Putin, she expertly weaves together ideological sources from different eras and “ideological ecosystems” to explain variation in how the regime has incorporated and instrumentalized different narratives over time. Laruelle includes quantitative analysis of presidential speeches, showing how concepts have changed in prevalence from 2000–23.

Russia’s relationship to the “West” and “Europe,” as “its main constitutive Other” (73) has fluctuated in the ideational realm and in foreign policy for centuries. Laruelle analyzes perspectives on whether Russia is a European power, and how the Putin regime’s relationship to the west has shaped its securitization of Russia’s culture and history with a gradual shift towards a blend of “imperial and irredentist themes” (126). These different perspectives lead to seeming contradictions that nonetheless work together to support regime stability, including Russia as “an alternative to the West in the name of Europe” (108), coexistence of imperial and Soviet heroes and ideologies in the historical narrative, or “the image of Russia as an empire” that is both reactionary and revolutionary (145).

Next, Laruelle details the development of strategic languages that work to support Russia’s counterrevolution against liberalism and the western-led liberal international order: civilization, conservatism, and katechon. In Russia today, conservatism, “the ideological cornerstone of the regime” (170), blends multiple ideological strands to create a national conservatism centered on protecting traditional values, respecting the uniqueness of national contexts—which fits well with civilizational narratives—and viewing the state as the generator of social order (192). Again, Laruelle finds flexible ideological coexistence, despite tension, as views of Russia as a shield against the degradation of the west can support “both isolationist and expansionist tendencies” (209).

Laruelle concludes with a comparison of Russia’s “geo-imaginaries,” of different “mental maps” of where Russia lies and which communities it leads: Eurasia, the Russian World, and the Global South (212), each of which themselves have multiple boundaries and definitions depending on the ideological entrepreneur. While she finds that the Eurasian and Russian World concepts have diminished in usefulness since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Russia’s positioning as an “anticolonial power” leading the Global South against western domination will be an effective ideological tool for gaining international and domestic support.

Laruelle’s book inspires many additional questions, as all good books do. Laruelle proposes that the regime had a “plurality of potential futures” beyond “War Putinism” (272), so why does ideological flexibility harden at particular points in time? Also, Laruelle follows the ideological thinking of a variety of figures, with some being more firmly integrated into the regime than others. A similar question then is what is the process by which integration occurs? Are these points of hardening and integration subject to common forces about which we can theorize, or are they largely contingent on specific contexts? Lastly, in the quantitative analysis, Laruelle counts the number of speeches including a particular term in a given year. It would be beneficial to know the percentage of documents per year containing the term in case there is wide variation in the number of documents analyzed each year.

This book will be of great use to those interested in Russian Studies from a variety of disciplinary perspectives, and more broadly to anyone seeking to understand how the Putin regime works, including its current foreign policy.