Contemporary Russian politics is often characterized as being bland and uniform, but this superficial impression hides a turbulent and contentious public sphere in which issues of Russian identity and national destiny are discussed with vigor and passion. This study by Østbø, based on PhD work on the same subject submitted in 2011 and updated to October 2015, focuses on one of the leitmotifs of the intellectual-nationalist debate, namely the idea of Russia as the Third Rome. This approach generates a rich and detailed study that provides a window into some of the most important issues shaping public discourse. The influence of the chosen thinkers in shaping policy is relatively limited, despite their prominence in the media, yet the discussion provides an important window into the concerns shaping contemporary Russian national identity.

Østbø has selected four thinkers as representative of the various poles of Russian nationalist and Third Rome thinking: Vadim Tsymburskii (who died in 2009), Alexander Dugin, Nataliia Narochnitskaia and Egor Kholmogorov. Their works have gained in prominence with the turn towards a more assertive foreign policy since the Ukraine crisis of late 2013, but one of the fundamental postulates of Vladimir Putin's regime is to keep social forces and intellectual movements strictly subordinate to the needs of regime perpetuation. Putin uses these movements as part of his strategy of faction management, and although the genie of irreconcilable Russian nationalism was let out of the bottle in the heat of battle in 2014, since then it has been forced back on the defensive. There has nevertheless been some spill-over, notably the insertion of the notion of the katechon, the nationalist idea of Russia as the bulwark against the chaos of the apocalypse and disintegration of world order, into the 2013 Foreign Policy Concept of the Russian Federation.

The letter by the monk Filofei of Pskov to Tsar Vasilii III in 1511 argued that “Two Romes have fallen, a third stands, a fourth there shall not be.” Østbø applies the notion of political myth to frame the discussion of the thinking about the Third Rome by the four thinkers, accompanied by an impressive discussion of various theories of nationalism. Østbø's methodological and conceptual discussion of myth is presented concisely and effectively. For him a political myth is far from a falsehood but a way of shaping narratives in specific historic contexts. The Third Rome idea is examined as both a foundational myth of Russian exceptionalism, but at the same time, the mythopoeic character of the notion is comprehensively analyzed as well as the philological background to the myth. Østbø argues that the common characterization of the Third Rome myth as inherently expansionist and imperialist is mistaken.

The four authors have been chosen as representing different facets of Russian nationalist thinking. Østbø places Russian nationalists along the two axes of religion and territorial orientation. Tsymburskii is characterized as less Orthodox and more “core-oriented” (based on his isolationist notion of “Island Russia”); Narochitskaia is more Orthodox but equally core-oriented, that is, not imperialist; Dugin, on the other hand, is less Orthodox but more imperialist; and Kholmgorov is both imperialist and Orthodox.

Tsymburskii had a varied career, beginning as a philologist and then a researcher at the Institute for U.S. and Canadian Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences (ISKRAN). In politics, he began as a “democrat” in the Gorbachev era, but after 1991 adopted a radically neo-isolationist position with Third Rome Russia represented as an island. Dugin is the best known of the four, drawing on an eclectic range of sources to advance his geopolitical theory of immutable conflict between Russia and the west. Østbø notes the high level of violence in Dugin's thinking, notably in his representation of Raskolnikov's murder of the pawnbroker in Crime and Punishment. Narochnitskaia represents the more conservative Orthodox part of the Russian national spectrum, describing herself as a neo-Slavophile. Her most famous work, Russia and the Russians in World History, stresses the permanence of conflict between Orthodox Russia and the west. For her, the Third Rome myth has nothing to do with territorial claims. As for Kholmogorov, he remains an active participant in the nationalist ferment in Russia, and advances a type of conservative “pragmatic imperialism.” All authors advance distinctive interpretations of the Third Rome political myth, but all four have an embedded notion of Russia as some sort of katechon against the chaos raging in the world, a bastion of spiritual and political resistance against the encroaching chaos.

Østbø has provided a powerful and convincing study of the distinctive intersection of time and space, as interpreted through the prism of Third Rome thinking, in Russian nationalist discourse today. This is not a debate, since the authors seldom engage with each other. This peremptory stance also applies to the study of Russian history, the interpretations of Russian national identity, and the place of Russia in the world. Russia is defined as unique in a way that enhances its moral status and global mission. The distinctive mix of rational analysis and anti-rational claims shapes a nationalist discourse that is tangential to the power system in Russia, but which also provides that power system with katechonic legitimacy. Putin's Russia is not the Third Rome, but it does believe in its unique mission.