Introduction
Part1: Ideological Foundations of the Russian State
1. The Empire of Meaning
2. Decontesting the Past: The Narrative of Russian Statehood and the Ideology of Putin’s Regime
3. A Never-Ending Rupture: The Contested Memory of Perestroika in Russia
Part2: Affect, Moral Sovereignty and Epistemic Closure
4. Slovo Patsana and the Aesthetics of the Russian Antiworld
5. The Phantasmatic Dimension of Culture Wars: The Case of Social Conservatism
6. Expo ‘Russia’: Narrating Past, Present and Future of Russia’s One Big Happy Family
7. Wave Genetics, DNA Genealogy, Telegony: Narratives of Pseudoscience in Contemporary Russia
Part3: War as Ideological Catalyst
8. What role did ideology play in triggering Russia’s invasion of Ukraine?
9. Russian Propaganda Tactics in Wartime Ukraine
10. Russian Voenkory as ‘Affective Entrepreneurs’ and the Mediatization of ‘Moral Sovereignty’
11. Politicized Law Enforcement and Its Ideological Orientation
Part4: Diffusion and Projection
12. Faith in Foreign Policy: The Geopolitics of Russian Orthodoxy in the Global South 13. The Concept of Neocolonialism in the Russian Regime’s Ideology
14. Russia’s “Anticolonialism” and the Design of an Illiberal International Disorder