I was born in Moscow to Armenian parents and completed a bachelor’s degree in philosophy at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, one of Russia’s most prestigious universities, founded in the 1990s as a think tank for economic and governmental reforms. It also had a reputation as the most liberal university in Russia, where students and teachers were allowed to express dissent and go to protests without facing repercussions.

As a student, I cofounded DOXA, a grassroots online student newspaper. At first, we covered issues at our own university, but then we started exploring issues at other universities and now we are one of the most well-known independent left-wing media [outlets] in Russia.

In April 2021, I was arrested with three other DOXA editors for publishing a video in support of students who faced retaliation for attending pro–Alexei Navalny protests. We supported Navalny as a political prisoner, not necessarily his political positions, but we were nevertheless arrested and put under house arrest.

We ended up spending a year under house arrest, during which I enrolled in a PhD program at University College London. The official charge was really absurd: since the protests happened during the pandemic, the state said we were putting students at risk of contracting COVID-19.

Meanwhile, the invasion of Ukraine started in February 2022, and DOXA was banned after the first week due to our firm antiwar stance. In April 2022 we received a sentence of two years of correctional labor. We filed an appeal, which gave us a window to flee the country. It was complicated since the state had confiscated our travel documents, but we made our way to Armenia where we received German travel documents and German humanitarian visas. Three of us came to Germany then.

Philosophy in Russian academia is really weird. Only a few departments teach it properly, and there is a lot of diversity between them, but the Higher School of Economics mainly focused on logic and analytical philosophy. Social and political philosophy was quite lacking. For example, we read the Communist Manifesto once and that was it — that was the only thing from the entire Marxist tradition we ever came across. It wasn’t even part of the main curriculum, but in an elective course.

I heard that students in cultural studies read some critical theory, like Walter Benjamin and some Frankfurt School, but the philosophy program had been totally purged of radical thinkers. Critical schools of thought like postcolonial studies or gender studies are very rare. There are two or three gender studies programs, but they are under constant threat.

The Soviet-era departments of Marxism-Leninism were closed in the 1990s and reestablished as political science or philosophy departments. Many of the instructors simply switched to other theories, from [Joseph] Stalin to Ayn Rand, so to speak. This is understandable, because in the Soviet Union, ideology was reduced to the symbolic repetition of the same, state-approved theses. The critical aspect of Marxism became very marginal. Thus, a lot of people who developed intellectually in the 1990s and 2000s were allergic to this kind of discourse and were open to anything but Marxism. A number of obscure, peculiar theories grew popular in the social sciences in the 1990s and 2000s because people just didn’t care anymore.

Formally, yes, and it actually is called the “Student Soviet” or council, but it is merely an advisory body that helps students with administrative issues. In most Russian universities it’s just window dressing for students who are close to the administration anyway and want a career in the public sector later on. I was in a students’ union for half a year — and it was bullshit.

No, no politics at all, not even advocacy for students’ rights — all that is immediately prohibited. Groups of students and teachers functioned outside formal institutions at some universities with larger numbers of left-wing students, especially Moscow State University. They were quite influential, but they died off as time went on. Nowadays most young people in Russia are politicized through independent electoral campaigns like Navalny’s, human rights organizations, or media.

The universities have been purged of political discussions, but online communities continue to exist, as well as independent circles called kruzhki that read [Karl] Marx and other thinkers. A lot of these groups are in the provinces, not just Moscow or St. Petersburg. There are some popular leftist bloggers, but there is no genuine left-wing party. There was the Russian Socialist Movement, the closest thing to a democratic left-wing party, but it was not allowed to participate in formal, institutional politics and dissolved this May after being included in the government’s “foreign agents” list. Another example is the Feminist Anti-War Resistance. Those are also important sites of politicization.

Authorities on all levels use these symbols, but all they stand for is a strong state, along the lines of, “The USSR was a great state with a glorious history, and we are also a great state with a glorious history.” Everything revolutionary has been erased from them. In Moscow, for example, many metro stations are named after radical thinkers like Peter Kropotkin, but their historical meaning is totally lost.

That’s a good question. I think he surely borrows a lot from Stalin’s playbook. I mean, he’s a KGB alumnus. His vision of the world is also very geopolitical: great powers divide the world up between themselves, and Russia can be a great power too. In order to achieve that, we need to show that we are strong.

In Putin’s view, all protest movements in Russia are instigated by the West. There is no place for any kind of a genuine opposition. That was the idea behind the implementation of the foreign agent law in 2012, which was extended to individuals in 2020. Previously, it only applied to NGOs that received grants from international donors, but now it’s very easy to be declared under international influence. For example, a professor who attends an international conference can be declared a foreign agent.

Yes, definitely. Especially since the beginning of the war, the “foreign agent” narrative has done a lot of harm to political discourse in Russia. A lot of people, even in my own circles, have started policing each other: “Oh, you are on American grants,” “You are on European grants,” and so on. It’s really terrifying. This notion of foreign spies and agents is very influential in Russia, even among people who think of themselves as anti-Putin.

This is something that war generally instigates. There is a real confrontation between Russia and the West, and a lot of Russians feel resentment. They feel like nobody cares about them, that the West is actually against them because of all the senseless sanctions that target Russian citizens rather than the Russian state or its elite, like visa bans. The West really pushed Russians into Putin’s arms and into this whole ideology of Russia versus the West, so that even anti-Putin Russians started thinking, “Okay, the West doesn’t want us either. Nobody likes us, so we might as well stand with Russia.”

Russian state ideology is a nationalist ideology. Every such ideology treats the nation as something homogenous that transcends time and space, whereas in reality, nations are formed by nation-states themselves. The same is true in Russia, where the state ideology focuses on glorious Russian history and presents Russia as monolithic.

In Russia, history — this ideological idea of a great Russian nation — replaced theory. This is complemented by so-called “traditional values,” which don’t amount to anything, as it’s not clear which traditional values are meant and whose tradition has value. In some ways, the ideas are copied from the American conservative right: anti-feminism, antigay, “family values,” all that stuff. It’s mostly artificial, I would say. There is an attempt to link it with Orthodox Christianity, but even that is artificial.

I think he probably believes all the stuff he says about Russian history, but it doesn’t amount to a coherent ideology. He doesn’t have any theory or ideas; it’s just nationalism. The problem here is the construction of the nation itself, because Russia was historically an empire, and there still are many ethnic and religious minorities in the country. Thus Russia’s nationalist state ideology balances between nationalism and a kind of multinationalism.

There are two different words for Russian people in Russian language: Rossiyane, which denotes Russians in the sense of a national identity, and Russkiye, which does so in the sense of an ethnic identity. It’s a vague construct, as it’s difficult to say that Tatars, Chechens, or Yakuts are Russki, since they’re not ethnically Russian or even Slavic. Thus the state employs a different kind of nationalism next to ethnonationalism to try to bind all these people together.

I’m not sure that Putinism could ever work without Putin. There are no ideological goals that go beyond him, and there is nothing he could leave behind ideologically. He could maybe become a cult figure for a nationalist minority, but I don’t know what his idea for the future is. He can only politically exist in the present. He has built a system that is not sustainable without his personal rule.

Russian sociologist Greg Yudin argues that Putin’s rule should be seen as a Bonapartist regime, which is actually like a bourgeois regime, but in which one leader balances the power of different segments of the bourgeoisie. He rules in their interests, but by himself. Economic power remains in their hands, but political power is in his hands. The regime can’t survive Putin because it depends on personal alliances with all these people. Any kind of change, any succession, would imply having to rebuild those alliances, and would result in political conflict.

I would disagree here. I think that Lenin is a very problematic figure for Russian state propaganda because on the one hand, he’s the founder of the supposedly great state, the USSR, but on the other hand, like Putin said in his speech announcing recognition of independence of the Donetsk Peoples Republic and the Luhansk People’s Republic, Lenin was the “creator and architect” of Ukraine. In that sense, it’s really different from the Soviet Union. In the Soviet Union, you wouldn’t have been able to criticize Lenin like that.

You could say that, but Stalin is not a sacred figure, either. What is really sacred in Putin’s propaganda are some specific events like the Great Patriotic War and defeating the Nazis. If you say anything against it or criticize how the Soviets fought the war, you’re done. Ten years ago, the biggest opposition TV channel, Rain (Dozhd), conducted an online poll about whether some Soviet actions during World War II were unjustified. After that, the channel was expelled from the Russian cable TV network.

Another foundational position for Putin is the unity of Russia. Surely no state takes kindly to separatists, but in Russia today, separatism is the most dangerous thing. Even just saying that the provinces should have more autonomy is completely off-limits.

Yet even if Russia is supposedly this great anti-fascist country, that coexists with Russian nationalism and xenophobia toward Muslims and people from Central Asia. Migrant laborers especially face that. It’s incomparable to what migrants endure in European cities — they are treated as subhuman. There is a joke in Russia that says we defeated the Nazis only to become them.

Dugin’s research center is called the Ivan Ilyin Higher Political School and was established in July 2023. Ivan Ilyin is a fascist Russian philosopher that Putin likes a lot.

There is this idea that Dugin is a great state philosopher, the creator of Russian state ideology who Putin listens to, but that’s just not true. Dugin is tolerated because he’s pro-Russia, but his theories aren’t taught anywhere. He enjoys some popularity, but it’s not like his ideas are published in newspapers or widely cited. He is still a marginal figure who markets himself in the West as this philosopher puppet master. It’s also very opportunistic of him to name the center after Ilyin, Putin’s favorite philosopher, which he can then use to gain more credibility.

Interestingly, Dugin’s center faced a huge pushback from students and also some professors, which I would not have expected in Russia in 2024. The protest was highly public and relatively successful, resulting in resignation of the university’s rector, but Dugin’s center stayed.

I think it would be difficult for him to play a major role. His reputation grew after his daughter was mistakenly assassinated by the Security Service of Ukraine, who were trying to assassinate him. He does have an audience, but his theories are quite obscure and esoteric. Russian state ideology is pragmatic, it doesn’t need complicated ideological constructs. Thus there is no use for Dugin’s theories in the Russian political machine. He’s merely an opportunist who is trying to gain more influence.

I think Navalny stands out among the Russian liberal opposition. His investigations showed how oligarchs and government officials enriched themselves at the expense of the rest of the country. He bravely announced his opposition to the war despite being imprisoned and became a martyr upon his death in February this year. This is why he is widely respected by political activists from my generation regardless of his political views, which could be summarized as anti-corruption populism.

Toward the end of his life, he also did something very important by deconstructing the liberal narrative that the 1990s were this great time when democracy was achieved before Putin came and destroyed it. Navalny began to criticize all of the liberals from the 1990s whose radical privatization schemes took everything from so many people, alienating them from politics altogether. He showed that those liberals who shed crocodile tears about Russia’s stolen democratic revolution actually destroyed Russian democracy themselves and gave birth to the status quo that allowed Putin to emerge in the first place.

These ideas are currently being developed by his team, which recently published a series called “Traitors,” a historical series about emergence of oligarchs in the 1990s. This critique was eye-opening for many young people and helped them understand how the privatizations of the 1990s created the class of oligarchs, ruined chances for democracy in Russia, and why so many older Russians are so distrustful toward democratic politics.