Putinism – Post‐Soviet Regime Ideology by Mikhail Suslov. BASEES/Routledge Series on Russian and East European Studies. London: Routledge, 2024. 286 pp. £36.00. ISBN 978‐1‐0321‐5388‐9

Putinism's ideological nature has drawn increased attention over the last few years. In part this is because Russia's war of choice in Ukraine has focused attention on Russian nationalism, imperialism, and the political mobilization of the Russian people. Discussion of these questions has not always involved much consideration of what ideology is, however, or concerted analysis of what ideas make up Putinism. Mikhail Suslov's brilliantly researched book—Suslov seems to have read everything—plugs these gaps and is an indispensable guide to the different intellectual strands and traditions that have twisted together to become Putinism, which Suslov labels Russia's "third official ideology" after Uvarov's Orthodoxy, Autocracy, and Nationality and Soviet Marxism-Leninism (p. 274). Suslov's book is the best work on Putinist regime ideology produced so far and it will be a long time before a better one is produced. This is an indispensable text given the increasing ideologization of Russian politics. For Suslov, Putinism as an ideology is not Putin's beliefs (which are not fully knowable to us anyway), nor some (self-proclaimed) complete and ready guide to the social world and human development like Soviet Marxism-Leninism. Putinism as an ideology is a bounded, but still broad, discourse that the elite—"a few thousand people, who are political figures, public experts, media personages, loyal academics, and the like"—use (p. 9). Thinking within the bounds of this discourse is necessary to be part of the elite and establishes a common language of politics and worldview. There are different ways into the discourse intellectually for members of the elite, since they can come to it through religion, political philosophy, nationalist ideas, and particular readings of Russian and world history, as well as the many possible combinations of these broad groups of ideas. They can also—presumably—come to it cynically, but motive is not the issue here since Suslov is not interested in belief but in the range of ideas that are contained within regime ideology and how they have emerged and developed together. Suslov's approach to Putinism is as a result partly a history of ideas as he traces Putinism's strands back through Russian thought, and partly a close reading of the range of positions taken within the elite on the core issues that Putinism as a bounded discourse seeks to address. Suslov's approach gives his book its structure. After outlining his approach to ideology and putting Russia's regime ideology in context by discussing arguments about Putinism as illiberalism, fascism, and what overlap there might be between it and popular attitudes, Suslov analyzes the historical antecedents of Putinism and its main pillars in conservatism, nationalism, religion, and geopolitics. Chapters on each of these topics make up the bulk of the book. Putinism, Suslov argues, is based on Slavophilism, and the ideas of Ivan Il'in and Aleksandr Zinov'ev. Suslov's summaries of the ideas Slavophilism, Il'in and Zinov'ev are masterly and at the same time focused on how old ideas are interpreted in the present. There is, Suslov argues, "no such thing" as Putin's "favourite philosopher" but collectively the Slavophiles, Il'in, Zinov'ev, and their interpreters have created the populist, communitarian, and anti-mimetic—against copying the West—strands of Russian political thought that underpin Putinism (p. 81). Suslov's discussion of conservativism shows how these strands developed into an ideology. This development was not straightforward given antipathy to ideocracy after the fall of the USSR and the lack of a social order that could be conserved. Russian conservatives had to work to find something to conserve, and this forced them to look backwards into history to discover Russian values to both recreate and protect. Over time this led to a particular view of ideology developing. As it developed, and especially given the role of the Russian Orthodox Church in debates, ideology was vulnerable to identitarian ideas as it searched for a vision of Russianness to defend. This meant that as a consensus about the need for an ideology developed it was not based on any teleology or even a positive vision. Instead, a consensus developed that ideology was necessary as a state "immune system" against Western erosion of Russian values, and as a means of developing Russia's great power status (p. 98). There are differences to Western far right ideas about community and ethnicity in the broad discourse that comprises Putinism, Suslov stresses, and differences in how community and great power are co-created. This makes Putinism unique among right-wing communitarian populisms but still a variant on a common theme right-wing populism that haunts the liberal world.