Crafting the State-Civilization Vladimir Putin’s Turn to Distinct Values

Since the Soviet disintegration, Russians have engaged in discussions of what constitutes their system of distinct values. Today the language of a “distinct civilization” is widely employed by top officials. This paper seeks to understand this discourse of distinctiveness as shaped by both history and politics. It studies the ideological shift by employing analysis of speeches by major officials and meaningful historical parallels. Like earlier historically significant concepts of value distinctiveness, Vladimir Putin’s civilizational discourse has resulted from a combination of external pressures and domestic vulnerability stimulating the rise of a distinct political coalition.