russia as an anti- liberal european civilisationConclusions
Among the three ‘civilisational grammars’ available for position-
ing Russia in relation to Europe, the Kremlin chose the second one
- of being a European country that follows a non- Western path
of development – already in the second half of the 1990s. Since
then, it has been gradually constructing an ideological posture,
cemented around the concept of conservatism. This posture has
been progressively refined into the three ‘declensions’, manifest
in concrete public policies and new coercive legislation. The con-
servative posture, and in particular the language of morality, are
seen as the way to rehabilitate Russia as the other Europe, making
it possible to reject Western liberalism while claiming to be the
authentic Europe. Within this ideological posture, plurality is
maintained, and even the institutionalisation of the three ‘declen-
sions’ still offers some sort of room for manoeuvre, including
many internal disagreements. This limited plurality has prevented
the constitution of a doctrine, properly speaking, on such key
matters as the relation between Church and state, the definition
of a core Russian identity, the relation to the imperial past and
current migration policy.
How does the analysis presented in this chapter relate to the
broader debate about Russian nationalism? Scholarly debates
have tended to overestimate the ideological contents advanced
by Russian intellectuals and politicians and underestimate the
personal trajectory or the institutional location of these entre-
preneurs of nationalism. As a result, nationalism becomes a
confusing notion employed to define several groups of people
or agencies, with different tools for disseminating their ideas,
speaking to different constituencies, and with highly diverging
agendas (for more on this, see Laruelle 2014a). State representa-
tives, politicians rallying around the regime or in opposition, the
clergy, academic or quasi- academic figures, skinhead groups – all
these may be encompassed as bearers of ‘Russian nationalism’,
something that does not help in building a relevant interpretative
framework.
Taking the state narrative as my focal point, I have sought to
encapsulate what is often interpreted as nationalism and show