Translated material
“It is the end of ideology, the lack of ideology as a system allowed Putin to start and wage this war.” The Economist observer Arkady Ostrovsky about how the ideology of the Kremlin replaced aesthetics
This is the summary of the report “Imitations as an ideology”, which the observer The Economist Arkady Ostrovsky read at the conference “ Country and Peace: Russian Realities-2023 ”, organized by the Media Project “ Country and Peace ”. This is the second report from this cycle, and the first, read by Ekaterina Schulman, can be found here.
Since about 2007, the question began to sound in my conversations with editors and readers: “What, Putin and people from his environment - they believe in everything that they say?” But even starting with Munich’s speech, Crimea, war, the first big texts about Vladimir Putin’s ideology, it seemed to me that it was not so working. In fact, the question is, a person believes in something, or does not believe, is initially meaningless. People do not necessarily say what they believe in. But most often they believe in what they say. Many believe in what it is convenient for them to believe at the moment, and are confident in their rightness, and do not think about how to deceive everyone more and more. I think about this we observe with Vladimir Putin.
It is common that ideological regimes are much worse than imperisa. Hence attempts to find an ideology that would explain the aggressive war of Russia with Ukraine. But it seems to me that it was the end of ideology, the lack of ideology as a kind of slender system allowed Putin to start and wage this war.
Arkady Ostrovsky, observer The Economist
Why did I seriously think about ideology, and especially about the ideology of fascism? In the early days and weeks of the war, we all observed the emergence of aesthetics, which was very reminiscent of fascist: the appearance of all these title letters of the Latin alphabet and characteristic stylized texts, such as the text of Timofey Sergei. These texts seemed interesting to me precisely by their style: the contrast between the lack of mass support of the war in the behavior of people and the aesthetization (imitation) of fascism was obvious.
Against this background, a rather large case of texts appeared about whether this is a fascist regime. It is clear that it all depends on the definition of fascism and ideology in general. My idea was that it was possible to argue for a long time about the definition of the ideology of fascism as a teaching, program, but there is a win -win typological approach: if something looks like a duck, swims like a duck and grunts like a duck, then this is probably a duck.
I was interested in why the war, which was declared under the slogans of the struggle against Nazism, used not so much Soviet aesthetics as the aesthetics of fascization familiar to us by mass culture and Soviet cinema.
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