Putin's Totalitarian Democracy

This book studies the cultural, societal, and ideological factors absent from popular discourse on Vladimir Putin's Russia, contesting the misleading mainstream assumption that Putin is the all-powerful sovereign of Russia. In carefully examining the ideological underpinnings of Putinismits tsarist and Soviet elements, its intellectual origins, its culturally reproductive nature, and its imperialist foreign policythe authors reveal that an indoctrinating ideology and a willing population are simultaneously the most crucial yet overlooked keys to analyzing Putin's totalitarian democracy. Because Putinism is part of a global wave of extreme political movements, the book also reaffirms the need to understandbut not accepthow and why nation-states and masses turn to nationalism, authoritarianism, or totalitarianism in modern times.

Provides a new, comprehensive explanation of why ideological authoritarianism reigns in Russia Highlights the warning signs of authoritarian and totalitarian movements Explains how populations might come to reject globalism, democracy, and rationality

Autorentext
Kate C. Langdon is an Erasmus Mundus scholar. She studied at Vassar College in New York and Charles University in Prague.
Vladimir Tismaneanu is Professor in the Department of Government and Politics at the University of Maryland, College Park, and a Global Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, USA.

Inhalt

1. Recentering Putinism.- 2. The Inheritance of an Autocratic Legend.- 3. Enter the Hero.- 4. The Intellectual Origins of Putinism.- 5. Putinism as a Culture in the Making.- 6. Russian Nationalism in Education, the Media, and Religion.- 7. Russian Foreign Policy: Freedom for Whom, to Do What?.- 8. The New Dark Times.