Putinism beyond Putin: Political Ideas of Patrushev and Naryshkin. Presentation by Andreas Umland

On 16 September 2022, Dr. Andreas Umland presented a paper “Putinism beyond Putin: The Political Ideas of Nikolai Patrushev and Sergei Naryshkin“, co-authored by himself and Martin Kragh, at the panel “Russia: Politics of Resentment, Conspiratorial Thinking, and Far-Right International Networking“ chaired by Dr. Anton Shekhovtsov of the Centre for Democratic Integrity. The panel was organised in the framework of the Fifth Convention of the International Association for Comparative Fascist Studies “Beyond the Paranoid Style: Fascism Radical Right and the Myth of Conspiracy” held at the University of Florence (Italy). The paper was published on 27 May 2023, read it in full: Abstract: This essay adds to previous research of Putinism an investigation of the political thought and foreign outlooks of Russia’s Secretary of the Security Council Nikolai Patrushev and Head of the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR) Sergei Naryshkin, with a focus on their statements between 2006 to 2020. The paper outlines Patrushev’s and Naryshkin’s thoughts regarding the United States, Ukraine, and the idea of multipolarity/polycentrism. We then introduce Patrushev’s critique of liberal values and color revolutions, and Naryshkin’s statements on the memory of World War II and Western institutions. The salience of these altogether seven topics is interpreted with reference to three classical topoi in Russian political thought: the Slavophile vs. Westerners controversy, the single-stream theory, and the civilizational paradigm. Our conclusions inform the ongoing debate on whether to conceptualize Putinism as either an ideology or a mentality. Dr. Andreas Umland is an analyst at the Stockholm Centre for Eastern European Studies at the Swedish Institute of International Affairs, an Associate Professor of Political Science at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy in Ukraine, and the co-founder of the Centre for Democratic Integrity in Austria. Andreas holds a PhD in History and a PhD in Politics. He has published widely on Russian and Ukrainian ultranationalism with a specific focus on Neo-Eurasianism, comparative fascism, East European geopolitics, German Ostpolitik, among other topics. Andreas is a member of the board of the ComFas and the editor of the ibidem-Press book series “Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society” and “Ukrainian Voices”.