The Rise of the Russian Hawks: Ideology and Politics From the Late Soviet Union to Putin’s Russia

Faure’s wide-ranging and penetrating research traces the evolution of Russian conservative intellectuals from their informal ideological pursuits in the 1970s to their involvement in policymaking under Russian President Vladimir Putin. The book focuses on the various proponents of what the author calls “modernist conservatism”: Orthodox monarchists, imperialists, Eurasianists, and others united by vehement anti-Westernism and a commitment to an alternative, specifically Russian model of technological modernity. Alexander Prokhanov, a flamboyant writer and journalist since Soviet times, looms large in Faure’s narrative. In 2012, he founded the Izborskii Club, an “idea network” that brought together modernist conservatives of diverse strains. The club’s principal idea—that Russia should rely on its technological and military might to assert its civilizational distinction from the West—initially seemed too radical for the Kremlin. Yet since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Putin has increasingly adopted this political thinking. Still, Faure argues that, despite the Putin regime’s growing reliance on ideology, the current Russian leadership, unlike its Soviet predecessors, does not have a government institution in charge of ideological production and instead relies on think tanks outside the halls of power.