Putin’s Totalitarian Democracy: Ideology, Myth, and Violence in the Twenty-First Century

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 Putinism-its tsarist and Soviet elements, its intellectual origins, its culturally reproductive nature, and its imperialist foreign policy-the 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 understand-but not accept-how and why nation-states and masses turn to nationalism, authoritarianism, or totalitarianism in modern times.