Sixty Shades of Statism: Mapping the Ideological Divergences in Russian Elite Discourse

The article designs and tests a framework that conceptualizes ideological divergences among the Russian elite by focusing on Radical Statism (Radical Gosudarstvennichestvo) and contrasting it with Radical Eleuthericism. In order to operationalize this distinction, the study develops lists of statist and eleuthericist topoi that serve as indicators for ideological positions. The framework is applied to the study of texts that are publicly produced by the Russian elite. The analysis divides the ideological spectrum of the top Russian decision-makers into six cohorts (hard, moderate, and soft statists and hard, moderate, and soft eleuthericists).