Everybody Hates Russia: On the Uses of Conspiracy Theory under Putin

if journalism is the first rough draft of history, academic scholarship about today's world risks becoming the equivalent of the infamous 1948 Chicago Daily Tribune "Dewey Defeats Truman" headline, rendered even more embarrassing by virtue of its publication 18 months later after two rounds of peer review.

I have been studying Russian conspiracy theories for over two decades, culminating in the publication of my 2019 book Plots against Russia: Conspiracy and Fantasy after Socialism. I was invited to give a talk that was eventually postponed several times due to COVID-19; when pressed for a title for my talk, I came up with "Everybody Hates Russia." That was in quotes, because my point was going to be that this really isn't the case. Two vaccinations and a booster shot later, when I finally gave the talk, my title had made it look like I was prescient, rather than what I really was, which is mistaken. Or, more charitably, the situation on the ground had changed so drastically that it was time to reconsider my conclusions.

I have long argued that Putinism is an empty, opportunistic excuse for an ideology and that years of op-eds demonizing Vladimir Putin and insisting that he was committed either to Soviet revanchism, great Russian imperialism, or quasi-mystical Eurasianism was the result of seeing him as a committed ideologue rather than a wily, self-interested chameleon. This was not a matter of making excuses for Putin, who had distinguished himself as a loathsome, authoritarian ruler who ruthlessly crushed dissent, fomented hatred against the LGBTQIA community, and illegally annexed Crimea. Rather, most of the conspiratorial blather Russian state-run media had been fomenting did not amount to anything like a coherent program.

And then on February 24, 2022, Putin launched an unprovoked, criminal, full-scale invasion of Ukraine, complete with indiscriminate bombing, looting, torture, and mass executions, ostensibly to protect the Russian-speaking population from Ukrainian "Nazis" (never mind the fact that most victims of Russian Federation's violence in Ukraine are from the Russian-speaking population). How did we get here, and how much of the justification of Russian violence is based on conspiracy theories?

To answer that question, we need to consider "Russophobia," the concept that forms the basis of Russian state and media discourse about the Russian Federation's relationship with the rest of the world. "Russophobia" (irrational hatred of Russia) is an old, not very good idea that has joined so many other old, not very good ideas to form one of the few stable pillars in the ever-shifting ideology that might be called "Putinism." The regime (and the Russian state media) have been hurling accusations of Russophobia right and left since Putin's return to the presidency in 2012, priming the Russian public to believe that the entire Western world is conspiring to destroy the Motherland. This notion is now, sadly, on display for all to see: Putin has justified his invasion of Ukraine as a defensive move against the American gay puppet Nazi drug addict regime in Kyiv. The insistence on the reality of Russophobia is how we got here.

Previously, I have had unkind things to say about the preoccupation during the 1990s under the first Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, with trying to workshop a new "Russian Idea." "The Russian Idea" is the title of an important work by the émigré philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev, published in 1944. Berdyaev did not come up with the term, of course, but he was the one to give it its most extensive treatment. The Russian Idea is less an idea than an idea about an idea. That is, the content of the Russian Idea can be filled with a variety of different notions, but the Idea itself is usually built on the premise that Russia has a unique historical destiny, an important purpose to play in the world. Yeltsin, in response to the general sense of rudderlessness in the aftermath of the collapse of communism, established a governmental committee to develop a new Russian Idea. In other words, the...