Director of Re:Russia and Visiting Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences, Vienna, 01.05.2022–30.04.2023.
As the face of European idea in Russia, Navalny incorporated everything that the forces of revanchism in the country oppose. But anti-Europeanism is no more organic to Russian politics than its opposite. Sooner or later, the pendulum will swing back the other way.
Russia’s anti-westernism and territorial revanchism have intensified. A case of deferred post-imperial syndrome linked to the collapse of the USSR? Maybe, says Kirill Rogov. But this alone hardly explains why associated policies are now apparently met with such widespread domestic popularity.
A surge of state violence and the subsequent curtailment of citizens’ right to protest, combined with an expansion of the authorities’ right to use force: Kirill Rogov reveals how the “Putin doctrine” previously applied to protests in Russia brought Ukraine to the brink of civil war.
