The Political Economy of the Russian Religious Renaissance - The Place of Putinism Between Spirituality and Modernity -

Abstract

The downfall of the USSR three decades ago caused a moral and political vacuum in post-soviet countries, and an extreme form of capitalism came to fill that void. Russia today confronts itself with the same questions it faced before the collapse of the Empire: how can aspirations to modernization coincide with a crude materialistic approach to society devoid of spirituality? We shed light on the contributions of the Christian philosophers of the Russian Religious Renaissance, and notable dissenters of orthodox Marxism in the early twentieth century, namely Tugan-Baranovsky, Solovyev, Bulgakov and Florensky. Through a selected analysis of these authors’ ontological reaction against the then prevailing orthodox Marxist ideology, we delineate the scope of an under-researched political economy of the spiritual world. Finally, we provide the foundations of a reconstruction of Russia’s intellectual History, a post-communist reinterpretation of its political economy and a renewed understanding of Putinism, between spirituality and modernity.