The Russification of the West

Abstract

The chapter reconstructs a particularly important episode in the genealogy of post-truth politics: the emergence of the regime of equivalence in the Russian postcommunist society and culture during the 1990s and its subsequent consolidation and weaponization by the Putin regime. The discussion of Russia’s ‘hybrid war’ on the West after 2014 has largely ignored the fact that this strategy was only deployed in Russia’s foreign policy after being successfully applied domestically for over a decade. The optimistic expectations of the Westernization of Russia in the post-Soviet period have given way to the fears about the Russification of the West, which turned out to be just as receptive to post-truth strategies and technologies as the Russian postcommunist society was since the late 1990s. The chapter retraces the emergence of the post-truth disposition in the late-Soviet period, marked by ideological disenchantment and societal disengagement from the political space, the intensification of this disengagement during the reform period of the 1990s, marked by the rise of a cynical and conspiracist mindset, and the eventual adoption of this disposition by the Putin regime as its quasi-ideological foundation, permitting the consolidation of authoritarianism and the marginalization of all opposition. The chapter concludes by addressing what is perhaps the most famous instance of resistance to this regime, Pussy Riot’s 2012 ‘punk prayer’.