The Kremlin’s engagement in this ideological realm has exacerbated differences, with a case in the fore being the return of the statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky to Lubyanka square. Differences among Russian conservatives of various strains are often irreconcilable.
Discord is not limited to officialdom and the liberals that it steadily persecutes. However, for all the Kremlin’s effort, its promoted conservatism is far from consensual. Newly adopted “history laws” criminalized inappropriate interpretations of World War II. My History” was launched with the central idea that most of Russia’s ills had come from the outside. As Russian historian Alexey Miller pointed out in 2019, “State and state-aligned actors have come to dominate the scene of the politics of memory.” Two major organizations-the Russian Military Historical Society and the Russian Historical Society-were founded in 2012 under the Kremlin’s auspices. The government has therefore been vastly expanding its operation in the realm of ideas, symbols, and historical memory. Organizations that engaged in ideologically unwelcome activities have been cast as “foreign agents.”
The government also sought to inculcate a more positive, patriotic, and ideologically correct mindset.
Legislators have been adopting legal constraints on public expression, including freedom of assembly and freedom of speech. As soon as Vladimir Putin embarked on his third presidential term, stances were radically hardened, and those who joined anti-Putin protests became branded in the eyes of the conservative majority as immoral and unpatriotic. For about a decade, negative, anti-Western, and anti-liberal ideological trends have been on the rise in Russia-corresponding to the Kremlin’s increasing reliance on such ideological and symbolic instruments to consolidate its legitimacy.
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