Good With Fists: Right Turn and the Construction of the People in Putin’s Russia

How does Russia’s state power justify its aggressive foreign policy and the Russia Ukraine war? In other words, how did the biggest and most destructive conflict in Europe since World War II, the war between Russia and Ukraine, become possible? The main goal of this project is to find the answer to this question.

There are two strategies for justifying militaristic policy in Russian political discourse. One of these is the realistic justification, that is, the references to NATO enlargement, national security issues and a “sphere of influence.” The second is the moral justification, which is the focus of the project. This project is inspired by the approach taken by historian Claudia Koonz to study the Nazi Conscience. It is based on the idea that states or political regimes, which violate international law and human rights and undermine world order, do not make a conscious choice to be on the side of evil. On the contrary, in their own eyes they act in the name of the good; they always consider their actions to be morally and legally justified. At the same time, this project proposes to expand Koonz’s approach, because it is necessary to take into account not only the system of moral norms, but also a set of values, ideology, and rights in order to reconstruct the system of justification of state policy. Hence the project’s attention to the so-called ideological “right turn” in Russia and the problem of the formation of a political community, that is, the separation of “us” and “them.”

About a hundred years ago, the Russian philosopher Ivan Ilyin, who was once a supporter of fascism, expressed an idea that his critics called “good with fists.” This idea is that the state has an obligation to actively fight evil, and that this fight is morally justified, even if injustice is sometimes done. Russian President Vladimir Putin reproduces the same idea in his justification for launching a full-scale armed aggression against Ukraine (as Putin puts it, “good means being able to defend oneself”).

This project explores the philosophical preconditions of Putin’s moral justification for war, his political ontology, the state ideology of modern Russia and the process of nation-building, and the crisis of democracy in the post-Soviet states.