Putin’s Neomedievalism: How Memory Politics Replaced Ideology in Russia

Dr. Khapaeva will discuss political neomedievalism, the memory politics that was instrumental to Putin’s oppressive regime. Political neomedievalism legitimized the Kremlin’s neo-imperial politics, the rule of terror, and increasing social inequalities. It also rallied Russians to support the war against Ukraine. Despite its importance for present-day Russia and beyond, political neomedievalism remains an understudied phenomenon. Recognizing that the age of ideology is over, Khapaeva argues that Putin’s regime demonstrates how memory politics has replaced traditional future-oriented ideologies, substituting more abstract theoretical discourses (“master narratives”) with decontextualized and misconstrued fragments of the past. Political neomedievalism helps transform the past into history’s only possible horizon and the politics of the past into the single vista of the Kremlin propaganda. Russia and the world are not returning to the Middle Ages, notwithstanding popular claims to the contrary. Instead, dictators and populists in Russia and other countries increasingly use medieval allusions to justify their anti-democratic politics aimed at creating new social and political regimes.

Dr. Dina Khapaeva is a Professor and the Russian Program Director at the School of Modern Languages, Georgia Institute of Technology. Until 2009, she was Director for Research at Smolny College of Liberal Arts and Sciences and a professor at St. Petersburg State University, Russia.

Her recent books include Putin’s Dark Ages: Political Neomedievalism and Re-Stalinization in Russia (Routledge, 2023), Crimes sans châtiment: Aux sources du poutinisme (Éditions de l’Aube, 2023, trans. Nina Kehayan), The Celebration of Death in Contemporary Culture (The University of Michigan Press, 2018), and a collective volume, Man-Eating Monsters: Human Exceptionalism in Popular Culture, ed. Dina Khapaeva (Emerald Publishing, 2020).