From Authoritarian Populism to War Violence. Debates and Controversies in Contemporary Russia

In the Russian context, populism refers to political dynamics that draw on contradictory heritages and philosophies. If the populism (narodnitchestvo) of the revolutionary movements of the nineteenth century died out after the Bolshevik revolution, it is populizm, in its authoritarian and reactionary sense, embodied by V. Putin, that has dominated public debates in Russia since the 2010s. If the concept of populism has the virtue of allowing a comparison between the Russian power and other illiberal regimes of its time (in the United States, Brazil, Turkey or Hungary), it must be refined to show the diversity of its uses in the Russian context, whether to designate the authoritarian state, the dissatisfied “low people” or the “techno-populism” of opposition. Once the massive war against Ukraine began in February 2022, populism seemed to be surpassed by the violence of the conflict. Critics of the aggression question the responsibility of the authoritarian power but also of the Russian people as a whole in supporting this imperialist war. In order to get out of a normative posture, sociological description reveals the ordinary incarnations of the populist project that allows the violence of war.