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Vladimir Putin's macho image and his deployment of a masculinized Russian nationalism have fascinated Russians and non-Russians alike, generating considerable public and scholarly analysis. This article argues that the appeal of Putin as a powerful and hypermasculine leader over the last twenty years is best understood not just in the larger geopolitical context of Russia's national and economic decline in the 1990s but also in terms of Soviet and post-Soviet discourses of failed manhood. In particular, this work focuses on the widespread critique of men as fathers in the 1950s and 1960s and the accompanying campaign to create a new model of Soviet fatherhood, aiming to make men into "family men" and better fathers. The construction of the new ideal father—actively engaged in household tasks and child-rearing—challenged the Soviet gender order and contributed to the development of a domestic and family-oriented model of Communist manhood. Although it is primarily an investigation of the problematization of Soviet fathers and the reconfiguration of Soviet fatherhood in the 1950s and 1960s, this article also suggests that perceptions of failed fatherhood and Communist manhood in the post-Stalin and late Soviet eras, combined with post-Soviet anxieties about masculinity in the new political and economic order of Russia in the 1990s, provide a window into the appeal not only of Putin and his strongman persona but also of the broader narratives of masculinized nationalism in contemporary Russia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses Russian President Vladimir Putin, focusing on the reasoning behind his actions and how his views affect Russia and its people. It also looks at Putin's affinity with the past, and his desire to invigorate a Russian nationalism. Other topics of the article include the Cossacks, Russia's unofficial nationalist army, the Russian mentality of greatness, and Putin's belief that he can act without repercussions. It also explores the relationship between Putin and other leaders including former British Prime Minister Tony Blair and former U.S. President George W. Bush, and Putin's ability to blend the political and the personal through his grudges.

Post-Soviet Russians' identity continues to evolve. While ‘Eurasianism’, with its idea of ‘symbiosis’ between Russians and Muslims of various ethnic backgrounds, has started to decline and has been replaced in the minds of the elite and some of the general public with ‘Byzantism’, a peculiar Russocentric ideology sans traditional Slavophilism and rising racism. ‘Byzantism’ emphasizes the importance of transethnic Orthodoxy and Russian language/culture as key elements of Russian civilization. It also implies adherence to a strong corporate state and the assumption that Russia is surrounded by a hostile East and West, the last more dangerous for it undermines the spiritual core of Russian/Byzantism civilization. These views, however, are challenged by those who believe that Russia is a part of the West or, to be precise, of Central/Western Europe. One sees the clash of these views in response to a movie on the death of the Byzantine Empire, which was produced in 2008 on the eve of Putin's transfer of power to Dmitry Medvedev. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article discusses the role of representative strategies in twentieth-century Russian culture. Just as Russia interacted with Europe in the Marquis de Custine's time via discourse and representation, in the twentieth century Russia re-entered European consciousness by simulating 'socialism'. In the post-Soviet era, the nation aspired to be admitted to the 'European house' by simulating a 'market economy', 'democracy', and 'postmodernism'. But in reality Russia remains the same country as before, torn between the reality of its own helplessness and poverty, and the messianic myth of its own greatness. Post-Soviet culture is a product of Stalinist culture. 'Russian postmodernism' was created less by artists, writers, poets, and film makers, than by theorists and critics. At the beginning of the 1990s, a need to describe contemporary Russian culture emerged. In this way, 'Russian postmodernism' arose from the desire to 'sell' projects in the West-from the simple obligation to describe socialist experience in concrete, transferable terms that Westerners could grasp. The nostalgia experienced by the post-Soviet era creates its own simulated postmodernism, in which the matrices of the construction and functioning of culture cease to be connected with specifically Russian (Soviet) history, and instead reproduce Western models almost exactly. We are facing yet another attempt at radical cultural modernization. If the first attempt (revolutionary culture) was the most original and fruitful, and the second (Stalinist culture, Socialist Realism) was less productive but still original, then the third, post-Soviet, attempt (rich in individuality, but lacking in original ideas or style) is for the moment the least productive and original. If we exclude sots-art (conceptualism) from 'Russian postmodernism', there would be nothing left. Clearly, an original cultural model in post-Soviet Russia will not take shape until original strategies for processing the country's cultural past are developed. In their turn, these strategies can only result from a radical transformation of post-Soviet identity into a new, genuinely Russian one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses Russian civilization and the feelings of nationalism which dominant Russian cultural identity. The reshaping of Russian cultural and civilizational identity following the fall of the Soviet Union is explored. The importance of religion, power, and culture in Russian national identity is analyzed. Reasons for nationalistic tenancies are also examined.

In the social sciences, nationalism is viewed as a primarily political phenomenon. Modernists such as Eric Hobsbawm have theorized that nationalism as a concept did not exist before the French Revolution, but Michel Bouchard, following the revisionist notions of Adrian Hastings, who proposes that the Bible and Christianity served as the foundation of England as a nation in the Middle Ages, tests Hastings' theory against the Russian case and concludes that the earliest traces of national self-consciousness in Kievan Rus' are found in the 11th century in such texts as Old Church Slavonic Psalters and apocrypha. He seeks the roots of the Russian nation not in the political sphere but in Eastern Orthodox Christian religious texts and demonstrates that the basic lexicon for describing national feeling in contemporary Russia harkens back to this early period. Examination of the "Primary Chronicle" and Metropolitan Ilarion's "Sermon on Law and Grace" lead the author to assert that in Kievan Rus' the concept of nation was formulated in a manner analogous to the way in which it is understood in Russia today. Bouchard declares that modernist theories are not adequate to comprehend the phenomena of the nation and nationalism that are characteristic of the Russian Federation and the Russian diaspora. [ABSTRACT FROM CONTRIBUTOR]