Event

Russia’s illiberal conservatives and the warfare state

Russia's illiberal conservatives won the culture war but struggle on the economy. Katharina Bluhm explains why, and sheds light on why inflation now has become their battleground.

30 October 2026

09:00 - 10:30 Europe/Oslo

Language: English

NUPI, Rosenkrantz' gate 22, OSLO

Seminar

Themes

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Amid deepening wartime repression and securitisation, Russia can appear to be a country in lockdown: the President sets the agenda that regime loyalists implement. Behind the patriotic façade of wartime unity, however, an important contest quietly bubbles over who should run the economy, and what kind of state Russia is becoming.

Central to this is an illiberal-conservative movement that grew up in opposition to the 1990s reforms and has become a crucial pillar of the late Putin state ideology. Triumphant in cultural and social policy after 2012, they have made far less headway in creating an effective “developmental state” or dislodging the neoliberal-technocratic “economic bloc” within Russia’s ruling elite. The Kremlin’s pivot to military Keynesianism and deficit spending from 2022 is transforming Russia’s economic landscape and challenging once-dominant neoliberal orthodoxies.

Drawing on her 2026 book Russia and the West: Ideology, Economy, and Politics in the Post-Soviet Era, Katharina Bluhm traces how conservative and illiberal ideas entered the official mainstream well before the full-scale invasion—and why the Kremlin co-opted key figures from this movement without ever adopting its full agenda. She then considers the ongoing latent tensions exposed by the regime’s balancing act between deficit-spending military Keynesianism and preexisting neoliberal and technocratic governance norms. The topic of inflation now emerges as a key battleground in the battle between illiberal and neoliberal visions of economic development. The outcome of this struggle will have crucial implications for Russia’s wartime transformation.

Katharina Bluhm is Professor of Sociology with a focus on Eastern Europe and Russia at Freie Universität Berlin. She has published widely on the transformation from communism to market economies in Central and Eastern Europe, as well as on Russia’s new conservatism and its economic and social policies since 2000. Her most recent book is Russia and the West: Ideology, Economy, and Politics in the Post-Soviet Era (Lynne Rienner, 2026).

This event is hosted by RUSSNETT and will be held at NUPI on 30 October, 09:00-10:30. We will also live stream the seminar to NUPI’s YouTube channel. No registration needed for digital participation.