Democracy Revised: Democratic Imaginary and Emerging Autocracy in Post-Soviet Russia

Contemporary autocracies often maintain a connection with democracy. They do not entirely dismantle the democratic structures established within unfinished modernization projects. Instead, they emerge as “electoral autocracies” and manipulate the concept of democracy offering alternative interpretations and meanings to further their illiberal agenda. The paper delves into the revision of democracy and how the democratic imaginary is utilized in the context of emerging autocracy in post-Soviet Russia. While the post-Soviet Russian autocracy adjusted democratic institutions for its own objectives, it also intended to appropriate the concept of democracy at the semantic and symbolic levels. The rise of Putin’s autocracy is characterized by the radicalization of cultural-civilizational particularism endorsing anti-democratic illiberal arguments. Through this adaptable hermeneutic framework, the Russian authorities tend to relativize the concept of democracy, criticizing, and dismissing the relevance of liberal democracy. Simultaneously, they articulate a distinct “sovereign” version of democracy and claim that non-liberal regimes are legitimate forms of political modernity. The autocratic political discourse on democracy is intrinsically non-democratic, as the lack of intellectual autonomy, control, and closure of discourse constrain the scope of meaning. The resulting heteronomous conception of democracy presents a static and ahistorical society predestined to (re)produce a single pro-authoritarian cultural-political pattern.