Chapter 6 shows that Russian hawks entered the regime’s market for ideology in the years 2005–12. Transactional relations were established between modernist conservatives and the ruling party, whereby the former’s ideological discourse was sponsored as a strategic resource for the regime’s legitimation against oppositional forces and for its distinction against the Western model of liberal democracy. In 2012, the creation of the Izborskii Klub provided institutional form to this interelite network aimed at gaining policy influence over more liberal-inclined elite networks.

Chapter 8 discusses how the Russian regime’s invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 concretely enacted Russian hawks’ conception of Russia as an imperial great power that should rely on its technological and military might to assert its civilizational distinction from the West. The chapter argues that the Russian regime has restored elements reminiscent of the Soviet-style “vertical,” facilitating the propagation of norms and principles through a bureaucratic chain of command. However, it has not completely reconstructed a cohesive institutionalized state apparatus. Its doctrinal framework remains adaptable. In addition to official state-led initiatives, the regime continued to oversee ideology formation through interactions and transactions with a variety of nonstate ideological entrepreneurs. This involvement of diverse actors across state and nonstate realms fostered a certain degree of polarization within policy circles. Moreover, the hawks’ production of narratives justifying Russia’s imperialism and war violence encountered resistance from recent intellectual emigrants who have established organizations in exile dedicated to fostering critical thinking and dissent in intellectual circles.

Chapter 7 finds that, from 2012 to 2022, the Izborskii Klub evolved from a state-sponsored think tank, whose ideas were used as legitimizing sources for the regime’s policy decisions, to a private lobby group serving as the ideological basis of a conservative interelite network. The alternative state promotion and demotion of the club demonstrates the executive power’s limited and contextual endorsement of ideological narratives and its principled commitment to maintaining a certain degree of pluralism and policy flexibility through the attribution of shifting power weights to different elite blocs.