(Reset DOC) The aim of the two-day workshop held in Berlin at the Deutsche Gesellschaft Für Auswärtige Politik on the 22nd and 23rd June 2015 on The Evolution of Russian Political Thought After 1991 was to go beyond looking at Russia through the prism of Putin’s personality and motivations, and to comprehend what are the stakes of Russia’s contemporary political culture as well as Russia’s ideological trajectory over the last twenty-five years.
One of the main conclusions of the workshop is that political liberalism as an ideology and as a political thought in Russia has been largely discredited. Western countries and international organizations have probably underestimated the trauma of the collapse of the Soviet Union, which instilled in a significant part of the Russian public a distrust toward liberalism, there understood as an ideological justification to destroy the Soviet Welfare state. This disqualification of political liberalism, associated by the Russian public opinion with neoliberal economic practices responsible for huge socioeconomic inequalities, contributes largely, today, to the call within Russia for a return to a Great Power status. […]
