Geopolitical Imagination Soviet and Post-Soviet Politics and Society Bd215 - Mikhail Suslov Kartoniert (TB)

In his timely book Mikhail Suslov discusses contemporary Russian geopolitical culture and argues that a better knowledge of geopolitical concepts and fantasies is instrumental for understanding Russia's policies. Specifically he analyzes such concepts as Eurasianism Holy Russia Russian civilization Russia as a continent Novorossia and others. He demonstrates that these concepts reached unprecedented ascendance in the Russian public debates tending to overshadow other political and domestic discussions. Suslov argues that the geopolitical imagination structured by these concepts defin es the identity of post-Soviet Russia while this complex of geopolitical representations engages at the same time with the broader international criticism of the Western liberal world order and aligns itself with the conservative defense of cultural authenticity across the globe. Geopolitical ideologies and utopias discussed in the book give the post-Soviet political mainstream the intellectual instruments to think about Russia's exclusion-imaginary or otherwise-from the processes of a global world which is re-shaping itself after the end of the Cold War they provide tools to construct the self-perception of Russia as a sovereign great-power a self-sufficient civilization and as one of the poles in a multipolar world and they help to establish the Messianic vision of Russia as the beacon of order tradition and morality in a sea of chaos and corruption.