*Originally published in 2023 and preserved as part of our archive project. E-International Relations is free to read. We rely on reader support to make this possible.

Marlene Laruelle, PhD, is Research Professor of International Affairs and Political Science at the George Washington University, Director of the Institute for European, Russian, and Eurasian Studies as well as of the Illiberalism Studies Program. She works on conservatism, illiberalism and nationalism and has studied Russia’s ideological landscape for three decades. Her recent publications include Is Russia Fascist? Unraveling Propaganda East and West (Cornell, 2021) and Entangled Far Rights: A Russian-European Intellectual Romance in the 20th century (Pittsburgh, 2018).

Where do you see the most exciting research/debates happening in your field?

I see a lot of exciting debates happening in the fields of both Russian Studies and Illiberalism. In the field of Russian Studies, there are mixed feelings, obviously, because of Russia’s full-scale war on Ukraine: a lot of pessimism regarding the future of conducting research in Russia and difficult discussions about our collective responsibility and need for introspection, but also fascinating – and welcome – transformations thanks to new epistemological interrogations, with the most polarising of these likely the idea of ‘decolonising’ the field. In the other area I cover, illiberalism, I think there is growing agreement among scholars that the concept is meaningful, especially as its main competitor, populism, has faded due to inflation and overstretch. I see many research directions emerging around the concept itself, its situational relationship to liberalism, its ambivalences towards neoliberalism, its grassroots aspect, its multiple reconceptualisations in different cultural contexts, etc.

As a leading scholar on the development of conservative thought, national identity and illiberalism in Russia, past and present, and as someone who initially trained as a historian, what is the utility of history in interpreting current events?

I believe we cannot understand today’s world without knowing history. Not because history repeats itself or because historical parallels make sense – they often do not and ‘trap’ us in paradigms that do not fit, such as seeing Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a repetition of the Second World War or interpreting the tensions between the West and Russia as a new Cold War. But because I believe in the longue durée, in the existence of long-term political, economic and cultural features that shape, constrain and inspire both elite and public opinion. Of course, there is always room for transformations, innovations, revolutions and breaks from the past, but there are heavy legacies to deal with, especially in the realm of geography, politics, identity and ideology. I think the social sciences – especially English-speaking political science, due to its obsession with statistical demonstration – do not sufficiently enter into dialogue with history. 

Russia is a test case for introducing history into our analysis of the present: continuities with the Soviet past, as well as with the imperial past, help us capture some evolutions, even if we should not allow ourselves to become imprisoned by them (as with the trope that ‘Russia will never democratise because it was never a democracy’). Reintegrating the history of state repressions, family memory traumas and forced transformations of the........

© E-International