The project at the Krupp-Kolleg is part of a larger enterprise that investigates genesis and the actors of the new illiberal conservatism in Russia, as well as its ideas and practical influence on economic and social policies. With the appearance of a new generation of intellectuals at the beginning of the 2000s, conservatism was transformed from being a political stigma into a positive self-description. Russia’s new conservatives describe themselves as social or national while opposing both liberalism and communism. Most of them advocate a developmental statism that relies on an intervening federal state without challenging market economy and private property in principle. They have long supported Vladimir Putin, whose primacy in securing power is, however, in tension with the conservative modernization agenda. Much of the current research, which focuses on patrimonial, personalized power structures, in which ideas are at best instrumental, misses this conflict and the dynamics that has emerged from it.

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