Russia's post-Cold War marginalisation in international affairs during the 1990s only temporarily suspended a powerful strand of exceptionalism and messianic thinking in Russian foreign policy discourse. By the late 2000s official discourse often reflected conservative ideas about Russia's ‘indispensable’ role in the world, and its engagement in a civilisational struggle, reflected in disputes over values and status in a contested international order (Lo 2015: 49–50). Putin's third term became identified with a ‘civilisational turn’, in which Russia claimed to represent a post-Westphalian ‘state-civilisation’, with a special role to play in international affairs (Chebankova 2013a; Linde 2016; Tsygankov 2016). Russia's international role was increasingly expressed in exceptionalist terms, reviving a long historical tradition of messianic thought in Russian political philosophy and spiritual thinking.

This messianic discourse characterised Russia as a civilisation fated to play an essentially tragic role in an imperfect world, a bulwark against the chaos and destruction unleashed by the dangerous excesses of American liberalism. Russia saw itself ‘as a unique restraining factor in the world of increasing chaos’ (Engström 2014: 362). The sources of this worldview can be traced to historical ideas of Russian exceptionalism, particularly reworkings of the theory of Moscow as the ‘Third Rome’ (Duncan 2000; Poe 2001; Østbø 2016). Since the 1990s these traditional Orthodox eschatological frameworks have been retheorised by radical conservatives through a variety of traditions, including Carl Schmitt's secular reworking of the Biblical figure of the katechon, portraying Russia as ‘the restrainer’, the power that holds back the apocalypse and maintains an imperfect order in a sinful world.

Schmitt and the Katechon

Schmitt's view of history denounces a liberal teleology, an idea of continual progress towards a better world, instead favouring a Christian eschatology, in which the world is inexorably moving towards the end times and humanity is continually threatened by a descent into chaos and disaster (Arvidsson 2016; Lievens 2016). Global conflict can be understood as a secularised version of the constant struggle between Christ and the Antichrist, in which ‘[t]he meaning of history … is not “progress” or unity, but salvation’ (Koskenniemi 2004: 501).