In early 2014, President Putin distributed as New Year presents editions of three books: Solov’ëv's Opravdanie dobra [Justification of the Good (1899) [Solovyov 1988 / 2005]], Berdiaev's Filosofiia neravenstva [The Philosophy of Inequality (1923) [Berdiaev 2004b / 2015]] and Il’in's Nashi zadachi [Our Tasks (1948–54) [Il’in 1993]] (Eltchaninoff 2015: 7; Laqueur 2015: 177). All along Russia's border, Europeans were eager to know what motivated the actions of the President of the Russian Federation. Michel Eltchaninoff's Dans la tete de Vladimir Poutine tried to meet this demand. Eltchaninoff saw continuity: ‘The USSR was not a country, but a concept. In Putin's hands, Russia is once again the name of an idea’ (Eltchaninoff 2015: 171 / 2018: 169). If this is true, then the quest for a new Russian idea that haunted Russian political philosophy in the 1990s has been answered by the current administration. In fact, the Russian government has several ideological constructions at its disposal: the Realpolitik framework of a regional power with global ambitions, the vision of a pan-Orthodox or pan-Slavonic world under Russian leadership that defends traditional values against Western liberalism, materialism and individualism, and the vision of a large Eurasian block between Europe, the Middle East and East Asia that acts as successor to the Russian Empire and Soviet Union.

Having, in the 1990s, licked its post-Soviet wounds, but also feeling betrayed by an at first welcoming but then excluding West, Russia entered a new era around 2000. Politically, this was the beginning of the Putin(–Medvedev) presidency. Socio-economically, it meant a rapid increase in the standard of living and the development of a consumers’ society. Societally, it marked an improvement in services and public safety. Religiously, finally, it started with the ROC's affirmation of its position with a Social Conception (Osnovy 2000 / Thesing and Uertz 2001). Russia's current regime links an increasingly ‘vertical’ government, ‘managed’ civil society and ‘sovereign’ democracy with an economic oligarchy that fully participates in neoliberal global capitalism.