From Informational Autocracy to Violent Autocracy

In 2019, Guriev and Treisman suggested that a new type of autocracy was on the rise – informational autocracy, characterized by a decline in violence and repression, focus on maintaining a democratic façade, coopting opposition elites, rejecting strong ideologies and giving priority to rhetoric of performance rather than fear. Russia was one of the main examples of this new, milder, form of autocracy. Since February 2022, it has become difficult to claim that Russia was an informational autocracy as it started a war, clamped down on the opposition, introduced censorship and has been conducting an aggressive propaganda campaign. It looks more and more like a “classic”, violent autocracy, underpinned by discourse on internal and external enemies posing existential threats to its civilizational uniqueness. In this paper, I claim that if Russia was indeed ever an informational autocracy, set up to avoid the major pitfalls of an openly violent regime, the change we are observing is not all that sudden. In fact, the change of rhetoric was not brought about by the state of war, but is the culmination of progressive radicalization since at least 2013. I demonstrate this by tracing patterns in institutional discourse on the topics of Russia’s identity, sovereignty and policy towards its post-Soviet neighbors since 2004. I use statement analysis to analyze speeches in the Russian parliament – the State Duma – to show how rhetoric of fear was progressively (re)introduced, first by most nationalist and radical parliamentarians and then by the “party of power”, United Russia. Progressively, Russian statehood and sovereignty were conceptualized in such a way that a violent response to contestation (from within and from without) became significantly more likely. In this new conceptualization, the use of violence came to be seen as rational and often unavoidable. Far from being an idiosyncratic effect of Vladimir Putin’s personal fears and fantasies, the war on Ukraine and the increasing militarization of the state and society thus are consequences of this longer institutional process of defining Russian state and nation in confrontational, zero-sum terms.