Society and Intellectual Life in Russia

Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014 and full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 have transformed the conditions of intellectual and public life in Russia. This volume examines how war has accelerated longer-standing pressures on academic autonomy while giving new force to demands for “sovereign” knowledge, political loyalty, and ideological conformity.The first part follows these changes through specific fields of scholarship. Its chapters examine the remaking of Russian philosophy, the use of German history to understand the present, competing political claims on Kant, the growing separation of political scholars inside and outside Russia, and the ethical pressures facing psychologists. Together, they show how censorship and repression affect more than institutions: they alter research questions, professional relationships, and the language scholars can use.The second part turns to the institutions and narratives shaping Russian society. It investigates the transformation of television and digital media, the ideology of “traditional values,” the Russian Orthodox Church’s responses to war, the political economy of mobilisation, the return of Soviet legal practices, and the glorification of military victory in school history textbooks. These studies trace how ideas about family, faith, national identity, and sacrifice acquire practical force through media, law, education, and everyday institutions.A concluding collection of anonymised testimonies gives voice to philosophers facing divergent choices about speaking, staying, leaving, and continuing their work. Combining disciplinary analysis with personal accounts, the book asks what becomes of scholarship and public reason when war reshapes both the society scholars study and the conditions under which they study it.