Russia’s official ideology prior to 1917 was Pravoslavie, Samoderzhavie,Narodnost, which has been translated as Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality.

After the Fall: 

Russia in Search of a New Ideology

by Walter Laqueur

As the Soviet Union disintegrated, ending on the ash heap of history in 1989–91, all the institutes for the study of Marxism-Leninism that had justified the regime, the collected and selected works of the communist classics, and the Marxism chairs in academies and universities also disappeared. From this void emerged a burning question: What was the raison d’être of the existing political system? And later, how did the new regime justify itself in the field of foreign and domestic affairs, and what was its social and economic policy? For the answers, Vladimir Putin and his followers went back to the future.

Russia’s official ideology prior to 1917 was Pravoslavie, Samoderzhavie,Narodnost, which has been translated as Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality. This statement was made first by Sergei Uvarov, the Russian minister of education, in a circular letter in 1833. Uvarov was a learned man who also served as president of the Russian Academy of Sciences. No one had asked Uvarov to prepare such an official binding declaration. However, Czar Nicholas I liked this “triad,” as it was called, even though its meaning was by no means always clear.

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