The Confluence of Historical Revisionism, Political Radicalism, and Militarism in Contemporary Russian-Imperial Culture: A Time-Sensitive Network Perspective

This record contains the slides of a conference presentation delivered at the international conference “Cultures of War and Violence” (University of Potsdam, Germany, 27–28 November 2025). Conference presentation was not peer-reviewed. Work-in-progress results of ongoing research project. The presentation analyses how historical revisionism, political radicalism and militarism intersect in contemporary Russian neo-imperial ideology under Vladimir Putin. It builds on previous work (Werner, Dieriabin & Vovchuk) that reconstructed transnational networks of far-right actors (individuals, organisations, media and states) connecting Russia, Western Europe and the United States. The new contribution of this study is to aggregate these actor-level relations to directed state-to-state influence networks and to analyse them in a time-sensitive perspective. Using manually coded influence relations extracted from a corpus of around 145 scholarly and journalistic sources, the study constructs four directed graphs for the periods 1945–1991, 1991–2014, 2014–2022, and after 2022. For each period, it computes standard network measures (density, reciprocity, degree assortativity, node strengths and centralities) as well as Russia-specific indicators (share of edges and total edge weight involving Russia, strength concentration). In addition, the presentation visualises directional flows to Russia and from Russia in each period. The results show a clear structural trajectory: from a relatively dense, multipolar Cold War network in which the USSR is one important actor among many; through a post-1991 phase in which Russia becomes a highly central exchange hub within a reciprocal transnational radical-right ecosystem; to a sparser, strongly disassortative hub–periphery structure after 2014, and finally to a small, asymmetric post-2022 core dominated by one-way flows from Russia to a reduced circle of states. Graph-theoretically, the network evolves from a configuration of ideological exchange to a broadcasting structure optimised for centralised propaganda and neo-imperial ideological export. The presentation illustrates how state-level Social Network Analysis combined with historically meaningful periodisation can illuminate long-term transformations in Russia’s position within the global radical right and contribute to broader debates on cultures of war, violence and memory in Eastern Europe.