Chapter 2 demonstrates that Russian modernist conservatism was first formed in the late Soviet Union as an attempt to confront the convergence horizon predicted by Western liberal modernization theories. From 1970 to 1985, theorizers of modernist conservatism aimed to reenchant Soviet modernity through the deconfliction of the relationship between technological modernity and spirituality. As they viewed it, this new ideological language should serve to reinvigorate the Soviet state ideology and maintain it as an alternative to the Western model of modernity. The chapter shows that, in contrast to the description of the Soviet state ideology as a rigid monolith, modernist conservatism’s ideas were selectively dispersed in official sites of ideology production such as the Komsomol.

Chapter 3 argues that, starting from 1985, the Russian hawks consolidated as an idea network built around their common opposition against perestroika. Modernist conservatism served as the ideological magnet of this eclectic group aggregating national-conservative intellectuals with pro–status quo members of the Soviet political and military establishment. The newspapers Den (1990–93) and Zavtra (1993–) became the intellectual and social fabric of the group’s identity and cohesion, which were maintained across the 1991 regime change. The chapter also demonstrates that some of the hawks’ ideas spread in the ruling elites’ discourse as early as the mid-1990s to legitimate the authoritarian nature of the turn to a superpresidential system and to foster the construction of post-Soviet state patriotism.

Chapter 4 shows how the Russian hawks’ ideas moved from the fringes to the center of the public sphere in the early 2000s. It investigates the 2001–02 controversy that surrounded the publication of a novel written by one of the most radical conservative ideologues, Aleksandr Prokhanov. It demonstrates that the controversy reconfigured the formerly consensual distinction between legitimate and transgressive public discourse. It explains that the intellectual legitimation of Prokhanov thrived on Russia’s political and intellectual elites’ backlash against the legacy of the 1990s and the standards of Western liberalism. The controversy eventually contributed to normalizing modernist conservatism, which gained a new audience among the younger generation of intellectuals.