Chapter 6 shows that Russian hawks entered the regime’s market for ideology in the years 2005–12. Transactional relations were established between modernist conservatives and the ruling party, whereby the former’s ideological discourse was sponsored as a strategic resource for the regime’s legitimation against oppositional forces and for its distinction against the Western model of liberal democracy. In 2012, the creation of the Izborskii Klub provided institutional form to this interelite network aimed at gaining policy influence over more liberal-inclined elite networks.

Chapter 7 finds that, from 2012 to 2022, the Izborskii Klub evolved from a state-sponsored think tank, whose ideas were used as legitimizing sources for the regime’s policy decisions, to a private lobby group serving as the ideological basis of a conservative interelite network. The alternative state promotion and demotion of the club demonstrates the executive power’s limited and contextual endorsement of ideological narratives and its principled commitment to maintaining a certain degree of pluralism and policy flexibility through the attribution of shifting power weights to different elite blocs.