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 5 demonstrates that in the years 2000–05 a new generation of Russian hawks born around the 1970s, the “Young Conservatives,” acquired a reputation as professional media intellectuals and developed a new type of collective ideological entrepreneurship. They naturalized modernist conservatism’s eclectic blend of concepts into a full-fledged ideology, “dynamic conservatism.” Moreover, they established themselves as a legitimate stratum of Russia’s intellectual elites contributing public policy recommendations.

The introduction states the premise that an essential precondition for the smooth transition from authoritarian to democratic government was the existence of a strong, resilient party on the Right that was committed to pursuing its objectives within the framework of the new democratic system and then asks why a party like the Conservative Party in Great Britain never succeeded in establishing itself as a durable political force in pre-Nazi Germany. It then focuses on the disunity of the German Right as a defining feature of the German party system and as it evolved in the late Second Empire and Weimar Republic. After a brief discussion of the milieu thesis as a theoretical point of departure for the study of the German Right, the essay then examines conservatism and its relationship to the German Right, the history of right-wing parties and organizations in the late Second Empire, and the role of antisemitism in the self-definition of those who identified themselves with the Right.