Since this book was finished, a major episode started, the result of which remains unclear. The army of the Russian Federation invaded Ukraine, a ‘brother-nation’ with which it has a lot in common, including a shared origin in Kievan Rus’. On the Russian side, this ‘special military operation’ is presented as a legitimate intervention to defend its geopolitical interests and to protect its Russian compatriots on the other side of the border. At the same time, it fits a narrative on the restoration of the political and economic space that once was the USSR and, before that, the tsarist Russian empire. Also, it is accompanied by discourses about Russia's mission to protect true, Orthodox Christianity, of which the Moscow Patriarchate continues to understand itself as guardian. The question how ‘ordinary’ territorial and economic interests relate to ideas of a Great Russia is, as always, difficult to decide.

Readers of this book will recognise motifs and patters connected to names like Dostoevsky, Il’in, Solzhenitsyn and Dugin. They will also notice the prominence of a ‘Russian idea’. Hopefully, however, they will not overlook the many critical elements in the currents and positions discussed in this book, connected to the names of Herzen, Skobtsova, Bibikhin and others; elements that can be easily transposed to the present situation. If that situation demonstrates one thing, it is that there never is a one-to-one correspondence between the actual domestic and foreign politics of a particular country and political philosophy as it exists in that country. In 2022, political opposition and protest in Russia are under even heavier pressure than they already were, and this also affects the academic world. Many people inside and outside Russia today feel as if three decades of intellectual effort have been lost and Russia returns to Soviet, or even Stalinist times. While this sentiment is understandable, it is also inaccurate: much of the yield of those 30 years has found a place in the minds of thousands of young Russians who have no experience with the long Soviet period.