Political conflict in the contemporary world is marked by reflection. This means that situational and interest-driven controversies tend to gradually acquire ideological grounds; and also that these grounds legitimize and justify each side, in reinforcing their claims and at the same time making possible an argumentative discussion. The task of intellectuals, in this context, is to take such ideological positions seriously, instead of buying into pejorative, dismissive and/or hyperbolizing labels, such as “populism,” “fundamentalism,” “reaction,” “bolshevism,” or “Gnosticism,” which are understandably put forward by the opposing camps in their rhetorical polemics. The ideological perspective is interpretive, in the sense that it attempts to understand the political actors, individually and collectively. The fact that they predominantly are not conscious of their ideology, does not mean they do not have one and that it is not implicitly defining their choices. Ideology is a subject-oriented and positioned idea (or a coherent set of ideas). In this sense, it is beneficial to use the old vectors “left” and “right” to understand this positionality. Certainly, almost each contemporary ideology is more complex than the simple “Left” or “Right” as they had emerged at the time of the French revolution, and this is why some authors^Footnote1 think that the terminology is obsolete, but they remain the clearest analytical tools to grasp the above mentioned positionality. In themselves, “Left” and “Right” are not ideas but spatial and mutually relative indicators. In modern politics, however, they acquire a degree of ideal clarity which makes them into ideas sui generis, or political ideas. With the end of Soviet socialism, it has even become difficult to characterize the left-wing programs otherwise as simply “the Left,” while the names of “conservatism” or reaction simply hypostasize the relative polemical stance. To specify the main ideas of the liberal, leftist, and conservative ideologies is difficult. These ideologies, and the respective notions, are historical concepts, which do not possess a fixed definition, but shift, depending on each other and on the historical events. The main laws of this shift are the substantialization of form (conservatives originally wanted to maintain status quo but gradually became a loose school of thought), and the formalization of substance (the “Left” in the twentieth century evolved from an intellectually dense school of thought centered around Marxism, into a loose principle of defending oppressed minorities through social movements). Nevertheless, I would mention the core of conservatism as an ideology: it is counter-revolutionarism, “realism” of the status quo as opposed to all sorts of idealism or utopianism, respect for tradition, often religious piety, and a defense of authority. Liberalism is even harder to define, but its core is individualism, legalism, and secularism, with a tendency to formal and idealist solutions as opposed to the practical revolutionary measures or unprincipled authoritarianism. Politically, liberalism has mostly defended a moderate mixed regime, but can settle for an authoritarian or monarchical regime based on a rule of law and commercial freedoms. The Left, hardest to define because it has drastically changed its terms, may be defined by its plea for the oppressed, emphasis on poverty, and a reliance on radical revolutionary solutions. The left has always tried to practically and literally realize liberal ideals, such as equality or democracy, using revolution as well as other practical methods that would ally them with conservatives (such as statism and dictatorship). Those are, again, the very approximate shibboleths that underlie extremely versatile trajectories. I am however convinced that, being versatile, these three ideologies remain alive and are still helpful, as categories, to map the field of political struggle. One should avoid excessive empiricism here (which would exaggerate the differences between species of conservatism and liberalism), because it produces anti-historical and depoliticizing effects. These preliminary considerations are important, in particular, in understanding the history of conflict between Russia and the West. In this case, like in others, the analytical tendency of Western political science was initially to study the developments of Russian society as the many “authoritarian” deviations from the path to liberal democracy which was erroneously seen at the time as the only player in the room. For a while, this view made sense, with a caveat that liberal democracy was itself an ideologically overdetermined phenomenon with its left-wing and right-wing facets. However, as mentioned, there is a historical law of reflection, and reflective work has been slowly taking place in post-Soviet Russia, culminating, in 2012–2013, in the conscious adoption by Putin of a “conservative” ideology and, from 2012–2024, in the gradual radicalization of this conservatism in the hegemonic discussion in Russia, with the anti-liberal and imperial/nationalist ideas of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Ivan Ilyin, Lev Gumilyov, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and last but not least, Alexander Dugin, coming to form a sort of unofficial canon. If we were to sum these ideas up very roughly, they are: aggressive counterrevolution, the unique path and values of Russia as a culture and “civilization” (“Sonderweg”), traditionalism in contrast to moral experimentation, the capitalist materialism of the West, and to the emphasis on the positive, good, and normal models as opposed to “Western perversity.” Conservatism talks about historical right (in the spirit of Burke or Savigny) as opposed to abstract and formal legitimacy, the value of religious spirituality, and the brutal collective identitarianism of an offended “us.” This is a more or less coherent set of ideas that, mutatis mutandis, has a long history roughly coinciding with Modernity.