Culture and Media

In 2012 Russia’s President Putin put his name to a number of short essays, published across several daily newspapers, setting out his position on a range of issues ahead of the presidential election in March of that year. In one of these, he focused on what he called the ‘common cultural code’ of the Russian people (Putin, 2012). In doing so Vladimir Putin drew together a number of threads that had been present in his discourse since he became president at the beginning of the century. At the same time, though this was less clear then than it is now, he laid down the framework for a decisive shift in the Russian state’s cultural policy that has become increasingly prominent in the years since.