Carl Schmitt and the Kremlin: the aestheticised politics of sovereignty in contemporary Russia

Abstract

This thesis examines contemporary Russian politics through the framework of Carl Schmitt’s political theory, arguing that the friend-enemy distinction structures Russian sovereign power not only conceptually but through concrete aesthetic practices. It contends that Schmitt’s core concepts (sovereignty, the state of exception, and the political) are inseparable from an aesthetic dimension: they require public embodiment, rhetorical staging, and symbolic form in order to become politically operative. This constitutive role of the aesthetic has been largely neglected in existing Schmittian analyses of Russia, and the thesis addresses the gap directly. Applying this expanded framework to the Russian case, the thesis analyses three sites of aestheticised sovereignty: the mythologisation of Putin’s sovereign body as the visible embodiment of political unity; the rhetorical crystallisation of the friend-enemy line in key speeches and legislative instruments, most notably Decree no. 809 on “traditional values”; and the condensation of political theology in the Cathedral of the Armed Forces. Together, these cases demonstrate that the Russian state does not merely invoke Schmittian categories but enacts them, sustaining a permanent state of exception and legitimising wars of aggression through the staged production of existential enmity.