Vadym Bondar

My name is Vadym Bondar and currently I am a PhD student at Vienna University School of Historical and Cultural Studies. My supervisor is Dr. Wolfgang Mueller from Vienna University Institute of Eastern European Studies. Previously, I studied International Relations at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow (2017-2021, Bachelor’s degree) and Tallinn University (2022-2024, Master’s degree).

My most recent working experience includes Stockholm Environment Institute (project: Chinese Great Game in the Persian Gulf Region: Implications for the European Union) and Charles University Institute of Europe (projects: Climate Policy in Eastern European Countries and Political Regime in Modern Russia).

Research Interests: Russian history and politics, political regimes, global world order and totalitarianism

Current Research Project: Currently, I am working on my doctoral project The Origins and Development of the Totalitarian Political Regime in Russia: 1999-2024. The goal of the project which is formulated in its research question is to ascertain the nature of the political regime in modern Russia, to trace its evolution and to show what role National-Bolshevism plays in its ideology. The project uses a theory of totalitarianism developed by H. Arendt which states that a totalitarian political system evolves in the atomised society (the idea taken from a mass-society theory developed by W. Kornhauser) under the influence of a totalitarian ideology used to mobilise masses. In this case, the totalitarian ideology is National-Bolshevism originally developed by N. Ustryalov and then modified by E. Limonov and A. Dugin. National-Bolshevism is a synthesis of Russian nationalism and socialist Marxist-Leninst views on the state economy. It is an ideology of expansion which is aimed at creating “Great Russia” in the 1991 borders of the Soviet Union and revising the World Order developed in the aftermath of the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

The project aims to prove that the Russian government under V. Putin uses National-Bolshevism in combination with some other ideologies (Eurasianism by A. Dugin and L. Gumilev and Russian facism by I. Ilyin) to mobilise the masses in Russia, thereby establishing a totalitarian political system whose goal is to re-establish the Russian empire in the form of Great Russia and revise the global political order (parts of that process are wars in Georgia in 2008 and Ukraine in 2014).