Methodology

This dossier originated as a single WordPress V1 article. During migration into Baudry.ai V2, every named source in the original text — interviews, books, essays, an academic article — was individually re-fetched and checked, rather than carried over on trust.

What was confirmed, and what was not

Most sources confirmed directly: the interviews with Khapaeva, Makarychev and Antonova, Snyder’s essay, the Re:Russia analysis, and a wire report on Patriarch Kirill’s sermon (fetched via a mirror, since the original Associated Press URL could not be reached directly). Two sources could not be independently checked during this migration — an academic journal article that returned an access error, and the full text of two books (Khapaeva’s Putin’s Dark Ages and Snyder’s The Road to Unfreedom), whose bibliographic details were confirmed but whose arguments are recorded as reported by their authors elsewhere, not independently re-read cover to cover.

An interpretive framework, not a single verifiable fact

Most claims in this dossier are interpretive theses, not the kind of discrete factual statement (“46 facilities”, “6.3% of GDP”) that a single document can straightforwardly confirm or refute. “Supported” here means: the cited source does make the argument attributed to it, checked directly against the source. It does not mean the argument is proven true of Russian society as a whole — several of the scholars surveyed here explicitly disagree with each other on how widely the ideology is actually believed, and that disagreement is preserved rather than resolved.