SUMMARY:

This article analyzes contemporary Russian textbooks on geopolitics, whose number soared spectacularly around and after 2000. Steeped in Eurasianism and pro-Kremlin conservatism, these textbooks marked an important – although much troubled – tendency to modernize the language of Russia’s self-representation along the lines of “Westernized” rationalism, nation-state political subjectivity, and the rhetoric of authenticity. At the same time, geopolitical discourses in textbooks fail to identify the real source of authenticity and agency in a democratic community. Nevertheless, in the epoch of “presentism” the state’s attempts to instrumentalize the geopolitical rhetoric of authenticity are severely limited by the fluidity of the Russian space and by the ideological character of geopolitical theorization itself.