Introduction

The main objective was to identify and characterise the messianic or mission-based motifs present in Russia’s contemporary foreign policy. This work is intended at providing an answer to the question of which mission roles are allocated to Russia by its elite, in particular by those responsible for foreign policy. The work also intends to show the extent to which mission roles are currently in line with the sense of mission articulated by Russian intellectuals in the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century. As with the majority of phenomena meriting in-depth analysis, messianism cannot be defined in simple terms. In the social sciences it is studied as a religious phenomenon or a philosophical or political idea. Messianism is taken for a type of consciousness, a type of identity, an idea and a myth. Mission designates the imperative to act as the particular calling a state has to remould the international order or to protect it from change.