Does the Russian Federation currently have a state ideology, and if so, what are its characteristics?[1]

– I think such an ideology has existed for quite some time. Ideology is a rather vague concept. Of course, Putinism does not reach the level of ideologies like Marxism or liberalism because of the absence of bright theoretical minds and the pragmatic tendency to subordinate ideology to propaganda. However, if we lower the bar and understand ideology somewhat broadly, it clearly exists in Russia. I would not call any system of beliefs or symbols an ideology. It is sometimes argued that anything with a symbolic dimension is an ideology. In my opinion, this definition is too broad. I prefer to understand ideology as located at an intermediate level between any system of beliefs and a theoretically grounded socio-political doctrine. Historians, in general, like vague concepts. Sometimes, they seem to correspond better to history itself.

In Russia, we see a set of purposefully promoted political attitudes that are contradictory and poorly articulated. These attitudes are inseparable from images, emotions, and symbols but sometimes entail simplified theoretical models. And the fact that dissent in Russia is punishable points to the existence of a state ideology.

In her book Memory Makers: The Politics of the Past in Putin’s Russia,[2] Jade McGlynn argues that history politics has replaced ideology in Russia. When exactly do you think this happened, and what institutions were behind this process?

– I like her book, but she is not the only one who thinks so. We can probably agree with that if we understand ideology in the narrow sense we have just discussed. But I would rather talk about a shift from ideologies based on relatively articulated conceptions of global history to ­ideologies based on fragmented collective memories. There can also be ideologies based on economic theory, such as neoliberalism, which, unlike liberalism, does not need any consistent master narrative and relies on manipulated collective memories to make sense of the past. 

When Putin came to power, influential segments of Russian ruling circles and society at large still shared a vague, fading, but essentially liberal ideology. Yeltsin’s regime retained elements of liberalism until its very end, although it increasingly used nationalist motives, authoritarian tendencies, and elements of memory politics. However, it was still based on a liberal narrative adapted to Russian conditions; recall, for example, the idea of a “liberal empire”.[3]

In the first years of his rule, when Alexander Voloshin[4] was his chief of staff and the new team was not yet fully formed, Putin used some elements of liberal ideology. Relatively liberal economic reforms, prepared by Yeltsin’s government in the 1990s, were implemented in the early 2000s, and Russia’s “infiltration” into European and international organizations continued. The liberal ideology disappeared gradually. At some point, there remained no room for it in Russia’s political and cultural environment. Only some elements of neoliberal economic theories – or, rather, recipes – remained, but not to such an extent that one could speak of a liberal ideology.

The transition from history-based ideologies to the politics of memory-based ideologies as the dominant form of legitimizing power relationships and social institutions is not a specifically Russian phenomenon; it is also noticeable in other countries. Moreover, in Russia and elsewhere, it ­began well before Putin. The cult of the Second World War became a central element of Soviet ideology in Brezhnev’s USSR. As liberal ideas weakened in the 1990s and the 2000s, the Kremlin, unable or unwilling to rely on them, leaned increasingly toward a politics of memory, quite in line with global processes. However, as is often the case in Russia, this happened in a highly exaggerated form.

One of the first steps was changing the national anthem.[5] This was an attempt to seize the initiative from the opposition, particularly the Communist Party (KPRF), which had already become a national-populist party by then. The national-communist opposition had to be domesticated, and Putin’s advisers succeeded in doing so during the first years of his rule. Of course, there was an element of memory politics in this.

The celebration of the 60th anniversary of the victory in the Second World War in 2005 was another decisive moment, although the rise of the war mythology had begun earlier: Putin created the Organizing Committee “Victory”[6] a month after coming to power, and huge funds were invested in this project. The large-scale propaganda campaign of 2004–2005 to prepare for the anniversary of the victory, as well as the strengthening of state control over business and society in general after the fall of Voloshin and the arrest of Khodorkovsky in 2003, contributed to the popularization of the cult of a strong state and the Second World War. Notably, Putin’s ideology was created by people who were cynical but not stupid. Many of them were well-read, including Gleb Pavlovsky.[7]

As far as I know, Pavlovsky played a decisive role in Viktor Yanukovych’s election campaign in 2004?

– Yes, Pavlovsky played on many “chess boards”. Yanukovych’s campaigns (especially in 2010) were saturated with Russian and Soviet patriotic motifs: the war cult was central to them. At the same time, an attempt was made to split Ukrainian society by contrasting the east and west of the country. War-related themes were also used here. This was essentially Pavlovsky’s work, although not only his. Those people read a lot, although they did not always fully understand what they read. For example, they read the works of Pierre Nora and his followers, from which they borrowed the idea of the “age of memory”. And we should not underestimate the contribution of pro-Russian Ukrainian politicians, who sometimes spoke like Russian nationalists.

Pavlovsky emphasized in his public speeches and articles that the politics of memory had become a winning ideological card. His article on memory, published in 2008, marked a critical moment when it became clear that this was not just the theoretical musings of a lone intellectual.[8] The first major raid on St Petersburg’s Memorial occurred almost simultaneously.[9] This showed that an important decision had been made at the highest level: to focus on the politics of memory and to persecute those who disagreed with the official interpretation of the past.

2007–2008 were critical: a temporary transfer of power from Putin to Medvedev was being prepared, mass demonstrations and public protests were taking place, and the system seemed cracking. It was then that a harsh crackdown on dissent began, including the aforementioned attack on Memorial and the preparation of the first memory law. This also coincided with the sharp deterioration of relations with the West after Putin’s Munich Speech in 2007 and especially the armed conflict with Georgia in 2008.

At this time, the politics of memory finally took center stage in the state ideology. But let me repeat that this tendency emerged much earlier. This was a long process in which it was difficult to identify a single turning point. The suppression of the 2011 mass protests and the annexation of Crimea in 2014 marked the following stages of this development. 

To what extent do you think the processes taking place in Ukraine at that time could have influenced Russia’s domestic policy?

– There is a direct connection here because, in 2004 and 2010, there were elections in Ukraine. Russia’s intervention in them was prepared ideologically with the help of the war cult.

Who do you think shaped Putin’s historical views?

– What is needed here is insider information, of which very little comes from the Kremlin. If we ever learn about that, it will be much later – just as we began to learn about what Stalin read decades after his death. Recent research into Stalin’s library is very interesting – about the books he read and his notes in the margins. It helps us understand how Stalin worked with historical materials. As for Putin, he certainly has some basic education in history.

Do you mean training as part of the official Soviet school curriculum?

– Yes, of course, but Putin also graduated from the Leningrad University School of Law. In addition to the history of the CPSU, his university curriculum included several legal history disciplines, such as the history of state and law and the history of political theories. This is already some training, although we do not know how well he performed in those courses.

How good was the education provided by Leningrad University at that time?

– The university provided basic training. However, Putin’s interests were far from science. He was a KGB officer and a mafioso, not a scientist or a practicing lawyer. When Putin came to power, first as vice-mayor of St Petersburg and then as a prominent figure in the Yeltsin administration, he was minimally interested in history. He did not come to power alone but with a team of people who, like him, had a Soviet education and Soviet ideas about history. These ideas were based partly on Marxism but mostly on patriotic claims because, in Soviet times, the CPSU history course was quite patriotic. And its Marxist component was quickly forgotten by post-Soviet rulers and politicians, including communists.

Later, in 2004, with the intensification of memory politics, the Putin administration began to be influenced by people like Dugin,[10] Yuriev,[11] and other ultra-nationalist, semi-fascist, or even openly fascist “theorists”. These people appealed to the same ideas that Putin and his entourage had, especially nationalist ones; after all, they were also products of the Soviet education system. They created an ultra-nationalist, state-centered version of history for Putin and his team, with some elements of fascist ideology. Putin has been actively reproducing this ideology ever since, as Dina Khapaeva has shown in a recent book.[12]

Has Dugin specifically influenced Putin’s historical worldview? On the one hand, Dugin heads a department at Moscow State University, where he develops his theories, but do they have any real weight in state policy?

– It’s hard to say anything definite here because many things happen behind closed doors. But I do not think Dugin or any other individual “theorist” has had a decisive influence. There was a whole circle of similar people who, at some point, began to actively promote ultra-nationalist ideas to the top, where there was growing interest in them.

Sometimes, these people sent their writings to the Presidential Administration. Many officials from the Administration and the Ministry of Culture joined the club, as well as political technologists and others who just “hung around”. Some acted out of personal ambition and career considerations, others, perhaps, out of ideas. Together, they created an atmosphere where ideas were “brewing,” gradually becoming part of state policy.

Much of this “literature” emerged from behind-the-scenes conversations, memos, and reports. This work continued for over twenty years. Officials who submit memos to the president’s desk always have influence, but they know their influence depends on how much the president likes their ideas.

Who then oversees historical policy: the Ministry of Culture? On the one hand, there is Vladimir Medinsky,[13] who directly stated that historical myth is much more important than historical accuracy; on the other hand, there is the Administration of the President of the Russian Federation.

– Virtually all major government agencies have departments and strategies for implementing memory politics. For example, Shoigu started to deal with this topic when he was head of the Ministry of Emergency Situations. His ministry’s website had an extensive section devoted to history, which is funny – where is the Ministry of Emergency Situations, and where is history politics?

I studied this issue in the context of the so-called memory laws. In 2009, Shoigu played a key role in promoting the first version of the memory law, which was adopted in 2014.[14] He spoke at various meetings, including the Organizing Committee “Victory” and meetings with veterans, proving the need for such a law. In late January 2009, it was announced that such a law would be adopted, and even earlier, a working group for its preparation was created under the leadership of Konstantin Zatulin.[15] Zatulin was Luzhkov’s man[16] but simultaneously had contact with various “patriotic” political forces. 

Of course, the military and the law enforcement structures also supported the war cult because they have always been involved in patriotic education. When Shoigu became the head of the Ministry of Defence, this cult received a new impetus there. Since the 1990s, this Ministry’s political propaganda department has been reorganized several times. Its history goes back to the 1917 Revolution, Trotsky, and the Red Army, but it was not disbanded after the fall of the USSR, even during the liberal reforms. The people who ran the propaganda institutions adapted to new conditions and then again to even newer ones. As a result, Soviet propaganda did not disappear, and the country plunged back into military-patriotic work. The government introduced new “historical” remembrance days, increased veterans’ privileges, and so on. This began in the mid-1990s.

The Foreign Ministry also actively promoted Putin’s commemorative agenda, not just Lavrov, although he spoke out most on the subject. All Russian embassies monitored historical memory-related events in the Czech Republic, Poland, Ukraine, and other countries, provoking diplomatic scandals, such as in Latvia and Estonia.[17]

The statements of the Russian Ambassador to Poland, Sergey Andreev, are worth mentioning![18]

– Exactly. Of course, the Foreign Ministry was actively involved in all of this. I’m afraid one cannot be a successful diplomat in present-day Russia without accusing other nations of “Russophobia”. The Ministry of Culture and Medinsky himself did the same. One should not forget his activities in the field of education either. The players in this field also include the State Duma, the Council of the Federation, the Presidential Administration, and the Russian Academy of Sciences (RAS), not to mention the Russky Mir(“Russian World”) organization.

As far as I know, Chubaryan[19] has been involved in this at the Russian Academy of Sciences for quite some time?

– Yes, that’s right. I sympathized with him at first. He was a relatively liberal Soviet academic administrator, and in the 1990s, he supported the Russian “branch” of the Annales School and such historians as Bessmertny,[20] Gurevich,[21] and Batkin.[22] He played quite a positive role then. But later, he became a Putinist – an apparatchik is an apparatchik. Chubaryan is said to have been involved in preparing Putin’s history-related speeches and articles and developing new history curricula and textbooks.

Many historians working for major universities and research institutes have participated in this ideological work and have never tried to hide it. Of course, some universities and institutes resisted the government, but they were gradually brought under control or closed. Today, there are no independent educational institutions in Russia. It is hard to name a Russian educational or research institution with no history of participating in such matters.

It turns out that every university in Russia has been an actor of historical policy in one form or another.

– Yes, independent institutions and associations such as Memorial have gradually been replaced by state-owned or ostensibly independent ones fully controlled by the authorities: the Russian Historical Society,[23] the Russian Military Historical Society,[24] and the Historical Memory Foundation.[25] It suffices to look at the people who head these organizations: Patrushev,[26] Naryshkin,[27]Medinsky, and so on. Or take the Institute for Scientific Information on Social Sciences of the Russian Academy of Science. Academician Pivovarov,[28] considered a liberal, had long headed it, yet a team of nationalistically minded historians linked to Medinsky’s Military Historical Society also formed there. Another example is one of the leading Russian historians in the field of memory politics, ­Alexei Miller,[29] who formerly worked for this institute. He recently created the Centre for the Study of Historical Memory at the European University in St Petersburg. This university was one of Russia’s most innovative and independent academic institutions for two decades, but this is no longer true. According to ­Miller, Russia’s history politics is just a reaction to the anti-Russian politics pursued by the West and the East European countries. This is precisely what Pavlovsky claimed in his 2008 article and what “Putin understanders” worldwide say. Also, Miller is very critical of the so-called cosmopolitan memory, or the memory of the Holocaust, which has been central to Western memory politics since the 1980s and was designed to suppress national narratives. However, this politics, Miller argues, has failed because national narratives cannot be suppressed. Miller refers here to left-leaning Western historians critical of the cosmopolitan memory, which they view as an instrument of Western hegemony. Indeed, Western critics of Western narratives have proven useful to the Russian authorities, not for the first time in history. Nationalistically minded Russian scholars and propagandists actively use their ideas.[30]

Can this turn be said to be a reaction to globalization caused by the fear of losing cultural identity? To what extent do Eastern Europeans fear “dissolving” into the EU, and how does this relate to the Soviet past and the desire to build nation-states?

– Let us consider how similar things worked in the past. The USSR and the Warsaw Bloc countries had a Marxist ideology diluted with elements of identity politics, especially nationalism. These elements could not fully develop within the communist system and often became the basis of oppositional ideology. The collapse of the Soviet Bloc occurred largely because of the conflict between particularistic national narratives and the global Soviet narrative. In addition, many East European cultures were more in tune with European traditions than Russia was.

I suspect that Ukrainians understand the idea of “national particularity” better than I do because of my Russian experience. Yet, I think the universalist and humanist ideal of European integration fuelled this idea. Liberal nationalists in Eastern Europe often claim that “we are a Western nation”.

Why, despite the memory of the horrors of the Second World War the wars in Afghanistan and Chechnya, does Russian society support the war against Ukraine? Witnesses and veterans of those conflicts are still alive, but this memory has not become a kind of “inoculation” for society, just like the popular line from a Soviet song: “as long as there is no war”.

– It is difficult to determine precisely what attitudes prevail in Russian society. Is it the real “support,” as some sociologists claim, or is it more of a desire to ignore what is happening? As in other authoritarian societies, a reliable assessment of public opinion is complicated.

If we step back from the data of sociological polls, we can note that there have been no mass protests of Russians against the war.

– No genuine mass protests were even against the pension reform, which affected millions of Russians. And in France, for example, large-scale demonstrations against a similar reform led to a deep political crisis. There have been almost no protests against mobilization in Russia either.

We could see people bringing flowers to Prigozhin’s improvised memorial. It is hard to imagine what different ideological constructs are combined in the heads of these people.

– Let’s try to explain this. Even though Putin has not been in prison, he is as much a representative of the criminal milieu as Prigozhin. Stalin’s regime was criminal not only because of its crimes against humanity, but also because the country was run by real criminals led by Soso, a specialist in bank robbery. We see something similar now: the KGB-FSB, closely linked to the Russian mafia, is a criminal structure organized on the model of a mafia group.

Part of Russian society accepts this kind of “politics”. For people who are not critical thinkers and who were poor for a long time, Putin’s regime has brought some improvement. This has not been to Putin’s credit; it is just that oil prices rose sharply at the beginning of his rule. However, ordinary Russians see much richer people around them and envy them, especially since their fortunes are very recent. How did they get rich? They stole! In most cases, this is true. So, the Russian makes an unambiguous conclusion: if he, too, wants to succeed, he must steal and resort to violence because, in his opinion, that’s what everyone does. For example, Russian soldiers send loot from Ukraine back home to their families, who unhesitatingly use stolen washing machines as legitimate “trophies of our troops”.

A quarter of a century under the rule of a criminal regime has led to severe degradation of moral values in a society that had already been prepared for this by the Soviet regime (although the communist ideology had humanistic motives, albeit hypocritical and perverse, which to some extent affected the norms of behaviour). The attitudes formed in the environment of the KGB and mafia have contributed to the blurring of the concepts of good and evil, blurring their clear boundaries in the public consciousness.

Can we say that KGB/FSB officers, acting within their system, may not perceive their actions as crimes?

–I think they believe that the world lacks universal moral criteria, and those that exist serve only as a tool to promote private interests. This is a simplified Marxism for criminals. Millions of people have grown up in this atmosphere, and millions recognize only violence and robbery as the way the world is. It is hard to argue that such attitudes are inherent in the majority, but they are, I believe, widespread, and the minority that promotes them has considerable influence. This minority has educated millions whose views are based on such simple ideas. The general moral decay of society creates the ground on which specific propaganda imposed by television can motivate aggression and hatred.

“Average” Russian people often display anger, envy, and a tendency to steal. Beautiful words about the “good-natured” Russian people are just part of the positive image that every nation wants to have. However, the reality is that up to 80% of Russia’s population were still serfs 150 years ago. Then, the country lived under the rule of a terrorist regime for another seventy years, albeit it softened in the last decades of its existence. Serfdom did not improve people, no matter how much Russian writers praised all sorts of Gerasims, Khoreys, and Kalinychs.[31]

After the events of 2014, we organized a screening of the excellent film Winter on Fire[32] about the Maidan revolution in Ukraine at Emory University. About two hundred people came. Afterward, we discussed it with the audience, and one of the key questions was: why is there no resistance in Russia while there is resistance in Ukraine? One of the reasons we discussed is that in Russia, serfdom existed from the late sixteenth century to 1861, while in Ukraine, it was introduced at the end of the eighteenth century. In the case of Russia, this is eight or nine generations; in the case of Ukraine, it is just two or three. This is a significant difference. In Russia, national pride often manifests in bitterness, compensating for centuries of internal humiliation. In Ukraine, on the contrary, this pride, in many cases, manifests itself in freedom-loving behaviour. At least, I hope it does.

In the past, the source of morality was religion, which formed moral guidelines for new generations. In modern secular societies, this role is partly fulfilled by history – Historia est Magistra Vitae. But does it really influence the formation of moral values?

I’m afraid I disagree that history today is mainly used for moral education due to the decline of religion. History has had this purpose since antiquity.

However, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, historians began to avoid discussing moral issues with the general decline of religion. This position gradually triumphed with the formation of professional historiography. Over time, the motto of historians became “to understand but not to judge”. Moral issues were taken out of the scope of their research. Modern historiography was formed in this spirit in Germany, France, and the United States, the countries that succeeded each other as its leaders. Only very recently, as part of the so-called ethical turn in historiography, historians began discussing the need to bring moral discourse back into historical research. 

The role of the professional historian and public attitudes towards his work have also changed. A classic example is Le Roy Ladurie’s book Montaillou, an Occitan Village,[33] published in 1975. Although it is about the fourteenth century, it sold 150 thousand copies. Tens or hundreds of thousands bought academic books on history in the 1970s and 1980s! Today, selling even a thousand copies is a success.

The relationship between the reading public, intellectuals, and universities has also changed. In the 1950s and 1970s, the number of universities in Europe and the United States increased dramatically. Many graduates continued to keep in touch with their alma mater, hoping someday to return and continue their academic careers as old universities expanded and new ones continued to be created. Throughout their lives, they remained part of the university’s intellectual culture to some extent. In contrast, now that there are too many universities and too many students, most simply cannot maintain that connection. And there are fewer incentives – the proletarianization of academia is taking place, after all. Most students and graduates of European and American universities are hardly bearers of academic culture anymore: they rarely read scholarly books and are not interested in the internal life of their universities.

Richard Pipes remarked in an interview that in his time universities were a source of enlightenment and professional knowledge. Today, he says, universities are more like social institutions where people interact on a social level rather than studying in the former sense.

– This is indeed true: the figure of the scholar, the university professor, is no longer an attractive role model for students.

Under current conditions, historians are increasingly involved in new forms of cultural politics. This is due, among other things, to the decline of the historical profession’s public role. Collective representations of the past, and occasionally even the historians’ research agenda, are defined today primarily by politicians and the media. The autonomy of the academic milieu has largely been lost.

We have discussed the views of Russian politicians representing the regime. Is the Russian opposition ready to revise Russia’s historical relations with the peoples of central and eastern Europe?

– The Russian opposition currently consists of disparate groups, often in conflict with each other and expressing very different views. Some in the opposition realize that the regime is using manipulative memory politics. However, many—perhaps most—still believe in the basic imperial myths on which this politics is based. Therefore, it is difficult to speak of a willingness to revise the history of Russia’s relations with neighbouring nations.

So, if the opposition comes to power, we should not expect a revision of historical policy, de-imperialization of Russia, or at least a symbolic farewell to the imperial past?

– Revision can begin if the opposition comes to power, which is unlikely. However, Russian culture is imperial. Take Brodsky’s poem “On the Independence of Ukraine”[34] or Bulgakov’s “The White Guard”. The imperial component is also inherent in many other national cultures. 

Even if a liberal government led by pro-Western politicians suddenly came to power in Russia, complete de-imperialization is unlikely – at least, it will take a very long time.

 

Could a conventional reformer like Khrushchev in Stalin’s circle emerge in Putin’s milieu?

– I don’t think the inner circles of those dictators are comparable. Stalinism was an attempt to realize the communist project, at least at the level of ideology. Putin’s regime lacks such a project and a “general party line”. “United Russia” is not an analogue of the CPSU: it does not rule or lead the country to the “future”. It is an instrument used for propaganda and mobilization – and, of course, for simulating the democratic process.

Reforming Putin’s regime from within is not impossible but with certain reservations. People in his inner circle know they can be removed from power at any moment. Periodic – albeit very selective – purges of the state apparatus could create the motivation to dismantle the existing system. Yet Putin’s regime does not practice repression against its inner circle. Prigozhin was an exceptional case, and key figures in leadership positions feel relatively safe, if not for their careers, at least for their lives and property. So, their motivation to end the terror and reform the regime to save themselves, which Khrushchev and the company had, is much weaker. 

Public discontent will unlikely reach the level necessary to initiate reforms without a significant military defeat or economic crisis. Another possible scenario is if Putin dies or goes missing, and a power struggle among his associates begins.

Putin’s regime is stable today thanks, among other things, to the instrumentalization of Russian culture. How important is cultural identity for the retention of power?

– Russian culture is highly contradictory – I think, more so than most other national cultures, due to the extreme and long-standing despotism of several consecutive political regimes. On the one hand, this culture is closely connected with the imperial component; on the other hand, it includes a robust tradition of struggle against it. Often, these opposites coexist in the work of the same author. This raises the thorny question of how to evaluate a particular cultural figure. For example, Dostoevsky, for all his talent and humanistic pathos, was an anti-Semite, a monarchist, and a gambler. Brodsky, despite his anti-Soviet views, wrote terrible things about Ukraine.

The question arises: does talent alone matter? Is it possible to read and honour Dostoevsky and Brodsky today? Is Tchaikovsky worth performing if his music is associated with imperial culture? These questions should be approached on a case-by-case basis. Some works of Russian culture that have become part of the world’s heritage cannot be expunged. Today, there is no rational reason not to perform, for example, Tchaikovsky’s “Eugene Onegin,” but it will probably be inappropriate to perform “Mazepa” for some time.

It is essential to maintain a balance: we should not label all Russian culture as exclusively imperial, but we should not idealize it. As for contemporary artists who support Putin’s policies while enjoying the benefits of Western society, they should, in my opinion, be boycotted and deprived of earning opportunities and a comfortable life in the West. This part of Russian culture is dangerous, not only for Ukraine but for the whole world.

Putin’s actions and ideology are changing the world, making it potentially unsafe for everyone for generations to come. Putin’s regime has already caused many tragedies, including famine in Africa. It is a global evil that is spreading around the world, and Russian imperialism is a common problem that goes far beyond the war in Ukraine, even if this war is our focus right now. That is why this war requires a global solution, and Ukraine – as some, including in America, say – is today the first line of defense of the free world.

In the 90s, many believed that liberalism had triumphed in Russia, but the political situation began to unfold differently. How do you see Russia’s future now?

– There is no clarity about Russia’s future at this point. At the beginning of the war, it seemed that it wouldn’t last long and the regime would fall… That all turned out to be naive. There’s a sense of confusion in intellectual circles because too many hopes were pinned on what didn’t come to pass. Unfortunately, I don’t believe in the imminent collapse of Putin’s regime, but I would be glad to be proven wrong.

Interview conducted by YANA PRYMACHENKO