“Designing” the Soviet political past in the authoritative discourse of the Russian Federation

Abstract

The article considers the changes in the discourse of the Russian authorities about the Soviet political past over the past three decades. The specificity of this discourse is highlighted in relation to three periods – the 1990s, 2000s, 2010s, which are also conditionally personified as “Yeltsin’s”, “Putin’s 1 and Medvedev’s” and “Putin’s 2” decades. At the same time, the discourse itself is viewed as a means of legitimizing the political regime of the corresponding period. In the “Yeltsin’s” period, the intense negative characteristics of the Soviet past serve to legitimize the reformist regime aimed at moving away from the Soviet model and focusing on other principles (economic and political freedoms, the rule of law, cooperation with the West). In the next decade, the “Soviet” is no longer unambiguously negatively interpreted by the authorities and is pushed into the area of historical narrative, where they are trying to find a place for it in the legitimizing discourse about “our great past”. A feature of that historical narrative is its “collage” (superficial and arbitrary “gluing” of heterogeneous fragments of the past). Since the beginning of the 2010s (during the third and fourth presidential terms of Putin), the authoritative discourse about the Soviet past serves to legitimize the authoritarian tendencies of the political regime. It stigmatizes the ideological character of the Soviet system, and contrasts “ideology” with “national identity,” which, among other things, is attributed to the properties of state loyalism. In current politics, it opens the way for the reproduction of Soviet ideological practices, discursively recoded in the spirit of “state identity”.