Who said it first? Investigating the diffusion of the Kremlin’s buzzwords before they entered the mainstream
russia
Traditional values, Russophobia, collective West, anglo-saxons… these are common buzzwords in Russian media and official discourse. But when did these actually become buzzwords, and who used them before they entered the mainstream?
Author
Giorgio Comai
Published
June 7, 2023
Work-in-progress
This is an early release of the dataset. Only limited quality checks have been conducted, so if you intend to use it, make sure it is fit for purpose.
A full release in a proper data repository with better documentation is forthcoming.
N.B. This post is actually in draft form and a work in progress, it has not reached its final version
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Abstract
There are a few expressions that have noticeably gained new prominence and significance in Russia’s official and media discourse in recent years. Some of these have been in use with renewed meaning since Vladimir Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012 and have already received significant scholarly attention; examples include “Russian world” (O’Loughlin, Toal, and Kolosov 2017; Starodubtseva 2022; Kosienkowski 2021), “Novorossiya” (O’Loughlin, Toal, and Kolosov 2016; Laruelle 2016b; Suslov 2017), and possibly “conservative/traditional values” (Laruelle 2016a). Others have started to feature more prominently in Russia’s mainstream media more recently or with Russia’s full scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022; examples include “collective West” (Chimiris 2022; Comai 2023), “russophobia” (Feklyunina 2012; Comai 2021; Вёрстка 2023), “anglo-saxons” (Meduza 2022), “denazification” (Smart 2022; Knott 2023), and represent a new repertoir of framings focused on the present, beyond the extenstive reframing of history that has also been object of previous analyses (McGlynn 2020). Some of these expressions, such as “denazification” or “special military operation” obviously entered the mainstream after Russia’s president Vladimir Putin used them in his speech launching the invasion. Others, such as “collective West”, have emerged more slowly, without a single obvious source. In either case, who has been using these terms and framings before they were popularised by the Kremlin? This paper addresses this question through structured analysis of the online websites of Russian institutions (Kremlin, MFA, Duma), Russia’s mainstream media (Pervy Kanal, Komsomolskaya Pravda, Rossiskaya Gazeta, Nezavisimaya Gazeta), and Russia’s nationalist media (Zavtra, Tsargrad). Text-mining and basic word frequency analysis will be used to confirm or disprove the change in the use of selected expressions, and observe the pattern that led to their mainstreaming (e.g. if from fringe nationalist media they became first more common in mainstream media and only later they have been picked up by the president, or if they have been first used by the president, and only later spread among other actors). Qualitative analysis of keywords in context will be used to enrich the analysis and provide more details on particular moments or actors that have likely contributed to change the use of these expressions. This paper feeds into the debate on the shaping and domestic diffusion of core ideas underpinning Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Russia’s current positioning in the international system.
Introduction
Focus on the elements used to define the purpose of the invasion and the enemy
Russophobia and denazification
One of the main purposes of the invasion, as identified by Russian President Vladimir Putin when announcing the beginning of the “special military operation”, was “denazification”.
“Denazification” is a term that effectively entered the public discourse on a specific date: 24 February 2022. Indeed, it has never been used - not a single time - before 2022 in official speeches, and it remained part of the official presidential parlance for just a couple of months.
Indeed, there are some references specifically to the “denazification of Ukraine”:
first, with established references to Stepan Bandera; after an incident on 9 May 2011, Konstantin Zatulin talked wrote about the need of a total “denazification and debanderization of Ukraine.” - Украинский рубикон, 18 May 2011, Zavtra.ru
starting with 2014, we have explicit references to the denazification of Ukraine that sound like those expressed by Putin in Ferbuary 2022. Quoting and paraphrasing this article by Mikhail Delyagin: “Russia must declare as its goal the denazification of Ukraine”; Ukrainian patriotism should be positively used in the fight against this struggle, which should end with Poroshenko and other Kyiv criminals going through something similar to the Nurnberg trials. To achieve all of this, a real mobilisation is needed: “a victory against Ukraine is not imaginable without a cardinal change of the current quasi-liberal course”. Russia itself needs to be cleansed, getting rid of all the liberals that are part of the state apparatus (“both brain and hands”, “from the presidential administration to village administration”, etc.).
Россия должна провозгласить своей целью денацификацию Украины
Chimiris, Ekaterina. 2022. “The Collective West Concept and Selected Western Actors (Germany, Norway, Estonia, NATO) in the Russian Media: Post-Crimea Dynamics.”Global Journal of Human-Social Science 22 (F1): 1–12. https://doi.org/10.34257/GJHSSFVOL22IS1PG1.
Feklyunina, Valentina. 2012. “Constructing Russophobia.” In, edited by Ray Taras, 91–109. London; New York: Routledge.
Knott, Eleanor. 2023. “Existential Nationalism: Russia’s War Against Ukraine.”Nations and Nationalism 29 (1): 45–52. https://doi.org/10.1111/nana.12878.
Kosienkowski, Marcin. 2021. “The Russian World as a Legitimation Strategy Outside Russia: The Case of Gagauzia.”Eurasian Geography and Economics 62 (3): 319–46. https://doi.org/10.1080/15387216.2020.1793682.
———. 2016b. “The Three Colors of Novorossiya, or the Russian Nationalist Mythmaking of the Ukrainian Crisis.”Post-Soviet Affairs 32 (1): 55–74. https://doi.org/10.1080/1060586X.2015.1023004.
McGlynn, Jade. 2020. “Historical Framing of the Ukraine Crisis Through the Great Patriotic War: Performativity, Cultural Consciousness and Shared Remembering.”Memory Studies 13 (6): 1058–80. https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698018800740.
O’Loughlin, John, Gerard Toal, and Vladimir Kolosov. 2016. “The Rise and Fall of “Novorossiya”: Examining Support for a Separatist Geopolitical Imaginary in Southeast Ukraine.”Post-Soviet Affairs 33 (2): 122–44. https://doi.org/10.1080/1060586X.2016.1146452.
———. 2017. “Who Identifies with the “Russian World”? Geopolitical Attitudes in Southeastern Ukraine, Crimea, Abkhazia, South Ossetia, and Transnistria.”Eurasian Geography and Economics 57 (6): 745–78. https://doi.org/10.1080/15387216.2017.1295275.
Starodubtseva, Anastassiya. 2022. “Negative Connotations of the “Russian World” Concept Against the Backdrop of the Russian-Ukrainian War 2022.”Respectus Philologicus, no. 42(47) (October): 141–53. https://doi.org/10.15388/RESPECTUS.2022.42.47.114.