Traditional, conservative, Christian, distinct… how supposedly old values emerged in the official and media discourse in Russia since 2012
russia
A data-driven exploration of how references to different types of values evolved in official statements and the media in Russia in the last two decades.
Work-in-progress
This post is still a work-in-progress. It is shared in the spirit of keeping the research process as open as possible, but it still a draft document, possibly an early draft: incomplete, unedited, and possibily inaccurate. Datasets included may likewise not be fully verified.
Context
“Traditional values” have emerged in Russia’s public discourse with new vigour starting with 2011-2012 (see e.g. Quenoy and Dubrovskiy 2018, 94.) and have soon become prevalent in Russian official and public discourse. With Putin’s return to the presidency in 2012, conservatism has become “official state posture” (Laruelle 2016, 287) in Russia. Increased reliance on conservative ideology may have been conceived largely instrumentally (Rodkiewicz and Rogoża 2015), as a discursive turn useful to reconsolidate after the wave of protests of 2011-2012 (Sharafutdinova 2014), but in the following years it has solidified as a central component of the Kremlin’s narrative about Russia itself, as well as its contrapposition with the West. These values have been called “traditional”, “conservative”, “Christian” - all expressions which would suggest they may not be specifically Russian. And yet, they were also unique, something that made Russia a “distinct civilisation” (Tsygankov 2016).
Well before Russia’s fulls scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, “spiritual-moral values” became an issue of national security in Russia, and a form of defence against foreign threats and influence (Østbø 2017). Indeed, “traditional Russian spiritual-moral values” (“традиционные российские духовно-нравственные ценности”) explicitly and repeatedly featured in the national security strategy of the Russian Federation introduced in 2015 (and then again in the more recent strategy introduced in 2021), in contrast to previous versions of the same document President of the Russian Federation (2021). “Traditional spiritual-moral values” are mentioned 10 times in the Foreign Policy Concept of the Russian Federation approved on 31 March 2023 (President of the Russian Federation 2023).
In 2022, they arguably became an important part of the rhetoric repertoir used to legitimise Russia’s military actions, and have become even more clearly “a focal point in the domestic crackdown on the liberal opposition, and in the standoff between Russia and the West in international affairs” (Østbø 2017, 202).
In this post, I will explore references to “values” in Russian official discourse and media in Russia. More specifically, I will:
identify which qualifiers have most commonly been added to “values” in the last two decades
check the relative frequency of various expressions used to refer to these values (e.g. traditional VS conservative VS Christian), and how they have evolved
check if indeed references to “traditional values” (or similar expressions) has increased in 2012 compared to previous years
check if there is a change in connection to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and in more recent months.
As will become apparent, some of the data sources used in this document have some features that make it more difficut to conduct consistent longitudinal analyses. Such limitations will be outlined clearly, as they are likely to have substantive impact on the results; they include issues of data availability, change in the volume of text available, and the same expressions used in different contexts (e.g. Western values were positive in the early 2000s, but negative in the early 2020s). Indeed, in this respect this post serves also as an exploration of the many challenges that come with longitudinal data analysis of textual corprora generated from online sources.
The unit of analysis
Throughout this post, the main unit of analysis will be the sentence. As will become soon apparent, qualifiers that clarify which “values” are being talked about often do not come immediately before or after the word “values” itself, but are part of longer expressions. Also, quite often more than qualifier is included (e.g. “spiritual-moral values”); some analyses will consider all qualifiers found within the same sentence, while others, for comparison, will just consider the qualifier that immediately precedes the word “values”. In such cases, the unit of analysis will only be mentions of “values” preceded by a relevant qualifier (full list below).
How frequent are references to “values”?
Let’s start with the English-language version of the Kremlin’s website, which should give some context, and then switch to a wider range of sources which are available only in Russian.
English-language version of Kremlin.ru has 32 102 items in total published between 31 December 1999 and 27 February 2023. If we count sentences, rather than items published, we have 821 552 sentences in total in our corpus. Among them, 2 120 make reference to “values”.1
Let’s look at their distribution.
While there is an increase in the absolute number of references to “values”, this is overall balanced out once we account for the increasing number of text published by the Kremlin each year.
See the data in both relative and absolute formats looking at the tabs.
| year | all | with_values | without values |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1999 | 171 | 0 | 171 |
| 2000 | 20 389 | 53 | 20 336 |
| 2001 | 20 016 | 43 | 19 973 |
| 2002 | 16 297 | 24 | 16 273 |
| 2003 | 26 149 | 57 | 26 092 |
| 2004 | 20 302 | 29 | 20 273 |
| 2005 | 24 106 | 70 | 24 036 |
| 2006 | 29 716 | 64 | 29 652 |
| 2007 | 27 960 | 101 | 27 859 |
| 2008 | 35 718 | 114 | 35 604 |
| 2009 | 47 206 | 102 | 47 104 |
| 2010 | 42 810 | 84 | 42 726 |
| 2011 | 32 692 | 74 | 32 618 |
| 2012 | 33 350 | 116 | 33 234 |
| 2013 | 40 217 | 121 | 40 096 |
| 2014 | 40 716 | 120 | 40 596 |
| 2015 | 34 024 | 77 | 33 947 |
| 2016 | 45 543 | 99 | 45 444 |
| 2017 | 54 373 | 124 | 54 249 |
| 2018 | 52 254 | 105 | 52 149 |
| 2019 | 42 643 | 112 | 42 531 |
| 2020 | 38 301 | 96 | 38 205 |
| 2021 | 46 024 | 155 | 45 869 |
| 2022 | 43 405 | 169 | 43 236 |
| 2023 | 7 170 | 11 | 7 159 |
An argument could possibly be made that the increased number of publications on the Kremlin’s website reflects the fact that it has become more common to cover minor events, but that the overall number of “big speeches” where one would talk about values has effectively remained constant, and hence the absolute figures are what really matters. But even looking at absolute numbers, we can see that the “moral turn” that according to the literature has started in 2012 is not really reflected in a sudden spike of references to “values” in the presidential rhetoric. Indeed, even if the figure for 2012 is much higher than that for the last year of Medvedev’s presidency in 2011, it is very much comparable to the the number of mentions recorded in 2007 and 2008. If we focus on absolute numbers, only beginning with 2021 there is an effective increase in comparison with 2007-2008.2 If instead we focus on relative numbers, we’ll notice 2007, 2012, and 2022 as somewhat exceptional years, when about 0.4 per cent of all sentences included a reference to “values”.
Ultimately, however, it is not the number of references to “values” per se that is most relevant: what type of values have been talked about at different points in time may be more revealing.
First, what “values” are we talking about?
There are many different types of “values” that appear in the Kremlin’s statements. Here is a rather comprehensive list of the most common qualifiers or expressions used to characterise the values. They are categorised and colour-coded in order to make it easier to spot them in the quotes below. The categories are indicative and may be adjusted (suggestions welcome).
Different types of values in the Kremlin’s official statements
I will now proceed to different ways of looking at these data. First, here are all references to values found in transcripts, statements, and press releases published on the Kremlin’s website between 31 December 1999 and 27 February 2023. Look at both tabs to see the quotes in either English or Russian.
For easier reference, keywords such as “values”, and different types of values are highlighted and colour-coded - traditional, Western, universal, common, and negative.