Who said it first?

Investigating the diffusion of the Kremlin’s buzzwords before they entered the mainstream

Giorgio Comai (OBCT/CCI)

The project: Text as data & data in the text

Studying conflicts in post-Soviet spaces through structured analysis of textual contents available on-line

Funding and disclaimers

This project is carried out with the support of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation under art. 23 bis, D.P.R. 18/1967. All opinions expressed within the scope of this project represent the opinion of their author and not those of the Ministry.

“Le posizioni contenute nel presente report sono espressione esclusivamente degli autori e non rappresentano necessariamente le posizioni del Ministero degli Affari Esteri e della Cooperazione Internazionale”

Context

Starting point

There are some expressions that seem to have gained prominence starting with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
They have become shorthands to define the war, its purpose, and the enemy
Using text-mining techniques it may possible to find out more about who used them first

⇨ gain some insights on cultural points of reference of the Kremlin and on the radicalisation journey of public discourse in Russia.

How did these expressions enter the mainstream?

Preliminary question: did they really gain prominence only with the invasion?
Were they introduced by the Kremlin, and then picked up by the media?
Or were they first popularised by the media, and only later entered the official discourse?
Or were they used only by some media earlier, and if so, which ones?

In dialogue with the literature

“Russian world” (O’Loughlin, Toal, and Kolosov 2017; Starodubtseva 2022; Kosienkowski 2021)
“Novorossiya” (O’Loughlin, Toal, and Kolosov 2016; Laruelle 2016b; Suslov 2017)
“conservative/traditional values” (Laruelle 2016a)
“collective West” (Chimiris 2022; Comai 2023)
“russophobia” (Feklyunina 2012; Comai 2021)
“denazification” (Smart 2022; Knott 2023)
reframing of history (McGlynn 2020).

Preliminary results [1/2]

some of these buzzwords entered the official and media mainstream only in 2022, others starting with 2014
mainstream media pick up on these buzzwords after they appear in official discourse
key buzzwords that accompanied the invasion were already established in at least one fringe nationalist publication (namely, Zavtra).

Preliminary results [2/2]

⇨ keywords previously used only in marginal nationalist circles have appeared in the Kremlin’s official discourse in recent years, most distinctly starting with Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, without obvious intermediary steps

⇨ these may be evidence of Vladimir Putin’s own radicalisation journey, or at least that speech writers and communication professionals working for the Kremlin took inspiration from this previously marginal cultural space

Case selection: which buzzwords?

Expressions immediately associated with the war

special military operation
denazification

Expressions used to put war in context

collective West
anglosaxons
russophobia
~~traditional values~~

Case selection: which sources? [1/2]

Russian institutions:

Kremlin
Duma
MFA

Russian mainstream media:

1tv.ru (mainstream pro-government TV)
rg.ru (government-owned newspaper)
kp.ru (tabloid / only politics section)
ng.ru (more analytical / opinion)

Case selection: which sources? [2/2]

Russian fringe nationalist media:

Tsargrad (nationalist TV, new, wider reach)
Zavtra.ru (nationalist weekly, publishing since the 1990s)

The tech

`castarter`

Content Analysis Starter Toolkit for the R programming language - https://github.com/giocomai/castarter

streamlined text-mining
keep records on the download process
facilitate file management and caching
support memory-efficient processing
facilitate corpus updates
explore and share data via web interfaces

A basic workflow

Output

a corpus in a tabular format with text and metadata
a selection of these corpora are publicly available for download, when the license allows for it - https://tadadit.xyz/datasets/
an interactive interface will be made available for some of them
extensive or full list of keywords in context can be shared in documentation or posts accompanying the article

One buzzword at a time

Caveats on the graphs that follow

figures presented in absolute numbers for clarity, even if number of publications not constant (substantially, in most cases, not a big issue)
different sources are available for different time frames
everything is based only on contents available online (a significant issue, in particular for TV channels)