Back to the Future. Socialism and Nationalism as Tools for Political Legitimization

Abstract

This article analyzes how, in the past years, Russia's political discourse has concentrated on the Country's place and role in the modern world and how top-down political communication seems to have somewhat succeeded in affecting the population's political culture and reviving old ideologies. The armed conflict declared by Russia against Ukraine seems to have had the effect of strengthening – once again - the polarization between the West and the East. New geopolitical arrangements and new power relations are being reorganized, and, in this process, political cultures and ideologies seem to be reshaped. In particular, the data from Russian national surveys on the population's political values and the analysis of political discourses show that Russia seems to have dusted off its old socialist ideology, emphasizing its nationalistic and neo-imperial traits while deepening its neo-authoritarian turn. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and a short period of de-ideologization, the Russian government has repeatedly attempted to develop a nationwide general civil ideology, mainly using the concepts of the "Russian world" and of "neo-Eurasianism", considered as neo-imperial ideologies, that determined the content of public discourse in Russia. Nationalism is both an ideology and a political practice based on the value of the nation as the highest form of social unity. This kind of nationalism is widely used by states through official rhetoric, symbols and ideological institutions (education, social sciences, mass media) to assert civil loyalty and disseminate national legal norms and cultural values. (Tishkov, 2021). Nationalism and Neo-conservatism have become of particular importance to Russian society, and during the last decade, they have become the core of the Country's political actions and rhetoric. Neo-conservatism includes a set of different ideological patterns such as nationalism, imperial claims, orientations on special ways of Russia, the priority of traditional values, etc., which are accompanied by authoritarian tendencies in the political process (A. Panarin, 1994, Dugin 2000). In this way, it seems correct to affirm that the neo-conservative ideology becomes the sociocultural base of the whole process of power legitimization. In this context and in the frames of the actual political system, no political movement, party, or group of interests can act as a real competitor of the federal government, which has built its ethnopolitics not only on the idea of uniting different nations of the Russian Federation but also on ideas of irredentism. This is not totally new. If in the 90s, political discourse and public dialogue were dominated by the idea of democratization and of transition from an authoritarian to an open society, only a decade later, as early as Putin's first mandate, political discourse started to turn to the idea of "stability" and of "sustainability of the system and of the welfare state", coupled with the idea of a so-called "conservative modernization" that essentially implied the beginning of a new era of anti-reformism and a nostalgic call for the Socialist past. In this article, moving from a neo-Marxist perspective on the concept of Political Culture (Burlackij, 1970; Markiewicz, 1971; Wiatr, 1980), we will analyze how these political ideas and values have turned into a political culture that seems coherent with the above mentioned neo-imperial nationalist ideology, and, most importantly, that is inclined to support it. Whereas the Russians who do not support the regime, seem far from being capable of displaying a coherent and alternative political culture, let alone organizing a different political programme that could activate a counteroffensive. While taking into account public speeches from prominent political leaders, the empirical basis of the article derives from the data of the all-Russia annual sociological monitoring "How do you live, Russia" (1992-2023) carried out by the Institute of Socio-Political Research - Branch of the Federal Centre of Theoretical and Applied Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, through a survey on a sample of 1400-1800 respondents, representative of all the Russian population. As we will see, the data shows that new forms of civic nationalism are largely based on nostalgic sympathies for the Soviet past and a new civil identity, formed successfully during the post-soviet period, is increasingly affirming itself.