Contemporary Russian Society and its Soviet Legacy: The Problem of State-Dependent Workers

Author(s):  
Victor Zaslavsky
2016 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dina Khapaeva

In this article, I explore the interconnection between Putin’s politics of re-Stalinization, historical memory, and a specific version of the post-Soviet neo-medievalism. I show that re-Stalinization is a mass movement that is grounded in the unprocessed memory of Soviet crimes and atrocities. The popular myth of the “Great Patriotic War” and the myth of Stalinism as the Golden Age exploited by Putin’s memory politics became a gold mine for Putin’s kleptocracy. I argue that re-Stalinization and the Kremlin-sponsored ideology of Eurasianism represents two interrelated trends of a complex ideological process. Eurasianism combines Soviet denial of individuality with the idea of a state-dependent patriarchal society and Russian historical messianism. It glorifies the reign of Ivan the Terrible and Stalin. The ‘medievalist’ discourse of Eurasian ideologists, which advocates a return to the medieval society of orders, on the one hand, and the Gothic monsters populating post- Soviet film and fiction, on the other, creates a political language that expresses new attitudes to people in post-Soviet Russia. They depict a new social contract that reconsiders the modern concept of citizenship, and creates a social basis for the criminalization and militarization of Russian society.


2000 ◽  
pp. 60-67
Author(s):  
M. M. Nikitenko

The inclusion of Eastern Slavs in the sphere of religious and cultural influences of Byzantium was a tremendous event both in national and in world history. Since then, the main center of the culture of Kievan Rus, incorporating a complex of ideas and functions of the spiritual, public and private life of ancient Russian society, became the Eastern Christian temple in its local version


Author(s):  
Tokhir S. Kalandarov

Today there are hundreds of papers published on the problem of labor migration from Central Asian countries, its political, social and economic aspects, as well as on the problem of integration and adaptation of migrants in the Russian society. However, the topic of migrant poetry is still poorly studied in Russia. At least there is no such research on Tajik labor migrants. The genres of Tajik migrant poetry vary significantly and include such forms as love poems, political songs, songs about migration hardships, religious poems. This paper is based on the results of monitoring social networks «Odnoklassniki», «Facebook», as well as on the results of personal communication and interviews with poets. In the paper we use the poems of three authors written in Tajik, Russian and Shugnani languages. The semantic translation from Tajik and Shugnani was done by the author of this paper


2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 157-171
Author(s):  
Elena Kravchenko ◽  
Tatiana Valiulina

This article focuses on the debate over Crimea's accession. The content analysis relies on data collected during the first and most turbulent year of Crimea's incorporation, which started with the decision to conduct a referendum on the Crimean status and then to declare Crimea's independence in March 2014. The sample consists of 50 entries published on LiveJournal, both posts and commentaries. We have discovered and problematized severe disagreements in bloggers' worldview that give rise to the antinomies of bloggers' linguistic consciousness. By this, we mean the use of words with opposite connotations relating to the same event within the same blog and an inconsistency between bloggers' perception of the event and the affective meanings of lexical items attached to it. Our main point is that Crimea's accession prompts bloggers to reduce this dissonance by “rolling up the semantic rainbow,” that is, by destroying meanings with rigid binary semantic opposition, which thereby further exacerbates deep-rooted divisions within Russian society where patriots and liberals increasingly keep apart.


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