Lento, a “chronicler” of the events of March 9, 1956 (According to Otar Chkheidze’s novel “Revelation”

March 9, 1956 remains a controversial issue in Georgian historiography to this day, as the protest was ambivalent in its content ad demands. Despite differences of opinion, everyone agress, that this was the first anti-Soviet political rally in the Soviet Union. On the one hand, the demonastrators, insulted by Nikita Khrushov’s report on “The cult of personality” at the 20th congress of the CPSU, praised Stalin, and on the other hand, distanced themselves from the Soviet Union and demanded national independence. In the Soviet Union (obviously in Soviet Georgia) this topic has been avoided for decades; It did not have a wide response in public discourse. Lasha Berulava comments on the tragedy in the article “March 9, 1956 – Another Bood Drop of the dead Man” the following opinion is expressed:”Stalin,with his death, acted as a “dead body” and “organized the massacre of the capital of the Georgian people. This was March 9, 1956, when Georgians protested against the cult of Stalin; It was Stalin who wrote to Orjonikidze standing near Tbilisi surrounded by Russian troops:”Attack now, take the city, I will command you!” {Berulava, 2011:09}.In this article we will try to briefly discuss the events of March 9, 1956, which take place agaibst the background of the life of a boy from the village, Lento. Lento, as a “chronicler” of “Looker” events from afar, tries to remember the “shots” which camera in his hand. Lento does not appear to be the leader’s apologist either, but he still has trouble and loses his brother and sister in these “dumb” people.

“So Many Mothers, So Little Love”: Discourse of Motherly Love and Parental Governance in 2019 Hong Kong Protests

This paper focuses on Hong Kong Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor’s discourse of motherly love during the 2019 mass protests, examining it in relation to the politicization of Confucianism taking place in China today. This politicization results from a new cult of personality centered on President Xi Jinping and his wife Peng Liyuan which reinforces patriarchal authoritarianism and familial nationalism through an explicit emphasis on Confucianism and traditional values. Through this process, authoritarian power has been reconfigured and legitimized as Confucian duty, with the result that political leaders are made to appear firm but benevolent parents while the protestors are cast in the role of children requiring discipline. Lam’s discourse of motherly love is further complicated by the fact that she is the first woman to assume such a leadership role in modern Chinese history, which further illuminates Hong Kong’s struggle against both patriarchal authoritarianism and the gendered legacy of coloniality.

A.S. Khomyakov and “people’s thought” in the epic novel by Leo Tolstoy “War and Peace”

The article reveals the deep connections of the “people’s thought” and Tolstoy’s philosophy of history in “War and Peace” with the theological and literary-critical works of A.S. Khomyakova. The author of the work analyzes the dispute between Tolstoy and the cult of an outstanding personality, with the Hegelian understanding of his role in the historical process. Tolstoy is alien to the Hegelian rise of “great personalities” over the masses, the Hegelian liberation of the “genius” from moral control and evaluation. Tolstoy believes that it is not an exceptional personality, but the life of the people that turns out to be the most sensitive organism, catching the will of Providence, intuitively sensing the hidden meaning of the historical movement. Anticipating Tolstoy, Khomyakov sharply criticizes the cult of personality in the church hierarchy, the Catholic dogma of papal infallibility, of the unconditional authority of an individual in matters of conscience and faith. Khomyakov reveals deep religious roots that feed the centuries-old Western enmity towards Russia. The article proves that Tolstoy is close to Khomyakov’s idea that Divine Providence overshadows with its grace only the believing people, united into a single organism by Christian love, that the epic basis of “War and Peace” is anticipated in Khomyakov’s literary-critical works “Glinka’s Opera ‘Life for Tsar’”, “On the Possibility of the Russian Art School”, “Ivanov’s Painting. Letter to the editor of ‘Russian Beseda’”. The article proves that “War and Peace” overcomes the conflict between the individual and society, the hero and the people, and reveals the epic horizons lost in the Western European novel.

The Partnership between the USA and the European Union

Western values are under attack all over the world, including in some of the oldest democracies. Populist demagogues are being voted into government in free elections, rather than by seizing power. The political middle appears to be hollowed out as extreme movements gain force. Yet the Western model, frequently predicted to be in danger of imminent collapse, lives on. For one set of values to collapse, another set of values needs to gain widespread acceptance. That prerequisite may never be achieved. China has proven that rapid and sustained economic growth is possible within an autocratic governance system. Its success in lifting hundreds of millions out of poverty into the middle class is rightly viewed as a historic achievement. But it has failed to inspire global admiration for its values, despite major efforts to project its influence culturally and diplomatically, and through massive investment in infrastructure around the world. News about China’s social scoring system, increasing drift toward a cult of personality under Xi Jinping, systematic surveillance, and massive internment of Muslims has contributed to unease about China. The USA and the EU still have an opportunity to ensure the continued relevance of the West as they work together along with other allies under the Biden administration, just as they did so often in the past (prior to the Trump administration) on issues of global importance, including trade, climate change, foreign aid and humanitarian assistance, data privacy, and human rights.

“President-Protector”: A Multimodal Critical Discourse Analysis of a News Report Promoting the Personality Cult of the President of Turkmenistan G. Berdymukhamedov

The cult of personality started by the first President of Turkmenistan Saparmurat Niyazov has acquired new dimensions with the present leader of the country. The cult of personality of Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov is actively constructed via mass media. This paper examines two short clips of a news report dedicated to the President’s birthday celebration that was broadcasted on the Turkmen national TV on 26 June 2020. The paper analyzes a set of specific mechanisms of flattery inflation used in the report and demonstrates special linguistic choices and visual patterns applied to force a specific ideology on the audience. Due to the multimodal nature of the analyzed discourse, multimodal critical discourse analysis has been implemented, additionally informed by the systemic functional linguistics and the visual semiotic analysis.

The sino-soviet border conflict in the middle of the XX century

The article is devoted to the analysis of the peculiarities of relations between the USSR and the PRC in the middle of the XX century. The authors analyze the circumstances of the deterioration of relations between the two countries since Nikita Khrushchev assumed leadership of the USSR and the condemnation of the cult of personality of Joseph Stalin. The nature of "cartographic aggression" and "great power chauvinism" is revealed. Besides, typological rhetoric, common and specific features in mutual accusations of the Soviet and Chinese sides are shown. The illegality of the territorial claims of the PRC, the betrayal of socialist ideals by its leadership, attempts to discredit the Soviet Union in the international arena, and the desire to undermine the world communist movement used to be the main theses in the research of the Soviet historians of the 1960s-1980s. It is concluded that the interpretation of Sino-Soviet relations in Soviet historiography was primarily propagandistic and closely related to the state interests of the Soviet Union.

THE AFFECTIVE BODY: PLATFORMED PRESENCE AND VIRTUAL EMBODIMENT IN THE POPULIST POLITICS OF NARENDRA MODI

Political theory agrees that the charismatic leader’s cult of personality is a cornerstone of populist politics, with an increasingly distrustful, contentious, and internally divided society seeing the leader as the embodiment of the popular will more viscerally than the electoral process allows (Laclau 2005). The power of the hypermasculine leader persists in the digital age where populists exert authoritarian control over media narratives and infrastructures, as feminist critiques of the iconography of statesmen like Putin, Erdogan and Duterte demonstrate (Chavez and Pacheo 2020). Yet this brand of strongman politics is discursively co-produced by the leader’s physical presence; my presentation argues in contrast that Indian PM Narendra’s Modi’s affective body is animated by its persistent digitization, virtualization, and absence of liveness. Modi’s populism is driven by his appeal as a technocrat, a man accessible to the people via hologram, Twitter, exclusive apps, 3D modelled YouTube videos, and other digitally enabled forms of disembodied representation which create a “fantasy of unmediated access” (Govil and Baishya 2018). When Modi appears in public to perform yoga or lay a silver brick in the foundations of a temple, his corporeal form is one iteration of his virtualized, mediated persona. Modi’s independence from the demands of embodiment is made possible by his substantive digital presence. The experiential intensity and interactivity of social media creates what I term “platform affect”, which mobilizes affective discourses like nationalism to material effect, such as drawing large crowds galvanized by a sense of intimacy with Modi’s virtual and physical person.

Addison and the Romantics

This chapter looks at the Romantic essayists as critics and emulators of Addison. It begins with ‘The Round Table’ of 1815–17 and Hunt’s and Hazlitt’s paradoxical attempt to revive the form and spirit of The Tatler and Spectator in their own time, while simultaneously attacking the polite consensus that those two periodicals had brought into being. It shows Lamb and Hazlitt seeking to discriminate between ‘Steele’s’ Tatler, in which the ‘first sprightly runnings’ of the periodical essay form had supposedly run freshest and clearest, and ‘Addison’s’ Spectator, in which that flow had been regulated and tamed. It explores how the Romantics, and Romantic-period magazine culture more generally, sought to revitalize the familiar essay form by breaking down its straitjacket of politeness with the contemporaneous cult of personality. But it also shows how a powerful nostalgia for the ‘honeymoon of authorship’ that had been enjoyed by Addison and Steele in the early 1710s continued to haunt both Hazlitt and Lamb. Finally, the chapter looks at the way in which Hazlitt made Addison’s supposed move away from conversational intimacy towards alienated sententiousness an allegory of the development of modern literature more generally, thus characterizing him as a kind of Eve in the garden of modern prose, at one and the same time its fairest embodiment and the harbinger of its ruin.

The Sino-Soviet Border Conflict in the Middle of the XX Century

The article is devoted to the analysis of the peculiarities of relations between the USSR and the PRC in the middle of the XX century. In a short historical period, two countries with a similar ideology and political system shifted from relations of friendship and mutual assistance to military-political confrontation, which culminated in the armed conflict on Zhenbao (Damansky) Island in March 1969. A special interest of the Chinese side in good-neighbourly relations with the Soviet Union at the initial stage of the existence of the PRC (1949-1955) is described. The authors analyze the circumstances of the deterioration of relations between the two countries since Nikita Khrushchev assumed leadership of the USSR and the condemnation of the cult of personality of Joseph Stalin. Special attention is paid to the border issue in the relationship between the two countries. It presents the different views of the PRC and the Soviet Union on the tsarist treaties with China concluded in the second half of the XIX century. Moreover, the problem of ideological confrontation between the Soviet and Chinese leadership is considered; the publications of Soviet historians which assess the actions of the PRC leadership against the Soviet Union are analyzed. The nature of "cartographic aggression" and "great power chauvinism" is revealed. Besides, typological rhetoric, common and specific features in mutual accusations of the Soviet and Chinese sides are shown. The illegality of the territorial claims of the PRC, the betrayal of socialist ideals by its leadership, attempts to discredit the Soviet Union in the international arena, and the desire to undermine the world communist movement used to be the main theses in the research of the Soviet historians of the 1960s-1980s. It is concluded that the interpretation of Sino-Soviet relations in Soviet historiography was primarily propagandistic and closely related to the state interests of the Soviet Union.