Identity has been making something of a comeback in the world of Russian politics of late. Ever since Vladimir Putin and his advisers turned to the so-called “values agenda” to drive a wedge between the Bolotnaya-era opposition and the bulk of Russian citizens—successfully, as it turned out—identity has been at the core of Russian politics. Scholars have noted the role of identity politics in reordering the behaviors of Russian elites (Sharafutdinova Citation2014) and voters (Smyth and Soboleva Citation2014) alike, as well as in structuring the Kremlin’s approach to geopolitical confrontation (Sztosek Citation2017).
Several years on from the “identitarian turn” in Russian politics, though, it’s worth looking back to see what is—and is not—changing. In each of the contributions here, the authors ask less what identity politics has done to Russia, as what Russians of all walks of life are doing with the roles, both new and old, that identity places in their lives.
Andrei Melville, as dean of social sciences and head of the department of political science at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow, is one of the most established Russian voices in contemporary political studies. In his contribution here, he explores the factors supporting—and potentially undermining—the neoconservative political consensus in Russia. Its biggest weakness, he argues, may lie in its very dominance: without a progressivist agenda to oppose, Melville asks, what really sustains and justifies conservatism?
Denis Zhuravlev—a PhD student at Russia’s People’s Friendship University at the time his article was written—takes the widespread observation that Russia’s politics have become imbued with Orthodox religion and turns it around: Has Orthodoxy come to be imbued with politics? Drawing on a careful discourse analysis, he argues that the Russian Orthodox Church has developed a “political theology” that sometimes subjugates universal morality to the demands of political expediency.
In her article, “National Identity as a Means of Reducing Ethnic Negativism”, Leokadiya Drobizheva explores the contradictory and sometimes confusing relationships between an individual’s sense of their own ethno-national identity and their propensity towards chauvinism. Interestingly, having a strong sense of one’s own identity, she finds, can help reduce bigotry towards others. Aside from the findings, which are themselves instructive, Drobizheva—the doyenne of Russian ethnic studies—makes a plea for educators, policymakers and journalists to think about identity with more care and nuance.
In an extraordinary piece of research, Nadezhda Vasilieva, Alina Maiboroda and Iskender Yasaveev—all research fellows at the Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg—delve into the daily lives and vernaculars of young Dagestanis to understand the flow of young men and women from the Northern Caucasus to join the ranks of ISIL in Syria. While the fighters themselves are unavailable for research, the authors find that there is very little social distance between those who leave for the front and those who remain behind. The ability of ‘loyal’ Dagestanis to understand and even empathize with those who leave serves as stark evidence of the social, economic and political challenges facing Dagestani society today.
Switching gears, the journalist and activist Sergei Parkhomenko presents what starts out as an obituary for Russian journalism—the victim of political, regulatory and economic pressures—but then gives way to optimism. Civic initiatives, ranging from his own Final Address project to Alexei Navalnyi’s anti-corruption network, have become important centers of collecting, processing and distributing information in their own right. More importantly, Parkhomenko adds, these initiatives are built around ‘distributed’ networks and resources, and so don’t have the structural vulnerabilities that made the traditional independent media so easy to kill off. That, too, is a shift of identity, both as journalists begin to think of themselves as activists, and as activists begin to think of themselves as journalists.
One wonders whether the same isn’t happening—or eventually bound to happen—to academics, as well. But that’s another issue.
References
- Sharafutdinova, G. (2014). The Pussy Riot affair and Putin’s demarche from sovereign democracy to sovereign morality. Nationalities Papers 42(4): 615–621.
- Smyth, R., and I. Soboleva. (2014). Looking beyond the economy: Pussy Riot and the Kremlin’s voting coalition. Post-Soviet Affairs 30(4): 257–275.
- Sztosek, J. (2017). Defence and promotion of desired state identity in Russia’s strategic narrative. Geopolitics 22(3): 571–593.