Framing the Collective Memory of the 1990s as a Legitimation Tool for Putin’s Regime

ABSTRACT

The article reveals how a sharp contrast between the “turbulent 1990s” and the “stable 2000s” was constructed and exploited by Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev for shoring up the regime. Using a qualitative content analysis, I demonstrate how Putin’s power was legitimized through three discursive mechanisms of re-presenting the recent past: the coining of buzzwords that became symbolic descriptors of the 1990s; the populist framing of the regime’s policies; the composition of narratives about the immediate post-Soviet years. Constructed largely in the early 2000s, the negative framing of the Yeltsin decade became central to the official legitimizing discourse of Putin’s regime.

Acknowledgements

The author thanks the anonymous reviewers for useful comments that helped to elaborate the arguments of this article. She also tenders thanks to Iain Ferguson for his kind help with proof reading.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. “Likhie” could be translated from Russian to English as “dashing,” but also as “turbulent” and “hard.” The cliché likhie devianostye became current in mid-2000s, especially during elections to State Duma in 2007. For an interesting analysis of dynamics of its usage see Bonch-Osmolovskaia 2018.

2. For a rare exception, see the chapter by Philipp Bürger in the collective volume on legitimation in post-Soviet Eurasia (Bürger 2016).

3. Here and later the emphasis is added by the author of the article.

4. For a brilliant analysis of strategies of legitimation of the Second Chechen War see Wilhelmsen (2016).

5. According to a study from the Institute of Sociology of the Russian Academy of Sciences, “the historical memory of the Russians reflects the recent past with considerable biases; the major tendency is a caricature-like exaggeration of the failures of Yeltsin’s time and of the achievements of Soviet times. Against this background, some exaggeration of Russia’s achievements in the twenty-first century is not decisive, because by contrast with the ‘terrible’ 1990s they cannot but look advantageous” (Latov 2018, 124).

6. It should be noted that this image was not totally new in Putin’s rhetoric. In 2005, narrating the collapse of the Soviet Union as the “major geopolitical disaster of the century,” he also added that those who would argue that “our young democracy was not a continuation of Russian statehood, but its ultimate collapse” were mistaken, because Russia actually succeeded in building its “sovereign” democracy (Putin 2005b).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Российский Фонд Фундаментальных Исследований (РФФИ) (Russian Foundation for Basic Research) [grant no. 17-03-00322].