Shifting spatial metaphors in Russia at a time of war

ABSTRACT

Russia’s war with Ukraine is reshaping Russia’s geopolitical orientation and transforming the ways the country relates to its immediate neighbours. In this article, rather than undertaking a geopolitical analysis of the consequences inside Russia of the ongoing war in Ukraine, we look at public discourse as one aspect of political activity. We describe how processes of a holistic kind are depicted in metaphors and how new spatial metaphors are emerging. The war has pushed earlier somatic and emotion-laden state-generated images into coexistence with new tropes of centripetal convergence around the President and loyalty to the power vertical. We also bring to attention other kinds of images: the downbeat metaphors and historical analogies with which people describe Russia’s changing actuality, and the new spatial-territorial images produced by ethnic groups who are looking at Russia from alternative, non-central and sometimes conflictual perspectives. Unlike the national homogenisation that has developed from Xi Jinping’s image of ‘China’s dream’, Russia remains a consciously ‘imperial’, multiethnic and economically diverse country. We suggest that examining the influential metaphors by which it is imagined, both the holistic and the diverse, incongruous or splintered, is one way to capture the multiplicity of a country at war and in flux.

KEYWORDS:

• Borders; conflict
• Europe; geopolitical imaginations; national identity; political geography
• Russia; metaphors

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 This metaphor is not one that is being used officially in Russia. The analogy was proposed by a Russian sociologist (who prefers to remain anonymous) and is one we find both graphically potent and theoretically productive.

2 More pragmatic considerations also involved access to ports and to various economic resources.

3 In a recent interview with Vladimir Putin by Tucker Carlson, the Russian President discusses Hungarian territorial losses and leaves the door open as to whether Hungary may in the future seek to reintegrate territories lost to Ukraine (Kremlin, 2024).

4 In their online sample of educated urban Russians before Crimea, Greene and Robertson write, ‘only 53 percent had expressed approval of President Putin. But when we asked the same individuals again in June 2014, Putin's approval had soared to 80 percent—almost the same as the population as a whole’ (2022, 110).

5 See website: https://senezh.rsv.ru/. Consulted January 2024.

6 Political speech, as in the Soviet era earlier, may sometimes be similar to glossolalia – the production of performative almost meaningless words in order to virtue signal.

7 A similar situation developed in Mongolia, a satellite of the Soviet Union, where Mongols were encouraged to see themselves as culturally different from, and superior to, Chinese and other Asian populations (Billé, 2015).

8 Note, however, the important distinction between ‘Asia’ and the concept of ‘Eurasia’. The latter is an idea first formed by Russian intellectuals and it continues to be popular in Russian governing circles as a ‘civilisational’ justification for the extent and character of the Russian empire and its successors.

9 https://www.idelreal.org/a/32104989.html. Consulted 30 April 2024.

10 https://www.idelreal.org/a/31292962.html. Consulted 30 April 2024.