Naming the War and Framing the Nation in Russian Public Discussion

Abstract

Fundamental changes in Europe’s political map following the end of the Cold War have led to a new competition of hegemonic interpretations of history and national memory. In particular this has happened in the former socialist Eastern European countries (notably in the Baltic States, Poland, and Western Ukraine) where there has been a big demand to establish a new state identity distancing these countries from the socialist past. For the Russian socio-cultural and political environment the given identity political demand has created a challenging terrain in which symbolic, and irrevocably political, resources for national identity are forced to be calibrated in line with domestic and foreign policy concerns. In this regard, the public usage of “The Great Patriotic War” and its ramifications has been the most notable manifestation, which exhibits the political significance of history in these identity debates. In order to grasp the manifestations of this significance, this article examines the uses of the terms “The Great Patriotic War” (Velikaia Otechestvennaia voina, VOV) and “The Second World War” (Vtoraia mirovaia voina, VMV) in the Russian mainstream media over the course of the last ten years. For this purpose the Integrum databases (Russian-language media corpus of more than 400 million documents) provide a productive tool for specified queries related to VOV and VMV allowing the examination of major themes that these two terms activate in the Russian public discourse. We argue that whereas the VOV signifies the “inner” canonized framework for discussing the war within society, it is the VMV which figures as VOV’s counterpoint in terms of activating “outer” frameworks for the war’s public discussion. In relation to the broader identity political context, the study expands the question of how the era of the Second World War is treated in Russia, and the potential limits of this discussion.