Shifting spatial metaphors in Russia at a time of war

Abstract

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.