The Historical Past as the Foundation of the Russian Polity: Vladimir Putin’s 2012–2018 Speeches

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article is dedicated to studying the reasons and political meaning of the contemporary Russian government’s increasingly active appeal to the past. Building on the post-fundamentalist tradition in political philosophy, the author argues that during V. Putin’s third term, history turned into a quasi-transcendency aimed at providing political life with a value dimension. Evidence for this includes, in particular, phenomena like the growing “securitization” of historical memory and the use of historical arguments as a basis for significant political decisions. The choice of history as a main source of value legitimization for Russian policy is tied both to seemingly evident historical facts and to the underdevelopment of Russia’s moral discourse, given the dominance of virtue-based ethics over principle-based ethics. Based on discursive analysis of Putin’s 2012–2018 speeches, the author concludes that the state is the main actor in Russian history, while the key political virtue is service to it. The persuasiveness of historical arguments is due, first of all, to the idea of objectivity of the past, and second, to the emotional power of images of heroes who sacrificed themselves in the name of the Fatherland. The latter explains not only the dominance of military themes, but also the desire of ruling elites to push topics related to political repressions to the margins of public space so that emotionally powerful images of victims are not used to justify alternative political values. Through his performative remarks, Putin has introduced historical themes into various areas of state activity and expanded the space of the relevant past to the prerevolutionary period. The repertoire of past used for political ends is limited to events that precede the early 1990s, that is, to the “political moment” when contemporary Russian politics began taking shape. This has led to greater autonomization of the space of collective memory. Correlating the collective “We” with the pages of the distant past requires imagination, but that same imagination often generates its own semantic world far from the real political problems of the present day.