Russian Nationalism Research Articles

Mythodesign in Modern Kazakh Realities

Abstract Kazakhstan is in a state of transformation. This is due, on the one hand, to the internal processes of generational change, the economic crisis, and demographic changes. But also, on the other hand, to the collapse of the global security system and the dysfunctionality of international organisations such as Amnesty International, Red Cross, OSCE, and UN. These challenges lead to the construction of a new system of meanings that will help unite Kazakh society. Mythodesign can be a technology for achieving this. In scientific publications, there are gaps in the analysis of how mythodesign is used in Kazakhstan. The article will analyse the state and prospects of mythodesign development in modern Kazakh reality. Mythodesign in the first thirty years of Kazakhstan’s independence included the following elements. Domestic policy: multiculturalism and dialogue in Kazakh society, especially the between the titular (Kazakh) and non-titular (Russian) nations. Foreign policy: a multi-vector policy that came about as a response to Kazakhstan’s geopolitical position. This manifests itself in Kazakhstan’s participation in the Eurasian Economic Union. The key political figure who constructed the national myth was N. Nazarbayev, whose political brand followed these key elements. This study can be used to develop new mythologemes for Kazakhstan.

Literary network hypertext in the context of native Russian media culture of the late 1990s – early 2000s

The article tries to explore network forms of literary content as part of media culture, which the author studies within the framework of an axiological approach. The active development of literary texts by native Russian media culture began at the turn of the 20th–21st centuries. The openness of media culture and its constant renewal is fertile ground for the mediatization of literature. Taking experiments with so-called pre-network hypertexts as a basis, the creators of original projects, using digital technologies, created a new type of content that has become a full part of both media culture in general and media art as its component. Literary projects in the Internet space of the late 1990s and early 2000s are at the intersection of mass and elitist culture, being one of the ways of aesthetic exploration of reality by a mass audience.

The Semantic Structure of the Image of “Vision” in the Russian Linguistic Worldview

This article examines the structure of the image of “vision” in the Russian linguistic worldview. The structural reconstruction was performed through the study of the key meanings of “vision” in the Russian language. The proposition, a logical outline of the components involved in visual perception, was selected as a way by which the knowledge about “vision” is gathered. The following components were found to be a regular source of figurative meanings: the subject of visual perception, the process of visual perception, the subject’s features indicating the quality of visual perception, and the means of visual perception. The dominant meanings of different propositional elements constituting the structural core of the image of “vision” were revealed: “the ability to see,” “the quality of vision,” “light,” “mediation,” and “accommodation.” The main denotative spheres covered by the knowledge about “vision” were distinguished: the human sphere, as well as the spheres of artifacts (technical means of image capture, artificial light sources) and nature (primarily natural light sources). It was shown that the metaphors referring to the human sphere are based on the idea of a close connection between visual perception and mental activity. The anthropomorphic metaphors arising from the artifacts used to produce images are created following the same logical pattern. The metaphorical understanding of light sources, both artificial and natural, is determined by the association between “vision” and light in the minds of native Russian speakers.

Linguistic and cultural content of teaching preschoolers the Tatar language in a multilingual developmental environment

The languages, in which children are raised and educated become a tool, a condition and a factor in the formation of children’s worldview and their linguistic picture. It underlies the ethnocultural and national identification of the child in the future. The education system faces challenges related not only to the education and development of children, but also to the formation of an all-Russian civic identity, to the education of a person with linguistic and sociocultural competence, the one who respects the language, culture and traditions of the peoples of the Russian Federation. This idea permeates all normative acts concerning the content of education. Education is becoming a strategic tool for ensuring the linguistic and ethnocultural diversity of our country, a support for preserving the experience of intercultural and interreligious interaction of the peoples that make up the Russian nation. Multilingual education, whose linguodidactic system ensures the development of the child in the Russian and Tatar languages, makes it possible to take into account the national and cultural needs of the younger generation living in the region.The article reveals the experience of introducing a linguodidactic system for teaching children the Tatar language in a multilingual environment, designed to ensure the formation of a child’s national language picture.

Folklore Elements in the Poetry of Ekaterina Kletnovaya

The article is devoted to one of the characteristic features of the poetic works of E.N. Kletnova (1869–1938), whose literary work is still not known to the general public and has not previously become the subject of a comprehensive philological study. Poems by E.N. Kletnova are filled with various folklore elements − syntactic constructions and language formulas, lexical means of expression, compositional elements (introduction to a song and song), epic images. The author especially actively resorts to folklore stylization when creating poems on general cultural and political topics, trying to give them a folk-epic sound. In the course of the study, the following methods were used: a comparative-stylistic method to establish the similarities and
 differences in the language design of E.N. Kletnova and folklore genres; a structural method for analyzing the specific structure of the text; a conceptual analysis to reveal the picture of the world of the author's linguistic personality; a descriptive method.
 It was concluded that folklore elements in the poetry of E.N. Kletnova, firstly, are a reflection of her scientific, primarily ethnographic studies; secondly, they are used to create a special native Russian flavor in the poetic disclosure of vital social topics;
 thirdly, they express the interest in mythological antiquities and folklore tradition characteristic of the Silver Age.

Mechanisms of metaphorical formation and interpretation of zoosemisms in Russian dictionaries

The subject of the study is the lexical and semantic features of Russian zoosemisms characterizing the internal signs of a person. The object of the study is Russian zoosemisms, that is, secondary names of persons motivated by animal names (zoonyms). The paper examines the relationship between the primary meanings of animals and their metaphorical zoosemic meanings; the interaction of metaphorical connections and cultural representations in language; and the potential for the development of zoosemisms in the Russian language. The author examines in detail such aspects of the topic as zoosemisms reflecting the internal characteristics of a person and directly related to the zoonyms motivating them; zoosemisms reflecting the internal features of a person and indirectly related to the zoonyms motivating them. Special attention is paid to the analysis of possible sources of zoosemisms, which are indirectly related to the zoonyms motivating them, as well as their stability in the psychological state of native Russian speakers. The following methods are used in the study: descriptive, component analysis, comparative analysis, as well as the method of continuous sampling of material. The novelty of this work lies in an in-depth analysis of a specific subgroup of zoosemisms; identification of various connections between zoonyms and zoosemisms motivated by them; as well as in highlighting the special role of zoosemisms in the linguistic picture of the world of Russian speakers. The results of the study confirm the complexity and diversity of the connections between zoonyms and the zoosemisms motivated by them, many of which are directly related to the cultural, historical and phraseological aspects of the Russian language. The zoosemisms ram, gad, beetle, fox, turkey exist as stronger cultural elements, and are steadily present in the minds of native speakers of the Russian language. The zoosemisms sparrow, goose, animal, dog, creature, chicken are in the status of dynamic development. The source of zoosemisms can be phraseologically related meanings of the corresponding animal (zoosemisms goat, sheep, donkey, rooster); metaphorical meanings of the corresponding masculine animal (zoosemisms gadina, fox/fox, donkey/donkey, bitch); metaphorical meanings associated with the species or family of the corresponding animal (zoosemisms barbosa, tigress, shiloh tail). This analysis enriches the understanding of the mechanisms of metaphor formation in the Russian language and can serve as a basis for further linguistic research, as well as methods of teaching Russian to foreign students.

ВОЗЗРЕНИЯ Н. С. ЛЕСКОВА НА ИМЯ (ОНОМАСТИЧЕСКИЙ КОММЕНТАРИЙ)

The article deals with the N.S. Leskov's views to a proper name in Russian culture. The writer highly values the Russian name as part of the national cultural fund. In N.S. Leskov's opinion, the wide use of native Russian names in naming will significantly enrich our culture. The article analyzes the anthroponyms of N.S. Leskov’s essay “Satiety with nobility” (1888), dedicated to the loss of the tradition of calling by name in Russian speech culture. The writer creatively comprehends the potential of proper name, thereby forming a unique metatextual reality of his works. The proper name plays an important role in N.S. Leskov’s creative workshop. Key words: name, onomastics, biblical names, autobiographical names, “Satiety of nobility” (1888), N.S. Leskov

Madonna versus “Mother Russia?” Visual Anthropology of Loneliness and Gendered Nationalism on Russian 2021–2023 Political Posters

Abstract This article is aimed at transdisciplinary (critical International Relations, visual anthropology, and existential philosophy) analysis of Russian gendered nationalism and masculine ontological insecurities. It explores and re-imagines how visual representations of “Mother Russia” became signifiers of the phallocentric voice of the Russian gendered state. What can return the voice back to the “invisible women”? I claim that the political activism of the singer Madonna in the spheres of resistance to warfare and protection of gender minorities may shed new light on hidden manipulations with masculine anxieties in modern Russia. Besides original empirics, the article proposes theoretical avenues to integrate into gendered nationalism studies research on what I call masculine “politics of loneliness.” I also look at the role such politics plays in constituting Russia's domestic narcissistic master narratives of the collective self and its frontiers with transnational celebrity activism. Based on feminism and narrative IR, this article investigates the “sociological dimension” of Russian loneliness. It examines the alienation of femininity as reflected on Russian street posters photographed during 2021–2023 and represented in the form of five “dialectical collages.”

Naming of a female person in the explanatory dictionary of the Russian language edited by D. N. Ushakov (1935-1940)

The object of the study was the lexical material of the first volume of the «Explanatory dictionary of the Russian language» edited by D. N. Ushakov. The purpose of the study was to conduct a comprehensive analysis of nouns naming a female person. The results of the study will allow in the future to identify the features and trends in the ways of naming female persons, the statics and dynamics of their use in speech from the point of view of stylistic norms, as well as to determine their status in the Russian literary language. As a result of the semantic, stylistic, etymological, comparative lexical analysis of nouns naming a female person conclusions were drawn: there are 15 lexical and semantic groups of nouns naming a female person by profession, nationality /nationality, place of residence, religious beliefs, title etc. were identified. It was found that a large number of obsolete words were included in the dictionary. A special place is occupied by dialectal and colloquial names of women. Etymological analysis showed that most of the names of female persons are of native Russian origin, formed in a word-formation way using suffixes, partly in a metaphorical way. Some of the words are borrowed entirely from French, Latin, etc. Russian languages, the other part has a borrowed root, but the word itself is formed in the Russian language with the help of Russian suffixes. It is argued that some of the nouns naming a female person by profession, position, occupation are not recorded in modern explanatory dictionaries because of their status in the SRL - «outdated» or they are abnormal (dialectal, colloquial).

Совместимы ли патриотизм и интернационализм?

This article analyses the relationship between patriotism and internationalism. In the context of the pluralism of interpretations in modern discourse, the paper clarifies the concepts of internationalism and patriotism, as well as their correlation with the terms cosmopolitanism, nationalism and anti-patriotism. All these categories are considered here as different types of attitudes of some ethnic communities, nations and peoples towards other ethnic communities, nations and peoples, as a way of nations’ self-positioning in the world’s multi-ethnic cultural space. The authors single out the ideological and the socio-psychological levels of the analysis of patriotism and internationalism. At the ideological level, the categories used to characterize interethnic relations are presented in the form of types of rational political ideology. Here, the subject of interethnic relations is the ethnic community as a whole, as a collective community. At the socio-psychological level, the types of mass socio-political orientations, feelings, behavioural attitudes and stereotypes in the sphere of interethnic relations are determined. Here, the subject of interethnic relations is the individual person as a typical representative of a certain ethnic community. It has been established that patriotism and internationalism are closely interconnected and mediate each other, both in individual and in social consciousness. The attitude towards one’s own Motherland and people determines the attitude towards other countries and peoples, and vice versa, the attitude towards other countries and peoples determines the attitude towards one’s own country and people. The essence of modern Russian patriotism is described as a harmonious balance between constructive humanistic patriotism and humanistic internationalism. In addition, the problem of forming constructive patriotism in the Russian mass consciousness, which should replace the liberal ideologies of cosmopolitanism and globalism, is discussed. These ideologies are viewed as destructive forms of internationalism, which promote the erasure of the socio-cultural identity of nations and deny national patriotism.

Degradation in Hypermasculine Cultures of Disposability and Forgetfulness: Nikolai Kolyada’s Ekaterinburg Theatre

Degradation in Hypermasculine Cultures of Disposability and Forgetfulness: Nikolai Kolyada’s Ekaterinburg Theatre

Russian Hip Hop and the War in Ukraine

In response to the ongoing war between Ukraine and Russia, beginning as early as 2014 but reaching a critical apex in the early parts of 2022, hip hop in Russia has only further cemented its role as a “popular” vehicle for the promotion of cultural activism and sociopolitical critique. Born out of post-Soviet antagonism, imperial hegemony, neoliberal commercialism, and jingoist logic, “Russian” rap is a mouthpiece of contemporary conditions. A tangible vehicle for the rediscovery of post-Soviet optimism and the promise of financial prosperity, rap in Russia both upholds and challenges cultural norms and values. In February 2022, the Russo-Ukrainian conflict turned savage, and what it meant to be Russian and be a Russian rapper changed forever. While some rappers rejected Putin’s actions, others either endorsed Putin or stayed silent. Despite the foreignness of rap to the Russian nation, by studying Russian rap and its response to geopolitical unrest the Russian “popular” thought can be more accurately understood. To ascertain how the invasion was conceptualized and synthesized into rap by the Russian rap community, two Russian rap tracks (Oksimiron, Miron Yanovich Fyodorov, Oida and Husky, Dmitry Kuznetsov, God of War) were aesthetically and linguistically analyzed. Lying on divergent sides, they represent polar opposites of Russian rap, each encoding their worldview and position of Russian life in disparate ways, reflecting their respective political voice. While limited in scope, the study provides researchers one possible way to observe how Russian rappers internalize and then aestheticize their political beliefs into their musical style.

Methodological conditions of teaching Russian as a foreign language and their implementation at Kazan Innovation University named after V.G. Timiryasov

The article analyzes the implementation by teachers of Kazan Innovative University named after V.G. Timiryasov of methodological conditions for teaching foreign students Russian as a foreign language, evaluates the effectiveness of the implementation of these conditions in terms of students achieving different levels of proficiency in the Russian language. The methodological recommendations of leading experts in the field of RCT on the maximum allowable number of students in a group of 8 people are substantiated. The requirement is being considered that classes in a group should be conducted by two teachers at the same time (in the weekly schedule, both teachers work in a 50%/50% ratio. This helps to overcome the effect of «getting used» to the timbre of a foreign student’s voice, the pace of speech and the phonetic features of a native Russian speaker. Each teacher activates all types of speech activity in each lesson: speaking, writing, listening, reading and learning vocabulary and grammar. The use of various non-academic forms of improving language skills in teaching foreign students allows students to actively train speaking and listening skills, expand their horizons by getting acquainted with the surrounding foreign cultural reality outside the framework of academic classes. A fundamentally important methodological point is the «re-equipment» of study groups after foreign students have passed the test for a certain level of Russian language acquisition, depending on the results demonstrated by the students. An important condition for ensuring the effectiveness of RCT training is interaction with the parents of students. Kazan Innovative University named after V.G. Timiryasov, when organizing the teaching of Russian as a foreign language to foreign citizens in a remote format, focuses in this process on ensuring «live» communication with the teacher.

Stalin and the Soviet theory of nationality and nationalism: Intellectual and political roots, implementation, and post-1991 legacies

In this essay, I assess Stalin’s ideas and concepts about nationalities, their ‘manipulability’ and their legacies. I do this by briefly reconstructing their theoretical and political roots in both Tsarist and socialist traditions. Special attention will be paid to the discovery of a positive correlation between economic development and the growth of nationalism among ‘backward’ peasant peoples, which went against the grain of previous socialist beliefs, and to the appearance of a theory according to which socialism would naturally produce a superior national-popular society. After discussing the evolution of these ideas and concepts, their practical applications, and the reaction they generated up to 1953, I will focus on the Soviet post-Stalinist theories and practices, and their results, also by taking into consideration the development in Soviet times and after 1991, of new, hybrid variants of Russian nationalism, as well as of Eurasian trends.

Destructively Independent. The Russian Central Bank Leadership in the Runup to the 1993 Constitutional Crisis

Abstract Attempts to get control over the Russian Central Bank are often seen as a key driver of the conflict between the Supreme Soviet and the Russian government in 1993. We argue here that the bank and its leadership were not only an instrument of other power centers but should be considered as active and fairly independent political players with their own interests, stakes, and strategies. In the struggle over monetary policy in the early years of the newly founded Russian Federation, inherited Soviet networks of power were more decisive than legal competences on paper. To the extent that ideas played a role at all in these transitional power struggles, their distinction was not between neoliberal shock therapy and social democratic gradualism, but between different notions of the future realm of Moscow’s financial power. Our paper is based on an assessment of biographical literatures and legal texts as well as a survey of the scholarly literature in economics and history. It shows how, in a phase of post-imperial institutional reconfiguration, different groups of the former Soviet elite competed to preserve their status in the emerging Russian nation state.

A Musical Offering by Nikolai Rakov: Nine Pieces for Piano Four-Hands

The article provides an overview of the “Nine Pieces for Piano Four-Hands” cycle of the late period of the work of Nikolai Rakov, a Russian composer of the 20th century. Allusions are actively used in the cycle, which consists of pieces of different genres, and the infl uence of various composing schools is noticeable. Having passed a long creative path, the composer seems to embody the need to create a musical offering to his great predecessors and contemporaries, involving expressive means of various styles. Masterfully using the arsenal of piano tools for children’s performance, he achieves the most vivid performing solutions and a variety of orchestral colours. At the same time, the culmination of the cycle and the fi nale are native Russian pieces that give the cycle a vividly national fl avour.

An Atlantis discovered: Riga’s Moskovskii forshtadt in the Russophone interwar imagination

ABSTRACT This article relates literary and journalistic representations of Riga’s historic Russophone neighborhood, the Moskоvskii forshtadt, to the interwar conversation on the future of ‘Russia’ outside of the Soviet Union. My analysis begins with a close reading of Georgii Ivanov’s sketch, ‘Moskovskii Forshtadt.’ I then contrast Ivanov’s sketch with local Latvian Russophone accounts of the forshtadt, published in the Riga newspapers Segodnya and Segodnya vecherom. In studying representations and discourses, I reveal how the discursive space generated by the forshtadt contains three different understandings of Russian nationhood in its diasporic, extraterritorial existence of the interwar period.

Comparative analysis of the conceptual features of the concepts of YOUTH and JUVENTUD in Russian and Spanish linguistic cultures

In modern linguistics, research is actively developing aimed at cognizing the surrounding reality, verbalized by linguistic units of a particular language. At the same time, of course, interdisciplinary research, including both linguistic and extralinguistic data, is of particular value. The relevance of our article is the comparison of the concepts of YOUTH and JUVENTUD as fragments of the linguistic picture of the world of the Russian-speaking and Spanish-speaking peoples based on the synthesis of linguocultural and linguocognitive approaches to the study of concepts. The purpose of the work is to identify and compare the conceptual features of the above-mentioned concepts in Russian and Spanish linguistic cultures based on lexicographic sources and using extralinguistic socio-demographic data. The results obtained can find practical application in lexicographical activity. In our study, the conceptual features of the concepts of YOUTH and JUVENTUD were reconstructed based on the data of explanatory, encyclopedic, etymological dictionaries of the Russian and Spanish languages. The conceptual features of the mentioned concepts were identified by understanding the semantic scope of the names of the concepts: the lexemes youth, young in Russian and juventud, joven – in Spanish. Despite the fact that the concept of YOUTH was previously the subject of scientific analysis in the works of Russian linguists, a comparative study of the conceptual features of the concepts of YOUTH and JUVENTUD in Russian and Spanish linguistic cultures has not been conducted before, which is the novelty of the article. It was revealed that the coinciding conceptual features include: 1) a certain life stage of a person between adolescence and adulthood; 2) characteristic of youth; 3) the first stage of life / existence (about an animal, plant, phenomenon); 4) younger in age or time. It was also found that the period of youth for speakers of Spanish linguoculture covers a greater number of years, compared with the same period in Russian linguoculture, which is due to extralinguistic factors – a longer life expectancy in a Spanish-speaking society. In addition, for native Russian speakers, YOUTH is often associated with ‘immaturity, weakness’, while in Spanish linguoculture JUVENTUD is perceived as a period of ‘flourishing, strength, energy'.

Processing and Comprehension of Locally Ambiguous Participial Relative Clause Sentences in Russian

The study tested how the Recency Preference and Predicate Proximity model (Gibson et al. in Cognition 59(1):23–59, 1996, https://doi.org/10.1016/0010-0277(88)90004-2) plays out by examining the attachment preferences of native Russian speakers when processing locally ambiguous participial relative clause sentences with three potential NP attachment sites in Russian. Using a self-paced reading task, reading times and noun phrase selection responses were collected. Results showed significantly shorter reading times at the disambiguating region and higher accuracy rate of selection in the high-attaching condition than in the middle- and low-attaching conditions. No significant differences were found between the middle- and low-attaching conditions. We argue that Predicate Proximity is a much stronger factor than Recency Preference in Russian.

Historical preparation and ideological legitimisation of the Russian invasion of Ukraine: a critical discourse

ABSTRACT I use imperial nationalists in this article to describe Russian nationalists because they have not sought to create an independent state, understanding ‘Russia’ to be bigger than the Russian SFSR and Russian Federation in the form of an empire and union. Russian imperial nationalists have not recognised Ukrainians as a separate people, but instead part of the inner core of their empires and unions. Imperial Russian nationalists believe a pan-Russian people is composed of Great, Little, and White Russians, or Russians, Ukrainians, and Belarusians respectively. In the USSR, Ukrainians were defined as a separate people to Russians, but also understood to be very close ‘brothers’ who were born together in Kyivan Rus and would always remain together. Imperial nationalism in Vladimir Putin’s Russia has stagnated from this Soviet recognition of a Ukrainian people to a Tsarist and White Russian émigré (anti-Bolshevik forces who fled from Russia after the victory of the Bolsheviks) denial of Ukrainians. This article is the first to analyse how this stagnation of Russian imperial nationalism in Putin’s Russia mentally prepared Russian society and provided ideological legitimisation for Russia’s February 2022 invasion with the goal of destroying Ukrainian identity and replacing it with a Little Russian.