The Construction of «Civilizational» Identity in the Discourse of Russian Top Officials

This research analyzes the manifestations of Russian “civilizational” identity in the discourse of Russian top officials expressed in the usage of the term “civilization”. Despite the fact that discussion of Russian national identity with references to “civilizational” elements has a long tradition within Russian and Western literature, not enough systematic studies have been carried out so far to empirically substantiate the theories about “civilizational” identity construction in contemporary Russia. Therefore this research purports to fill in this gap by analyzing the construction of Russian “civilizational” identity firstly in presidential discourse and then in the discourse of other Russian top officials using the methods of discourse analysis presented by Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA). The research questions raised by this work would address the points in time when the references to Russian “civilization” became more intense, how the term “civilization” was used and how the meanings attributed to this term depended on the context in which they were carried out. This work initially hypothesized that the references to Russian “civilizational” identity had intensified since 2013 in relation to Russia-Ukrainian crisis. However, the findings from this research did not support the initial hypothesis and outlined the earlier intensification of this discourse, and also revealed the national and global-context dependent strategy of its use in the speeches of Russian presidents, which however diverged from the speeches of other top officials. Overall, this work not only had some important theoretical findings that substantiated the literature on this topic, but also made some practical conclusions about the consequences of references to “civilizational” paradigm.