Russia as Civilization

Ideological Discourses in Politics, Media and Academia

Kåre Johan Mjør, Sanna Turoma, Kåre Johan Mjør, Sanna Turoma

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780367493851
• eBook ISBN: 9781000072358
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Analyzing the use of civilization in Russian-language political and media discourses, intellectual and academic production, and artistic practices, this book discusses the rise of civilizational rhetoric in Russia and global politics.

Why does the concept of civilization play such a prevalent role in current Russian geopolitical and creative imaginations? The contributors answer this question by exploring the extent to which discourse on civilization penetrates Russian identity formations in imperial and national configurations, and at state and civil levels of society. Although the chapters offer different interpretations and approaches, the book shows that Russian civilizationism is a form of ideological production responding to the challenges of globalization. The concept of "civilization," while increasingly popular as a conceptual tool in identity formation, is also widely contested in Russia today.

This examination of contemporary Russian identities and self-understanding will be of particular interest to students and scholars of Russian area studies and Slavic studies, intellectual and cultural history, nationalism and imperial histories, international relations, discourse analysis, cultural studies, media studies, religion studies, and gender studies.

1 “Nation” and “civilization” as templates for Russian identity construction

A historical overview

Olga Malinova

In recent decades, the term “civilization” has reached beyond academic and intellectual discourses as a category of identity construction and policy description. Samuel Huntington’s seminal work (Huntington 1993) became both a mark and an influential driver of this tendency. A proliferation of “civilizational talk,” i.e., various discourses narrating civilizations as developing cultural units and competing geopolitical actors, gives rise to “civilizational politics” (Bettiza 2014, 1), which makes such “imagined communities” a social fact capable of guiding and structuring social action at national and international levels.

The concept of civilization is not a new tool for identity construction. Both “civilization” in the singular and “civilizations” in the plural have been used for that purpose. Civilization in the singular marks a distinction between civilization and barbarism and describes the development of the universal (Western) civilization. Civilizations in the plural, developed especially by Oswald Spengler and Arnold Toynbee after the end of World War I, provided firm grounds for rising nationalisms, first in anti-colonial and later in post-colonial contexts. In a non-Western context, the concept of civilizations worked as “the spiritual, moral, and universal core” that furnished new nations “with the same kind of authenticating and authorizing function that Civilization furnished for Western imperialist nations” (Duara 2001, 107; see also Bradley 2004; Duara 2004). However, it was after the end of the Cold War and collapse of “the second world” that the “narrated civilizational imaginaries” became visible as factors shaping formal institutions and patterned practices in international arenas and empowering actors who claim to speak in their name (Bettiza 2014, 23).

In the Russian case, civilizational talk (Bettiza 2014, 5) demonstrates a specific dialectic of domestic and foreign policy aspects. Since the 1990s, the concept of “civilization” has been used increasingly for descriptions of post-Soviet Russian identity in academic and public discourses (Shnirel’man 2007). It has also penetrated into political rhetoric. In particular, it played an important role in re-interpretation of the Soviet historical narrative by post-Soviet Communists (see Malinova 2015, 50–51). In the 2000s, an evident rehabilitation of the imperial legacy in Russian public discourse (Malinova 2010; Miller 2010) facilitated its further proliferation. Scholars trace a formation of the civilizational discourse in ideas expressed by such different public figures as Patriarch Kirill, former Minister of Railroad Transportation Vladimir Iakunin, and Communist Party leader Gennadii Ziuganov (Tsygankov 2016, 150), as well as Vladislav Surkov, a prominent official in Putin’s Administration, and public intellectuals such as Boris Mezhuev, Sergei Karaganov, and Mikhail Remizov (Ferguson and Akopov 2019). From the domestic perspective, this discourse provides a specific conception of Russian identity. A civilizational description of the identity of the multinational people of the Russian Federation (as it is termed in the Constitution) allows an emphasis on its Russian cultural core, avoiding the contentious alternative—the term “Russian nation” (russkaia natsiia), which has a strong ethnonationalist connotation (Tolz 1998; Shevel 2011). Some scholars fairly describe such discursive practice as “civilizational nationalism” (Pain and Verkhovskii 2010). From the foreign policy perspective, constructing Russia as a “distinct civilization” supports its presumed great power status and emphasizes its role as vis-à-vis “the West” and “the East” (Tsygankov 2008). These perspectives are interconnected, as the civilizational discourse not only shapes the shared perception of the Western “other” but also works as a tool of political mobilization.

The emergence of civilizational talk in the discourse of high public officials is particularly remarkable, as it reflects some changes in both domestic and foreign policy. On the one hand, it appeared as a reaction to the opposition from the Russian nationalists who were an active element of the protest movement in 2011–2012. In the new context, the ruling elite felt it was necessary to break with the tactics of playing down the natsional’nyi vopros (nationalities question) and provide a more explicit articulation of the official position (see Laruelle 2016; Linde 2016a). Representing Russia as a “state-civilization” became an opportune solution. On the other hand, it is hardly a surprise that “the civilizational turn” in the official discourse preceded the dramatic deterioration of Russia’s relations with the West that started with suspicions about foreign support of the anti-Putin opposition in 2011–2012 and developed into a full-fledged crisis after the annexation of Crimea in 2014. As Ian Ferguson and Sergei Akopov demonstrate, the idea of Russia’s civilizational interests is now at the heart of a rather influential current in foreign policy thought (2019).

Of course, the term “civilization” has been a part of the lexicon of all Russian presidents, but until 2012 it was used mostly in the singular, denoting the “all-human” civilization. It was in 2012, during Vladimir Putin’s electoral campaign, that Russia became conceptualized in opposition to other civilizations, as “a unique multi-ethnic civilization that is fastened by the Russian cultural core” (Putin 2012a). Since then Putin has come back to this idea several times in his speeches and interviews, thus giving a kind of semi-official blessing to the concept of the “civilizational” nature of Russian identity (Linde 2016b; Ferguson and Akopov 2019).

There are various explanations of the observable proliferation of civilizational talk in Russian political discourse. Victor Shnirelman, who has studied the development of the idea of “the Russian civilization” in academic discourse and school textbooks since the 1990s, interprets it as a “substitute” for the Marxist concept of socio-economic formation combined with Russian nationalism (Shnirel’man 2007). Fabian Linde considers Putin’s adoption of civilizational rhetoric as further development of the statist aspiration that he had demonstrated earlier (2016a, 25). According to Andrei Tsygankov, Putin’s use of civilizational categories should be considered a signal of cultural backlash to pressure from the West, as well as to the radicalization of the Islamic world (2016, 147). Marlène Laruelle argues that Putin’s use of civilizational discourse results from the complete development of “the ideological posture”¹ based on a certain “civilizational grammar.” According to Laruelle, in the Russian context “there is a triple choice of identity: being a European country that follows the Western path of development; being a European country that follows a non-Western path of development; or being a non-European country” (Laruelle 2016, 278). She argues that, as early as the second half of the 1990s, the Russian ruling elite made a choice for the second option, which allows them “to rehabilitate Russia as the other Europe, making it possible to reject Western liberalism while claiming to be the authentic Europe” (Laruelle 2016, 295). But it took almost two decades to construct “an ideological posture, cemented around the concept of conservatism” that allows them to represent Russia as “an anti-liberal European civilization” (Laruelle 2016, 295).

To continue Laruelle’s argument, I will not only look into particular ideological choices made by political actors but also probe further into the historical and discursive contexts that shape a range of meaningful options. I argue that the attractiveness of the concept of “civilization” in the Russian case is grounded on the symbolic resources that took shape over time. Two aspects of the historical tradition are particularly important here. The first is Russia’s imperial legacy, which involves a competition of different nationalisms and impedes a consolidation of the multiethnic nation. At the same time, it provides cultural and symbolic resources that make it tempting to use a supranational, or civilizational, template. The second aspect is a long tradition of constructing Russian identity through correlation with Europe/the “West,” a tradition that produced a rich repertoire of ideas, symbols, and narratives facilitating Russia’s representation in civilizational terms.

A construction of Russian identity should be considered the historical process of a (co)relation with external and internal “others,” involving questions of status, comparison and assessment, mutual attitudes, and emotional reactions (Tsygankov 2008; Malinova 2014). It depends on intersubjective understandings, i.e., results not only from “observable” differences and similarities between “self” and “the other” but also from current modes of their interpretation that have taken shape over time. In other words, identities come as discursive constructions that may be structured by various “templates.” According to Benedict Anderson’s influential postulation (Anderson 2006), nations can be understood as imagined communities. But they are not the only available model of imagining modern macro-political communities, i.e., bodies of people “constituting” a particular state. Imperial identity can be considered an alternative model of such an imaginary.² In the twentieth century, with the decline of the idea of the universal civilization, the imperial principle has significantly lost its moral attractiveness. However, this is not the case with the idea of civilizations in the plural that comes as “the source of authenticity or truth” for many nations (Duara 2001, 106). If so, it makes sense to look at civilizational identity as a distinctive template of imagination of community that has much to do with imperial legacy but cannot be reduced to it (cf. Malinova 2012b; Akopov 2015). Empires, as political bodies integrating a culturally heterogeneous population of waste territories, contributed greatly to the emergence and development of what we now call civilizations. However, empires cannot be equated with civilizations as distinctive spiritual, moral, and cultural principles that, according to Arnold Toynbee’s conceptualization, had strong connections with major world religions. In the final analysis, not every empire was able to create a civilization.

The fact that Europe/the “West” has been a significant reference point for Russia’s self-identification for a long time does not necessarily mean that the political community constituting the Russian state at its various historical stages was imagined according to the civilizational model. There is a remarkable area of scholarship demonstrating that the imperial context did not actually exclude an adaptation of the idea of nation (Miller 2008; Maiorova 2010). In the same way, arguing about Russia vis-à-vis Europe/the “West” does not necessarily involve a “civilizational” model of imagination. As I try to demonstrate below, such an argument could be compatible with the “nationalist” template as well. To distinguish between imperial and national, and between national and civilizational, visions and elements of Russian identity, we need to look carefully at particular texts and contexts.

As the scope of this article does not allow me to present a comprehensive study of such dialectics in a proper sample of texts, I shall try to describe the general historical patterns of discursive construction of Russian/Soviet identity, focusing on the ideas of nation and civilization as competing templates of imagination. I argue that the disposition of the contemporary ruling elite to use both national and civilizational terms for the description of post-Soviet Russian identity is a result of a long tradition of its construction according to mixed templates, without fully fitting either one. According to Franklin and Widdis, Russianness “lies, in a sense, on a fault line between imperial and national identities; or more precisely, between geo-political and ethno-cultural criteria of self-definition” (2004, 5). Undecidedness on that matter contributes to the often...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Preface
• Note on transliteration and translation
• Introduction: Russian civilizationism in a global perspective
• 1 “Nation” and “civilization” as templates for Russian identity construction: a historical overview
• 2 From socio-economic formations to civilizations: seeking a paradigm change in late soviet discussions
• 3 Russia between a civilization and a civic nation: secular and religious uses of civilizational discourse during Putin’s third term
• 4 “Civilization” in the Russian-mediatized public sphere: imperial and regional discourses
• 5 “Clash of masculinities”? Gendering Russian-Western relations in popular geopolitics
• 6 Re-imagining antiquity: the conservative discourse of “Russia as the true Europe” and the Kremlin’s new cultural policy
• 7 Civilizational discourses in doctoral dissertations in post-Soviet Russia
• 8 An eternal Russia: Oleg Platonov, the Institute for Russian Civilization and the nationalization of Russian thought
• 9 Contemporary civilizational analysis and Russian sociology
• Index