Memory Makers by Jade McGlynn;

Author:Jade McGlynn; [McGlynn, Jade]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350280779
Publisher: Bloomsbury UK
Published: 2023-02-18T00:00:00+00:00

Messianism

The media defines those resisting the onslaught of enemies, whether at home or abroad, as actively mobilized against identity-based threats.3 From 2012 to 2014, the ‘counter-rhetoric of hysteria’, or the hysterical justifications of any Russian aggression as pre-emptive, was one way politicians sought to depict their country as the victim of the international order – unfairly lampooned by resurrected Nazis and the cruel West (Pasitselska 2017). However, by 2015 a new approach was needed – one that characterized Russia as an assertive actor and channelled its obsession with history into a clearer sense of purpose. Consequently, following Russia’s intervention in Syria, the media and politicians replaced the highly defensive tone, typical of coverage of Ukraine and third-wave sanctions, with self-congratulatory gloating as they moulded an image of Russia asserting rather than defending itself (Kazun 2016). The discursive transformation from defensiveness in 2014 to bombast and messianism in 2015 mirrored a change in how the media positioned the government’s actions as well as the evolution of Russia’s role on the world stage. The media’s increasingly messianic depiction of Russian identity was a clear link between historical framing and the government’s strategy to intensify the significance of history to national identity, a strategy explored further in Chapter 6.

The media and government built the argument, which emerged steadily from 2012 and had crystallized by 2015, that Russia must not only forge its own path but also act as a beacon, helping others to find their own paths. This neatly folds back into the worldview that sits at the base of the historical lessons being promoted: Russia as a strong state, with a special path of development and a great power mission. Russian elite political rhetoric and self-understanding has long embraced elements of messianism, from the promulgation of Moscow as the Third Rome to the Soviet Union’s universalist identity as the first international workers’ state (Duncan 2002; Kukulin 2018; Berdyaev 1922, 1990; Rabow-Edling 2006). Moreover, messianic thinking is particularly complementary to the Kremlin’s presentist uses of history, especially if we employ Walter Benjamin’s definition of messianism as a ‘simultaneity of past and future in an instantaneous present’ (Benjamin 1968: 265). Certainly, a strong sense of messianism has become increasingly apparent as the klaxon of the call to history has grown ever louder, heralding Russia’s bloodthirsty ‘liberation’ of Ukraine in 2022.

Although it can take different forms, this messianic tone has relied on a self-assurance, buoyed by a chauvinistic understanding of history that depicts Russia as saviour of, if not the world, then at least the Eurasian landmass. The example from the MFA below is rather typical in this sense:

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