Authors

Discussion

Political readings of Mikhail Bakhtin have frequently argued that his ideas of carnival can be deployed to conceptualise forms of democratic resistance to authoritarian discourses and practices. Yet alternative readings have always questioned this notion of carnival as liberation, and instead pointed to a darker interpretation that presents the carnival as a space and time of violent lawlessness and transgression. I explore these contested readings in this paper by identifying carnivalesque elements in contemporary Russian narratives and practices during the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. In this paper I argue that Russia's revisionist challenge to the discursive and regulatory hegemony of liberal international order also seeks to articulate an anti-liberal narrative through carnivalesque elements. I use evidence from Russian social media campaigns, talk-shows, media coverage and diplomatic interventions, and the lifestyles of Russian elites to inform this framing of Russia's engagement with and challenge to the international order as a dark and subversive form of Bakhtinian carnival. This conceptualisation of carnival challenges Bakhtin's own ethical claims of carnival as freedom and instead views the carnivalesque mode as contributing to the production of spaces of violent exception and transgression.