Authors

Discussion

From 2012, Russia’s political elites have gradually come to accept previously marginal ideas of Russia as a civilisation-state struggling against Western neo-colonial hegemony. Even before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, there was a clear divergence between the patriotic discourses and practices emerging from the state-army-church nexus, and the strategic narratives of the Russian state for international audiences. While the former produces a set of sacred images and places to commemorate patriotic sacrifice, the latter is finely tuned to refute Western and Ukrainian discourses on Russia as terrorist state and force of barbarism. In appealing to the Global South, Russia also uses civilizational rhetoric to show itself as merely defending its rights as a civilisation-state against a marauding imperialist West. Using quantitative and qualitative discourse analysis, the paper provides a clearer picture of the limited salience of civilizational imaginaries in relation to the other key discursive tropes of the Kremlin. The paper also examines the possible divergence of priorities between the traditionalist patriotic domestic agenda and the lofty geopolitical aims of the Russian state to create a new global order.