Authors

Discussion

In his inauguration address of 1991, Boris Yeltsin expressed his aspirations for the future of Russia using the metaphoric slogan “Great Russia is rising from her knees”. Many other public figures adopted the slogan to evaluate social progress in Russia. This paper analyses the changes this slogan underwent from 1991 to 2022. It uses a discourse dynamics framework (Cameron & Maslen 2010) for metaphors to catalogue the modifications. The analysis was broken down into several stages. 

The first stage delves into identifying key political players who used the metaphor (Boris Yeltsin, Vladimir Putin, Yevgeny Lukianov, Ramzan Kadyrov, Valentina Matvienko, and Sergei Lavrov). In this stage, key discourse events have also been identified (i.e. the inauguration of the first democratically elected Russian President, preparations for the second Chechen war, Putin’s speech at the 2007 Munich Security Conference, foundation of BRICS, annulment of the Russian Constitution in 2020 and the beginning of the full-scale invasion in Ukraine). 

The second stage deals with the identification of changes in the metaphoric story (Burgers et al., 2019). They include: (a) the introduction of new agents into the storyline such as a helper and villain, according to the story grammar; (b) a shift from an attempt to achievement such as Russia standing on her feet and her rise; and (c) presenting an attempt of the villain to put Russia back down on her knees. The third stage deals with the identification of changes in the target domain of the metaphoric scenario (Musolff, 2006) The target domain terminology reveals that social progress was previously evaluated as the rule of law and the prosperity of Russian citizens. In Putin’s era, it was assessed as a strong army and the ability to dictate Russian terms to the world. The incremental changes in the metaphor scenario, its recontextualizations, and novel readings accentuate the evolution of national priorities.