Messages of the President of the Russian Federation to federal assembly as source for studying historical policy of Russia

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to reconstruct the historical representation of the highest state power in today's Russia (President's level) by considering the texts of presidential messages to the Federal Assembly. Content analysis, both semantic and quantitative, has been applied as a key research method. There were investigated the fragments of messages containing an appeal to events, phenomena, personalities of the past and the historical process as a whole. The results of the study make it possible to confirm the fact that there has been a paradigm shift in the perception of history at the highest state level of Russia, which consists in the transition from a liberal version of the modernization theory to a nationally conservative approach close to the theory of civilizations. Three Presidents of the Russian Federation - B.N. Yeltsin, D.A. Medvedev and V.V. Putin, despite the coinciding positions on a number of issues on coverage of the past, presented diverse visions to the historical process in the texts of their messages. The integration of the current policy into the general outline of history distinguished all the messages, making it possible to talk about preserving the tradition of historiosophical reflection on state activity in the Russian Federation, despite different versions of historiosophy. The transformation of historical policy in Russia is an indicator of the ideological inversion of the Russian state as a whole, the transition from a liberal to a nationally conservative pattern. The attitude of the state officials towards the history reveals the potential for the use of value-and-semantic guidelines of current policy as a means of reconstruction.