“How Do We Arrange Russia”: The Problem of Social Harmony in the Discourse of Post-Soviet Identity

Abstract

The collapse of the Soviet Union, the large-scale transformation of the political and social structure in the early 1990s actualized the problem of nation-building in the new Russian state. The search for a “national idea” has contributed to the fact that over the past thirty years several dominant concepts of identity have changed in the Russian official discourse: from the denial of Soviet identity and the strategy of rapprochement with Western democracies to the construction of a great-power conservative identity of the “successor state”. The central place in the discourse of Russian identity is occupied by the problem of achieving social harmony through the elaboration of attitudes to the past, the construction of political values, the definition of symbolic boundaries of the political community. This research is devoted to the comparison of ideas about social harmony articulated within the framework of key concepts of post-Soviet identity of Russia.

Keywords

• social harmony
• consolidation
• identity
• russia
• 1990s
• political discourse
• atlanticism
• eurasianism
• neo-slavophiles
• neo-westerners
• patriotism