Between faith and rationality: how the narratives on the poisoning of Alexey Navalny and his return to Russia employ arguments and justifications through mythologization

Current political process in Russia is challenging the very concept of public trust, while the policy debates are systematically building the ideological dichotomy between the President of Russia Vladimir Putin and the proclaimed leader of the opposition Alexey Navalny. Foundations of these debates could be roughly summarized in the following ways: 1) President Putin is the official embodiment of the truth; Navalny is the embodiment of offensive lies. 2) The image of the leader of the opposition is revealing the truth and nothing but the truth, while the President is a manifestation of total lie, corruption, and manipulation. A lay citizen is expected to join one of the viewpoints, occupying the assigned narrative. One cannot be on both sides, there is a necessity to choose and consequently maintain the choice. Binary oppositions omitting subtleties simplify the diverse reality to facilitate the cognitive process. Binary cognitive structures were recognized in XX century (See K. Levi-Strauss, Y. Lotman, N. Trubetskoy, etc.) and appreciated as an effective tool of persuasion referring to mythological worldview by composing of a narrative structure. These competing stories extensively utilize some of the strategies theorized by the Narrative Policy Framework and it seems that with the use of a specific characters and plots they creating a ‘new rationality’. The same event depicted from opposing perspectives differs not by minor details, but by the answer to the question: “Is it true or false?”; “Whom you believe, Putin or Navalny?” Eventually, the trust is substituted with an attitude close to the religious faith in personal merits of the opponents. Current competition of mutual accusations which cannot be fully proven is serving the purpose of battling for hearts and minds on almost instinctive level, while there are no argued debates on policies / decisions / measures, engaging both members of this binary opposition. The opposing party elaborates the arguments constructed according to the same manipulative model and apparently pursue the goal to ‘educate’ the society in their own benefit. From the discussion of public policy issues such as national legislation and human rights, corruption, political crime etc. the discussion in each case swiped to the level of (inter)personal communication, containing demands and offenses, underpinned by emotional actions / utterances. Engaging the binary opposition of a hero and villain (interchanging positions in competing discourses), each plot developed into a set of narrative stories, which were close to such archaic cognitive structures as myths or tales.