Mobilizing the Russkiy Mir: Actors and Discursive Varieties of Russian Authoritarianism

Beginning in 2008, the Kremlin has endeavored to introduce a new ideological paradigm that aims to unify Russian speakers living abroad through three key pillars: the Russian language, a shared historical memory, and the Russian Orthodox Church (Kallas, 2016). The new ideological tool was named the "Russkiy Mir" (or the "Russian World") and soon became a prominent element of Russian foreign policy to the extent that it was used to justify the invasion of Ukraine both in 2014 and 2022. However, despite the rising attempts made by scholars to understand the Kremlin's instrumentalization of the term, the degree of variation in the usage of the concept across the actors of the Kremlin's propaganda machine as well as within the discourses of these actors over time remains unclear. Therefore, this paper presents one of the first attempts to conceptualize the way how "Russkiy Mir" has been instrumentalized in the discourses of the primary Russian political and cultural actors. To do that, we follow the principles of the mixed method approach and combine the word embedding techniques with qualitative discourse analysis. We base our analysis on a novel dataset, collected through web scraping techniques, that includes speeches made by Putin and Medvedev (2008-2022, n=1173), foreign minister Lavrov and foreign minister's spokesperson Zakharova (2005- 2022, n=5213), sermons and messages made by patriarch Kirill and Aleksii in the period of 2001-2022 (n= 7015), as well as the official journals published by the Russkiy Mir foundation in the period from 2007 to 2021 (n=168). First, we train a word embedding model for each actor using the glovec algorithm to identify semantically most similar words to "Russkiy Mir". Then we train a second set of word embedding models for each actor before and after the invasion of Crimea and identify the words with the highest semantic similarity increase to "Russkiy Mir". Utilizing the most relevant words we identified in the word embedding stage, using in-depth qualitative discourse analysis of selected speeches, we then trace how the use of concept changes across actors and within actors over time. The results suggest that the Russian political elites use the concept as an ideological tool for legitimizing foreign policy goals and asserting its geopolitical ambitions. Moreover, it aims constructing the vision of Russia as a kin state for all those knowing the Russian language and sharing anti-Western views. Overall, it illustrates how authoritarian regime utilizes ideological narratives as a mean of external legitimization to maintain its foreign policy goals.