Digital Memory Politics and Strategic Narratives About Russia: A Comparative Study of Czechia and Slovakia

Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, historical narratives have played a significant role in political debates over national identity and geopolitical orientation in Central and Eastern Europe. This paper examines how political elites in Czechia and Slovakia mobilize historically framed narratives related to Russia in digital political communication, and how these narratives contribute to contested interpretations of history. Political actors reinterpret experiences of Soviet domination, the post-1968 period, and the post-1989 transformation in order to frame Russia as either an existential threat or a legitimate geopolitical actor, thereby contributing to competing constructions of “good” and “bad” history. The analysis focuses on political communication on social media published between the outbreak of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 and the 2024 European Parliament elections. The study is theoretically grounded in the strategic narratives framework (Miskimmon, O’Loughlin, and Roselle, 2013) and in the literature on memory politics, which conceptualizes narratives about Russia not as externally imposed influences, but as domestically produced interpretative frames actively mobilized by political elites. Empirically, the paper employs a comparative case study design and discourse analysis of a purposively selected corpus of social media communication published on Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), and Telegram, focusing on posts by party leaders and members of parliament across political parties in Czechia and Slovakia. Comparing two closely related yet politically divergent cases shows how digital platforms transform historical narratives into flexible political resources through which competing visions of Russia, Europe, and the past are constructed and contested in contemporary Europe.