Russian try to manage narrative in Ukraine employs age-old tactic of ‘othering’ the enemy

Controlling the narrative has lengthy been essential to Russian President Vladimir Putin in his conflict towards Ukraine.

Within the worldview he promulgates, the U.S. is an “empire of lies,” the West is bent on “tearing aside Russia,” and Ukraine is a “Nazi-run” nation whose statehood is a historic fiction.

By way of speeches and propaganda, Putin presents this narrative to his personal nation and the remainder of the world. It’s a worldview that’s damaging, traditionally and factually false and depends on provocative rhetorical framing. It’s a framing that matches properly the Russian phrase that interprets in English as “who will not be with us, is towards us,” types of which have been popularized by czarist and Soviet years and have returned with a vengeance underneath Putin.

It is usually, as I discover in my new guide, a well-liked kind of what’s referred to as “cultural othering,” which can be utilized to achieve, keep and train energy.

Cultural othering, defined

Cultural othering is the means of defining a bunch of individuals – be it a racial, ethnic or nationwide group – as totally different after which treating them as inferior. This “different” group is assigned damaging traits to make them seem decrease to the dominant group, and to marginalize them.

Othering has lengthy been a instrument employed to say authority over marginalized teams, akin to by European colonizers in Africa and Asia, or by settlers in Native American lands.

Putin and the Russian state are very expert at working towards cultural othering and have deployed it towards Ukrainian “enemies” as tanks rolled into Ukraine. Within the worldview of Putin, their separatist imaginative and prescient was primarily based on Russophobia, fascism and neo-Nazism.

Putin’s othering predates the 2022 invasion. It was seen within the 2014 unlawful annexation of Crimea, the 2008 battle in Georgia and the brutal Chechen wars from 1994 onward. All represented Russian makes an attempt to reestablish its management over “others” – Ukrainians, Georgians, Chechens, the Crimean Tatars – that underneath the Soviet system had been reincorporated into an thought of a “Nice Russia.” Their crime, as seen from Moscow, was that they had been undermining Putin’s long-held imaginative and prescient for a return to that nice Russian empire.

Soviet brotherhood, revisited

The curious factor about Putin’s othering is it focuses on nationwide teams that he has concurrently claimed to be of the identical folks as Russia.

From Putin’s perspective, these would-be breakaway neighbors are former “brotherly republics” cleaved from Mom Moscow solely by the breakup of the Soviet Union within the early Nineties – an occasion Putin has described as the largest geopolitical tragedy of the century. To push this narrative, Putin employs a warped view of historical past, invoking the “Kyivan Rus” – the medieval state that sought to unite the folks of an unlimited land mass – and denouncing Soviet chief Vladimir Lenin as “the creator and architect of Ukraine” and inspiring nationalist ambitions.

Beneath Putinism, there are seemingly two choices for international locations that after shaped the Russian, and later Soviet, empire.

The primary includes whole geopolitical and cultural submission, assimilation and acceptance of pan-Russian sameness, as is seen in Belarus underneath Putin ally Alexander Lukashenko. The second choice is to hunt nationwide and cultural self-definition, however be subjected to probably the most excessive types of cultural othering for doing so. In different phrases, it’s the selection of being a brother or the opposite.

To Putin, nations that dared to interrupt away from Russian hegemony and, like Ukraine, developed pro-Western ambitions, changed into an enemy.

Othering in historic context

Putin’s cultural othering of Ukraine faucets right into a historical past of Russia that goes again centuries. It was evident in imperial Russia and mirrored within the literature of the time. Russian poet Alexander Pushkin, in his epic “Poltava,” and novelist Leo Tolstoy, in “A Prisoner within the Caucasus,” each glorified Russian martyrdom and heroism whereas using othering language and units towards totally different teams of individuals, together with the French, Swedes, Turks, the Circassians, Crimean Tatars and Ukrainians. This othering serves to painting these looking for distance from Moscow as subhuman, or not less than sub-Russian.

Within the Soviet interval, cultural othering took the type of demonizing anybody who balked at or actively fought makes an attempt to drive a homogeneous Soviet identification over ethnic and sophistication variety. The punishment for resistance and disobedience was extreme, particularly underneath Josef Stalin; the gulag served as the last word vacation spot for many who didn’t assimilate.

In the meantime, Ukraine paid a horrible value for resistance to assimilation. Stalin’s human-made hunger of Ukrainian peasants from 1932 and 1933 – which many historians attribute partially to an try and suppress or punish Ukrainian aspirations of independence – killed thousands and thousands of Ukrainians. And right here lies an necessary side of cultural othering: As soon as a individuals are “othered,” their lives are degraded and dehumanized – making such atrocities extra acceptable to the dominant group.

Ultimately – to flee repressions and to outlive – Ukrainians, Georgians, Crimean Tatars and different “others” reluctantly accepted Soviet brotherhood and political and linguistic submission and cultural assimilation with Russia.

On this means, Russian leaders from emperors to Soviet chiefs have manifested Russian geopolitical and ideological hegemony. Putin is following go well with.

New chief, previous technique

Since coming to energy, Putin has tried to reconstruct Russia’s former territorial and ideological may, whereas concurrently positioning the nation in opposition to its routine enemy – the “collective West.” When Ukraine selected a pro-European course, Putin noticed it because the act of a treacherous enemy.

Putin’s rhetoric has been fusing Ukraine and the West collectively in a single single enemy ever since. Putin typically “others” the West – and, by affiliation, Ukraine – by drawing comparisons between Russian conventional values and Western cultural “decadence” with its LGBTQ+ rights, gender-related debates and different identification points. For the reason that starting of the conflict, Putin has othered Ukraine by making it each “of the West” but in addition “Nazi.” That has allowed him to border his conflict as “liberation,” “demilitarization,” and “de-nazification.” In the meantime, spiritual leaders in Russia have framed the battle as a holy conflict, with the purpose of “de-Satanizing” Ukraine.“

This continued othering of Ukrainians by Putin signifies that the conflict is one which goes past territory and beliefs. Fairly, what has been arrange is a battle between two cultural selves which might be mutually unique. It’s, to Putin, the Russian “us” towards the Western and Ukrainian “them.”