Imaginary, Collective, Genuine: Journey of “the West” through Russian Politics

The article examines the main interpretations of the West within Russian politics. As the author shows, at least since the 18th century, despite all the current geopolitical declarations, the image of the West has been established as one of the main important to Russian politics. Confrontation or cooperation with the West becomes the leitmotif of foreign policy, and the protection of morals from the “Western” trends and tendencies triggers domestic politics. At the same time, the vagueness and ambiguity of the construction itself only increases the horizon of an acceptable appeal to this construction. According to the author’s hypothesis, starting from the 18th century and until present three forms of representation, or image, of the West characterize Russian political discourse (if we leave out more or less pragmatic constructions related to the maintenance of bilateral relations between Russia and individual European countries). Methodologically relying on Norman Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis, the author interpret the form of representation (image) as a way of presenting, describing and linking a particular lexeme with others within the language and discourse of a certain community (in this case — Russian community). The author designates the first of the selected images as the “imaginary West” (a deeply illusory idea of geographical neighbors with a negative or positive light), the second as the “collective West” (an idea of neighbors not as separate states or cultural models, but as a whole), the third as the “real West” (with Russia itself assuming this role). Having traced the appeal to these images over the past several centuries of the Russian history, the author documents a tendency to mythologize the corresponding markers.