“Are We Getting Back to the 1990s?” Reframing Russia’s Traumatic Past in the Context of Western Anti-war Sanctions

Abstract The article analyses the patterns of framing the 1990s in the discourses circulating in the official Russian public sphere in the first year after the entry of Russia’s troops in Ukraine, that is officially called the ‘special military operation’, and the unprecedented retaliatory sanctions imposed by the West. It seeks to identify probable transformations of the myth that contrasts the turbulence of the early post-soviet period with the stability associated with Putin’s rule which previously served as a major pillar for legitimizing his power. It argues that despite Putin’s evident reluctance to recall the hardships of the 1990s in the context of an unfolding crisis, in media discourses, memories of the past traumatic experience turned out to be an essential symbolic resource for making sense of the new reality.