Ideological discourses in the Bolsheviks’ narratives and Udmurt media in the 1920s and 1930s

In this article, I examine the ideological discourses of the Bolsheviks regarding the national policy towards the peoples of the Soviet Union during the 1920s and 1930s, and I investigate how these discourses were reflected in the Udmurt media, particularly in the journal Kenesh, later renamed Molot in 1935. I employ the method of critical discourse analysis (Wodak 2014, 2009) to explore how the discourses of “us” and “them” were constructed, the attributes they were associated with, the modality and argumentation they presented, and the ways in which they were mitigated or intensified. The research findings reveal that despite the Bolsheviks’ rhetoric about liberating peoples from the oppression of Tsarist Russia and the dominance of other nations, the linguistic narrative suggests that the Bolsheviks themselves implemented top-down policies, othering the peoples of the Soviet Union by depicting the negative “them” as “backward”, thus excluding them from the positive “us” construction. Udmurt authors mirrored the Bolshevik narratives and constructed negative portrayals of “us”, particularly depicting a “backward Udmurt people living in darkness”.The primary successful endeavor of the positive “us – the Udmurts” narrative was the establishment of a national autonomous region for the Udmurts in 1920, which became the main symbol of Udmurt agency during the 1920s. However, by the 1930s, with the strengthening of ideological propaganda, the narrative of “us – the Udmurts” became entirely aligned with the Party. Most of the participants in nation-building efforts during the 1920s faced repression in the 1930s, and consequently, since then, all decisions were made centrally, depriving the Union’s peoples of any agency.