Going jingo: a classification of the wartime positions of Russia’s “systemic opposition” parties

ABSTRACT

This article explores the impact of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine on party-system dynamics in Russia by analyzing the war-related communication of the five main “systemic opposition” parties, their leaders, and three Communist MPs who initially criticized the invasion. Examining their adoption of established pro-war regime propaganda (anti-Ukrainian, anti-Western, “Z-talk”) or anti-war rhetoric, we assess the extent of rhetorical convergence in the party system. Based on a dictionary analysis of over 60,000 posts between February 2021 and February 2023, we find the Communist Party to be the most proactive in its pro-war jingoism, Just Russia leader Sergey Mironov to be the clearest case of a regime mouthpiece for Z-talk, and only Yabloko to provide weak but consistent dissent, while New People and the three Communist MPs avoid both pro-war and anti-war rhetoric. Our findings indicate a functional reconfiguration of the party system, stopping short of full-fledged rhetorical harmonization toward “GDR-ization.”

KEYWORDS:

• Authoritarian party systems
• Russian invasion of Ukraine
• Russian systemic opposition
• social media
• political communication

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank colloquium participants at the Research Centre for East European Studies at the University of Bremen for their comments on an earlier draft.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/1060586X.2024.2324628

Notes

1. While Yabloko appears at first sight to constitute a more clear-cut case of “principal opposition,” it, too, has been noted for its preference for “loyalty” over “exit” in supporting legislative initiatives of the Presidential Administration as well as its stubborn unwillingness to align itself with more radical or “non-systemic” opposition forces (Gel’man 2005, 2015).

2. It should be noted that even among actors not necessarily considered structurally close to the regime (e.g. so-called “milbloggers” or “war correspondents”), the choice of adopting Z-talk can be seen as a marker of identification with the regime. Igor Strelkov (Girkin), for instance, eschewed Z-talk in an effort to position himself as a critic of the regime’s conduct of the war.

3. As detailed above, we analyzed the communication of five opposition parties and their current leaders, the regime party United Russia and its current leader, one important Yabloko politician (Yavlinskiy), and three “dissident” Communist MPs, totaling 16 actors. We have scraped former LDPR leader Vladimir Zhirinovskiy’s posts as well, but due to his death shortly after the full-scale invasion, we refrain from a full analysis. We therefore refer to 16 actors in the text.

4. While some actors clearly post very similar content on the three different platforms (VK, Telegram, party websites), the amount of fully identical material is exceedingly low (45 posts).

5. Surprisingly, Figure 1 shows noticeable bands of anti-Ukrainian and anti-Western rhetoric as well as Z-talk for Yabloko. Our qualitative check reveals, however, that these relate to citations or critical mentions rather than genuine uses: In several cases, the party refers to the titles of public events held by authorities that include “Z” or “Za” and also mentions the phrase “we don’t abandon our own” (svoikh ne brosaem) when it reports that intruders shouted it while raiding a Yabloko office in Nizhnii Novgorod. In addition, there are numerous critical mentions of terms used in pro-war propaganda, such as: ‘“We will not abandon our own?’ This slogan is questionable when you see how our state treats its OWN citizens”; “Propaganda and the Kremlin called ‘the threat of NATO’ one of the reasons for the SVO [special military operation].”

6. We found that despite his well-known ostentatious nationalism, Zhirinovskiy hardly used the terms specified in the dictionary in his own communication from the beginning of the full-scale invasion until his death in April 2022.

7. In online appendix E, we reproduce the figure, removing Z-talk from our jingoism scale. The only meaningful difference is the position of ER, which considerably drops on the jingoism scale.

8. We provide a quantitative way to measure rhetorical convergence for our four dictionary categories in online Appendix G. Based on an analysis of how the differences between the parties with regard to their use of the dictionaries change over time, we show a minor tendency towards convergence in the anti-Ukrainian and anti-war dictionary and no such evidence for the anti-Western and Z-talk dictionaries (see Figure G1).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Elitenetzwerk Bayern.