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This article reveals how the official patterns of commemorating the Soviet historical past in Russia match its local projections. Based on interviews with experts from 27 regions and some other field materials, the article maps the diversity of commemorative agendas across Russia. Focusing on the violent aspects of Soviet history, it outlines current configurations of the usable past important for local identity and notably used by regional authorities and other mnemonic actors over time. These repertoires of the usable past depend on the cultural infrastructure that was formed over time, but also on the efforts of mnemonic actors, who promote specific memories. This article argues that although regional approaches to commemorating the historical past are evidently dominated by the official federal narrative, local visions of common history are far from being uniform. The aspects that are downplayed or silenced at the federal level might be indispensable to regional and local identities. Expert interviews suggest that collisions between the narratives circulating at different levels typically do not escalate to open conflicts. The commemorative projects supported by regional authorities tend to conform to the federal-level framing, which is flexible enough to tolerate some local peculiarities. However, in many regions there are also non-state mnemonic actors who promote a commemorative agenda that deviates from the official state discourse. While being short of resources for developing memory hardware, they affect public discussions raising awareness about the downplayed aspects of the local past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article follows the transformations of the official narrative about Russia's post-Soviet transition over 20 years of Putin's stay in power. To detect how the gradual evolution of political regime toward authoritarianism was legitimized, it focuses on comparison of concise narratives articulated in the Presidential Addresses to the Federal Assembly between 2000 and 2020. The method of research is computer-assisted qualitative content analysis. The article reveals how the declared stages of modern Russia's development correlated with the evolving representations of the West. The initial goals of establishing democracy, the market economy, and the rule of law over time were either reinterpreted or dissolved into minor practical tasks. The most often articulated policy goal was raising the people's living standards, which was narrated as overcoming the trauma of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the hard 1990s. In the Addresses, Russia became represented as a country that completed its transition between 2012 and 2018, with restoring its international positions and military strength, as well as resources for better social welfare. The "democratic society" was declared to be instituted; however, this term was associated with formal elections and facilitating civic participation, not with the alternation and accountability of power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reveals how a sharp contrast between the "turbulent 1990s" and the "stable 2000s" was constructed and exploited by Vladimir Putin and Dmitry Medvedev for shoring up the regime. Using a qualitative content analysis, I demonstrate how Putin's power was legitimized through three discursive mechanisms of re-presenting the recent past: the coining of buzzwords that became symbolic descriptors of the 1990s; the populist framing of the regime's policies; the composition of narratives about the immediate post-Soviet years. Constructed largely in the early 2000s, the negative framing of the Yeltsin decade became central to the official legitimizing discourse of Putin's regime. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article tests the extent to which Russia's "pivot to the East" was supported by shared visions of the American and the Chinese "Other" after the annexation of Crimea in 2014. It compares representations of the United States and China as Russia's Others in discourses of Vladimir Putin, major political parties, and policy experts at a time when Russian–American relations experienced a considerable downturn and relations with China surged. The method of analysis is frames coding. The article demonstrates that for most of the actors considered, the United States plays a much more important role as constitutive Other than China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]