Roundtable on Gulnaz Sharafutdinova’s the red mirror: putin’s leadership and russia’s insecure identity

Abstract

Introduction Timothy Frye In this roundtable, we bring together a distinguished group of academics to discuss Gulnaz Sharafutdinova’s excellent new book, The Red Mirror: Putin’s Leadership and Russia’s Insecure Identity (Sharafutdinova 2020). Sharafudinova addresses two central issues of Russian politics: the source of popular support for President Vladimir Putin and the dynamics of political change in Russia. She critiques those who argue that Russia under Putin is a “return of the Soviet man, the Soviet system, or the Soviet identity” (p. 19). Instead, she argues that Putin has “been successful in promoting his image as an embodiment of the shared national identity of Russian citizens” by “tapping into powerful group emotions of shame and humiliation, derived from the painful experience of the transition in the 1990s” (p. 18). In turn, he transformed these emotions into pride and patriotism by drawing on two central pillars of Soviet collective identity: Soviet exceptionalism and a keen sense of extreme foreign threat to the state and its people. Yet, she also notes that this moment of national consolidation is just that, a moment, which has already given way to a much more uncertain period. Indeed, she identifies the sense of victimhood that Vladimir Putin has stoked as a key impediment to the modernization of Russia. To make her case, she draws on social identity theory, which emphasizes the importance of group attachments and collective memory to explore how Vladimir Putin made the “politicization of Russia’s collective identity into the core of his legitimation strategy” (p. 27). She begins by exploring collective identity in the late Soviet period, highlighting how the Communist Party fostered the notion that the Soviet Union was an exceptional country with an historic mission that also was encircled by enemies bent on its destruction. She then documents the shared sense of shame, humiliation, confusion, and vulnerability that marked Russian society in the 1990s as the country struggled over how to adapt its social identity to the country’s much-diminished status. In turn, she depicts how Vladimir Putin came to power and constructed a narrative of victimhood that proved remarkably powerful and long lasting. Putin’s great success was to both identify the national mood and shape it in ways that served his political ends. Sharafutdinova then unpacks how the Kremlin reinforces this narrative. She explores the “modern media machine” that Putin built in his first two terms in office and traces its increasing emphasis on conservative moral values and martial themes largely directed against the West. Going deeper, she dissects Russia’s political talk shows that mimic their Western counterparts in form but differ in content by loyally propagating themes favored by the Kremlin. Finally, she presents several vignettes of how Kremlin violations of basic human dignity, such as the arrest of the rapper Husky, the increase