Lecture: Prof Alexei Kamenskikh – The Effect of the Substitutive Historical Analogy in Pro-Kremlin Military Propaganda (2014–2023)

The Institute for the Study of Strategic Regions at CU FA and the Department of East European Studies at CU FA with the support of Sekyra Foundation cordially invites you to a public lecture by Prof Alexei Kamenskikh (a special Hans Koschnik scholar at the Research Centre for East European Studies, University of Bremen). The lecture and discussion will be held in English.

Annotation

Since the very beginning of Russian aggression against Ukraine in early spring 2014 the space of Russian official media discourse turned to be flooded with terms and images strange for the 21st century: these were “fascists”, “Einsatzgruppen”, “Bandera’s men”, who allegedly acted in Ukraine under the control of the “American puppeteers” attacking the Ukrainians who sought to maintain their loyalty to the “Russian world”. We can conceptualise this manipulative strategy as the effect of the substitutive historical analogy which is produced by using the language and imagery of the past (the “Great Patriotic war”, the Cold war, or those typical for the pre-revolutionary imperial Russia) for description of the current events. In the lecture this effect of substitutive historical analogy will be analysed as one of the main tools that ensured the effectiveness of pro-Kremlin military propaganda and prepared the mass opinion in Russia to the full-scale invasion.