Messages of the President of the Russian Federation to the Federal Assembly as a Source of Studying the Historical Policy of Russia

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to reconstruct the historical representation of the highest state power in modern Russia (the level of the president) by examining the texts of the presidential messages to the Federal Assembly from 1994 to 2020. As a key research method, content analysis, both semantic and quantitative, was applied. Fragments of messages containing an appeal to events, phenomena, personalities of the past and the historical process as a whole have been examined. The quantitative analysis has revealed the number of usages of the word “history” and the total textual quantity of historical references in the messages. The thinkers of the past quoted by the Presidents associated with various ideological connotations have been considered as a special indicative position. The generalized content analysis data is accumulated in the table in the article, which has the potential for further independent use in studying the dynamics of power discourse in Russia. The results of the study enable to confirm the fact of the paradigm shift in the perception of history at the highest state level in Russia lying in the transition from the liberal version of the theory of modernization to a nationally conservative approach similar to the theory of civilizations. Three Presidents of the Russian Federation — B. N. Yeltsin, D. A. Medvedev and V. V. Putin — despite the coincidence of positions on several issues of interpreting the past, presented different visions of the historical process in the texts of the messages. The integration of the current policy into the general outline of history is characteristic of all the messages, which points to the preservation of the tradition of historiosophical perception of the state activity in the Russian Federation, in spite of different versions of historiosophy. The transformation of historical politics in Russia is an indicator of the ideological inversion of the Russian state as a whole, the transition from a liberal to a nationally conservative model. The attitude of the authorities to the history reveals the potential of using axiological vectors of the current policy as a means of reconstruction.