Constructing the image of the USSR in traditional media (on the example of Argumenty i Fakty): Experience of statistical and qualitative analysis of communication strategies

Abstract

The article defines the communication strategies of creating the image of the USSR on the basis of statistical and qualitative analysis of the Argumenty i Fakty content. The empirical basis of the article is based on the material of the newspaper published from 1992 to 2022. The use of statistical methods to analyze all issues (by continuous sampling) made it possible to identify the range of articles that mention the lexemes “USSR”, “Soviet Union”, “Union Soviet”, “country Soviet”. Communication strategies are determined by analyzing the frequency of mentioning certain word forms in the media content. The use of the thematic modeling algorithm, namely, the method of machine learning allowed us to analyze the corpus of documents, to detect patterns of words and phrases that occur most often and thus characterize the content of Argumenty i Fakty, and to automatically group articles in which terms close in meaning occur. Thus, 5757 articles were classified and 95 clusters were identified, which in turn were reduced to 16 large thematic blocks: sports, cinema, economy, music, memory, ideology, politics, education, space, debts and credits, products, man, war in Afghanistan, intelligence, atomic project. The most prominent images of the USSR in the newspaper Argumenty i Fakty appear to be the following: the winner in World War II and the geopolitical rival of the USA in the Cold War. Statistical analysis of the articles proves the importance of the Soviet experience for understanding Russia’s domestic and foreign policy. Qualitative discourse analysis shows the prevalence of positive representation of the Soviet era, which allows to label the USSR as a significant “other” for contemporary Russia. Argumenty i Fakty is characterized as an important agent/subject of the contemporary politics of symbolic identification.