Russia’s National Identity Report - 2020

Abstract

In 2020, the dominant Russia’s national identity narrative is one of State-Centric Stability, which highlights the elites’ desires to unify the national identity around legitimate authority, historical continuity, and traditional values. These discourses are challenged by the mass disillusionment and disappointment over social inequalities and in-justices. Elite’s State-Centric Stability discourse emphasizes sovereign statehood, political stability, historical continuity, and moral order. This discourse presents strong centralized authority as both legitimate and necessary, anchors national identity in the memory of the Second World War, and frames traditional social values as essential to cohesion. External actors—particularly the United States and the West—are portrayed as adversarial, reinforcing significance of sovereignty and justifying political centralization. This dominant narrative is countered by a competing set of discourses that emphasize institutional distrust, systemic corruption, class inequality, and social disillusionment. They expose the gap between official narratives of stability and the lived realities of injustice ordinary masses are exposed to daily. Authority, law, and economic order are thus assessed as hollow or selectively applied, even when individual actors are portrayed sympathetically.