The authors offer their definition of national-state identity: a macro-political construct that projects the image of “us” (an “imaginary community”) to various dimensions (value-based, temporal, spatial, and symbolic). This image is supported by state institutions as well as the political and cultural tradition of national sovereignty. In the article, special attention is paid to the four systemic challenges of the Russian national-state identity. The first challenge - internal political - stems from the costs and contradictions of the institutional organization of state identity policy in modern Russia. The second national identity challenge is due to information globalization and, as a result, a drastic change in the information and political landscape of Russian society. The third challenge is determined by weakness and vagueness of the collective image of the future in the political consciousness of Russian citizens. The fourth Russian identity challenge is geopolitical in nature and is associated with memory wars, which actively unfolded in the post-Soviet space in the 2000s-2010s. The authors conclude that an effective response to the Russian national-state identity challenges could be a complex state identity policy. This policy can be described as a long-term strategy for the formation of a conventional all-Russian identity “matrix” through building and promotion of a balanced, internally consistent image of “us” and a set of social and political views, attitudes and values associated with it.
In the framework of the presented study, the author analyses the question of the role of images of the Soviet past in the formation of the national-state identity of Russians. The purpose of the study is to identify problems and perspectives for the transformation of the national-state identity of citizens of the Russian Federation by forming the image of the past as the main element of collective social memory. The methodological base of the research combines the features of descriptive political-cultural analysis and systematization of published big data of sociological surveys. The author concluded that attempts to destroy the heroic component of the Soviet symbolic heritage and replace it with a narrative associated with the pre-revolutionary period lead to the erosion of the value-symbolic foundations of group favouritism in Russian society, which causes resistance from carriers of Soviet and Russian identity. The synthesis of the symbolic heritage of the Soviet and pre-revolutionary erases based on the recognition of universal values, and historical continuity in the development of the Russian state seems to be the most reasonable option for using images of the past to strengthen the national-state identity of Russians.
ПОЛИТИЧЕСКАЯ СОЦИОЛОГИЯ Т.Н. Самсонова, докт. полит. наук, проф. кафедры политологии и социологии политических процессов социологического факультета МГУ имени М.В. Ломоносова, г. Москва, Россия * В.В. Титов, канд. полит. наук, доц. кафедры политических исследований России и постсоветского пространства Московского педагогического государственного университета, г. Москва, Россия **
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