Culturalizing the Nation: A Quantitative Approach to the Russkii/Rossiiskii Semantic Space in Russia’s Political Discourse

While the differences and overlaps between the two terms used to describe Russia’s national identity, rossiiskii and russkii, have been well studied, very little research has tried to quantify the balance between them and to identify the semantic space in which they are deployed. Many Western observers have claimed that russkii is now prevailing over rossiiskii and that the multiethnic character of Russia’s identity is gradually disappearing. Our pioneering research quantifies the deployment of both terms in three datasets—Presidential Administration, Putin’s speeches, and Duma debates— offering the first quantitative study of the evolution of the two notions over two decades. We conclude that the current culturalization of political national identity is not necessarily synonymous with ethnonationalism so much as with the growing authoritarian trend of the Russian regime, and that it meshes with the conceptual framework of “culturalization of citizenship” visible across Europe.