Articles

This article focuses on the stages of development of the Eastern Partnership project, the European Union (EU) foreign policy strategy towards it and the role of Russia as a political competitor of the EU in the region. With the help of analyzing key documents that define the goals and objectives of the Eastern Partnership from the moment of its creation up to today, the features of the project initiative’s way of development and the degree of the EU’s involvement into political and economic processes of the Partnership states are pointed out. The research allows to clarify and evaluate the political background for the changes in the EU strategy towards the Partnership states and the principal incentives for the widening of cooperation within its framework. The main conclusion of the research is that the Eastern Partnership has grown in importance for the EU over time, especially since 2014, when the EU started to view Eastern Europe as one of the principal areas of influence and Russia as a direct competitor. The project has begun to include more and more spheres of political and economic cooperation, placing an emphasis on energy security, economic aid, and the development of civil society via European “soft power”.

The article considers the prerequisites and problems of the evolution of Russian-Ukrainian relations in the period from 2014 to 2022. Geopolitical causes of the reunification of Crimea with the Russian Federation in 2014, as well as the consequences of the mentioned event have been analyzed. The results of negotiations for settlement of the conflict in Ukraine within the framework of the Normandy format have been studied. It is emphasized that in the result of the failure to implement the Package of Measures for the Implementation of the Minsk Agreements the process of resolving the conflict in the South-East of Ukraine has reached a dead end. Moreover, the Ukrainian side, with the support of the states of the socalled collective West, has initiated the preparations to finish the conflict under consideration by military means. In addition, the transformation of the doctrinal documents that determined the Russian-Ukrainian relations has been analyzed. The active influence of the member states of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization on the foreign policy of Ukraine during the period under consideration is noted. The military and technical, reconnaissance, financial and diplomatic support provided to Ukraine by Western states, as well as the politics of Ukraine for implementation of the ideology of Ukrainian nationalism and Russophobia into society have been studied as the factors of transformation of Russian-Ukrainian relations, as well as the prerequisites for the Special Military Operation initiated by the Russian Federation on February 24, 2022.

Very approximate information is available about the electoral preferences of the residents of Donbass within the framework of the Russian political and legal field. The article considers the issue of establishing the exact results of the will of the voters of the L-DPR, who were citizens of the Russian Federation, in the elections to the State Duma in 2021. Conclusions about the electoral preferences of residents of the L-DPR are made on the basis of the difference in the results of voting on the proportional and majority components of the electoral system of the Russian Federation, within which residents of Donbass could not vote for majority candidates. The results of remote electronic voting (REV), “exit” voting at the polling stations of the Rostov region and post-election polling are analyzed.
It is established that at least 200 thousand L-DPR voters voted in these elections. The results of the REV and “exit” voting differed somewhat. The greatest support was enjoyed by: “United Russia” (the “exit” vote of the DPR — 81 %, the LPR — 83 %, the REV — 88 %) and the LDPR (up to 10 % on the “exit” vote). The electoral culture of Donbass had features of “periphery” in relation to the whole of the Russian Federation: many residents are poorly versed in the intricacies of Russian politics, vote for patriotic forces, identify support for the Russian Federation and its leadership.
According to the results of surveys, more than 60 % of residents of the L-DPR ethnically identify themselves as Russians. Depending on the wording of the questions, from 65 % to 80 % of respondents called joining the Russian Federation a priority vector of integration of the region. During the period of the existence of the L-DPR, the prevailing pro-Russian sentiments in this territory have only intensified.

The article presents the results of applied political research, the purpose of which is to determine the scale, mobilization potential, social base, and digital communication technologies of protest-oriented information flow in the Russian segment of social media on the eve of the Single Voting Day of 2021. The cognitive mapping implemented in the study made it possible to identify the meaningful characteristics of the information flow. The social media analysis made it possible to determine the dynamic and structural characteristics of the information flow, the gender and age specifics of the users involved in it, as well as quantitative characteristics of the activity of key communities forming protest information flows. The method of social
graphs revealed the structure of interaction between the opposition and protest communities of Telegram in 2021. The event analysis carried out during the study made it possible to fix the key peaks of growth in the dynamics of user activity around protest events and discourses. On this basis, it was possible to identify the triggers used to involve users in protest information flows (elections, law enforcement agencies, vaccination, socio-economic problems), typologize the communities forming the protest information flow (protest aggregator communities, news aggregator communities, local analytics communities), and model of mass protest mobilization (primary trigger — secondary trigger — offline protest).

The problem of the application of punishment to realization political goals in international relations is considered. The author characterizes the social institution of punishment, indicates its place and role in the structure of social relations. The political and legal component of punishment is analyzed in the context of unilateral sanctions of some sovereign states against others. The main forms and content of the influence of political goals on the institution of international legal sanctionspunishments are determined. The author’s vision of such specific phenomena as “self-punishment” and “political engagement” is substantiated. An algorithm for identifying the political bias of decisions on the imposition of international legal penalties, as well as possible ways to develop an adequate response to them from the “punished” subjects (target states) is formulated. The empirical base of the study includes materials on the application of punishments by individual and collective subjects of international relations against the Russian Federation, including the geopolitical consequences of the relevant sanctions decisions.

In the article, the author refers to the history of the formation of political psychology as a scientific discipline. In the first section, the reader sees a brief overview of the works of Russian and European scientists, which, in essence, had a political and psychological character. The second section shows the participation of US researchers, whose efforts have brought political psychology to the international level. The following sections deal with the stages in the formation of political psychology in Moscow, Leningrad, and then in St. Petersburg. The author notes that at present in Russia there are three main centers for political and psychological research and scientific and pedagogical training of specialists - the Department of Political Psychology of St. Petersburg State University, the Department of Sociology and Psychology of Politics, Lomonosov Moscow State University, and Research Institute of Political Psychology and Applied Political Research, Pushkin Leningrad State University. The paper presents the main directions of political and psychological research in our country.

The article is devoted to the analysis of the semantic structure of narratives about the collapse of the Soviet Union in the context of ideological splits. The material of the analysis is Telegram as an information platform that manages media memory in modern Russia. 62 influential political Telegram channels have been identified, reflecting the main ideological positions and splits of public consciousness. Based on a combination of narrative analysis and content analysis, a conclusion is made about the competition of two large narratives about the collapse of the Soviet Union — patriotic and liberal-Westernist, each of which corresponds to a block of Telegram channels. The peculiarity of the liberal-Westernist narrative is the deconstruction of the cultural trauma of the of the Soviet Union. The patriotic narrative uniting the right and left is based on the perception of the collapse of the Soviet Union as a national trauma and a negative assessment of Gorbachev’s role. It is concluded that the tragic memory of the collapse of the Soviet Union through the mechanism of cultural trauma becomes part of the collective identity of Russian society, significantly changing it.

The purpose of this article was a comparative analysis of the images of the collapse of the Soviet Union in television journalism and the comments of Internet users within the framework of commemorations of the thirtieth anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Based on the content analysis, as well as comparison with television projects of the late 1990s-2000s, not only a decrease in the total number of television projects dedicated to the collapse of the Soviet Union, but also the unequivocal dominance of television projects focused on the reproduction of traumatic discourse was revealed. It was concluded that the appeal to the events of the collapse of the Soviet Union on contemporary Russian television is not so much focused on the reconstruction of the events of 1991 as it turns out to be a historical illustration of the socio-economic and political transformations of the current government in the last twenty years. This can be clearly seen in the transformation of the images of the victim, enemies, as well as the strengthening of the rhetoric of reassessment of the events of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The analysis of the peculiarities of the viewer’s interest on the Internet also showed the dominance in terms of the number of views of television projects that reproduce traumatic discourse. The use of machine learning (ML) methods and sentiment analysis revealed the relative dominance of neutral comments and a rather high percentage of those who negatively assessed the collapse of the Soviet Union, where romanticization of Soviet everyday life, family experience and the influence of media figures of the Russian Internet turned out to be nostalgia factors.

The article defines the specifics of the actor approach in the context of the study of memory policy, and also analyzes the specifics of political parties as mnemonic actors. The collapse of the Soviet Union is used as a historical event demonstrating the difference between the symbolic trajectories of political parties. Based on an analysis of party election programs, the dynamics of ideas about the collapse of the Soviet Union among the parliamentary parties of the VIII convocation was analyzed. The LDPR and the Communist Party of the Russian Federation turned out to be the most active in terms of the implementation of the memory policy, while the rest of the parties showed a weak interest in updating and interpreting the collapse of the Soviet Union as an element of the party’s memory policy. Such differences may be related to the desire of parties to increase their political status by including their own history in a more significant political context, so those parties that arose in the 2000s are not interested in the symbolic use and appropriation of images of the Soviet past. In addition, it is worth considering generational changes in party elites, due to which the traumaticity of perception of the collapse of the Soviet Union gradually decreases as changes in the composition of governing bodies.