“Ours” and “Others”: Images of Foreign States in the Context of the Perception of Russia by Its Own Citizens

Abstract

This article analyzes the results of a study conducted in 2017–2018 by the Program of Sociology and Psychology of Politics of the Political Science Department of Lomonosov Moscow State University. The study examined the features of the perception of foreign countries (of Western Europe, BRICS and the former Soviet Union) by Russian citizens. The results of the study lead to a number of conclusions. First, the perception of a number of other countries — the images of the “signifi cant other” — are the backbone structures of Russian political consciousness. Their importance and relevance is explained by the desire, through an appeal to “others,” to see the cultural and historical specifi cs of Russia and the Russian national-state identity more clearly. Secondly, the hypothesis put forward by the authors was generally confi rmed: the images of foreign countries in the minds of Russians are shaped under the decisive infl uence of socio-political discourse — a situational factor that broadcasts certain semantic patterns through various mass media. At the same time, the infl uence of prolonged socio-cultural and generational factors on the system of ideas about a foreign country is less pronounced. The most vivid example of such infl uence was the total negativization of the image of Ukraine, a transition from the category of “ friends” to one of “aliens.” In the structure of Russian perception of other countries, the “ friend — alien” scheme likewise occupies a central position. States perceived as “ friends” (for example, Belarus, Kazakhstan) are deemed, a priori, to possess more positive characteristics. These positive evaluations are usually emotionally tinged and fairly weak from the point of view of cognitive justifi cation. This also characterizes the images of those states that are viewed by Russians as “allies,” conventionally “ours” (e.g. Brazil, China). At the same time, Western countries perceived as “aliens” are endowed with mostly negative emotional characteristics.

References

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