Civil War Anxiety: Political Emotions During Perestroika and the 1990s in Russia
This project investigates the meanings and uses of 'civil war' as a political idiom in Russian-speaking public discourse from the late Perestroika period to the mid-1990s. Although Russia did not experience large-scale internal armed conflict, the prospect of civil war was persistently invoked by politicians, journalists, intellectuals, and citizens across the political spectrum, especially during the October 1993 violence in Moscow and the 1996 presidential election. Drawing on a corpus of periodicals and political documents, supplemented by interviews with contemporaries, the project examines how this pervasive talk of civil war shaped ideological languages and political emotions in Russia during the post-Soviet transition. It asks: what were the political semantics of 'civil war' and its repertoires of representation, and how was 'civil war' experienced and shaped emotionally — for example, as anxiety, shame, or fear? The central argument is that the discourse of impending civil war served as the primary idiom through which the collapse of state socialism and the emergence of capitalism were simultaneously imagined, contested, and depoliticised. The project contributes to scholarly debates on political communication, memory politics, ideology, and the cultural history of emotions, while offering a new interpretive framework for unveiling the ideological dimensions of the post-Soviet transition.
Dr. Aleksandr Reznik will continue his research on his project at the ZZF Potsdam in Department I as part of the ERC project “Perestroika from Below” until November 30, 2026. / Dr. Aleksandr Reznik wird am ZZF Potsdam im Rahmen des ERC Projekts „Perestroika from Below“ in Abteilung I bis 30.11.2026 die Forschung zu seinem Projekt weiterführen.