Russian Electoral Politics and the Search for National Identity.

When the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics formally dissolved in December 1991, the Russian Federation became the most prominent of the new nations that emerged. The rebirth of the entity generally known as Russia brought with it the need to create and institutionalize democratic practices after centuries of authoritarian rule, as well as the opportunity to effect market reforms from the remains of a controlled economy. That, in turn, set in motion the rhetorical exigency of engendering in the citizenry a new identification, a new nationalism as citizens of something now called the Russian Federation. Changes such as these necessarily entail questions of public argumentation, debate and rhetoric: democratic forms of governance, for example, may be understood as the institutionalization of a public forum to resolve conflict. Such governments are characterized by open deliberation of choices for future action-the use of rhetorical and dialectical processes-rather than by coercion or the threat of violence. Similarly, efforts to create or re-create definitions of national identity and individual identification with the national polity are clearly the undertakings of rhetoric and argumentation. In the case of the Russian Federation, of course, traditions of public deliberation about national self-definition and choices of future actions never had been firmly established, even prior to 1917, and they were non-existent from 1917 through at least 1989. Thus, political argumentation in the Russian Federation from 1991 forward offers the scholar a case study by which to investigate the processes of democratization, the creation of institutionalized dialectics, and the rhetorical search for national identity. The present study represents a further step in a continuing examination of political reform in the Russian Federation. Specifically, it examines political argumentation advanced by various parties and candidates in Russian elections held to date (Williams, Young, Ishiyama, & Launer, 1997 and Young, Launer, Likhachova, Williams, & Ishiyama, 1997). In this essay, we sketch our theoretical orientation to the rhetorical construction of national identity and examine the 1993 and 1995 Duma elections as well as the 1996 presidential campaign. It is our contention that the results of these elections say more about the search for a Russian national identity in the wake of dramatic change than they do about the electoral process itself. RHETORICAL CONSTRUCTIONS OF NATIONAL IDENTITY Our approach to national identity is informed by Kenneth Burke, who sets forth a theory of "identification" as a fundamental rhetorical process that constructs one's psychological "identity" and, ultimately, one's sense of "self" (1937, 1950, 1951). Drawing upon the work of George Herbert Mead (1934), Burke argues that personal identity is neither purely individual nor purely socialized but rather a murky amalgam of the two. Identity is constituted and reconstituted through a dialectical relationship between external manifestations ("me") and a core sense of self ("I") (1937, p. 139). Through common identifications, which is to say through rhetoric, individuals may coalesce collectively, may commingle in a symbiotic sharing of the same substance, a partial sharing of the ontological ground for the being of both the individual and the collective, although this ontology, too, is an ever-shifting dialectic. National identity may be understood as a special case of collective identification. "[W]hen considered close up, the identity of the 'self' or 'person' becomes part of a collective texture involving language, property, family, reputation, social roles, and so on-elements not reducible to the individual" (Burke, 1937, p. 139). It is through rhetoric and argument that identity is constituted and reconstituted in the ambiguous nexus between the individuated and the collective, between division and unification. Burke (1950) writes, Identification is compensatory to division. …