'Barbarian Invasions': Rhetorical Appellations to 'Barbarism' in Wartime Russophone Media

• In Event: Non-Liberation, or "The Tradition of All the Dead Generations Weighs Like a Nightmare on the Brain of the Living"

Abstract

This paper explores rhetorical stuckness by examining the ways in which the discursive figure of “barbarism” informs Russophone mediated discourses, often irrespective of their political stance, origins, or affiliation. Even when political positions on the war in Ukraine; the role of Russia’s opposition; the nature of Russia’s political regime; and visions for a desirable future diverge widely, “barbarism” and its semiotic cousins have come to operate as a touchstone for the condemnation, othering, or denunciation of different actors or lines of thought across political camps. With an eye towards the ways in which Soviet uptake of social evolutionism shaped interventions into people’s everyday lives and historiographies as it marshaled notions of “cultural survivals,” “atavisms,” and “throw-backs”, this paper asks what makes the optics of “barbarism” so rhetorically effective in Russophone media spheres. Whether mobilized through images of the Golden Horde, of “cannibalism,” or as appellations to Tolkien’s fictional “orcs,” these refractions of social evolutionist discourses often elicit high emotions, but not puzzlement. At a time when different political actors in and outside of Russia claim for themselves the role of defenders of distinct ethical values (be those “patriotism,” “tradition,” “culture,” or “freedom,”) the specter of “barbarism” appears to operate as the capacious constitutive outside from which these claims derive their shape. This paper asks what makes “barbarism” endure as a productive shorthand, one that retains rhetorical power across otherwise deeply fractured media ecologies. It also attempts to track how “barbarism” comes to reproduce normative narratives of history.

Author

• Tatiana Chudakova, Tufts U