Emulating the Autocrat: Gubernatorial Addresses and the Supply of Volunteer Battalions

• In Event: Post-Soviet Politics of Patronage and Identity

Abstract

Analyzing a dataset of special addresses by Russian governors following the February 2022 invasion of Ukraine, this paper examines the relationship between rhetorical emulation and the provision of volunteer battalions. While the Putin regime has primarily relied on volunteer battalions to avoid full mobilization and to outsource recruitment and casualty reporting to the regions, volunteer battalions have also benefited governors by elevating their political profiles and offering financial inducements to their constituents. To understand which governors provide volunteer battalions, the paper investigates how closely governors emulate the rhetoric from Putin’s special address on February 21, 2022 using text clustering via NLP technique to measure the similarity between governors’ special addresses in the wake of the invasion and Putin’s address preceding the invasion.

Author

• Kathleen Gergely, Indiana U Bloomington