(iPoster) Managing Doubt, Making Legitimacy: NLP Models of Russian Authoritarian Rhetoric

• In Event: Poster Sessions: Political Methodology & Foreign Policy I – Great Power Competition and Strategic Rivalry
  In Poster Session: Poster Session: Political Methodology

Abstract

This paper examines how the Kremlin’s wartime discourse operates as a strategic instrument of authoritarian governance during Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Scholarship on authoritarian legitimation and Russian nationalism shows that regimes rely on narrative cohesion to coordinate a modern nomenklatura, a politically dependent governing class of bureaucratic, security, and economic elites, to justify coercion and cultivate public compliance. However, few studies analyze how such rhetorical systems reorganize under the pressures of prolonged war. I offer a strategic signaling account of wartime legitimation, analyzing Kremlin rhetoric as a mechanism of elite coordination and public legitimation and tracing how official discourse manages uncertainty, signals regime stability, and shapes expectations under wartime conditions. Existing research on Putin’s rhetoric primarily focuses on the 2014 Crimea period or qualitative accounts of symbolic politics, lacking a systematic, large-scale analysis of discourse during the invasion era.

I address this gap by leveraging high-performance computing infrastructure to construct an eighteen-year corpus of Kremlin text units (2008-2026) and applying RuBERT-based embeddings, unsupervised clustering, cosine similarity measures, and temporal alignment with an original hand-coded escalation timeline for the Russia-Ukraine war. This analysis reveals a semantically stable but strategically modulated communicative environment in which the Kremlin maintains a rigid narrative core while selectively intensifying administrative, military, foreign policy, and economic registers at key junctures of escalation. I argue that this rhetorical stability is not ornamental; it functions as a coordination technology that disciplines elites and normalizes long-term war expectations for both the nomenklatura and the broader public. The text contributes to research on informational autocracy, wartime signaling, and authoritarian resilience by demonstrating that public language can be modeled, measured, and tested as a mechanism through which the Kremlin sustains a protracted conflict and shapes the environment in which Ukrainian and international actors must operate.

Author

• Jadie Minhas, Arizona State University