From Gagarin to Sputnik: the role of nostalgia in Russian public diplomacy

Abstract

In recent years, diplomats have increasingly employed nostalgic tropes in their digital communications (Surowiec and Manor 2020). As a public diplomacy instrument, nostalgia serves two ends. First, nostalgia can be used to help digital public makes sense of complex crises using historical precedent. Second, nostalgia can be used to reduce feelings of uncertainty brought about by globalization and the contestation of local traditions as well as novel planetary threats. By summoning a nation’s past to the present, the past becomes a template that illuminates the present and elucidates the future (Miskimmon et al. 2014). For instance, British officials have equated Brexit with the British Empire’s ‘last stand’ during WWII in which an independent UK charted its own destiny (Saunders 2020). Over the past 2 years, the Russian MFA has promoted three nostalgic campaigns on Twitter. The first, called ‘Faces of Victory,’ celebrates the heroes of the Red Army. The second commemorates important Red Army victories in WWII. Notably, in these tweets, the Red Army is re-imagined as a diverse people’s army, a fighting force that represented the diversity of the USSR as its soldiers belonged to different religions, nationalities, and ethnicities. Concurrently, the Russian MFA has used Twitter to lambast Baltic States for re-writing history by ignoring the Red Army’s role in the defeat of Nazi Germany (Manor 2019) (Fig. 1). The third campaign commemorates the flight of Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin. On Twitter, the MFA re-imagined the Space Race not as a global competition over hegemony, but as an endeavor that advanced all of humanity. The MFA used images from Gagarin’s personal life, as well as images from monuments to Gagarin’s flight across the world to transform the Cosmonaut from as a Russian hero to a global one. In this campaign, Russia celebrated the scientific achievements of the USSR while arguing that the USSR, and the bi-polar system, did not undermine global peace but actually benefitted all of mankind through scientific and technological advancements.1 Notably, the Russian MFA’s use of nostalgic tropes can be viewed as part of a wider effort to disseminate revisionist narratives that re-interpret history, with an emphasis on WWII. In this way, Russia’s use of nostalgic tropes differs from other states’ use of nostalgia to narrate complex crisis or reduce feelings of uncertainty following geo-political shifts (e.g., Brexit). Russia’s historic revisionism is, in part, a response to a 2019 European Parliament resolution that condemned Russia for colluding with Nazi Germany and starting WWII. The resolution also called for the removal of Soviet war memorials across Europe (Radchenko 2020). Notably, Russia’s historic revisionism, and reliance of nostalgic tropes, may be but a tool to rally domestic support in Putin, while diverting attention from Russia’s domestic woes (Sargeant 2021). For example, in a 2020 meeting of world leaders Putin discussed WWII at length, arguing that the war was the result of Poland’s collusion with Nazi Germany (Radchenko 2020). Taken within this revisionist context, the Russian MFA’s re-imagining of the Red Army and the Space Race is but one element in a larger effort in which a tangled web of official and non-official digital channels promote a a meta-narrative built on a dichotomy of “Russia as an ally with a common history, culture and interests” and the “West as a foreign, imperialist enemy” (Ukraine, Crisis Media Center 2020). We contend that nostalgia also underpins Russia’s attempts to market its Covid19 vaccine on Twitter. The vaccine’s very name, Sputnik, harks back to the USSR and the Space Race. The name suggests that the same minds * James Pamment James.pamment@isk.lu.se