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“The Fold of the Motherland”
“The Motherland opens out her arms and welcomes you into her home as her own daughters and sons,” the president of Russia said to the inhabitants of Crimea during his visit to Sevastopol on May 9, 2014 (Putin 2014).1 Apparently, these words of Vladimir Putin were aimed, first, to justify Russia’s policy on Crimea, explaining it as a maternal gesture and the duty of protecting her “children,” and, second, to legitimize the actions of the Kremlin, which was represented thereby as a spokesperson for the interests and desires of the Motherland.
Putin’s popularity remains high, which was reflected in his landslide victory during the presidential elections 2018, and scholars suggest various explanations for why the current political system enjoys such legitimacy in the eyes of the majority of Russian voters, often emphasizing the role of nationalism in the legitimation of power. In order to contribute to the examination of the modes of nationalist legitimation, I analyze the ways in which the authorities use the symbol of the Motherland.
The “Motherland”/“Mother Russia” has been one of the most important symbols of Russian history for many centuries—an element of the myth-symbol complex of Russian culture. Starting with its appearance as “Mother Earth” in pagan times, the mother image of the country has been present in Russian culture (literature, philosophy, arts, etc.) throughout its whole history (Riabov 2007). The data of sociological surveys testify to the importance of the symbol in the eyes of contemporary Russians. As All-Russian poll of ROMIR (September 29, 2015) showed that out of 1,500 participants to the question what they associated the Homeland with, 26 percent of respondents answered “with the image of mother,” 19 percent with “a Russian woman,” and 11 percent with the woman’s image from Iraklii Toidze’s poster “The Motherland Calls!”, which was created at the beginning of the Great Patriotic War in 1941 (“Obraz Rodiny – v nature” 2015).
Significantly, the researchers of theoretical issues of nationalism addressed the mother image of Russia in their works (Anderson 1983, 172; Smith 1997, 46). The first prominent research focused on this image was published 30 years ago: Joanne Hubbs’ Mother Russia: The Feminine Myth in Russian Culture (1988) has aroused considerable debate and at...