In September 2025, the process of introducing a new series of school history textbooks for teaching Russian history was completed. The reform, overseen by Vladimir Putin’s close advisor Vladimir Medinskii, implies that for the first time since the breakup of the Soviet Union, Russian students no longer have a range of textbooks to choose between: from now on, there will only be one textbook for each grade. For any given regime, the power to control the official interpretation of national history is considered an important instrument for nation building and nation maintenance. Through mobilizing a real or invented common past, the historical narrative is seen to strengthen the sense of belonging to and identification with the nation. In the process, historical narratives are subject to re-construction and contestation. Ancient cultures may be appropriated to extend the “national” roots, alternative histories that do not fit with the current administrative map may be silenced, and inconvenient historical episodes forgotten to present an image of a united nation destined for a bright future together. School history textbooks, and the educational system in general, represent important locales for such struggles between competing historical narratives. As history books, school history textbooks represent a special genre in which complicated issues are reduced to undebatable “shared truths” ready for student consumption. Here, the past is first and foremost meant to provide meaning to – and legitimation of – the present and to help stake out a common course for the future. With their near universal reach to entire cohorts of youths, school history textbooks are a powerful tool for spreading the message of the current regime of who and what the nation should be – and for legitimizing the powers-that-be. In this paper, I examine continuity and change in the presentation of three foundational moments of Russian history – Kyivan Rus as the foundational myth of Tsarist Russia, the October Revolution as the foundational myth of the Soviet Union, and the Great Patriotic War as the foundational myth of contemporary Russia – in Russian school history textbooks. The analysis aims to explore changes in the understanding of the national self and the regime’s legitimation strategies. I rely on Soviet school history textbooks in use in the early 1980s as a “baseline”. Then I trace how the same key events have been depicted across three sets of post-independence school history textbooks: textbooks that were in use in the second half of the 1990s, textbooks that were introduced after the 2016 adoption of the new historical-cultural standard, and the post-2022 unified textbooks developed under the auspices of Medinskii. What historical “facts” remain constant? What has changed? And what can these shifting interpretations of historical events tell us about changes in the evolving understanding of the national self and the regime’s legitimation strategies?

Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 led to a large-scale language shift away from Russian in public and, to a lesser extent, in private communication, which was part of the remarkable national consolidation in the face of unprovoked foreign aggression. Despite inevitable fatigue and frustration of the prolonged war, the shift did not stop in the following years, although some commentators argued they were observing a partial reversion to Russian in certain practices. Most people believe that the expansion and promotion of the national language should be an integral part of Ukraine’s strategy of survival and future development, even if they disagree about the degree of desired de-Russification. At the same time, a sizable minority continues to rely on Russian wherever possible and support its uninhibited use not only in the private but also in the public domain. Such people are especially numerous and vocal in the east and south of the country where Russian was until 2022 the dominant language of all communicative practices. As long as the war goes on, their opposition to the cleansing of what most people perceive as the enemy language manifests itself primarily in social media discussions, but after the war it is likely to reappear in political and institutional media discourse. Based on a series of focus group discussions conducted in June 2025 with people in different parts of Ukraine and a number of discussions of language matters on social media since 2022, the proposed paper will analyze the main arguments and discursive strategies of supporters and opponents of a thorough de-Russification of Ukrainian society. I will examine the proposed scale and domain specifics of the language shift as well as the perceived merits and dangers of the exclusion of Russian. The paper will conclude with a brief discussion of the likely impact of language controversies on the developments in Ukraine after the end of the active phase of war.

In this paper, I examine how the Russian state governs culture through manufactured (un)certainty, by using elastic legal and administrative categories. The most salient categories in this sense are “extremism” and “LGBTQ+ propaganda”, whose definitions remain difficult to operationalize. Building on Lisa Wedeen’s concept of authoritarian ambiguity, I argue that vagueness and selective enforcement generate a broad regime of ritualized compliance in which cultural intermediaries preemptively self-censor to reduce risks of unpredictable punishment. Under these conditions, compliance becomes a survival strategy that produces compliance artifacts, such as age restrictions, Aesopian language, quiet removals, “safe writing” checklists, and visible redaction practices. Empirically, the paper traces this mechanism across 2022–2025, examining how interpretive cues circulate between regulator discourse, judicial decisions, and industry practice. I also analyze how different cultural actors translate uncertainty into routinized decisions of preemptive self-sensorship. The principal analytical benefit here is a comparison of book publishing and cinema/streaming platforms operating under the same uncertainty regime. While streaming services largely face administrative fines and respond through silent edits and policy adjustments, book publishing confronts a higher-stakes horizon of criminalization under Supreme Court’s 2023 designation of the “international LGBTQ+ public movement” as an extremist organization. Methodologically, the paper uses comparative process tracing. I triangulate four types of material: 1) ethnographic field notes from a Roskomnadzor workshop that trained market actors to apply the new interpretive distinctions; (2) auto-ethnographic insights from work experience inside one streaming platform and one publishing house, capturing how risk is assessed and translated into internal rules; 3) court decisions obtained via mosgorsud.ru, and 4) posts from Telegram channels of writers, book bloggers, and film critics, used to locate and timestamp changes in circulation, labeling, and content. By foregrounding uncertainty as an administrative technology, the paper contributes in studying how shrinking civic and cultural spaces are governed through delegation.

This paper analyses the Hungarian government’s anti-Soros campaigns between 2015 and 2018. This period includes the migration crisis as a starting point, the 2016 referendum on the so-called ‘Soros plan’, the 2017 legislation against the Central European University in Budapest, the 2017 anti-Soros billboard campaign, and the 2018 parliamentary elections in Hungary. Rather than treating the Hungarian government’s communication as monolithic, this study employs a novel analytical framework, termed polyphonic political discourse. I argue that the Hungarian government and its political leader dominate the Hungarian media system and can launch a comprehensive communication campaign that mobilises many actors and utilises a graded discourse to incorporate slightly different interpretations of events and phenomena into the same narrative framing. Polyphonic political discourse typically occurs in the context of a dominant party and a (relatively) centralised media environment, in which democratic credentials, public opinion, and popular mandate still matter for the legitimacy of the government. To address the demand for diverse opinions, the government may foster or coordinate nuanced variations of its message, creating the appearance of pluralism. Using this approach, the paper demonstrates how a range of discursive actors—including politicians, pro-government media, and affiliated experts—produced differentiated yet interconnected messages that portrayed George Soros as an ‘umbrella enemy’ or ‘puppet master’ behind NGOs, media, opposition parties, and even the EU, allegedly aiming to weaken the sovereignty of Hungary and pursue a liberal agenda. George Soros can be considered an ‘ideally constructed’ archenemy, who became an overarching theme in the Hungarian governmental communication during the 2015 migration crisis. His Hungarian-Jewish origin made him the personal representation of many conspiracy theories, and his influential, transnational figure allowed the Hungarian government to emphasize his hidden, undemocratic motives. To uncover the subthemes related to the Hungarian government’s narrative on George Soros, this study relies on the central discursive actor (speeches by Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán) and the publications of the Hungarian pro-governmental press from the analysed period (Origo, Magyar Nemzet, Magyar Idők). The added value of this research is evident in that the overwhelming majority of studies present the narrative of illiberal governments as unitary, and disregard the (slightly) different narratives (intellectuality) and tones (harshness) that the governmental or government-related discursive actors may convey.