Mythscaping Novorossiya: Nationalism in the Donbass, 2014-15

Abstract

In 2014, Russia-backed rebels in the so-called Donetsk People’s Republic (DPR) and Lugansk People’s Republic (LPR) declared independence from Ukraine. In addition to establishing control over large swaths of territory in the Donbass region of eastern Ukraine, separatists took over media outlets and began to disseminate propaganda that heavily focused on war-related themes and new national symbols. This dissertation explores this media in order to theorize how political entities that form as a result of secession deploy symbolic repertoires in conflict environments, particularly for the purposes of legitimization and national group mobilization. Scholarship on nationalism indicates that regimes create new symbolic repertoires whenever existing symbolic regimes become discredited. Recent work on nationalism tends to view national communities as constructs which are shaped through symbols and discursively, among other things, in order to create actual national communities of like-minded individuals. However, gaps remain in this literature—namely, the literature on nationalism and national symbols is under-theorized with respect to the different roles that symbols play during wartime, and, empirically, there are no rigorous case studies that examine symbols with respect to nation- and identity-formation and the development of nationalism(s). This work aims to fill these gaps by studying across time how different war-related themes, rhetoric, and symbols change over the course of a conflict, and how these changes may be affected by conflict-related events, hardship, and annual holidays. To accomplish this, I catalogued the symbols and historical materials deployed in the separatist-controlled media throughout 2014 and 2015 into an original dataset. I also employed Social Identity Theory (SIT) in order to hypothesize about why separatists chose particular symbols and what affected the use of different symbols. SIT provided two possible strategies that motivated separatists, both of which were centered on the idea that the primary goal of deploying symbols and themes was to achieve positive distinctiveness for a new national group that was culturally and ideologically distinct from Ukraine. One strategy focused on situations where perceived intergroup similarity induces an identity threat that motivates in-group members to increase intergroup differentiation via out-group degradation. The other strategy focused on social competition between in-groups and out-groups which motivates in-group members to favor value dimensions that are shared between in-groups and out-groups. I argue that across the media produced in the DPR and LPR, there are three main themes in national symbols, which pertain to Ukraine and its western allies, Russian-Soviet civilization, and rebel organizations. I explain the choices of the DPR’s and LPR’s symbols as being based on their abilities to fit into the Russian-Soviet political-military symbolic repertoire, particularly symbolism that is associated with the USSR’s experience in World War II / the Great Patriotic War (GPW). In my analysis of the symbols and themes deployed in this media, I find evidence that some conflict-related events, weather and some holidays/anniversaries seem to affect the use of different symbols. I also find evidence that separatists tend to follow an intergroup differentiation via out-group degradation logic. This effect is significant even after controlling for newspaper- and time-fixed effects. Finally, I find that certain symbols and historical materials were deployed as part of mythscapes to legitimize the DPR and LPR and connect the contemporary conflict in eastern Ukraine to the USSR’s GPW experience—particularly the USSR’s liberation of the Donbass region from Nazi Germany. Symbols and themes both ostensibly function to affect readers of the separatist media on an emotional level.