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Conspiracy and Alternate History in Russia: A Nationalist Equation for Success?
Author(s) -
LARUELLE MARLÈNE
Publication year - 2012
Publication title -
the russian review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.136
H-Index - 24
eISSN - 1467-9434
pISSN - 0036-0341
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-9434.2012.00669.x
Subject(s) - nationalism , contextualization , the imaginary , identity (music) , literature , plural , history , aesthetics , epistemology , sociology , law , linguistics , philosophy , political science , art , interpretation (philosophy) , psychology , psychoanalysis , politics
In the post‐Cold War period conspiracy theories have become more fashionable, both as an element for explaining international affairs and as one for rewriting history. In this latter aspect, they comprise part of a particularly broad genre, called alternate history. Each of these plural histories of Russia has its own proper focus, in terms of its periods of predilection, of its way of formulating the components of identity (religion, race, culture, state, and so on), and of designation of the enemy. However, nearly all of them use the conspirological framework and its presupposed secret manipulation to articulate the dramaturgy of the nation in logical terms. After a contextualization of the broad domain of alternate history, this article enquires into the modes of nationalist types of alternate history and its multiple conspiracies, and looks in detail at one of its “textbook cases,” so‐called New Chronology. The principal hypothesis defended here is that the conjunction between conspiracy theory and the rewriting of history makes up one of the main instruments for disseminating nationalist theories in today Russia, theories based on a kind of post‐modern, paranoid cultural imaginary.