Narratives about the Soviet Past in the Discourse of the Russian Non-Parliamentary Opposition (Example of Alexei Navalny’s Texts)

The article is devoted to the analysis of the discourse of the Russian oppositionist Alexei Navalny. The purpose of the study is to understand how one of the leaders of the Russian non-parliamentary opposition uses narratives about the Soviet past. The analysis shows that the arsenal of such narratives in Navalny's discourse is quite broad and includes references to events, actors, and realia from all main periods of the Soviet history. The whole variety of ways of using the narratives about the Soviet past in Navalny's discourse can be generalized to four typical discursive templates: (1) “analogy with the Soviet”, (2) “inheriting the Soviet”, (3) “stealing the Soviet”, (4) “(mis)commemorating the Soviet”. The “analogy with the Soviet” and “inheriting the Soviet” templates are used by Navalny in his strategies of negative representation of certain contemporary Russian political events, actors, institutions, and practices (in particular the ones having to do with political repressions and state propaganda). The application of the “stealing the Soviet” template is almost entirely limited to the texts that negatively represent Russian “oligarchs”. The “(mis)commemorating the Soviet” template is applied in the texts that promote (or condemn) certain commemorative practices. In general, in his discourse Navalny often effectively applies the discursive strategies that allow him to use the narratives about the Soviet past, but, at the same time, he is rarely seeks to actively construct such narratives himself.