Continuity or Rupture? What Data Science Reveals about Russia’s Politics of Memory - Lecture at Harvard
Using data science methods, I demonstrated the evolution of the Kremlin’s historical narrative – from retrospective commemoration to real-time myth-making.
Listen to my lecture on YT.
In my lecture I argued that the Russo-Ukrainian War has produced a qualitative transformation in Russia’s politics of memory. While the use of World War II as a legitimizing myth has long been a feature of Russian state discourse, what is new is the immediate memorialization of the ongoing “Special Military Operation” as a sacred event on par with the “Great Patriotic War.” Drawing on data science methods – including large-scale text mining, sentiment mapping, and co-occurrence analysis – the study traces how the Kremlin’s historical narrative has evolved from retrospective commemoration to real-time myth-making. A key case in point is the 2025 volume On the 80th Anniversary of the Great Victory, published by the Security Council of the Russian Federation and nominally authored by its 33 members. Computational analysis of this 500-page text reveals that references to the “Special Military Operation” appear almost as frequently as those to World War II, signaling the deliberate fusion of both wars into a single ideological continuum. This merging of past and present marks a profound shift: history is no longer used to interpret the present, but the present is re-inscribed into the canon of national memory. The study thus exposes how Russia’s ruling elite now sacralizes its own war as living history.