Authors

Discussion

Abstract

This paper traces how the concept of “enemy” was constructed and recycled in Russian media from 1995 to 2025. Using frequency analysis of ten leading Russian newspapers and weeklies, it quantifies mentions of putative foes -United States, Europe/EU, Ukraine, China, the enemy within - and aligns the curves with key political junctures. The 1990s display an ambivalent attempt to exit the Soviet template: a tentative westward orientation coexisted with inherited suspicion of NATO, periodic moral panics, and residual anxieties about China. The inflection arrives with Putin’s consolidation of power. From the mid-2000s, and especially after 2007, anti-Western rhetoric intensifies; it spikes again after the 2011–2012 protests, escalates sharply following the annexation of Crimea and Western sanctions, and reaches an apogee in 2022 with no reversal since.

The data visualize a substitution game: discrete national “enemies” (the US; then the EU; then Ukraine) give way to an elastic, totalizing figure - the “collective West.” Analytically, the enemy ceases to be a state with negotiable interests and becomes a civilizational antagonist, enabling permanent mobilization at home. The study combines year-by-year counts, relative salience indices, and newspaper-specific profiles to separate structural trends from editorial noise. Counter-hypotheses (e.g., periodic concern about China) are tested; while such themes recur, they never achieve the sustained prominence of anti-Western framing.

By making visible three decades of discursive drift - from hesitant post-Soviet pluralism to a durable siege mentality - the paper shows that what changes most is not who the enemy is but how encompassing the category becomes. The “collective West” functions as an all-purpose container for grievance, aligning media narratives with a politics of exception that normalizes confrontation and forecloses alternative futures.