Discussion
Despite progressively heightened state control over non-state nationalist groups and their discourses in Russia throughout the 2010s, nationalist/ ultranationalist organizations and individuals (both grassroots and quasi-autonomous) have continued to produce discourses throughout the 2022 full-scale invasion of Ukraine, both parallel to and at times in contradiction to the discourses of the Putin regime.
Through focusing on Russian non-state discourses on the social media platform Telegram, this project seeks to use a hybrid of the discourse historical approach (DHA) of critical discourse analysis (CDA), to shine a light on nationalist groups and actors that have more recently tended to fly under the radar of scholarly research. Specifically this thesis seeks to understand how two of the most prominent online (and real world) groups; Sorok Sorokov and Russkaya Obshina, have (re)produced, amplified, or contested state narratives, since the onset of Russia's 2022 invasion, constructing distinct visions of Russia’s identity and future. The analysis interrogates how discourses such as ethno-nationalism, Orthodoxy, imperialism and Russian historical memory, have been articulated, negotiated, and transformed within these respective Telegram channels.
