Dear Compatriots: New Year Speeches and Post-Soviet Political Communication

• In Event: Autocratic Challenges in the Post Soviet States

Abstract

This article offers a comparative analysis of post-Soviet leaders’ new year addresses to the nation. As highly prominent, programmatic speeches, such texts provide a unique and valuable basis for examining insights from literatures on authoritarian political communication and regime legitimation. Collecting 152 new year addresses from across the region (Belarus, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan), we find systematic differences in leaders’ political communication depending on the openness of the regime, both in ordinary times and during global crises such as Covid-19. Autocrats’ acknowledgement of mass unrest, however, is less consistent, reflecting broader uncertainties in the political regime as we illustrate through case comparisons of Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia, and Uzbekistan. Across all our cases, we find leaders increasingly using new year addresses to articulate claims about the identity of the state and the nation, (re)interpreting its history and past achievements, as well as defining a vision of the future. Moreover, these visions increasingly coalesce around unitary understandings of the nation, replacing multiethnic narratives of the immediate post-Soviet period. The unique status of the new year as one of the most enduring “invented traditions” of the Soviet Union provides an important lens to assess continuity and change across the region.

Authors

• Akbota Karibayeva, George Washington University

• Adam Lenton, Wake Forest University