Considerable scholarly and public interest has been drawn to political emotions as a crucial component of mass consciousness. To understand the period of Russian history preceding the revolutionary crisis of 1917 and continuing after the fall of tsarism, it is important to analyze the genesis and dynamics of political emotions that encompassed all strata of society and, to a significant extent, shaped political behavior. This problem is explored in V.B. Aksenov’s recent book The War of Patriotisms. Propaganda and Mass Sentiments in Russia during the Collapse of Empire (2023). Among the most salient emotions of this transformative time was patriotism, which manifested itself in diverse and often sharply contrasting forms. These various “patriotisms” reflected both affective bonds of friendship, love, and solidarity within groups, and emotions directed outward — anger and rejection of the “other”. Propaganda, exerting strong influence on the psycho-emotional condition of society, played a key role in shaping the dynamics of the affective components of mass consciousness during the empire’s collapse, generating different versions not only of patriotic awareness but also of political behavior. The centrality of emotions and affects in the formation of collective identities intensified propagandistic appeals to such concepts as “fatherland,” “people,” and “national community”. In late-imperial Russia, multiple versions of patriotism coexisted and frequently overlapped, including loyalist, conservative, statist, paternalist, military, civic, and revolutionary forms, each with its own ideological coloring. Yet an “ideology of patriotism”, were such a thing to exist, would necessarily be constructed around the search for markers — whether in the past, present, or imagined future — of an idealized, better country as the object of patriotic feeling. The history of Russia, as elsewhere, shows that patriotism, as a predominantly affective sentiment, is not identical with a rationally articulated and conceptually coherent system of ideas, that is, an ideology. Equally important is the problem of the historical genesis of patriotism: it emerges when essentially medieval loyalty to a suzerain gives way to loyalty to the fatherland and to fellow citizens.
Livshin et al. (Wed,) studied this question.