About what is Russophobia

Annotation

The relevance of the study is determined by the fact that during the Special Military Operation in Ukraine, the Russian Federation and its citizens have faced growing russophobic sentiment in the West and within the country. In this regard, the State Duma even discussed the issue of introducing criminal liability “for Russophobia” in Russia. However, one of the problems faced by supporters of the initiative was the vague nature of the “Russophobia” concept and the need to systematize it for further legislative activity. Thus, the purpose of the study is to highlight and systematize key approaches to the definition of the term “Russophobia”. As sources for the research, the author used journalistic and scientific articles posted on the Internet. They were analyzed using the following methods: discourse analysis, content analysis and political-textual analysis. As a result, it was identified that there are two key approaches to understanding of “Russophobia”: psychological and communicative. In the first approach, can be called classical a definition coined into social circulation by F.I. Tyutchev. Representatives of the second approach understand Russophobia as a strategy or tool of information warfare. Separately, there were highlighted works in which Russophobia is defined as an ideology, as a way of manipulating public consciousness, as a variant of ethnophobia, as a manifestation of xenophobia, as a form of racism, and as a type of extremism. At the same time, there is also a point of view that completely denies its existence. Thus, the study showed that consensus on the definition of Russophobia has not been reached yet, and the scientific community has to solve this problem.

Keywords

• russophobia
• political science
• xenophobia
• definition
• history of socio-political doctrines
• theory of politics
• ethnophobia
• racism
• ideology
• information war
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Acknowledgments

the study was supported by the Russian Science Foundation. Grant no. №523–28-00182, https://rscf.ru/en/project/23-28-00182/ (Lomonosov Moscow State University).

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