Dear Compatriots

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’ acknowledgment of mass unrest, however, is less consistent, which we argue reflects broader uncertainties in the political as seen in our 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, past achievements, as well as defining a vision of the future. Moreover, these visions 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.

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