Publications

Realism- and geopolitics-inspired rhetoric was common currency in Russian foreign policy discourse throughout the 1990s. This led some commentators to adopt realism and geopolitics - realism’s more nationalist and strategic counterpart - as conceptual lenses for understanding Russian foreign policy. As a result, Russian foreign policy of the 2010s is still considered predominantly geopolitics-driven despite the fact that geopolitical vocabulary has virtually disappeared from foreign policy discourse while a desire to carve out spheres of influence have been officially pronounced utterly anachronistic and inappropriate, a “thing of the past”. Thus, a more nuanced interpretation views the rise of geopolitics in Russian post-Soviet foreign policy discourse as an attempt to tap into the symbolic and rhetorical power of geopolitics in order to reduce ontological insecurity brought about by the end of the Cold War. The chapter, therefore, advances a theoretical claim about the relevance of the constructivist and poststructuralist literature and very limited relevance of realism for understanding the twists and turns of Russian post-Soviet foreign policy. Methodologically, the chapter argues that an exploration of state identity rooted in the ontological security argument will benefit from employing discourse analysis. Empirically, the present study provides substantiation of the theoretical claim that the concept of hegemony captures well the historical trajectory of Russia’s relations with its ‘significant other’- Europe/the EU/the West – and provides important insights into the sources of Russia’s ontological insecurity in the 21st century.

The article presents an empirical study conducted on the material of the Russian language segment of Change.org in the theoretical field of digital political participation and in the case of slacktivism to clarify e-petitions contribution to changes in public life. The purpose of the study is to present thematic dominants in federal districts at the levels of petitioning and support by online voting.

22452 Change.org petitions from 2012 to 2017 were extracted and analysed with the Python software (Lxml, Requests and Re libraries). The territory of their creation was marked as well. 918 petitions identified by the author as ‘executed’ were taken for the analysis by region. Both text databases underwent the open coding technique using the AntConc and TopicMiner software and descriptive statistics tools, i.e. cluster analysis (SPSS Statistics 22).

As a result, three groups of territories were identified. In the first group, the government and business are ready to solve a wide range of issues in the region and they are responding to the requests; in the second group, they respond only to the survival problems; in the third group of territories, they feel the safest, helping animals and ignoring other demands.

The study suggests ‘an offline effect’ of online petitions where the themes are an integrative indicator: they reflect the needs of the population of a given territory, indicate the recognition of the problem as worth solving and show what problems the regional authorities or business are ready to tackle without significant public pressure.

The paper deals with the use of precedent phenomena for the purpose of creating the “friend / foe” opposition in the discourse of Aleksey Navalny’s blog. It is revealed that various (Russian and foreign) source spheres of precedence are used in the electronic diary. Foreign precedent phenomena are predominantly used to conceptualise the “friend” circle.  

The topicality of the research is explained by the growing popularity of social networks as a channel of political communication. Modern elements of intertextuality, such as hashtags, retweets, @ sign, ensure participation of a large number of users in the discussion of certain political topics, and allow to quickly track public's reaction to political events. Employing the methods of computer linguistics, the paper analyzes the elements of intertextuality implemented on Twitter as reaction of users of the English-language segment to the introduction of the US President Decree No. 13769, known in the media space as "travel ban". The study found that the most popular element of intertextuality is the hashtag, which is actively used by users to popularize the opinion and involve a wide range of people into discussion. In addition, thematic grouping of hashtags allowed us to identify the opposite reactions of users, and to assume that it is possible to control the route of the debate with the help of hashtags. To attract attention of the maximum number of users, hashtags must also be single-component and act as the subject, marking the topic of the message.

 Political humor in the US late night comedy shows is considered in the paper.

The article discusses the importance of the ideological factor in national policies and military doctrines of States. The conclusion is that the ideological basis of foreign and military policy of Russia is still only at the stage of formation.  

This paper aims at analyzing the differences in views on human freedom as seen in Socrates’ argument with the sophist Callicles and his own pupil Aristippus. These differences reflect sociocultural issues that emerged amid the crisis of the classical polis, and called for rethinking an antinomy between freedom and slavery, typical of antiquity. While Socrates emerges victorious in both discussions, his understanding of freedom is not devoid of contradictions, stipulated by an attempt to combine freedom of a thinking person with the traditional unity of a civic community. At the same time, this debate brings to light a new dimension of human freedom, that allows a human being to stay true to oneself even in a poorest social environment, namely one’s spiritual freedom.

This paper presents a description of the German language identity in the Crimea from the point of view of the study of linguocultural markers - the church, associations of German immigrants, schools, cultural traditions in a dialectal island.

The paper presents an attempt to solve the task of aspect-based sentiment analysis in the domain of Russian-language hotel reviews, using distributed representation of words. The authors follow an approach similar to [Blinov, Kotelnikov, 2014], but applied to a different domain and using different parameters. The authors also present a new dataset that is made available to the community. To build the vector space of words with word2vec, a corpus comprising 50 329 hotel reviews was constructed. The next step was the compilation of aspect and sentiment lexicons in the vector space obtained. The lexicon construction approach was based on iteratively expanding a small set of initially specified terms. Finally, the sentiment of aspects in actual reviews was calculated given the aspect and sentiment terms found in the text and their weights, i.e. cosine similarity to the initial terms. The model was tested on a corpus of 6 876 texts from the same domain.

The paper considers the task of the morphemic analysis of Russian words and compares the efficiency of several proposed models. These models can be divided into three groups: derivational and inflectional rule-based, proba- bilistic, and hybrid models. The latter achieved state-of-the-art results of 0.848 F-score on a test set of 500 Russian words. The models use dictionaries of morphs and words and information about the part of speech and other morphological fea- tures of the word. Importantly, our solution takes into account synchronic word- formative relations between words. This allows for analyzing words in any gram- matical form, as well as previously unseen words. Our system, which we make freely available to the community, also features morphemic annotation of entire texts and search for specified morphs.

Die Russische Februarкevolution 1917 im Spiegel der deutschsprachigen Zeitung "Prager Tagblatt"

The article discusses the problems and prospects for using the methodology of Digital Humanities in the historical psychological studies. The authors present the results of the search and analysis of the mentions found for the name of the outstanding psychophysiologist, psychoneurolo-gist, and psychologist Vladimir M. Bekhterev (1857-1927) in the body of texts in the Google Books system in Russian and English languages. Hypotheses are advanced regarding the high or low frequency of references. The dissemination of the scientist’s ideas in various scientific fields is analyzed in both Russian and English. The results of the mentioning frequency study on the names of Vladimir Bekhterev and Lev Vygotsky are compared to define the factors that determine the use of the name and these scientists’ ideas. The advantages and disadvantages of qualitative and quantitative analysis and interpretation of texts within the framework of digital humanities are shown.

This training manual is addressed to law students, learning English for professional purposes.

The book consists of two parts:

Part 1 – Legal Listening

The main aim of the materials of the 1st part is teaching students listening to texts on legal topics in English. The materials are supplied with the recording of texts to practice in-class listening (on CD), they also contain communicative tasks and key answers as well as scripts. The texts cover the following themes: The Practice of Law, Company Law, Contract Law and Employment Law.

Part 2 - Legal Reading is directed to teaching students different kinds of reading based on authentic legal texts.

The texts of all the sections cover the following topics: Company Law, Contract Law, Family Law.

Both parts of the manual envisage exercises for both  inclass  and out-of- class work, including the use of the Internet.

The book includes Progress tests with answers.

This study based on the use of methods of corpus linguistics compares literary and “naive autobiographies” of men and women. The empirical material of this research is represented by texts of autobiographies of men from provincial Russia, the corpus of “naive” male autobiographies comprises 36 interviews (28 335 word usages). For the comparative analysis 46 female autobiographies have been used (the total corpus contains 48.530 word usages) dwelling in the countryside and provincial towns as well. The other group of materials includes 20 “literary autobiographies” of writers (the corpus of literary male autobiographies contains 27 241 word usages). It was found that the autobiographies of writers, as well as the autobiographies of “ordinary males”, are being constructed by the authors within the boundaries of the “male culture” rules regardless of abilities and literary experiences.