ABSTRACT

This chapter briefly engages the dominant perceptions of the meaning and uses of 'ideology' in order to arrive at a useful understanding of its contextualization to the experience of Soviet federalism. The construction of the Soviet people is a result of a number of discursive articulations aiming at the fixing of a particular system of meaningfulness to the Soviet society. Its narration was triggered by the immense discursive rupture of the October Revolution. The Soviet Union was a federal state whose unity was premised on the articulation of a common supranational identity transcending the differences of numerous national groups living on its territory. Ideology, thereby, was promoted as a mechanism, a set of ideas, and a locus of power for shaping social destiny by recruiting individuals into a certain imaginary unity. The main focus of discourse analysis appears to be defined by the question of why the materiality of surrounding realities becomes interpreted in this way, rather than another.