Since the annexation of Crimea in early 2014, the beginning of sanctions and the intensification of imperial rhetoric around the situation in the Ukraine, there has been a radicalisation of the conflict between various sections of Russian society, which cannot help but manifest itself in heated discussions between people professing different views. It is moreover becoming more and more obvious that there is no possibility of reaching a compromise and that these arguments are leading nowhere: they have in fact turned into mutual accusations, attempts to abuse the other side and at the same time demonstrate their political unreliability. All this means that there is a need not only for a study of public communication, but also an analysis of the mechanisms for discussing political questions or, to put it another way, the character of the discursive forms of political participation.

It has become a commonplace to point out the lack of a skill-set (resulting from historical conditions) for discussing political problems. One cannot help feeling that the basic reason for this constantly noticed inability to conduct a dialogue is the absence of any ‘public language’, an inability to argue and come to agreement. At the same time it cannot be denied that people succeed in interacting in other cases, demonstrating not only the skills for having a discussion, but equally the possibility of recognising that the other party is right if his or her arguments are convincing. Why then on every hand as soon as any public debate begins on national politics, instead of a constructive exchange of views and civilised discussion, is the opponent's language discredited, likened to ‘screech-ing’, ‘screaming’ and ‘howling’, which automatically prevents any possibility of dialogue? It is not simply a matter of overcoming the contradictions between ‘liberals’ and ‘conservatives’, ‘patriots’ and the ‘fifth column’. In this case we are confronted with the defining elements of the Russian public sphere, which, ever since it came into existence at the beginning of the eighteenth century, has on the one hand been that space in which people communicate with each other, and at the same time has tended towards a depoliticisation of language, refusing to acknowledge that utterance may be a form of political participation.