David Cratis Williams

Echoes of Berlin, 1989: Post-Soviet Discourse and the Rhetoric of National Unity

Just as the popular imagination became inflamed by the events of 1989, and the “fall of the wall” was commonly taken as a sign of the inevitability of a new, open, free, and democratic Eastern Europe, so too was the disintegration of the Soviet Union in December of 1991 taken as a sign of the inevitability of a new, open, free, and democratic Russia. Although the events in Berlin were significant in spurring changes onward, with different rhetorical choices by Soviet and Russian leaders along the way history could have been written quite differently. The central concern of this article is to show how these rhetorical choices shaped the future of post-Communist transition in the Russian Federation. We proceed chronologically, examining key moments in the rhetoricity of the Russian transition from Communism toward its current form of governance.

Text network analysis: exploring relationships with qualitative methodology and rhetorical criticism

the text) would be less important. For example, any practical details of the working coordination between such software products as Sigma.Js library (developed by Alexis Jacomy) and the Force Atlas layout (developed by Matthieu Jacomy) should certainly be more fully explained – in case a would-be reader of the text by Paranyushkin starts thinking about perspectives of the application of these software visualization tools in his or her own (moderate or large-scale) research project.