UKRANIAN FACTOR IN THE TRANSFORMATION OF RUSSIAN IDENTITY

The transformation of Russian identity in the last 30 years has been influenced by both internal and external factors. As a rule, researchers attribute the policy of the West towards Russia to the most important external factors. In the opinion of the authors of this article, events and processes in the post-Soviet space, especially those taking place in Ukraine, are of no less importance. The article characterizes the impact of changes in political courses on the identification strategies of the political class of Russia and Ukraine, as a result of which they turned out to be not just different, but multidirectional. The work uses the traditional socio-constructivist approach for identity studies and the concept of identification matrices; discursive analysis was used as a method, the source base is presented both by publications and speeches of representatives of the political elite, and by data from public opinion polls and sociological surveys, which are secondary in nature. The conducted discursive analysis confirms that the most important point of divergence between the identification of Russia and Ukraine was the events that received the name “Orange Revolution” in Ukraine and caused value contradictions that contributed to the transition between the two countries into an open conflict after 2014. The severity of the reaction of Russian society to these discrepancies is explained by the stable traditions of perceiving Ukraine as a neighbor, as “Own”, due to which the change in value orientations and the political course of the Ukrainian elite towards Euro-Atlantic integration, accompanied and encouraged by anti-Russian rhetoric, the presentation of Russia as an oppressor and colonizer, began to be perceived and evaluated as a betrayal of the “brotherly” people, which destroys the Russian identity matrix .