By Julia Khrebtan-Hörhager, David Boromisza-Habashi, Zenia Kish, and Marina Levina
While the rapid rise of authoritarianism in the United States is oftentimes portrayed as the problem of power, it is also a problem of culture and communication. That is why the field of communication studies has a unique responsibility in developing communicative strategies to counter authoritarian rhetorics and fictions. To do that, however, we need to understand that authoritarianism is a global mechanism of power and that any development of successful resistance to authoritarianism in the United States relies on the thorough understanding of global authoritarian regimes. On April 25, 2025, we organized a virtual learning opportunity (VLO) for the National Communication Association that examined the through line between the current authoritarian turn in the US, the history of authoritarianism in Europe, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. We are Ukrainian and European scholars who study the ways in which rhetorics of land, peace, safety, and identity have been weaponized by authoritarian regimes in Central Eastern Europe (CEE), the former Soviet Union, and, most recently, by Russia against Ukraine. We argue that understanding the history of authoritarianism in CEE, Russian neo-imperialism, and Ukrainian invasion is essential to creating a robust response to authoritarianism in North America. What follows is our reflections and follow up to the VLO, in which we examine how the politics of Ukraine, Russia, and Central Eastern Europe can shine light on the emergence of authoritarianism in the United States.
Br/Others in Arms: Weaponized Peace and Profitable Patriotism in Russia’s War on Ukraine
Colorado State University
History does not always repeat itself exactly, but it often offers patterns that help us make sense of the present. The histories of fascist Italy and Nazi Germany offer urgent lessons for understanding the mechanisms of propaganda, nationalism, and authoritarianism that now shed light on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Today, as far-right ideologies re-emerge globally, these echoes of the past find sharp resonance in Russia’s war on Ukraine.
Russian invasion is not only grounded in a military strategy—it is deeply communicative. Russian imperialist ambitions in Ukraine and beyond weaponizes language, distorts history, and turns peace into a rhetorical strategy. In doing so, the Russian regime follows a playbook disturbingly similar to those of Mussolini and Hitler—reframe aggression as protection, conquest as restoration, and enemies as once-beloved brothers.
Across time, autocrats have rebranded territorial expansion as a moral imperative. Mussolini’s spazio vitale sought to justify Italian colonization in Africa and the Balkans. Hitler’s Lebensraum rationalized genocide and domination across Eastern Europe. Today, Putin’s invocation of Novorossiya (New Russia) lays imperial claim to southern and eastern Ukraine, casting the war not as invasion, but as historical correction.
Language becomes a second front in this ideological battle. Russia insists it is “liberating” Russian speakers in Ukraine, transforming linguistic affinity into a proxy for national identity—and a rationale for war. As in Nazi Germany, language and ethnicity are conflated to build a moral case for intervention. The rhetoric of “denazification,” though absurd when applied to Ukraine’s Jewish president and democratic government, evokes the memory of World War II to lend moral weight to violence.
At the heart of this discursive strategy is what I call the Br/Other dynamic. Ukraine is treated as a “brother” when compliant, and an “Other” when sovereign. This shifting frame enables the regime to toggle between affection and aggression depending on political utility. It is a dangerous narrative—one that strips a nation of its autonomy in the name of fraternal correction.
But the story doesn’t stop at nationalism. In Putin’s Russia, patriotism is profitable. War sustains the military-industrial complex, feeds a media economy of loyalist influencers, and rallies citizens around a brand of heroic sacrifice. Propaganda reframes economic hardship as virtue, casting war not only as a necessity, but as a moral investment. Mussolini used similar tools: textbooks, monuments, cinema. Today, Russia uses state-controlled TikTok, influencers in uniform, and televised parades of patriotic fervor.
Even the language of peace has been turned inside out. Russia does not call this war a war—it is a “Special Military Operation,” allegedly to defend peace-loving people from fabricated Nazi aggression. In this Orwellian framing, calls for peace can mean acquiescence to occupation or silence in the face of war crimes. When we call for peace in Ukraine, we do not mean surrender to authoritarianism or acceptance of imperial domination; we mean a just peace—one that upholds sovereignty, dignity, and accountability. This distortion of language is not just semantic—it is strategic, weaponizing ideals to mask oppression. Peace becomes not a path to reconciliation, but a veil over violence.
To justify internal repression, autocracies often need external enemies. Russia casts the West as a decadent, existential threat, turning Ukraine’s European aspirations into evidence of betrayal. This dualism—West as corrupt, Russia as pure—reinforces national pride while suppressing dissent at home.
Ultimately, this is a war of narratives as much as weapons. When regimes can rebrand Brothers as Others at will, truth becomes the first casualty. Our task, then, is to decode these strategies, challenge their normalization, and insist that truth—not fear—guides our communication. This vigilance is not just about Ukraine—it’s about recognizing how authoritarian regimes, from Russia to rising far-right movements in the United States and elsewhere, rely on similar manipulations of language, memory, and identity to consolidate power. By understanding how narrative control enables oppression, we become better equipped to resist authoritarianism in all its forms—both abroad and at home.
Authoritarian Discourse in Central and Eastern Europe: Language Ideology and Possibilities of Mobility
University of Colorado, Boulder
In the early 2010s, I connected with a colleague in my native Hungary over our shared interest in public debates about “hate speech” after the country’s transition from state socialism to liberal democracy in 1989. We agreed that these debates were shaped by recent memories of authoritarianism and wondered how scholars in the region described the relationship between authoritarianism and political discourse.
We identified four characteristics of authoritarian discourse in our review of Central Eastern European (CEE) scholarship. First, the authoritarian discourse of the region deeply and broadly transformed the language of public life by introducing new words and linguistic styles with fixed meanings (e.g., describing the dismissal of a party functionary as “the acceleration of development”). Scholars typically describe these new linguistic forms as Newspeak, borrowing the term from Orwell. Second, Newspeak engendered standardized forms of public expression only state actors were allowed to use in a tightly controlled and uniform manner. Authoritarian regimes centralized public expression, stamping out any possibility of debate among multiple voices and positions. Third, authoritarian regimes used public expression as a means of control through the manipulation of citizens’ thoughts and emotions, with the goal of securing loyalty and breaking resistance. Fourth, authoritarian discourse reflected a belief in the magical quality of public expression, namely its power to shape reality. This belief led regimes around the region to forbid the public use of words they thought could bring about political crises. In Hungary, for example, the regime harshly punished citizens for publicly discussing the 1956 revolution against Soviet occupation for fear of further uprisings. When state actors talked publicly about 1956, they studiously avoided the term “revolution” and used phrases like “the unfortunate events of 1956,” “the disturbance,” or “the counter-revolution” instead.
State socialist authoritarian regimes’ view of political discourse, we concluded, rested on the belief that the control of language was a chief means exerting centralized control over society. Public discourse usefully complemented, and sometimes even became the means of state violence. Recently, however, the work of the late Hungarian political philosopher G. M. Tamás led me to recognize that Pál and I had told only half the story. In his last book, Tamás pointed out that CEE authoritarian regimes’ view of public expression also rested on a revolutionary ideology, at least for the two decades following World War II. Like all revolutionary ideologies, this one also required a source of transcendence, a utopian vision of social order: the creation of a proletariat with class consciousness. The revolutionary ideology of class warfare replaced religion as a source of transcendence with “culture,” understood as high culture encompassing all forms of art and intellectual life, pressed into the service of an emerging class consciousness. The Party became the coalition of workers and intellectuals and acted as the source and steward of this new transcendence; language became the means of revolutionary transformation.
A key contribution of our field to human knowledge is the insight that the way people talk reveals how they imagine, and go about creating, socio-political order. The four characteristics of CEE authoritarian discourse is a useful diagnostic tool for detecting and comparing authoritarian tendencies in the contemporary United States and elsewhere toward centralized power and the elimination of multiple voices and positions. Besides analyzing discourse, we can also investigate institutional and financial infrastructures through which authoritarian discourses spread across space and time. Finally, the example of CEE authoritarian discourse invites us to investigate if the language of established and emerging authoritarian regimes is a simple means of control, or if it also exhibits a revolutionary quality. The type of transcendence animating post-WWII CEE regimes is of course not the only one available: religion, nationalism, post-fascism, and other systems of belief can also serve as sources of transcendence. If the example of CEE is any indication, authoritarian forces that cultivate utopian visions of social order create broader coalitions of willing supporters and are therefore stronger and more dangerous than the ones satisfied with raw power politics.
Extractive War/Extractive Peace
Ontario Tech University
In a speech delivered on February 21, 2022, days before Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Russian President Vladimir Putin claimed that the modern Ukrainian nation-state was a Soviet fiction created by Vladimir Lenin by “separating, severing what is historically Russian land.” Although Putin’s retelling of history is a distortion rooted in his denial of Ukrainian history and sovereignty, he cites Lenin’s supposed “mistake” to justify reinvigorating Moscow’s historical mission of “gathering the Russian lands.” Such evocations of imperialist nostalgia have become a commonplace in Putin’s political rhetoric as he has consolidated authoritarian power, appealing to Russian publics with expansive narratives of Russia’s territorial entitlements and regional dominance.
While control over the land has been a significant impetus for Russia’s war of aggression, it has received comparatively little attention in analysis of the invasion’s causes. While Putin rewrites history to romanticize his vision of violently restoring the “greater Russian nation” of Belorussia, Ukraine, and Russia, this land lust veils another set of claims over the wealth that lies beneath the surface. Ukraine’s mineral reserves are estimated to potentially total over 100 billion tons and be valued at over $10 trillion. This includes everything from coal and natural gas deposits to iron, manganese, and titanium ores as well as sought-after rare earth minerals such as lithium. Significantly, many of these valuable resources are concentrated in the areas of Ukraine targeted or occupied by Russian forces, including Crimea, Luhansk, Donetsk, and Zaporizhzhia.
In contrast with Russia’s imperial desires to reclaim Ukrainian land, the United States has made its own claims to Ukrainian resources as a premise for peace negotiations. President Trump regained the White House riding a wave of populist authoritarianism and has reframed international relations in terms of what others “owe” the US. In discussions with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy about American-led military assistance and ceasefire negotiations, Trump made clear that support would be predicated on gaining access to Ukraine’s rare earth minerals. Shortly after taking office, Trump said of Ukraine: “We’re putting in hundreds of billions of dollars. They have great rare earth, and I want security of the rare earth, and they’re willing to do it.” After initially demanding rights to half of the revenues from Ukraine’s mineral resources, strained negotiations eventually led to an agreement ratified in May, 2025 that “hands the United States preferential access to Ukrainian minerals.”
While Russia wages an extractive war in Ukraine, the US desires an extractive peace. Both regimes seek to profit from the war amidst broad realignments in global geopolitics over trade, resources, defensive and political alliances, and other contested areas. These extractive approaches to Ukraine are part of an attempt to normalize a new—or perhaps return to an anachronistic—world order characterized by competitive spheres of influence between increasingly authoritarian superpowers. This world order is enacted through land grabs, protective trading blocs, populist nationalism, accelerated extraction, and fierce competition over strategic zones (e.g. the Arctic) and resources (e.g. rare earth minerals).
While global authoritarianism is on the ascent, particularly among powerful nations like the US, Russia, China, and India, we need to pay close attention to not only their commonalities but also how they diversify strategies to centralize power, shape political narratives, monopolize violence, and carve up scarce resources between themselves. Ukrainian land is in the crosshairs of two very different extractivist superpowers, but the Ukrainian people are also demonstrating how democracy and civil society can survive under these pressures and resist the forces of autocratization.
Rethinking the Impossible Times: Lessons from a Life in the Soviet Union.
University of Memphis
I spent my childhood and most of my teen years living in the Soviet Union, or Soviet Ukraine to be precise. Growing up in Odesa was filled with the usual childhood memories – the beautiful Black Sea, the parks where my grandmother took me for fresh air, strolling down old streets, hanging out with cousins. The way in which the sweet acacia trees’ fragrance filled the spring air. First loves, first heartbreaks. Our lives were ordinary in so many ways.
Yet in other ways they were filled with experiences that are only possible in authoritarian regimes. My mom warned me when I was seven that if I said anything to anyone about the critique of the Soviet government that filled dinner conversations, she and my Dad could be disappeared to Siberia. The way in which our school days featured constant forced assemblies that educated us on the evils of the West and the virtues of the Soviet empire. The way in which history was erased or altered – I didn’t know about either the pact between Stalin and Hitler or about the Holocaust until I got to the United States. The ways in which Jews or Zionists – a term used interchangeably by the Soviet regime – were held responsible for all the evil in the world. And most importantly for our purposes here – the way in which all the citizens of the Soviet Union were expected to self-sacrifice and ultimately die for the motherland. The gruesome stories of teenagers dying in the war against Nazi Germany filled our books, television, and classrooms. We were supposed to be like them. We, too, were supposed to be willing to die for the cause of communism and for the great project that was the Soviet empire. These lessons were only interspersed by the acute cruelty of the regime – a cruelty that permeated every bit of our lives, cruelty that elsewhere I term joyful in its resolution and moral certainty.
In some ways, I was primed for the emergence of authoritarianism here in the United States. The idea that my life is disposable in the struggle against a greater evil was imprinted on me in childhood. The great irony of this is not lost on me. Everything that I have done or will continue to do in the struggle that’s ahead of us is informed by this one great truth of life in authoritarian regime – we are not meant to survive. Authoritarian regimes do not care about the lives of their citizens – if nothing else, their citizenry is an inconvenience to that mechanism of power. And this is what authoritarianism is first and foremost: it is a mechanism of power, not an ideology. Do not be fooled to think that it is only a purview of the right. In fact, many authoritarian regimes are leftist. This is why I echo Michel Foucault’s warning that we must guard against authoritarianism in us all, in our heads and behavior, authoritarianism that “causes us to love power, to desire the very thing that dominates and exploits.” But how do we respond to authoritarianism? How do we fight the thing that seems so much bigger than all of us combined? I see my fellow academics despairing – rightly so, overwhelmed by the immensity of the evil facing all of us. If I am to provide a response to this question, I would say that we respond to authoritarianism much like we eat an elephant – one bite at a time.
As the editor of Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, I argue in my debut editorial that shrinking our intellectual pursuits benefits authoritarian regimes; we cannot and should not enable that in our own work. Risk is an essential mode of scholarship and pedagogy, not something to be avoided or managed. The reason why authoritarianism tries to silence intellectuals is that it recognizes their power to challenge and destabilize totalitarian thought. We must embrace this power and must be driven by its own mission to change the world. We must teach, we must write, we must embrace public scholarship and our power to contribute to and shape public discourse. Because we do still have that power. Let’s not give it up prematurely. Institutional chaos is the point of authoritarian regimes, it exhausts the opposition and eliminates any kind of desire outside of the desire to rest. And the desire to rest leads us to be nostalgic for the abhorrent things of the past. It also conceives of resistance as a restoration project. The project of restoration is an authoritarian project based in a scarcity model, where scarcity is a discursive and material weapon of power that aims to divide and fracture its populace while finding scapegoats for all that ails us. As academics, we must offer a compelling vision for the future that’s based in abundance as supposed to scarcity. We need to articulate a desire for a world that does not rely on a return to the past but rather imagines something beyond the already existing possibilities. We need to live remembering that, as Audre Lorde reminds us, we were never meant to survive.
Bios:
About Julia Khrebtan-Hörhager, Colorado State University: Dr. Julia Khrebtan-Hörhager is an Associate Professor of Communication Studies, the Director of the ACT Human Rights Film Festival at Colorado State University, and the Director of Education Abroad programs in Italy and Austria. Her research focuses on cultural Othering, intercultural communication, international relations, global conflict, and memory. She also explores feminist perspectives on communication, as well as film and media studies. She has received three ICA Top Paper Awards and is the author of Communicating the Other across Cultures and Migrant World Making.
About David Boromisza-Habashi, University of Colorado, Boulder: David Boromisza-Habashi (Ph.D., University of Massachusetts Amherst) is an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Colorado Boulder. His research focuses on cultural theory, the cultural foundations of public expression, and the transcultural circulation of discursive resources. His book Speaking Hatefully: Culture, Communication, and Political Action in Hungary (Penn State University Press) chronicles the debates surrounding “hate speech” in his native Hungary in the early 2000s.
About Zenia Kish, Ontario Tech University: Zenia Kish is Assistant Professor of Communication and Digital Media Studies at Ontario Tech University (Canada). Her work explores global digital media, food media, digital agriculture, and ethical finance, and she recently co-edited Food Instagram: Identity, Influence, and Negotiation, which won the Best Edited Volume Prize from the Association for the Study of Food and Society. She is currently researching the social and environmental impacts of the Russo-Ukrainian War on Ukrainian soil.
About Marina Levina, University of Memphis: Marina Levina is Professor in the Department of Communication and Film at the University of Memphis. She has done extensive work in critical cultural studies of power and difference. Originally from Odesa, Ukraine, Dr. Levina has been writing extensively about refuge/refugee experiences; the intersectional politics of disease, and cultural meanings of monstrosity. Her current work explores the rise of authoritarianism and its connections to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. She is the editor of Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies (National Communication Association journal) and the chair of NCA’s Critical Cultural Studies Division.