Lenin, Putin, and Rage Guy: Internet memes in the discourse of a Russian far-right community

The article addresses Internet memes’ usage in Russian far-right discourse, seeking to evaluate how it corresponds with the basic roles of memes in political communication and the extent to which the Russian far-right memetic vernacular is universally translatable. The article uses qualitative content analysis and multimodal discourse analysis of the “Right-Wing Memes” community on the Russian social networking site Vkontakte. The Russian far-right builds its social identity by filling the floating signifiers of the “left-wing,” “migrants,” and “Russian national state” with relevant meanings through the memetic means of visual humor, bitter irony, and parallel comparison. These construct the in- and out-groups, convey the ideological message, and give voice to the groups excluded from the mainstream. However, although the Russian far-right employs globalized memetic tropes, the content is mainly country-specific, which, together with the language barrier, hinders the formation of a universal far-right memetic discourse.