Wealth & Money Quote by Dmitry Medvedev

Patriotism is easiest to sell when it’s framed as caretaking. Medvedev’s line wraps state power in the soft language of stewardship: “rich history and culture” as a shared inheritance, “future generations” as the moral alibi. It’s a classic move for a modern Russian leader, especially one whose public persona has often oscillated between technocratic modernizer and loyal custodian of a harder-edged system. The sentence is deliberately uncontroversial; its strength is that it sounds like something no decent person could oppose.

That’s also the subtext: if you resist what the state is doing, you’re not just disagreeing about policy, you’re failing the family. “We must work” is a collectivizing command that blurs the line between citizen and government, culture and regime. “Preserve and promote” doubles as an instruction manual for memory politics: preserve the parts of the past that legitimate the present, promote the narrative that keeps the nation coherent under pressure. Culture here isn’t art so much as infrastructure for loyalty.

In context, this kind of rhetoric tends to surface when the state wants to consolidate identity - during geopolitical confrontation, domestic unrest, sanctions, or wartime mobilization. The appeal to history does two jobs at once: it counters feelings of isolation with grandeur, and it preemptively delegitimizes dissent as corrosive, even un-Russian. It’s not just pride; it’s a claim that continuity requires compliance, and that the government is the curator of the national soul.