Stephen Hutchings

Faultlines in Russia's Discourse of Nation

On 6 December 2010, four Spartak football fans became involved in a late-night altercation with a group of men from the North Caucasus in northern Moscow. The circumstances remain shrouded in controversy, but there is no dispute about the tragic consequences: one fan, Egor Sviridov, died after receiving four bullet wounds. Six men were detained, of whom fi ve were later released. Aslan Cherkesov, from Dagestan, was later charged with Sviridov’s murder. The event sparked mass demonstrations by Spartak fans, culminating in a violent riot on Manezhnaia Square in central Moscow on 11 December as fans gathered to protest the dual outrage of Sviridov’s murder and the apparent incompetence (or, worse, complicity) of the law enforcement agencies. The rioters targeted their anger both at the latter and at people whom the Russian media typically refers to as being of “non-Slavic appearance.” Numerous shocking beatings occurred. It took the rearrest of two of the original suspects, interventions by Dmitrii Medvedev and Vladimir Putin on 12 and 13 December, respectively, and Putin’s appearance at a Sviridov memorial meeting, all broadcast on prime-time television, before calm was fully restored in the capital and other cities where protests in solidarity with Moscow rioters took place.1 Seen now as a milestone in the troubled history of interethnic relations in post-Soviet Russia, the Manezhnaia riots delivered a blow to the nation-building effort which, since the end of the last century, had been launched to create a sense of common purpose and overcome interethnic differences and separatist tendencies under the auspices of a supposedly powerful, confi dent state.2 This Kremlin-sponsored national unifi cation project entails simultaneously a discursive promotion of the concept of the civic Russian multiethnic nation (grazhdanskaia rossiiskaia natsiia) and

The Polonium trail to Islam: Litvinenko, liminality, and television's (cold) war on terror

This article examines how Aleksandr Litvinenkos death links the ‘war on terror’ with an emergent New Cold War. Based on an analysis of BBC and Russian Channel 1 news bulletins, it highlights the centrality of the post-imperial legacy of the two sides in the dispute to the manner of its unfolding, and to how war on terror discourse reconstructs national identities and international antagonisms. It draws on narratology to account for Litvinenkos liminal position inside and outside Islam (his deathbed conversion), the Russian security apparatus (his prior conversion from Cold War spy to noble dissident), and the UK (his ‘good asylum seeker’ status).

The gypsy as vanishing mediator in Russian television coverage of inter-ethnic tension

The article addresses the representation of gypsies in Russian television news bulletins and popular drama series over a 15-month period. It seeks first to explain the prominence of the media image of the gypsy relative to the size of the Roma population and second to account for the relationship between fictional and non-fictional modes of representation. Situating itself within the broader field of post-Soviet Russian identity studies and applying qualitative tools differentiated according to the arena of analysis, it looks at questions of lexicon, voice and viewpoint in relation to news and issues of characterization, fictional space and plot with respect to drama. The two apparatuses are linked through a shared emphasis on narrative, and in particular on its dual orientation toward the exceptional (what makes a story worth telling and capable of embracing “difference”) and the typical (what enables it to represent and project “identity”). In its central argument it maps this dual “identity/difference” dynamic onto the gypsys liminal status as both “of the self” and “of the other”, and its mediatory function: the ability to serve as a proxy for ethno-cultural difference more generally, and to negotiate the tensions between the cultural and racial aspects of ethnicity.

Comparing Russian, French and British Television News Commemorations of 9/11: Terror, Everyday Nation Building and the Struggle for the Universal

This article broaches the need of television-led nation building projects to frame the traumatic with the everyday, and to map that process onto the ongoing renegotiation of the relationship between the particular and national on one hand, and the transnational and universal on the other. Nowhere is this mapping more vividly revealed than in national mediations of 9/11 anniversaries. In their approach to 9/11 anniversaries, broadcasters convey this sense of the threat of an unprecedented, and continuing, danger to the “universal” human values embodied in the nation they represent, whilst “normalising” the situation as part of the fabric of that nation’s everyday life, differentiating “our” capacity to cope with, and properly contextualise it, from “their” tendency to ignore, or hyperbolise, its true meaning. The article compares Russia with Britain and France, concluding that all three engage in distinctive instrumentalisations of 9/11 for national purposes. But it is Russian Channel 1 whose abstraction of a universalised, post 9/11 terrorist “evil” renders it most transferable to other contexts, and most significant in terms of its potential for the nation building strategy.

Symposium Editors' Introduction

THIS SECTION IS LARGELY BASED ON PAPERS PRESENTED AT ‘The Mass Media in Post-Soviet Russia’ conference held at the University of Surrey on 6 – 8 April 2006. The conference was organised as part of the AHRC-funded project ‘Post-Soviet Russian Television Culture’ headed by Professor Stephen Hutchings. The conference attracted not only a wide range of Russian and Western academics researching postSoviet mass media from different angles, but also journalists and media consultants. After the conference, the BBC Russian Service broadcast some interviews with keynote speaker, Ellen Mickiewicz, and several other paper-givers. To further broaden the debate about the post-Soviet media, three public debates on related topics were sponsored by the AHRC and organised by Professor Stephen Hutchings (University of Manchester), in co-operation with Dr Natalia Rulyova (University of Birmingham) in 2007. Currently, we are starting a new project funded by the Centre for East European Languages Based Area Studies (CEELBAS), which aims to consolidate the efforts of academics, media specialists, and journalists by running an electronic forum on the mass media in Russia, Belarus, Ukraine and Kazakhstan. The experience we have gained from these initiatives demonstrates that to understand the complicated media situation in post-Soviet countries is impossible without collaboration between political scientists, sociologists, cultural analysts, media studies researchers and media practitioners. This special symposium is one of the first attempts to bridge the gaps between political and cultural studies approaches, between textual analysis and audience research, as well as between practitioner-led and scholarly approaches to the post-Soviet media. The present collection of articles opens with a piece by Nadezhda Azhgikhina, a prominent journalist and Secretary of the Russian Union of Journalists. As an insider who worked for Nezavisimaya gazeta, Ogonek and other post-Soviet publications, she gives a unique view of post-Soviet journalism. Her analysis of the recent past and near future differs from the views often favoured by Western journalists in that she does not see Putin’s regime as solely responsible for the current situation in the media, searching for the roots of current problems in wider social and historical circumstances. As a Western media consultant, Daphne Skillen brings a contrasting perspective on the role EUROPE-ASIA STUDIES Vol. 59, No. 8, December 2007, 1243 – 1244

Media Genre, Disrupted Memory and the European Securitization Chronotope: Transnationalizing the Lee Rigby Murder

A paradox lies at the heart of contemporary security culture; to thrive, it must foster a constant sense of fear and unpredictability, yet limit that fear by containing it within familiar epistemological paradigms. Taking as our case study the Islamist murder of the soldier, Lee Rigby, in London in April 2013, we explore the paradox through the prism of media genre theory. For the genres traversing news media in particular rely on parallel dialectics of stability and rupture, ‘memorizing’ and ‘forgetting’. We demonstrate how they serve as a tool with which unexpected events can be both encoded within pre-established patterns based on memories of previous such events, and empowered to disturb those memory patterns, thus re-configuring and re-vitalizing the structure of genre itself.

A home from home: recursive nationhood, the 2015 STS television serial, Londongrad, and post-soviet stiob

ABSTRACT Drawing on the mathematical concept of recursion as the repeated application of a single function to an initial element in a succession capable of indefinite extension, the article develops a recursive nationhood framework to capture the ongoing, mutual production of nationhood by the transnational, and nation by nation, in an extendable series of self-renewing repetitions which mirror and transform one another. Arguing that the framework has particular resonance for post-Soviet Russia, it explores one instance of recursive nationhood: the 2015 television serial, Londongrad, broadcast by Russia’s STS channel. It analyses how, in the serial, transculturally generated images of Englishness, Russianness and Russian émigré-ness are recursively reprocessed and re-projected through one another in a self-conscious but circular hall-of-mirrors effect. The article concludes by linking recursive nationhood in Londongrad to a post-Soviet version of stiob, the peculiarly Russian form of self-parodic discourse which arose at the end of the Soviet period.

‘Race and ethnicity in the Russian media: rights, responsibilities and representations’, Public debate, The Frontline Club, London, Thursday 18 October 2012

reforms’ replace their personal life stories. This group of papers on hybrid autobiographies of the nineteenth century was conceptually joined by the paper on the text written in the twentieth century, Sof’ja Tolstaja’s ‘My Life’, where the autobiography gives way to the memoirs of the author’s great husband (Roberta de Giorgi, Udine University). A quite representative corpus of papers dealt with autobiographical and biographical forms in twentieth-century Russia. A number of conference contributors discussed the pre-revolutionary period of Russian autobiography: journalists’ memoirs (Natal’ja Rodigina, Novosibirsk University, and Tat’jana Saburova, Omsk University); the combination of verbal and visual means as a ‘space of memory’ for symbolist and realist writers (Aleksej Cholikov, Lomonosov State University, Moscow); and the particularity of life-writing practices by Andrey Bely as a multi-dimensional autobiographer (Oleg Kling, Lomonosov State University, Moscow), as a serial autobiographer (Maria Levina-Parker, the Sorbonne), and as an autofictional writer (Claudia Criveller, Padova University). Hybrid genres, such as fictional memoirs or memorialistic fiction and the combination of autobiographical subjectivity with ‘social request’, in Russian prose of the 1920s–1930s, were examined by Francesca Lazzarin (Padova University) and Patrizia Deotto (Trieste University). Tolstoy’s autobiographical devices as projected onto RAPP aesthetics and socialist realism were discussed by Evgenij Dobrenko (Sheffield University). Exploration of the memoirs of the epoch of Stalin’s repressions was provided in the papers on the writings by escapees from Soviet camps (Andrea Gullotta, University ‘Ca’ Foscari’ of Venice) and on Vasilij Grossman (Pietro Tosco, Verona University). Il’ja Kukulin (the Higher School of Economics, Moscow) presented and analysed the highly innovative montage-like principles of autobiographical writing by Pavel Ulitin when compared with European and American experiments in autobiography. Particular international aspects of the ‘space of memory’ were addressed by Massimo Tria (Venice University) as illustrated by memoirs of Russian émigrés in Prague.

The Political Context: International and Domestic Security Concerns

The call to a Global War on Terror was logically implausible but rhetorically effective in its propagandistic evocation of a worldwide threat which required a resolute response. It conjured up a binary world of friends and enemies. Who, except the practitioners or sponsors of terror(ism), could eschew the challenge to destroy the sources of this evil? In the real sphere of international politics the concept of a Global War on Terror was as disingenuous as it was simplistic, but as a mobilizing ideological slogan or as a shorthand label it was endlessly reproduced in the Western media, preparing the way for George W. Bush’s doctrine of pre-emptive war against the rogue states deemed to support terrorism. It set the tone of international relations for the remainder of Bush’s presidency, before the terminology was discarded by Barack Obama’s new administration in 2009, even though many of the associated policies remained in place (Zalman and Clarke, 2009). While it was current, the apparent success of the Global War on Terror as a political watchword also offered other states the opportunity to identify their policies towards troublesome neighbours and/or hostile groups within their own borders as part of the global struggle. The Global War on Terror extended in principle to any source of terrorism. However, the focus of discourse and policy was heavily concentrated on radical, anti-Western Muslim groups and the states which aided them. Huntington’s ‘clash of civilizations’ threatened to turn from myth into reality.

Commemorating 9/11: The Struggle for the Universal

Our final chapter unifies the central concerns of the preceding two. On one hand it treats a distinct genre of television terror reporting: the annual 9/11 commemoration report. Following Chapter 6 , it focuses on the role of genre in reconciling the generality of the campaign against the terrorist threat with the specificity of its manifestation in particular national contexts. And like Chapter 6 it refers to the poles of narrative in its approach to the treatment of this tension. But its efforts to locate the tension in the context of the semiotic flow and counterflow across national media spaces, and to interpret the multiplicity of transnational meaning as a function of cross-national divergence in perspective, place it within the orbit of the issues addressed in Chapter 7.