Abstract
A remarkable coincidence, in 2017, two books – Losing Pravda: Ethics and the Press in post-Truth Russia by Natalia Roudakova and Popular Tropes of Identity in Contemporary Russian Television and Film by Irina Souch, analysing Russian media and their changes in recent decades, were published. This, however, was rather a significant achievement than a coincidence, since not much has been written recently on the Russian media transformation by scholars outside Russia. What is more important is that both books combined a focused study of a particular research subject with an attempt to put it into a broader analysis of the Russian media transformation in a wide political and anthropological context. Both authors underlined in their works that they were particularly interested in cultural aspects of the Russian media transformations, together with the process of socio-economic transition started by Gorbachev in 1985 and continued after 1991 – the year of the USSR dissolution.
The analysis of the changes in Russian media has been for a long time characterized by the interest in particular topics and the use of academic methodologies focusing in most cases on the relations between journalism and politics, as well as between media and politics, mixed with the political economy approach and media systems studies. The first methodological approach discussed among other things the instrumental role of journalists who were used by the political elites in the election campaigns, and more generally in modern political processes. An important, though, traditional focus on journalists, their self-perception and professional identity in some way dominated this approach later on. Another research tradition was rooted in the books by Siebert, Schramm, Petersen and Hallin and Mancini, presenting theories of the press and media system analysis. It was used to describe the socio-political transformation of the Russian media system through political logic, economic structures and organizational change. However, while paying special attention to the institutional changes Russian media were subject to, even the most comprehensive research on the Russian media transformation did not fully cover its cultural and ‘human’ perspective.
The two recently published books have successfully filled this gap by providing new research angles and methodology. The monographs – each in its own way – proposed a new and timely analysis of the media change through a prism of ethics and culture as a topic of media anthropology. For both authors, it was crucial to find their own particular ‘human’ perspective – either the ethics of Russian journalism, or Russians’ cultural identity as portrayed by visual media.
Natalia Roudakova’s Losing Pravda: Ethics and the Press in Post-Truth Russia analyses the epistemic dimensions of the post-Soviet political change through the prism of journalism as a profession and through one of its conceptual binaries – that is truth versus propaganda. The title of the book is really illustrative – by using the word Pravda it brings together key dimensions of the research, since it refers both to the name of the central Communist daily of the USSR and to the Russian word ‘truth’. Thus, the truth becomes a core philosophic concept, theoretical framework and professional value, which defines the logics of the research and the structure of the book subsequently. Furthermore, the research discusses one of the key issues of this institutionalism: Whether a political and economic shift from authoritarianism would necessarily be accompanied by a corresponding cultural and value shift among journalists and their audience. By drawing upon her educational and professional background as a journalist, Natalia Roudakova makes use of various research methodologies – ethnographic observations, interviews with journalists, archival work in order to put the analysis of the nature and specifics of Soviet and post-Soviet journalism into the broad epistemological and ethical context of media transformation. Although the focus on politics might seem quite traditional for recent research on Russian media, Roudakova manages to find a unique, historically determined approach to political change as a cultural process. This allows her to reach a degree of sophistication in her analysis of a range of concepts such as trust, justice, morality, power, dissidents, conformism, censorship, and others related to Soviet and post-Soviet public communication.
This empirically rich and theoretically well-grounded study of Soviet journalism and its transformation in the changing modern Russian political environment involves a special focus on culture as a process and the ethics of journalism professionalism. The latter has been dramatically changing under particular economic changes, though in some respects it remained unchanged as a result of preserved political culture and moral developments. The author, however, does not consider common assumptions about ‘press freedom’s progressive movement’ (p. 3) helpful, since they describe Russian media transformations as driven mostly by powerful social institutions and actors. Instead, she offers a new approach using ethics as a continuously evolving set of practices rather than a set of normative rules. This contributes to a better understanding of professionals and even audiences as drivers of change and agents of continuity.
The introductory chapter is crucial for defining the conceptual framework of the book. It discusses the journalistic, historical and epistemic meanings of truth as a social product and as a solution to the problem of moral order. The ideas of truth-seeking and truth-telling as a part of journalism have different implications in Western and Soviet media contexts, as evidenced by a deep impartial analysis of the standards and moral values of Soviet journalism. By placing the practice of Soviet journalism into the Western academic discourse on truth and ethics, which also includes works by Aristotle and Habermas, the Introduction reveals the controversies and conflicts of the profession, public communication and ‘journalism – power’ relations, which made the transformation of Russian media so painful and complicated.
Chapter 1 looks at Soviet journalists as mediators between the state and society, thus approaching them as both political and moral actors. In this capacity, journalists built close relations with their audiences aiming to stimulate and maintain audiences’ trust. This chapter clearly identifies some important controversies in understanding the professional ethics, values and social roles performed by Soviet journalists as compared with the Western norms of journalism. The author’s assumptions were confirmed by interviews with former Soviet journalists from Nizhny Novgorod whose experiences and opinions became vivid empirical evidence of the discontinuity within the professional ethos.
Chapter 2 focuses on the turning historical point in the mid- and late-1990s, when Soviet journalism previously characterized by firm ideological postulates and overall state economic control, faced new realities of capitalism, privatization and establishment of private media ownership. The rise of private and commercially oriented media companies not only influenced the economic structures of the media, but also, as Roudakova underlines, had significant impact upon the public and social realms. It also influenced various social practices and emotions, including people’s sense of solidarity, obligation and commitments, thus mixing in a new way the public and the private, the political, the economic and the moral. Using the experience of regional journalists, the chapter shows how election campaigns brought money to journalism and how a public domain was at the same time corrupted by the private interest.
Chapter 3 looks at the new realities of commercial journalism and the rise of the so-called information wars between political and business groups struggling for power. This led to further media instrumentalization and de-professionalizing of journalism in the early 2000s. Attempts to publish ‘kompromat’ against political competitors in fact eroded and discredited investigative reporting by bringing down the values of critical journalism, as well as the ideals of truth-seeking and truth-telling in the professional and public domains. This was probably one of the crucial periods for the rise of cynicism, including the later rise of fake news as a media phenomenon. The careful ethnographic fieldwork in the newsrooms of Nizhny Novgorod conducted by the author in 2001–2002 provides a good illustration of these processes.
Chapter 4 focuses on the emergence of cross-institutional groups in the post-Soviet period, which brought together local officials, industrialists, bankers and representatives of the security services and their connections with media institutions. This part is based on the regional case of Nizhny Novgorod. The investigation of the Russian public culture conducted by the author focused on the rise of depolitization and authoritarianism in the 2000s. When analysing what is called cynical zeitgeist, Roudakova makes use of different research methods, including the analysis of diverse secondary data sources from academic and public discourse, as well as anonymous interviews with local media managers. Although the chapter examines the concepts of cynicism and post-Soviet irony, namely the so-called stiob, together with the Russian controversial political reality and the public discourse of the late 2010s, we can see a shift from the ethnographic study of journalism changes and the focus on the profession to more general problems of public communication. While the theoretical framework widens, the subject of research becomes more politicized.
Chapter 5 describes the protests in 2011–2012 and their relations to the issues of truth-seeking and truth-telling as a tendency of the political life, particularly noticeable in the two largest cities of Russia, Moscow and St. Petersburg. She bases her investigation on ethnographic observations of protest activities and monitoring of their coverage in traditional and new media. Again, the idea of truth and re-establishing ethical values is discussed in a broad theoretical context, also with regard to protest politics and politicians.
The conclusion becomes an essential aspect of Roudakova’s research on the moral and ethical factors of the transformation of post-Soviet Russian media and journalism. I think it is crucial that Roudakova ends the book by identifying the epistemological foundations of Soviet and Russian journalism and propaganda, especially in their ethical dimensions.
The book Popular Tropes of Identity in Contemporary Russian Television and Film by Irina Souch looks at the same period of macroeconomic and social transformations, but focuses mainly on the creation of Russian identity after the collapse of the Soviet system. Using methods of cultural analysis to study popular post-Soviet films, she argues that the term ‘post-Soviet was treated not as indicative of a static but as a dynamic category’ (p. 9). The author considers it not as ‘a category of self-sameness, unity, and immobility but as versatile, multiple and heterogeneous social construction prone to continuous transformation and adjustment’ (p. 9). Thus, the study of tropes and related to them discourses of identity in television series and films is aimed at highlighting the cases when they are replaced by alternative modes of identification. Accordingly, the book is structured around two main dimensions – the investigation of the process of Russian identity formation based on social changes’ reflection in popular film and television drama, and the parallel theoretical examination of the identity theories developed in Russian academia.
The introductory part analyzes narratives of the key post-Soviet films and television series as cultural objects. They were selected on the basis of their box office results, TV ratings, impact on public debates and the role they played in further popular imaginations. At the same time, the key values, beliefs and/or tropes embedded into Russian national identity became the focus of the author’s analysis of particular films and series.
Chapter 1 discusses one of the most well-known post-Soviet films Brother, which played a very important role in the process of comprehension and interpretation of the post-Soviet transformations in mass culture. The chapter focuses on the value of brotherhood as an alternative to paternal authority and interprets it in the context of the Soviet myth of a paternal family.
Chapter 2 is devoted to the analysis of the Brother 2 sequel. It discusses individual and group strategies to determine and defend the national identities that started to emerge in the post-Soviet period. We can observe here a traditional dichotomy of ‘us’ – ‘them’ reflected in the idea that all the controversies and conflicts of modern society have always taken their origin from outside Russia.
Chapter 3 discusses the television series The Enchanted District as an attempt to understand the contemporary world better and to overcome the feeling of precarity caused by social and political changes in the country. One of the key Soviet everyday practices of ‘double-thinking’, which appeared as a result of social demagogy and institutionalized oppression, was used to analyse the series. While explaining double thinking as the negative adjustment that creates an obstacle to the modernization of Russia, the chapter also describes it as an inevitable reaction to changing and interpenetrating controversial post-Soviet discourses, intensified by the emerging structural socioeconomic inequalities.
Chapter 4 makes use of the family metaphor too but does it in a different way – with regard to the problems of a real family. Two realist films The Man of No Return and Gromozeka are discussed using a ‘waning genre’ concept. The author argues that ‘the received idea of the family is in itself a genre gradually losing the capacity to help Russian subjects give meaning to structural and historical antagonisms and to mediate their feelings of belonging to a larger sociality’ (p. 121). The analysis shows that both films dissolve the patriarchal myth, and also represent the decline of the traditional family, emerging intergeneration clashes and changing traditional beliefs of the gender roles. Concluding the chapter, the author states that new generational and gender identities are increasingly challenging the family metaphor as a life organizing principle.
Chapter 5 focuses on selected episodes from the Real-Life Lads (RLL) and reflects on the social dilemmas faced by Russians on a daily basis. Defining the series as a combination of two divergent television genres – a reality show and a situation comedy – the chapter discusses the productive and creative role of irony in building new forms of post-Soviet sociality, and the author argues that it operates as a mode of social exchange creating the possibility to reconsider the entrenched patterns of social thought and behaviour. The laughter in RLL possesses the creative potential to defamiliarize the existing reality and to help it to be seen from a deviating perspective. The chapter sees irony and laughter as modes of social communication and productive forces that provide ‘an opportunity to aspire to new social constellations’ (p. 175).
The book is rich in theory and presents many different approaches to understanding the media, journalists’ role in society, popular culture, social discourses and other issues. An important factor in this respect is the comparison of Russian and non-Russian approaches to understanding identity, which is often treated by scholars worldwide as a complex multidimensional phenomenon. Nonetheless, the already deep and rich analyses could have even been richer if the author had added some facts on audience behaviour and the impact film and television have on them.
Both books make an important contribution to the theoretical understanding of the roles media and journalism have played in Russian society, both in the Soviet period and nowadays. Both authors appear to have a somewhat critical attitude towards the Soviet past – in different respects and due to different reasons. They do a great job of backing up their argumentation with solid reasoning and remaining objective while discussing the past, though. Overall, it appears to me that both authors realize the important role of Soviet history in creating new theoretical concepts, current approaches to media and journalism theories in modern Russia, as well as building on the solid theoretical foundation of journalism, media and communication studies in the country today. Roudakova and Souch have a clear understanding of the Soviet past; they realize that it gave rise to many ideas and approaches used, developed or reconsidered in Russia today.
At the same time, I assume that both books could have benefitted from adding a more elaborated and detailed overview of the present state of Russian media and journalism studies in the Russian language. References to such works and their analysis could have served as a valuable addition to the theoretical interpretation of many topics under discussion, such as journalistic cultures, media transformations under changing political landscapes, national identity building, and so on.
The two books – both unique in their own ways – are more than timely and highly valuable research monographs for all scholars interested not only in Russian media, but also in media changes under the conditions of moral and ethical transformations in Russian society as well as the role of national cultural factors in constructing post-Soviet identity.