Revolution from the margins: Commemorating 1917 and RT’s scandalising of the established order

Centring the margin

There is no clearer illustration of the Putin regime’s purported aggression towards its Western adversaries than what are portrayed as the disreputable activities of one of its primary tools of ‘state propaganda’: the international broadcaster, RT. For several years, conventional wisdom has it, RT has spearheaded the Kremlin’s disinformation campaign (Paul and Matthews, 2016), sowing division, undermining electoral processes (Oates, 2017) and whitewashing or obscuring Russia’s many misdemeanours.

While such an account may suffer from hyperbole, the evidence for it is abundant, regardless of the critique it has received from Mickiewicz (2017) and Galeotti (2017), who chide purveyors of this account for overstating RT’s influence. My purpose is not to enter that debate. Rather, it is to view RT’s activities through a different optic and to develop from it an alternative perspective – one that both links the broadcaster to broader media trends, and identifies the specificity of its mode of operating within them. This alternative perspective does not dispute the portrayal of RT as what US Senator Kerry called Russia’s ‘propaganda bullhorn’ (LoGiurato, 2014). Instead, it indicates that any strategy fully to understand Kremlin strategy requires a more multi-layered understanding of RT’s place in a rapidly transforming global media ecology.

The basis of the alternative perspective can be found at the margins of RT’s activities – those points at which cracks appear in conventional accounts of the broadcaster. In adopting this approach, I ground my response to the question of ‘what RT is’ in an intellectual tradition that seeks identity in ‘difference’ and ‘self-contradiction’ rather than in ‘sameness’ or ‘self-equivalence’. It can be traced from Saussure’s (2013) differential account of the linguistic sign, through Bakhtin’s (1981) dialogism, to Derrida’s (1988) ‘différance’ and Laclau’s (2014) antagonistic theory of hegemony. This approach’s interpretative strategies rely not on the accumulation of supporting data (the demonstration of normative self-sameness over time) but on the qualitative analysis of brief moments of deviation from the norm, when phenomena lose their self-equivalence and become different from themselves. Such moments serve as a window into fundamental, but occluded, aspects of those phenomena.

Even during the 2014 Ukraine crisis, when RT attained its apogee as an instrument of ideological warfare, it was party to a series of puzzling incidents at which its self-equivalence as Putin’s mouthpiece seemed temporarily to malfunction. One example was the widely reported incident during the Sochi Olympics when members of the Punk group, Pussy Riot, were brutally whipped by uniformed Cossacks, renowned for their commitment to Putin’s ‘traditional values’ agenda. Less widely acknowledged was the fact that it was RT which filmed the incident, uploading the recording to its website and confounding its viewers. Comments on YouTube videos of the event included ‘Why would they do this?’; ‘I am confused!’ ‘I think it is strange that RT, Russia’s semi-official news TV source would actually show this. Why would they go out of their way to do that?’ Some speculated that RT approved of the whipping: ‘RT is airing this because they think it’s a good thing’. Others expressed outrage and incomprehension: ‘Horrific: Pussy Riot whipped, pepper sprayed, thrown to ground by Cossacks in Sochi. Why is RT airing this? No idea’ (YouTube, 2014). RT’s (2014) website retained a still from the video depicting the assault, but with a tongue-in-cheek reference to the #SochiFails hashtag initiated to track the problems besetting the Games organisers. It thus mocked Russia’s opponents, while distancing itself from the ultra-conservative Cossacks.

RT’s propensity for inner ‘malfunctions’ was epitomised in a scandal that arose later in 2014 when, at the end of one of her flagship ‘Breaking the Set’ shows, the broadcaster’s star American presenter, Abby Martin, issued an extraordinary on-air protest against Russia’s annexation of Crimea – a carefully prepared statement to camera which concluded with Martin’s affirmation of her editorial independence. The incident went viral, briefly making the BBC headlines. RT issued an instant rebuttal, with editor-in-chief, Margarita Simonyan, noting that this American journalist knew nothing of Ukraine, and sarcastically offering her an educative stint in Crimea (Martin politely, but equally sarcastically, declined). Yet the protest’s authenticity was subsequently exploited by RT to disrupt mainstream narratives portraying it as a Kremlin mouthpiece. Simonyan cited the incident as evidence that RT accords its journalists free speech (Talmazan and Simmons, 2017). Its careful staging – Martin’s visually choreographed protest required full cooperation from her production team – eluded Western broadcasters who initially focussed on Martin’s ‘brave insurrection’. This raised suspicions that the whole episode was a deception, causing the BBC hastily to cancel an interview it had scheduled with Martin. Nonetheless, she remained with RT for another year, before resigning. A malfunction of similarly ambivalent status was Simonyan’s much-derided RT interview with the Salisbury poisoning suspects. Here, the channel’s post-interview strategy oscillated between emphasising Simonyan’s knowing scepticism towards the suspects’ implausible denials of guilt, and defiantly acknowledging the interview as an act of state ‘trolling’ (Hutchings et al., forthcoming).

My focus in this article is on a more substantive instance of RT in uncharacteristic mode: its project to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the 1917 Russian revolutions. In line with the theoretical principles outlined above, my argument is that, rather than view this as an educational ‘time-out’ from RT’s day job as scourge of Western democracy – a ploy designed to demonstrate its commitment to legitimate ‘soft power’ activities – the project leads us to the heart of RT’s controversial presence on the international stage. By conducting a qualitative analysis of the project’s multi-media output, in particular a corpus of Tweets, I will demonstrate that a set of reflexive and deeply dialogic features, linked to a late Soviet form of humour known as stiob, align it with RT’s disruptive mainstream output. They indicate that RT’s scandalous, pariah reputation is internalised within a fragmented institutional identity key to the entire ‘information war’ dynamic.

#1917Live and the New Cold War Pariah

RT’s commemorative project – abbreviated as #1917Live – was a multi-media initiative. It included a multilingual website with a chronology of events, a set of original documents, links to documentary films and a quiz allowing followers to test their knowledge. The website was accompanied by a series of ‘360 degree’ three-dimensional films offering immersive ‘real-time’ experience of revolutionary situations. The centrepiece was a Twitter re-enactment involving the creation of over 90 accounts in the names of revolutionary personalities, many historical (Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, General Kornilov, Tsar Nikolai), some imaginary and others a combination of the two (the student, Khlebtsevich, caught up in the revolutionary action). On a daily basis, these characters tweeted authentic historical quotes; imaginary comments that they might have made and humorous remarks laced with social media jargon, or anachronistically targeting contemporary events including accusations of Russian interference in US elections. These tweets were live and open to all Twitter users to engage.

There was also a #1917Live ‘Crowd’ initiative which enabled users to set up accounts in the name of figures from a revolutionary period they were invited to co-create, to ‘take a stand with workers, or support the Royal Family’ (RT, 2017a). Prominent personalities who accepted this challenge include the British historical writer, Helen Rappaport, who tweeted in the name of the Romanov sisters, and Brazilian novelist, Paulo Coelho, who created an account for the legendary female spy, Mata Hari.

Several of the un-RT-like features of #1917Live are evident from this brief account (the terms ‘un-RT’ and ‘un-RT-ish’ occurred in focus group comments made to members of the research team of which I am part). ¹ First, its primary aim appeared not to be crudely propagandistic but educational. Second, the narrative of the revolution constructed via the website’s Chronicle section was of an event that was the inevitable result of uncontrollable socio-political pressures, and the harbinger of progress across the world. This deviated sharply from the interpretation dominating Russian state television whose account of Bolshevism as an alien force backed by foreign powers was promoted consistently (Tolz and Chatterje-Doody, this volume). Since one of #1917Live’s primary target audiences was the global leftist community, the deviation was in one sense to be expected. However, it remains striking that a ‘media event’ (Dayan and Katz, 1994) of this degree of importance to Russian national identity should tolerate such markedly contradictory narratives.

The most un-RT-like feature of all was the ceding of narrative control to users – not just those who signed up to the #1917Crowd and endorsed the revolutionary spirit, but also those who reacted, in ignorance, or with contempt, to the tweets of Lenin, the Tsar and other historical icons, or who made inappropriate links to current events, skewing the preferred narrative or dissolving it in a sea of ideologically incoherent noise. The project’s Twitter component soon eclipsed the others (only the chronology was maintained on the website, and the Spanish- and Russian-language versions were abandoned, incomplete). The live nature of the Twitter re-enactment was politically risky. The fact that it won a series of international social media awards proved the risk to have been well judged. Nonetheless, its success met with indifference from the mainstream Western press.

#1917Live’s deviation from the RT norm was of a different order than the Pussy Riot and Abby Martin scandals. Rather than peter out after several days, it grew to a crescendo over a year. And instead of an improvisation on circumstances created by critics of the Russian state, #1917Live represented the fruits of the hard labour of senior figures in RT’s social media team (Kirill Karnovich-Valua and Ivor Crotty). What, then, is its relationship to the earlier deviations from the RT norm? What does it say about the RT of popular perceptions? Several mundane answers suggest themselves. Perhaps, the glitches are no more than inevitable exceptions that prove the rule, deviations which reinforce rather than breach the norm? Perhaps, instead, they are forms of ‘inoculation’ – symbolic platforms accorded to deviant voices in order to authenticate RT’s claims to endorse free expression, but incapable of threatening the pro-Kremlin consensus? Or might they represent subtle recalibrations of RT’s brand identity as it reinstates elements of the ‘soft power’ strategy that preceded its switch to ‘information warrior’ status following the Ukraine crisis? Maybe they are the price paid by international broadcasters for delegating their operation to foreigners lacking full acculturation into the local context (Abby Martin; Ivor Crotty)? Finally, do they represent examples of RT’s political opportunism – its tendency to adjust its stance in light of the particular audiences it is targeting?

All the above possibilities have validity. However, they fail to account for the mystifying and partially manufactured confusion created by the two news stories. Nor do they explain the sheer audacity of #1917Live’s misalignment with RT’s standard idioms. My contention is that they are all missing something fundamental about RT, something which has passed unnoticed because it appears to be restricted to the peripheries of the broadcaster’s activities, but which in fact penetrates to the core of its role within the wider global media ecology. The scale of the 1917 project, meanwhile, ensures that it offers the most detailed illustration of this principle.

My thesis is that RT can only be properly understood within the framework of mediatisation: the notion that the media have penetrated the fabric of politics, war, consumption and even everyday life, to the extent that they no longer ‘mediate’ events external to them, but have fused with those events (Asp, 1986; Hjarvard, 2008a; Lilleker, 2008). Because the term was coined by social scientists, much of the associated research focusses on socio-political and other changes that the phenomenon enacts within the practices of the institutions and audiences whose identities the media have infiltrated (Couldry and Hepp, 2013; Hjarvard, 2008b; Schulz, 2004).

However, my interest is in what mediatisation means for the media’s representational function, now that they are both ‘subject’ and ‘object’ of the representation process. This feature is reflected in participatory media-audience co-production (Bolin, 2012; Jenkins, 2006), of which RT’s #1917Crowd is a compelling example. But the short-circuiting effect has the potential, too, to foreground, and ultimately alter, the modality of media representations. Endley (2010) defines modality as ‘the stance . . . or attitude . . . the speaker adopts toward some situation expressed in an utterance’. In a media context, modality describes the claims to truth that representations make, and the kinds of contingency, probability or subjectivity attached to the realities they depict. For Palmer (2001), ‘modality is concerned with the status of the proposition that describes the event’. Mediatisation heightens RT’s sense of its own presence as subject, and that of other media subjects, at the heart of the news it reports. This renders the status of its representational propositions reflexive and dialogic, shifting their modality from one of mere constative assertion, to one oriented self-referentially and performatively towards the act by which they are articulated, yet also polemically towards the ‘other’.

My contention is not that perceptions of RT as a linear instrument of Russian disinformation are invalid, nor indeed that mediatisation is not being cynically exploited by Kremlin media strategists; as Pomerantsev (2014) has shown, these strategists have skilfully turned the various corollaries of subject-object convergence to political advantage. It is rather that such instrumentality does not lead us to the root of the meanings that coalesce around RT: those which it authors and co-authors; those which other media actors attribute to it and those that emerge from the dynamic between them. In this context, I shall suggest that RT’s growing reputation as a scandalising pariah is becoming internalised within a complex and conflicted institutional identity. This has implications not just for how we perceive RT’s relationship with the Kremlin, but also for the spiral logic of what is dubbed the ‘New Cold War’ (Lucas, 2014[2008]; Trenin, 2014)

Mediatisation, methodology and mockery: the ‘stiob’ effect

If mediatisation provides my conceptual framework, my central research question asks how the mediatised dimensions to RT’s culturally nuanced, commemorative ‘time-out’ illuminate the crude polemics of its ‘day-job’ as anti-Western scourge. The basis for my answer to this question is a collection of the daily tweets of 10 of the 90 characters in the Twitter element of the #1917project between September and December 1917 (encompassing the October Revolution itself). These included Lenin, Trotsky, Tsar Nikolai Romanov, Stalin, the student Khlebstsevich, the RT1917Live account, the fictional pre-revolutionary newspaper Russian Telegraph (RT), which became Revolutionary Times after the February Revolution, as well as four character accounts ostensibly established by 1917Crowd members: John Reed (the American communist, famous for his live-witness story of the 1917 revolution); the Romanov sisters (curated by British historian, Helen Rappaport), Mata Hari, the exotic dancer executed as a German spy in 1917 (an account curated by Brazilian novelist, Paul Coehlo) and Piotr Kropotkin (the Russian revolutionary anarchist). The widely used project hashtag gave me access to a fuller range of Tweets, as did the commemorative tweet book produced by RT at the end of the project (RT, 2017b). I also watched five of the eight 360^o immersive videos and the four RT television broadcasts relevant to the centennial. I periodically consulted the various project website features.

In total, I collected over 1000 English-language tweets (including multiple responses from followers – the project’s ‘audience’ – which sometimes formed long threads). In applying the mediatisation framework, I did not categorise, code or quantify them, since my analysis is qualitative and hermeneutic. I aim for plausible, holistic readings rather than empirically triangulated findings. I work not with sociological data to be sorted and verified, but with elusive cultural texts alive with contradiction. ² Nonetheless, all qualitative research involves implicit counting, just as quantitative research cannot escape the need for the creative intervention of the interpreting subject. My generalisations are (1) based on multiple instances of the same phenomenon (albeit without passing a consistent threshold of measurability) and (2) capable of integration within a plausible, overarching argument. In a manual analysis aimed at identifying each Tweet’s discursive function, and complemented by analysis of selective film, television and website content, I focussed on a set of intersecting features relating to the following:

temporality (in particular, the articulation of revolutionary past with contemporary period and of time with space; and the adoption of either epic or quotidian narrative perspectives);

modality (historical fact transposed directly into Twitter format; historical fact reimagined as fictional hypothesis – what Lenin ‘might have said’; fictional supplements to history – invented characters who enhance verisimilitude; or historical fact accorded a parodic or ironic voice);

performativity (what a Tweet is ‘doing’ in terms of its dialogic purchase on its audience – amusing; scandalising; confusing, etc.–as distinct from what it is ‘saying’, i.e. the content of its historical message); and

reflexivity (linguistic or other evidence that a Tweet is drawing attention away from its historical referent, or object, and towards the contemporary context of its articulating subject).

As I have indicated above, mediatisation’s short-circuiting of the subject-object axis of representation is the corner stone of my argument. The archetypal symbol of this process as it applies to #1917Live is the Twitter account of the fictional Russian Telegraph/Revolutionary Times. Through this gesture, RT stages its own creative presence within the historical events it claims to re-enact. It captures the three features of the project around which my examples cluster:

I suggest that this ironic tone is the by-product of a broader modalisation effect: the re-expression of the historical truth of 1917 in a subjunctive mood which qualifies it, infuses it with uncertainty or subjects it to an ambivalent ridiculing without clear purpose. This effect is akin to a cultural form that emerged in late Soviet Russia. Known as stiob, it was developed when opportunities to engage in straightforward political satire were limited. It can be characterised as official patriotic discourse developed to an absurd extreme from within a consciousness which is barely distinguishable from that discourse, ambivalently endorsing it by over-identifying with it. Alexei Yurchak (2005: 250) characterised stiob as requiring

such a degree of over-identification with the object, person, or idea at which [it] was directed that it was often impossible to tell whether it was a form of sincere support, subtle ridicule, or a peculiar mixture of the two.

Often (wrongly) equated to self-parody, stiob is rather a double-voiced discourse in which official culture is both endorsed from within and objectified from without, either to assert parodic intent, and/or to undermine that intent precisely by mimicking it, thus generating a means of escaping its satirical effects. This is consistent with RT’s own ambiguous position at the heart of official Kremlin discourse, yet required by its mission to employ un-acculturated foreign staff, and to address audiences to which that discourse may seem alien.

Stiob’s heyday marginally predates the saturation of global culture by mediatisation. In its post-Soviet manifestation, however, it is powerfully remotivated by that phenomenon. Most obviously, the transnational nature of the dialogism underpinning contemporary stiob is facilitated by the affordances of media globalisation. More significant is how the stiob effect re-foregrounds shifts in the subject-object articulation that media representations accomplish under mediatisation’s influence. If the instalment of RT at the heart of the event-ness of 1917 elides subject-object boundaries, then the stiob-like modalisation of that act reinstates them, but in a reflexive and self-parodic fashion. In a paradoxical, double gesture, the gap between subject and object is simultaneously closed and celebrated. This process highlights RT’s own motives and methods, constituting it as both story and storyteller. I conclude, therefore, that seemingly marginal outputs with a cultural or historical emphasis like #1917Live reveal the complexity at the core of RT’s identity. They confirm its status as a disruptive force whose strategy, as Simonyan boasts, is expressly to scandalise and antagonise the established order: ‘The more they pick on us, the more publicity we get, and the more people ask . . .: What did they do wrong? What if I go and see for myself?’ (Sputnik, 2017). They also underscore the reflexivity that characterises RT’s internalisation of its mission, demonstrating that because the so-called ‘information war’ is itself attributable to mediatisation, it acquires a seemingly irreversible spiral logic.

Revolutionary times (and spaces): post-truth Avant La Lettre

In one sense, Twitter re-enactments are no different from other genres aimed at recreating the historical past (Crilley, et al. this issue). In each case, the audience is required to suspend disbelief – a term whose structure of double negation (we temporarily negate our inclination not to believe) indicates that at some level audiences must retain that disbelief, in order to prevent comfortable cinema auditoria, cosy sitting rooms and pleasant fields from filling with the screams of terrified, fleeing viewers/participants.

Unlike other re-enactment genres, the Twitter variant superimposes a new technology, together with contemporary social practices, onto the past in deliberately anachronistic fashion (the conceit inviting users to imagine how figures from the pre-digital age might have used smartphones is central to the genre’s appeal). #1917Live exploits that anachronism, creating a specific chronotope in which contemporary socio-cultural and political events and stylistic idioms are deployed to illuminate those of the revolutionary period, and the circumstances and dramas of 1917 generate new perspectives on the present. The glimmering of past within present and vice versa exceeds national boundaries: 1917 Russia illuminates, and is illuminated by, 2017 America and Western Europe. The process is precisely chronotopic; it unifies, yet separates, different times and spaces in a way that invites a re-evaluation of each element of the synthesis.

This unique chronotope provides a context within which to reconcile the Kremlin’s (and Russian domestic television’s) stridently critical evaluation of the Bolshevik revolution and the implicitly anti-tsarist, pro-revolutionary narrative that tended to prevail in #1917Live, commitments to ‘not taking sides’ notwithstanding (Tolz and Chatterje-Doody, this issue). ³ The summary introducing the ‘Chronology’ section of the website reads,

So-called ‘bread riots’ were spreading . . . ‘This is but a pack of hoodlums’, Empress Alexandra Romanova would write to her husband, Nicholas II. ‘Adolescents roaming the streets, yelling they have nothing to eat’. She does not think much of it – certainly not that it was a full-blown revolt. But . . . Russia had reached a point of no return.

Such sentiments betray little regret for the impending fall of the Romanovs. More tellingly, Ivor Crotty, who co-led the #1917Live team, often adopted Bolshevik idioms to mock those who critiqued his project. In response to a #1917Live Crowd member who had set up her own Twitter account and was thanking Crotty, he tweeted on 1 January 2018,

Thank YOU so much for helping make #1917Live what it has become, bourgeois disapproval notwithstanding (https://twitter.com/IvorCrotty/status/947799670704738304).

Intriguingly, Kremlin’s official anti-revolution narrative found its way literally to the margins of #1917Live when a link was tweeted to a video serving to close the project. This video was as grim in its depiction of the bloodshed unleashed by the revolution as its narrative voiceover was sombre about its significance for Russian history. Some of the project’s many leftist followers took exception, one tweeting on 31 December 2017,

Maybe it was important to name the tens of thousands of victims of the ‘White Army’, the USA, Great Britain, Japan, Germany and ten more countries who attacked Soviet Russia?

This narrative also surfaced in one of the project’s paratexts – the hard-back ‘book of Tweets’ produced after the project had formally closed (RT, 2017b). This included an introduction by project creator, Kirill Karnovich-Valua, who, despite his restatement of the motto ‘We don’t judge’, bookends his introduction with the same lugubrious words repeated in reverse order: ‘Year 1917.War. Blood. Revolution . . . Revolution. Blood. War. 1917’. In his scene-setting prologue, he opines: ‘The more we learn, the greater the chance to avoid wars and bloody revolutions in future’. The Russian, Karnovich-Valua’s, traditional perspective in which lessons learned from the brutal past enable us to avoid problems in the present coexists with the more experimental use of idioms from the past to ‘correct’ errors made in the present offered by his Irish collaborator, Ivor Crotty. ⁴ This coexistence maps onto that of the Kremlin’s negative evaluation of the revolution with the global left’s near veneration of Bolshevism. The contradictions between these two narratives are subsumed within, and reconciled by, the #1917Live chronotope. The narrative conflict is also openly played out by the project’s ideologically heterogeneous followers. In one exchange (21 December 2017), an anti-revolutionary user complains: ‘Awful! . . . a few weeks back there were people tweeting their praise for the revolution, as if it was some warm, fuzzy, benign event. It wasn’t’. He received a withering response from a pro-revolutionary enthusiast: ‘Oh yeah! The Revolution wasn’t a “benign event,” especially compared with somebody’s grandma’s birthday party’.

Nonetheless, RT’s appropriation of Twitter’s inherently democratising impact to ‘delegate power’ to its audiences won over some sceptics of the channel, as several tweets confirm (3 January 2018): ‘Whatever you think of the TV channel, this has been absolutely gripping stuff’ and ‘I have little time for RT News, but that was a very useful project’. We should therefore not be misled by the superficial similarities RT’s #1917 project bears with the ‘Project 1917’ initiative launched by the liberal intellectual, Mikhail Zygar (https://project1917.com/). Despite speculation that RT ‘plagiarised’ the idea, Zygar’s is not hosted on Twitter and cannot engage with its audiences. Its approach is primarily documentary and its ‘tweets’ are all based on historical pronouncements (Wijermars, 2017). Ironically, the state propaganda tool, RT, offers the more open-ended approach to marking the centenary, while the liberal, democratic-minded ‘Project 1917’ retains tight control over its narrative.

Tweets within the #1917Live project are a hybrid of

Tweets within the latter two categories – the majority – are written in the style of the present period. One ‘as if’ layer (‘if Lenin had owned a smartphone and tweeted his revolutionary thoughts to contemporary Twitter users’) is superimposed upon another (‘if Twitter users could engage with the heroes of the revolutionary past’). This ‘double subjunctive’ mood motivates the project’s anachronistic language, as references to contemporary technology resurface in 1917: ‘Exclusive CCTV: Watch former Russian Telegraph office raided by @MRC 1917 squad’ (6 November 2017, https://twitter.com/RT_1917/status/927534468080029696); and revolutionary Marxism infiltrates US popular culture: ‘This @justinbieber seems to be a utopian without a program on how 2 “make the world better”, what we need is #scientificsocialism!’ (31 July 2017).

Another factor contributing to #1917Live’s chronotopic distinctiveness is the mediatised temporality arising from the transposition of the epic time of revolution onto the quotidian routine of the daily Tweet. It reduces revolutionary giants to a human scale, exposing them to the familiar banter of a ‘Crowd’ whose interests they supposedly represent. There is a related interlacing of ideological and political perspectives from the past and the present, Russia and the wider world. For many project followers, the revolutionary radicalism of 1917 provided a diagnostic tool for the ills of the present, whether in the post-crash West, or in Putin’s Russia:

Replying to @V.Lenin_1917 and @RT.com: Finally someone willing to stand up for the 1% (10 August 2017);

Russian liberals are the satellites of the West without their own opinions (9 August, 2017).

Others mock these sentiments via the crude language of the street, as in the following three-way exchange:

YOU’RE A DUMBASS COMMUNIST! I’M AMERICAN AND PROUD OF IT WITH THE GREATEST PRESIDENT EVER!

But the polemics of the present are also anachronistically appropriated by historical figures, as exemplified by Lenin’s deployment of the ‘fake news’ insult when rebutting an opinion attributed to him by the contemporary British Library: ‘Don’t recall saying it. Must be the bourgeois press spreading #fakenews and #fakequotes again’ (19 August 2017, https://twitter.com/VLenin_1917/status/898809924540649472). Feminist sensibilities from the 21st century were flattered by the highlighting of the nascent women’s movement championed by Bolsheviks like Alexandra Kollontai and pioneer female soldiers including Maria Bochkareva who tweeted on 21 August 2017: ‘Was advised to go as a nurse in the rear. Enough of sexual harrassment and rape . . . I wanted to be a soldier’ (https://twitter.com/bochkareva1917/status/874545629057261569). ⁵

The interlacing of values of different spatio-temporal provenance confounded several project followers, including one struggling to place a New York Times tweet reporting Jewish-Palestinian conflict from 1917: ‘Been following these #1917Live tweets and honestly get confused if it’s current events or history’ (6 December 2017). However, it is related to a feature of #1917Live reliant on greater sophistication: its playful conflation of historical truth and imaginative fiction. This principle is hardwired into the project’s structure via the trope of a ‘Twitter re-enactment’. The principle is also adopted by historical characters who tweet a combination of actual assertions, hypothetical statements imagined by users and entirely anachronistic pronouncements. The waters of ‘truth’ are further muddied by characters like the student Khlebtsevich (an RT account) who lives on beyond the time of his actual death. His fictional demise is reported as fact by the Revolutionary Times (RT), itself a fictional newspaper. He is mourned by real historical characters (John Reed), imaginary characters (Lev Filipowitsch) and Twitter fans with no imaginary identity, and whose grounding in the world of ‘truth’ is marked by their tongue-in-cheek awareness that they are following a fictional creation. One tweets at the news of Khlebtsevich’s demise: ‘No, no, please no! He was my favourite revolutionary’ (17 July 2017). The dizzying dance of fact and falsehood performs a semi-humorous nod to contemporary ‘post-truth’ debates, particularly since ‘Fake News’ is a recurrent theme in the #1917Live Twitter universe.

From chronotope to carnival: the scandalous ‘event-ness’ of #1917Live

In joining the exuberant throngs of protesters and eyewitnesses as part of an elaborate fiction, the 1917Crowd appropriates the spirit of 1917. For the limited period of the project, the ‘established order’ is purportedly overturned by the ‘Crowd’ which assumes the role of the project’s creators, challenging the privileged status of its initiators (RT). This overturning is more semiotic effect than actual fact, since the number of Crowd accounts established by actual users rather than RT proxies appears to be minimal.

The carnivalesque inversion in which the king is temporarily ‘dethroned’ by ‘the people’ – again, a semiotic rather than an empirical event – is traceable through the language of the Twittersphere. Contemporary actors are ‘interpellated’, or ‘hailed’ as subjects (Althusser, 1970), to interact on an equal basis with the iconic heroes of the past. Spatio-temporal distance from those heroes is erased by the informal language and conventions of the 140-character tweet. The epic sweep of the Bolshevik revolution is replaced by the everyday temporality of daily social media chatter. Lenin and Trotsky tumble from their pedestals and are forced to interact with the rabble they claim to lead, reduced to the scale of the social media user. The idea of allowing barely literate Trump supporters to intrude upon the hallowed territory of 1917 to ‘troll’ that territory’s inhabitants in a crude modern lexicon is scandalous. This scandal is, however, the corollary of a strategy aimed at normalising the revolution, exposing the daily travails of its actors to public scrutiny, in order better to appreciate their epic achievement.

Conversely, the heroic giants of Russia’s glorious past are accorded the freedom to engage in their own banter with social media users across the global present, as Lenin’s tweet to mark Twitter’s recent doubling of its character limit indicates: ‘Today, thanks to the Bolshevik victory over the oppressive bourgeois regime, everyone can enjoy #280characters!’ (8 November 2017; https://twitter.com/vlenin_1917/status/928151917280276480). In carnival time, the Crowd’s inversion of the established order of media educator (RT) and audiences-to-be-educated is mirrored in a parallel erosion of the epic distance between revolutionary leaders and the masses-to-be-led.

Such inversions flow directly from mediatisation: here media tools no longer invisibly ‘mediate’ the historical past; they ostentatiously weave themselves into its very fabric. These inversions perform ideological work, seamlessly linking the Bolsheviks’ shock overturning of the old imperialist order and RT’s association with contemporary movements of global resistance to US hegemony. When, on 26 October 2017, Twitter – one of the media ‘arms’ of US hegemony – took action to suppress that resistance, banning RT from advertising on its platform, a #1917Live follower chastises it as follows: ‘Twitter bans #1917Live because of RT. What, the “spectre of Communism” is haunting Twitter now?’ (26 October 2017). Such Marxist lexicon has enduring global currency. It facilitates #1917Live’s interpellation of a cosmopolitan audience constituency rooted in the progressive agenda of the anti-hegemonic left for whom 1917 conjures images of a proletariat emboldened by self-consciousness to disrupt the established order. At the same time, #1917Live maintains the revolution’s status as an event of its own place and time to exploit the cultural capital that it puts at contemporary Russia’s disposal. As the introductory text on the project’s English-language website confirms: ‘The 1917 crisis in Russia . . . set the scene for the geopolitical struggles that would define the 20th century’ (RT, 2017a).

The light-hearted transience of #1917Live’s chronotope further contributes to resolving the tension between the Kremlin’s abhorrence of all revolution and RT’s desire to exploit the mystique that 1917 accords Russia in the eyes of progressive movements elsewhere. Thus, RT (The Revolutionary Times) calls on project followers steeped in the lexicon of 1917 to support RT (Russia Today) in its bid to secure a ‘bourgeois prize’ for social media innovation (11 April 2018; https://twitter.com/RT_1917/status/984130633655087109). By humorously acknowledging the contradiction entailed in inviting socialists to support a capitalist-inspired competition, it eviscerates 1917’s political force, corroborating Kremlin hostility to revolution more generally. This is conveyed in the juxtaposition of the two large-lettered epigraphs introducing the Book of Tweets: ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’ and ‘In memory of the victims of the 1917 revolutions, the Great War and the Russian Civil War’ (RT, 2017b: 4–5).

The idea of ceding control to ‘the Crowd’ is a context-specific metaphor rather than an actual power shift. Nor is there anything new nowadays about ‘participatory audiences’. The metaphor’s potency lies in its double-sidedness. Not only does RT’s radically reconfigured relationship with its audience echo the historical radicalism of the Bolshevik slogan: ‘All Power to the Soviets’; the scandalous revolt of 1917 in turn proleptically re-stages RT’s own ‘scandalous’ intervention in the hostile ‘information war’ environment of 2017. The intervention corresponds to what Johnson (2017: 704) terms modern scandals’ function as ‘crucial sites in . . . enabling and realising a particular form of politics’. This sense of the term is captured in Ivor Crotty’s sarcastic response to Twitter’s ban on RT adverts in the aftermath of accusations of Russian interference in the 2016 US Presidential Election: ‘Sad to report the death of our #1917Live emoji. It obviously keeps American democracy safer’ (2 November 2017; https://twitter.com/IvorCrotty/status/926070731850616833). The otherwise facile pun involved in creating a Bolshevik equivalent to RT (Revolutionary Times) suddenly acquires political traction. The fact that Crotty’s response is inserted into a retweet of a fictional Russian Telegraph story about tsarist efforts to arrest Lenin adds to its force, at least in the eyes of 1917Live’s progressive following.

The degeneration of epic revolutionary time into the banal temporality of the quotidian is a key element in the scandal of #1917Live. Via the day-by-day approach to detailing the lead-up to the revolutions of 1917, this feature accords RT a flexibility of manoeuvre enabling it to incorporate references to current news events as they occur. It also allows it to respond to hostile commentary and recalibrate its depiction of the fixed, historical time of the past in the open-ended, real time of the present. This makes it a media event – a collaboration between state and broadcaster marking a key moment in the national narrative (Dayan and Katz, 1994) – of an unprecedented kind. As Crilley et al. (this issue) argue, state-sanctioned Twitter re-enactments form an emergent genre. #1917Live injects further innovation into that genre by establishing the mediatised presence of the broadcaster within the historical event being marked.

Sometimes, the incorporation of present into past involves responding wittily to passing trivia in the contemporary press. Spying an item in the Moscow Times about an iPhone-X tribute to the NKVD (the Soviet Secret Police), one observant project follower tweets to Molotov, the NKVD’s founder, ‘Don’t encourage him, comrade. He’ll be wanting his own i-phone next’ (3 January 2018). Elsewhere, the hashtag device is used to draw unexpected developments from current times into the orbit of 1917, as when the crisis over Catalonia’s illegal vote for independence from Spain broke (8 November 2017). Most importantly, it affords RT a timely tool of defence in its battle with Russia’s foes in the latter-day information war (Twitter’s sudden action against RT advertising).

The most extensive instance of RT’s scandalous exploitation of the chronotopic event-ness of #1917Live occurred when the British Embassy objected to the project account established in its name. The Embassy demanded that Twitter close the account for breaching its intellectual property rights; Twitter dutifully complied. This sparked Twitter responses from Crotty, Simonyan and Karnovich-Valua ranging from the indignant to the sarcastic. The episode soon attracted the attention of #1917Live followers, including Wikileaks campaigner, Julian Assange, who accused the Embassy of preventing RT from exposing Britain’s involvement in the Western allied intervention in post-revolutionary Russia (3 September 2017). The scandal was subsequently reimagined by other followers as though it had happened in 1917, with anti-Bolshevik generals weighing in to accuse Twitter of targeting the wrong enemy: ‘First @GeorgeV_1917 denied @NicholasII_1917 . . . asylum. Now this! Are we really #Entente allies? Sad’ (3 September 2017) and ‘Twitter should better suspend @Bolsheviks_1917 propaganda and ban @Lenin_1917’ (2 September 2017). Here again, RT succeeds in (1) turning those responsible for the assault on its integrity into a public laughing stock for its Twitter followers; (2) ensuring that #1917Live itself acquires the status of a scandalous happening and (3) establishing parallels between current British ‘interference’ in Russian affairs with allied intervention in post-revolutionary Russia. The Embassy scandal captures a core feature of RT’s identity as a creatively disruptive force on the global media stage. In such instances, the status of the historical event being marked is reduced to that of a metaphor celebrating the broadcaster’s scandalous role in the contemporary world and eliding the boundaries between fearsome ‘information warrior’ and harmless ‘soft power broker’.

The event-ness of #1917Live is evident in less controversial circumstances. As #1917Live drew to a close two seemingly spontaneous developments occurred. First, despite the announcement that the project was winding down, and despite the ‘concluding’ video and final messages of appreciation, #1917Crowd members decided to continue tweeting from their accounts. A #1918Live hashtag was created as the story of the revolution’s descent into Civil War emerged. The impression was one of the #1917Crowd’s spontaneous activism rather than a cunning ploy by the project creators. The unanticipated continuation of the project on the initiative of its audience not only reinforces the symbiosis of past (the scandal that was 1917) and present (the scandal, i.e. #1917Live, and by extension, RT). It also diverts attention away from revolutionary heroism, and towards the ‘heroic’ actions of latter-day followers of #1917Live, reconfirming the project’s status as an unpredictable event in its own right.

Alongside another, related development crystallised: that of the growing recognition accorded to the project by the global media industry. In addition to its nomination for the Webby Awards, in 2017 RT won a prestigious Shortys award for ‘Best in Education’, and an Adweek ARC award made for best ‘brand storytelling’. In the same year, it was nominated for a Drum Social Buzz Award in the category of ‘Most Innovative Use of Social Media’. The praise heaped on #1917Live by media professionals soon entered the project’s mythology. RT’s website began to feature pleas to its audiences to vote for the project in the Shortys competitions, along with prominent articles celebrating successes in competitions already achieved. It was not long before the project’s chronotopic inversion mechanism enabled the excitement created around these successes to infiltrate the narrative of the revolution, enriching the metaphoric interplay between past and present, 1917 Russia and the Western world of 2017. The fact that the prize eventually won by the project in the 2018 Internet Webby competition was the ‘People’s Voice Award’ institutionalised #1917Live’s trademark interleafing of revolutionary past and capitalist present.

The re-expression of the 21st-century media industry lexicon as po-faced Marxist disdain for all things bourgeois is more than clever political self-mockery. It points to a key contradiction at the heart of RT’s institutional identity. RT’s pride in its capacity to scandalise the established order, to disrupt the global media equilibrium, conflicts with the broadcaster’s aspiration to be accepted within the media professional fold as a serious actor capable of rivalling the BBC or CNN. This aspiration is reflected in the online personae adopted by RT’s most well-known presenters, and in its annual international ‘School for Journalists’. It is also evident in the decision to build on the recognition gained by #1917Live by launching a follow-up project centring on the Romanov family’s last days. Entitled #Romanovs100, the new project featured previously unseen photographs from the historical archives. The introductory narrative highlights the RT team’s technical know-how and imagination – the very attributes that secured international acclaim for #1917Live – rather than the geopolitical disruption of the historical events being celebrated. It also foregrounds the hybrid sensibility combining witty light-heartedness and tragic foreboding that suffused #1917Live:

Four social media networks will host a comprehensive photo-story review depicting the last decades of Imperial Russia – through the lenses of the Romanovs’ family cameras . . . photos from the family album featuring the most artistic, unusual and difficult images taken . . . Also, Tsarevich Alexei’s Spaniel, Joy, brings a canine perspective to the lives of his humans (http://romanovs100.com/).

#Romanovs100 plays on the aspirational professionalism element of RT’s institutional identity, not its disruptive, scandal-mongering aspect; it is an acutely self-aware display of creative prowess, not an audaciously acerbic dig at Western political sensibilities.

Conclusion: mediatisation, modalisation and stiob

The conceit of a canine Instagram account formalises the informal wit that became more prominent as #1917Live concluded. The sense of organic growth over time represents another benefit of the chronotopic specificity of this kind of media event, which acquires its own narrative trajectory to ultimately displace that of the historical drama it commemorates. Correspondingly, it was just as the #1918Live hashtag emerged in December 2017 that the historical characters began to realise the true self-reflexive potential of their anachronism. Legendary Bolshevik leader and subsequently Stalin’s Foreign Minister, Viacheslav Molotov, took particular pleasure in the logical anomalies inherent to Twitter re-enactments: ‘Exciting news: I finally managed to persuade Comrade Dzerzhinsky to get his own account and stop borrowing mine!’ (4 January 2018). Molotov even conversed with his own creators from a contemporary vantage point, enabling him both to evaluate his earlier role in the Bolshevik uprising, and to project his existence into the ‘future’ beyond his death in 1986: ‘I enjoyed reading the tweets of my younger self, @Molotov_1917. They really took me back’ (16 December 2017).

The all-pervading, knowing irony that came to define #1917Live helped construct the project’s disparate audience as members of a single transcultural community. This involves both a feeling of inclusion, and the power to exclude those ‘not in the know’, as illustrated by a response to a naive expression of confusion over Lenin’s ‘impossible’ 21st century ‘resurrection’: ‘Lol! This is only historical re-enactment which follows events as they occurred 100 years ago’ (23 August 2017). It also provides an ideological ‘loophole’ (or get-out clause) enabling #1917Live’s creators to escape the constraints imposed by any narrative that threatens to congeal and attach itself to the project as its ‘official line’. The ironic overtones seeped beyond the confines of the project’s Twitter component into other elements, including the 360^o ‘real-time’ panoramic videos. In one, Lenin is depicted in a safe-house with Stalin, who decides to help Lenin preserve his anonymity by shaving off the great leader’s iconic beard. A stereotypically grave voiceover telling of the historical significance of the Bolsheviks’ success in evading capture combines uneasily with Lenin’s pun-laden, proleptical jokes, complimenting Stalin on his skill with the razor and conjuring up Stalin’s bloody future (https://1917.rt.com/#!/en/video360/all/59f87e875367e9660b22d3d2). This ambiguous wordplay occludes Stalin’s later paranoid purges without negating them.

The same, knowing distance contaminates RT’s otherwise more controlled and predictable television coverage of the centenary. One broadcast, a documentary about latter-day communists, featured an eccentric Swedish millionaire communist to whom the documentary returns repeatedly, recording his thoughts on honouring Lenin’s memory while he takes viewers on a guided tour of his opulent abode. The tone surreally mixes reverence, voyeuristic curiosity and ambiguous mockery reminiscent of the documentaries of Louis Theroux. #1917Live modalises its depiction of the monumental history of the revolution and the tragic destiny of Russia’s royal family via a self-reflexivity attributable to mediatisation’s short-circuiting of the subject-object relationship. This modalisation is linked to stiob’s ambiguous, double gesture of endorsing official culture from within, while objectifying it from without. ⁶

Earlier instances when RT’s self-equivalence as a Kremlin disinformation tool seemed momentarily to falter – Abby Martin’s puzzling deviation from the official narrative on Russia’s seizure of Crimea; the unreadable, semi-parodic exposé of Pussy Riot’s brutal punishment by Putin’s loyal Cossacks – now appear in a new light. What is important in these anomalous incidents is not whom RT may, or may not, be endorsing, but the foregrounding of the motives and methods of the broadcaster itself, such that the storyteller becomes the story. Seen through the prism of #1917Live, these incidents illuminate RT’s ‘mainstream’ output, where #1917Live’s cosmopolitan, urbane wit is refitted for a vicious battle with the Western media establishment. A prime example is the irreverent advertising campaign unleashed in early 2017 on unsuspecting London underground travellers, just as the broadcaster found itself pilloried for its role in Putin’s suspected war on Western democracy. Here, the reflexive internalisation by RT of its status as a propaganda bullhorn inverts stiob in its classic form: the over-identification is not with the official discourse to which RT subscribes, but with that of its arch enemies. Creative ambiguity degenerates into crude, ideological chutzpah:

OPEN IN VIEWER

RT’s subversive 2017 poster campaign on the London Underground.

Source: Waterson J (2017) ‘Russia Today is Trolling Everyone with Adverts Joking About Russian Hacking’, October 6. Available at: https://www.buzzfeed.com/jimwaterson/russia-today-is-trolling-everyone-with-adverts-joking-about

Appropriately, the campaign coincided with the period over which #1917Live ran, reaching a crescendo in October 2017 – weeks before the 100th anniversary of the storming of the Winter Palace – with calls by British parliamentarians for Ofcom to investigate RT for breaching impartiality standards.

Let us recap. Viewed through a conceptual apparatus locating meaning in the marginal and different rather than the normative and recurrent, RT’s uncharacteristically open-ended commemoration project illuminates the process by which the mediatised environment in which it operates shapes the tendentious output of its core news output. Mediatisation’s short-circuiting of the subject and object of media discourse is traceable throughout #1917Live. Symbolised by the imagining of a fictional ‘RT’ news outlet for the revolutionary era, it is reflected in the chronotopic interlacing of commemorated past and commemorating present, and thus RT’s appropriation of revolutionary, carnivalised inversion. It accords the project revolution’s disruptive potential, as the scandalising storyteller becomes the scandalous story itself (a gesture indicative of RT’s entire institutional identity). Via #1917Live’s year-long duration, the short-circuiting feature fosters the project’s potential to adapt to challenges from without, and also to capitalise creatively on plaudits garnered, situating it within a new, maximally pliable, category of media event. Finally, it explains the project’s modalised character: its suffusion with a self-reflexive irony aligning it with stiob whose strategy of over-identification with official discourse allows the project’s creators ideological wiggle room. Energised by the transnational dialogic exchanges of a media-saturated present, however, this strategy is adapted for cruder, propagandistic purposes when RT’s self-reflexive awareness of its pariah status is re-deployed as a tool of disruptive scandal-mongering.

Herein lies a lesson. I have argued elsewhere that the mediatised environment surrounding #1917Live is characterised by the deep inter-penetration of competing narratives (Hutchings and Miazhevich, 2009). This fosters a ‘hall of mirrors’ effect in which, as RT’s poster campaign illustrates, every discursive move finds its distorted mirror image in a counter-move that both mimics and undermines it. Demonisation of RT comes at a price: that of feeding the spiral logic of the ‘information war’. At present, there is little sign that the lesson has been learned.