Tweeting the Russian revolution: RT’s #1917LIVE and social media re-enactments as public diplomacy

Introduction

At the start of 2017, the Russian state-funded international broadcaster RT (formerly Russia Today) launched an ambitious, year-long social media campaign to commemorate the centenary of the Russian revolution by re-enacting the events of 1917 on Twitter and YouTube. The centenary of the 1917 revolution was a problematic event for the Putin regime, given its preoccupation with stabilising its power and prestige and maintaining the status quo rather than encouraging memories of revolutionary change (see Wijermars, 2018). Despite this, RT’s (2018b) social media project, 1917LIVE, aimed to ‘take you 100 years back to relive the Russian Revolution in real time’ and involved a cast of over 90 characters including Lenin, Trotsky, Mata Hari, Tsar Nicholas II and the Romanov sisters tweeting about their activities as if the revolution were happening today. Throughout 2017, RT created social media accounts for this cast of historical figures and a fictional newspaper – the Russian Telegraph – that published over 7000 tweets about the revolution. RT also maintained an interactive website and published videos on YouTube, including a series of virtual reality (VR) videos. In response, RT (2018b) received over 275,000 tweets featuring their hashtag (#1917LIVE), over 75 million impressions and acquired around 250,000 followers on Twitter, YouTube and Facebook. The resources RT dedicated to this social media re-enactment, alongside the large audience and interaction it garnered are remarkable in themselves but even more so given the Russian government’s decision ‘to refrain from publicly commemorating the 100th anniversary of 1917’ (Wijermars, 2018: 45; see also Omelicheva, 2017: 441).

How are we to understand the cultural and political significance of RT’s 1917LIVE project? We argue that a cultural studies perspective is necessary to understand how this and other social media re-enactments perform a public diplomacy role and can contribute to a soft power effect. Centred around the question – how did audiences of 1917LIVE participate in, interpret and respond to RT’s re-enactment of the 1917 revolution? – we explore how 1917LIVE directed the attention of audiences towards Russian history and culture in ways that promoted a positive feeling about RT and Russia. It elicited affective identifications with events and characters by (1) bringing the past into the present by engaging audiences interactively; (2) providing a view of history ‘from below’ and promoting an identification with the ‘people’ or underdogs against oppression and (3) provoking discussion about the role of revolution in social transformation by providing didactic entertainment that worked well.

In this article, we demonstrate the importance of theoretically informed empirical analyses of how audiences interpret and interact with such public diplomacy projects (Gillespie and Nieto McAvoy, 2016). We analyse the 1917LIVE project through the lens of public diplomacy given how it aims to promote Russian history and culture to international audiences. As it is produced by RT – an international broadcaster funded by the Russian state – 1917LIVE is demonstrative of several key activities associated with public diplomacy, namely, the promotion of Russian history and culture through an international broadcaster (Cull, 2008: 32–34).

However, we seek to redress some of the weaknesses in theories of public diplomacy and soft power. In bringing a cultural studies approach to bear on the particularities of social media re-enactments, our original contribution to debates about commemoration in international cultural studies is to (1) move theorisations of soft power forward by eschewing top-down, policy-led conceptions of culture and communication and (2) fill a gap in empirical research in this field through a more nuanced conception of how Russian soft power works by placing audience reception and participation centre stage.

Our article proceeds in four parts. First, we analyse social media re-enactments such as 1917LIVE as an opportunity for political and state media actors to deploy public diplomacy resources to produce a soft power effect – directing and attracting audiences to their history, culture and identity with the intention of exerting influence. Second, we introduce RT and 1917LIVE in more detail and situate this project in the context of studies into RT and Russian soft power. Third, we discuss the findings from our analysis of a sample of tweets posted during the 1917LIVE project. Finally, we discuss the findings from focus groups conducted with UK Twitter users who engaged with 1917LIVE.

We conclude by drawing attention to the implications of our findings for the future study of Russian soft power – important at a moment when international understanding and adversarial diplomatic relations between Russia and the ‘west’ are at an all-time low. It has been suggested that commemorations of the 1917 revolutions ‘did not provide a compelling narrative base on which national unity and the Putin government’s legitimacy could be constructed’ (Omelicheva, 2017: 441). It is also argued that Russian state broadcast commemoration outputs, though diverse and contradictory, ultimately served processes of legitimation of Putin’s neo-authoritarian regime, rather than nation-building (Chatterjee-Doody and Tolz, this volume). We argue that RT’s 1917LIVE project made an effective use of social media to attract audiences, via interactive processes of identification with revolutionary characters. In so doing, RT mobilised a politics of affect combined with didactic entertainment while encouraging audiences to co-shape revolutionary narratives. 1917LIVE prompted positive perceptions of Russian history. It used social media to shed its reputation as merely a mouthpiece for Putin and to situate itself just like any other international state broadcaster with a mission to inform, educate and entertain. Here, it appears that RT is moving beyond the current limitations of Russian soft power – viewed as being too reliant on critiquing the ‘West’, too focussed on coercion and the threat of hard power and aimed at audiences with cultural ties to Russia (Grix and Kramareva, 2017; Just, 2016; Kiseleva, 2015; Miazhevich, 2018; Rutland and Kazantsev, 2016).

Social media re-enactments as public diplomacy

Social media re-enactments, like other mediated commemorations can, and do, serve political purposes (Steele, 2017: 340). But what are the implications of interactive social media re-enactments for contemporary accounts of public diplomacy as a soft power tool or resource? Soft power, according to Joseph Nye, depends on a country’s culture, values and policies and refers to a state or political actor’s ability to influence the behaviour of others through attraction rather than through force. Nye (2008) argues that public diplomacy has long been used to promote a country’s soft power, and to be successful, ‘public diplomacy requires an understanding of the roles of credibility, self-criticism, and civil society in generating soft power’ (p. 94).

Drawing on Nye, Grix and Lee (2013) suggest that soft power is ‘a discursive mechanism for increased agency in global affairs through the performative politics of attraction’ (p. 526). This latter emphasis on the communicative and cultural underpinnings of soft power, especially the way actors use the media to make themselves and their actions attractive to others is important. Despite this, the literature on soft power often lacks a sophisticated theorisation of culture, media and communications and audience ‘effects’ (Gillespie and Nieto McAvoy, 2016). There has been little engagement with how the audiences – often theorised as the ‘targets’ of soft power initiatives – actually interpret and feel about them, as audiences and users are either seen as passive targets or homogeneous masses who receive state messages uncritically (Gillespie and Nieto McAvoy, 2016: 204–206). Media are viewed as either ‘neutral platforms’ (Bolin and Miazhevich, 2018: 8), or empty vessels for the communication of state messages as studies often do not take into account ‘the agency of the media as organisations’ (Bolin and Miazhevich, 2018: 12) or of audiences themselves.

A cultural studies approach to soft power recognises that soft power is not a force that political actors exert over target audiences, rather

Soft power works best when it goes unremarked, and is often generated through the everyday corporate cosmopolitan practices forged by established institutions and activities that are deemed relatively credible and are, for the most part, respected . . . soft power is essentially about intercultural dialogue (Gillespie and Nieto McAvoy, 2016: 205).

This account emphasises how audiences are ‘active contributors’ (Gillespie and Nieto McAvoy, 2016: 207) with political and social actors in the co-construction of meaning and understanding of culture. When such actors attempt to promote a positive image of themselves and make themselves and their actions attractive to others (in order to improve their soft power), these activities are understood as efforts of public diplomacy (Nye, 2008; Pamment, 2014). Public diplomacy relies on political actors using or working with the press, international broadcasters, strategic communications and cultural assets such as Hollywood, as well as digital technology, in ways that ‘contribute to a nation’s soft power by generating credibility, fostering values . . . changing behaviour, and increasing goodwill’ (Pamment, 2014: 53; see also Nye, 2008: 101–108). Consequently, we understand social media re-enactments, when produced by state-affiliated groups such as Ministries of Foreign Affairs (MFAs) or international broadcasters, as instruments of public diplomacy for generating and enhancing ‘the soft power of attraction’ (Nye, 2008: 101).

We build upon the nascent literature on public diplomacy by arguing that those actors – like RT – who organise social media re-enactments for overseas audiences, on behalf of the states they are associated with, do so in order to attract audiences to their country’s history, culture and identity. Because of this, it is important to understand how audiences interpret and feel about social media re-enactments.

Historical re-enactments are not new, and encapsulate a broad range of performative phenomena, including costumed enthusiasts enacting past events, historical literary fiction, TV docudramas, Hollywood films depicting iconic events, videogame, videogames of historic battles of the past and digital media sites that open up historic archives (Agnew, 2004; Agnew and Lamb, 2009; Jackson and Kidd, 2012; McCalman and Pickering, 2010; Schneider, 2011). Recently, state actors have turned to social media, especially the microblogging platform Twitter, to re-enact key historic events. In 2014, the British Foreign Office used Twitter to display historical documents from 1914 in the run-up to the centenary of the First World War (Smith, 2014). Similar techniques were used by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 2016 to mark the fifth anniversary of Osama Bin Laden’s death (Hunt, 2016) and in 2017 by the Israel Defence Force who ‘live’ tweeted the events of the 1967 6-day war (Yaron, 2013).

Such social media re-enactments draw on the conventions of traditional historical re-enactments (Agnew, 2004, 2007; King, 2012; McCalman and Pickering, 2010), which are built around a co-created performance of historical events that involves people attempting to get as close to the past as possible. Re-enactments encourage the participant to relive the past and experience events as if they were living through them, encouraging people ‘to see the world from the perspective of historical actors, to understand their motivations and to face their dilemmas’ (Cook, 2004: 491). Unlike other forms of historiography that attempt to provide objectivity, distance and ‘narrative closure’, re-enactments provide embodied, inter-subjective interactions, with other participants acting as ‘a springboard for collective identity formation’ (Mikula, 2015: 598).

The use of social media, and particularly Twitter, to conduct historical re-enactments originates with educators using them to teach students about history. Referred to as ‘TwHistory’ (Lee et al., 2012), these entertaining didactic projects depend on the unique affordances enabled by social media platforms, as well as the active and affective participation of audiences. Social media re-enactments enable people to construct narratives of their histories and to project these narratives through multiple accounts and in multimedia formats. By moving re-enactment from a physical space to a virtual one, social media re-enactments enable educators to ‘engage students in a topic that may not necessarily interest them by using new media that does’ (Lee et al., 2012: 27) and have provided digital ‘learning experiences’ (Krutka and Milton, 2013: 28). Audiences are often also invited to take part in the re-enactment themselves (such as by sharing content as if they were involved in the events) on their own social media channels, using associated hashtags and the stylistic conventions of the medium.

Social media re-enactments then, are an important site of analysis when considering the cultural politics of memory in the digital age (Drezov, 2018; Hoskins, 2011; Wijermars, 2018). First, historical re-enactments involve a mutual constitution of the past and the present. Second, historical re-enactments are not generally concerned with grand narratives of history, but rather are concerned with ‘understanding the past “from below”, focussing on ordinary historical figures and everyday social life’ (West, 2014: 163). By portraying the everyday experiences of ordinary people, social media re-enactments serve to make historic events relatable to people in the present and, in doing so, they serve to solicit empathy and understanding for a state’s population. Third, through their focus on experience, historical re-enactments elicit affect and emotion (Agnew, 2007: 301; see also Ahmed, 2014; De Groot, 2011; Doveling et al., 2010), prioritising subjectivity and a personal ‘living of the moment’ rather than a detached, objective and single authored view of history (Mikula, 2015: 598). This creation of emotional attachment is a mechanism by which audiences of public diplomacy initiatives come to be directed and attracted to a state’s history, culture and identity (Roselle et al., 2014: 72; Solomon, 2014).

Although political actors are increasingly turning to social media to re-enact their history, there is little academic research into this practice (c.f. Drezov, 2018; Wijermars, 2018). Our study contributes to addressing this gap and theorises state-associated social media re-enactments as instruments of public diplomacy which serve to elicit an emotional attachment with events and characters from a state’s history. As we shall see in the following sections, it is the combination of affective involvement and entertaining didacticism that underpins the processes of engagement with social media re-enactments as public diplomacy instruments.

RT and #1917LIVE

RT is an international broadcaster that the Russian government created in 2005 to ‘stem the flow of negative and “non-objective” information about Russia’ (Simons, 2014: 447). RT is aimed at global audiences and is ‘a tool with which to improve Russia’s image in the world’ (Hutchings and Tolz, 2015: 33). Subsequently, RT has often been viewed as ‘a direct mouthpiece of Russian propaganda’ (Miazhevich, 2018: 3). Indeed, RT has had to register as foreign agent in the United States and has been investigated on numerous occasions by the British broadcasting regulator Ofcom for breaking due impartiality rules. To date, research on RT suggests that its broadcast and digital content is often anti-Western and attempts to ‘justify Russian government policies and create an image of Russia as the leader of global resistance to the US’ (Yablokov, 2015: 312). Further studies also highlight how RT focusses on depicting the ‘West’ as ‘corrupt and hypocritical’ (Miazhevich, 2018: 16) and Russia as a victim of ‘Western’ propaganda (Hutchings et al., 2015: 653).

RT is viewed negatively as part of Russia’s ‘propaganda blitzkrieg’ (Weiss, 2015) and seen as supine and ‘monopolized’ by the Kremlin (Just, 2016: 85). Some see RT as founded on disinformation that is ‘wildly inconsistent’ (Kragh and Åsberg, 2017: 788) and part of a broader trend of flawed Russian soft power attempts that are only focussed on Russian diaspora audiences, reliant on the threat of hard power (Just, 2016: 90) and too focussed on ‘nationalism, patriotism, imperialism, respect for authority, and the idea of the uniqueness of Russian historical development’ (Liñán, 2010: 169). With this criticism, there has been little space or opportunity for an assessment of RT’s output, which may not be as homogeneous, or as state-controlled as it is often portrayed. Studies suggests that RT should be researched as an important actor in contemporary practices of Russian soft power and public diplomacy (Chatterje-Doody and Crilley, 2019; Hutchings et al., 2015; Miazhevich, 2018; Orttung and Nelson, 2019). RT operates in a rapidly changing international news media ecology with unpredictable and disruptive effects. To dismiss what are effectively heterogeneous outputs as mere propaganda is to limit our understanding of culture in contemporary processes of public diplomacy and soft power.

RT’s Twitter revolution

Despite the Russian government’s decision to not publicly commemorate the centenary of the 1917 revolutions, RT launched 1917LIVE on 1 January 2017. RT then published tweets on a daily basis from the Twitter accounts of the fictional newspaper the Russian Telegraph @RT_1917 (rebranded as the Revolutionary Times in October 2017) and through the accounts of 90 historical figures involved in the 1917 revolutions. The tweets produced by RT’s 1917LIVE project sought to re-enact the events of 1917 as if they were happening throughout 2017. The way in which 1917LIVE re-enacted history and mutually constituted the past and the present – to create a ‘pastpresent’ (King, 2004, 2012) – is explicitly demonstrated in the second tweet published by @RT_1917 (Figure 1). This tweet reports the death of Rasputin as if it were ‘breaking’ news, happening now and juxtaposes a historic image of the dead Rasputin with a screenshot of Google Maps showing where his body was found. This use of a modern, digital, everyday map that will be familiar to most people with a smartphone serves to make the historic events of 1917 relatable (West, 2014: 163), and the historical image serves to evoke emotions (Agnew, 2007: 301). Responses to this tweet also highlight the importance of audience participation in the project. Comments such as ‘good riddance. He has been meddling for far too long’, and ‘the Czar and his family would be wise to flee into exile’ are indicative of how 1917LIVE’s audience adopted the conventions of the social media re-enactment and engaged with the events of 1917 as if they were happening in 2017.

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Figure 1.

Rasputin confirmed dead.

RT itself claims that 1917LIVE is a ‘new form of educational storytelling’ (RT, 2018b) with the main objective being ‘to educate and inspire the audience to learn’ (RT, 2018a). 1917LIVE, then, appears to break with the broader trends and limitations of Russian soft power previously noted by scholars. First, while RT is funded by the Russian government, 1917LIVE diverges from the Kremlin’s official decision to not commemorate the 1917 revolution (Zygar, 2017). Second, rather than attempting to control the narrative of the revolution, RT invited Twitter users to take part and join in co-creating and co-performing the revolution using the hashtags #1917LIVE and #1917CROWD. Third, 1917LIVE made no claims about Russian hard power: the project’s first tweet was explicitly about military losses and weakness (RT, 2017a). Finally, throughout 1917LIVE, there is no clear or consistent single narrative that explicitly states the views of the Russian government. Putin’s presidency is founded on the notion of stability and the Kremlin was therefore reluctant to promote ideas of revolution as the 1917 revolutions provide little historical grounding that serve to build legitimacy for Putin (Omelicheva, 2017). Speaking about the centenary, Putin stated,

It is inadmissible to drag the schisms, anger, resentments and bitterness of the past into our life today, to speculate – for one’s own political and other interests – on tragedies that affected practically every family in Russia (Putin quoted in Wijermars, 2018: 46)

The lack of an overt political narrative in 1917LIVE indicates how, even in the neo-authoritarian state of Russia, media actors like RT have a level of independent agency (Tolz and Teper, 2018: 222).

1917LIVE has been lauded by various organisations and public figures. 1917LIVE’s recent accolades include prominent social media and advertising awards (for a full list, see RT, 2018a) and commendations from many journalists, academics and public figures (see RT, 2017b). One journalist stated that it was ‘insanely well researched and produced’ (França, 2017) and another said ‘Whatever your views on @RT_com, their ‘live-tweeting’ of the 1917 revolution is social media brilliance’ (Kempas, 2017). The positive reception of 1917LIVE appears to be exceptional when compared with RT’s other broadcast, social media and public diplomacy efforts. Given the participatory nature of social media which means that audiences can and do drive social media narratives of global events (Bruns, 2008; Rosen, 2012), 1917LIVE complicates prior assumptions about the direct control of the Russian state in RT’s outputs and its reputation for mere propaganda.

Understanding RT’s audiences: mixing methods

We address the need for research into RT’s audiences (Hutchings et al., 2015: 653; Yablokov, 2015: 311) by asking: how did audiences of 1917LIVE participate in, interpret and feel about RT’s re-enactment of the revolution? And what is the significance of the strategies of engagement and responses for understanding Russian attempts to mobilise soft power resources? Our study draws upon mixed methods in order to answer these questions.

We began our research by using Twitter’s streaming application program interface (API) to collect all tweets posted by public Twitter accounts which contained the hashtags #1917LIVE or #1917CROWD between October and December 2017. These were the final 3 months of the 1917LIVE project and included the date of the October revolution that took place on 7 November. In total, 13,640 original tweets ¹ containing the relevant hashtags were posted in this time period, peaking on 7 November, when a quarter of the collected tweets (9354) were posted. During our period of analysis, these original tweets received 57,942 retweets where a Twitter user had retweeted a tweet containing the hashtags but did not add their own comment to it.

Our sample for analysis was chosen as a random sample of 1000 tweets from the 13,640 original tweets. This number was chosen to provide us with a manageable but sufficient data set for thematic analysis. These tweets were then coded according to their main theme in line with qualitative research (Gibbs, 2008: 24) where codes were determined inductively by analysing the content of tweets and determining their main theme (Boyatzis, 1998; Clarke and Braun, 2014).

As Stanley and Jackson (2016) have recently argued, ‘if you want to understand how people make sense of world politics, then it makes sense to ask them’ (p. 233). We therefore organised three focus groups in the United Kingdom with people who had followed or tweeted about 1917LIVE. Focus groups provide an appropriate method for exploring how media audiences interpret and feel about important political, social and cultural issues (see Gillespie and O’Loughlin, 2009; Gillespie et al., 2010; Pears, 2016) and provide an insight into ‘how people construct and reconstruct their stories’ (Barbour, 2008: 42) as they demonstrate how participants collectively give meaning to the world around them and the actors and events in it (Bryman, 2008: 476).

Given that focus groups provide the best insights when focussed on specific groups of people (Stanley, 2016: 244), we focussed on British audiences of 1917LIVE. We used two ways of finding participants. First, we organised our scraped tweets by location and contacted those who had tweeted from London, Glasgow or Edinburgh; these three cities were chosen because of the high volume of tweets originating from them. Other participants were found by manually opening the list of followers on the @RT_1917 Twitter page and contacting people whose profiles stated that they were located in these cities. Our focus groups took place between December 2017 and February 2018. Each involved five participants (four males and one female, all over the age of 18 years) and lasted for 3 hours. Participants were presented with retail vouchers in return for their time. They were structured into three sections, the first focussed on discussing the Russian revolution in general, the second involved a detailed discussion of RT and 1917LIVE and the final section involved participants viewing and then discussing a VR video created by RT as part of 1917LIVE. Following from qualitative approaches to focus group research (Morgan, 1997; Wilkinson, 2004), our research is not aimed at providing a representative sample of audience opinion, rather for our purposes, they are a method that can illuminate the contours of a ‘type of collective experience’ (Stanley, 2016: 244) for a group of people (in our case, British followers of 1917LIVE).

Audience Engagement with 1917LIVE on Twitter

Our finding that the 13,640 original tweets received 57,942 retweets demonstrates that retweeting content was one of the major ways in which Twitter audiences engaged with RT’s social media re-enactment. As these retweets contain no additional comments from those users who retweeted them, we cannot infer what they thought about the project beyond viewing parts of it as worthy of sharing. Therefore, in order to understand how 1917LIVE was interpreted by audiences, we selected tweets containing original commentary on the project: original tweets, replies to tweets or quote retweets that included the hashtags #1917LIVE and/or #1917CROWD.

Of the 1000 random original tweets analysed in our sample, 342 were published by official character accounts created by RT (e.g. by Vladimir Lenin @VLenin_1917). This high frequency of original tweets from these accounts suggests that RT itself was, as would be expected, prominent in producing original tweets as part of their own project. Because these tweets provide a real-time account of how the revolution occurred, they were not coded; we wanted to see how people engaged with and responded to these tweets, so we analysed the content of the remaining 658 tweets in the sample.

Our analysis found that the conversation around 1917LIVE was global in scope: 192 tweets were posted in a language other than English. The majority of tweets were in English; however, there were tweets in Spanish, Russian, Croatian and Turkish, as well as other languages that appeared less frequently. Prior research has suggested that Russian public diplomacy is mainly focussed on the Russian diaspora (Just, 2016: 86), yet RT is itself aimed at non-Russian audiences, and with 1917LIVE, it appears they have been successful in engaging with international audiences. Due to the diverse languages of tweets and the multiple language skills required to analyse them properly, we focussed on coding and analysing tweets published in English. While this does not give an insight into the non-English-speaking audience’s interpretation of 1917LIVE, it provides a focussed account of the English-speaking audiences’ engagement with the project. The remaining 466 tweets in the sample were then coded according to their main theme (Figure 2).

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Figure 2.

Themes of English-language tweets in our sample containing #1917LIVE or #1917CROWD.

The first prominent theme in our sample consisted of tweets that were coded as ‘historic reporting’ (21.9%). These adopted the conventions of RT’s social media re-enactment and were written as if the revolution was happening in real time. Examples included ‘Bolshevik revolution getting underway’ and ‘all kicking off in the Winter Palace’. These tweets often used the word ‘BREAKING’ to suggest the content being tweeted was breaking news. Despite one tweet in our sample not understanding this convention (‘how is this breaking if it happened 100 years ago?’) the volume of tweets that express ‘historic reporting’ demonstrate a diffusion of the social media re-enactment to its audience who then adopt the genre and stylistic conventions of reliving the revolution themselves (Agnew, 2007). The participation of the audience in the re-enactment as if it were happening in the present ‘testifies to a taste for immediacy and personal experience’ (Mikula, 2015: 585) and highlights how 1917LIVE, as public diplomacy, engaged audiences in a form of participation facilitated by the immediate interaction that characterises Twitter.

The second major theme we identified was tweets that were supportive of the Bolshevik revolution – coded as ‘Pro Revolution’ (20.8%). This category included tweets such as ‘BEST DAY EVER’ and ‘Great news, comrades!’. In contrast, 5.6 percent of tweets were anti-communist or anti-revolution. These tweets included statements like ‘100 years and 100 mln victims. #CommunismKills’. Despite these, other tweets suggest that those who engaged with 1917LIVE thought positively of it. Forty-eight tweets (10.3%) were explicitly positive comments about 1917LIVE such as ‘This is why I love twitter’ and ‘#1917live is genius’. A further 52 tweets (11.2%) were coded as ‘promoting 1917LIVE’ due to how they served to advertise 1917LIVE. Forty-three tweets (9.2%) were coded as commemorating the centenary of the revolution, using phrases such as ‘OTD [on this day] 100 years ago’. These findings highlight how historical re-enactments are ‘a gesture of utopianism’ (Agnew, 2004: 329), by which participants express, and experience, their ideals and values through re-enacting historical moments. The volume of positive comments in our sample suggests that the audience of RT’s social media re-enactment felt positively about Russian history and culture, and even those that did not, still expressed an interest in it. Social media re-enactments will provoke a contestation of meaning around historic events, that reveals how – in the digital age – soft power is not wielded but negotiated and ‘created by the dynamics of the network’ (Gillespie and Nieto McAvoy, 2016: 207).

Thirty-one tweets (6.7%) related the past events of 1917 to contemporary events. These were diverse and included references to revolutions against Saudi Arabia, capitalism, and how the ‘Kremlin sees many of the same challenges today’. They also included references to Donald Trump and Jeremy Corbyn. Such tweets reflect how the revolutionary symbolism of 1917 resonates with audiences and indicate how people draw upon the past as a prism to understand contemporary global politics (Agnew, 2004: 335). This also highlights how the meanings of the Russian revolution were appropriated in different ways by Twitter users.

The sample tweets of 5.4 percent appear to be published by bots or by people who use bots to publish tweets. These included: tweets from accounts that only added the hashtag ‘#1917LIVE’ and tweets that ended with ‘Daily!’ which were roundups of tweets containing popular hashtags. Our findings provide no evidence to suggest suspicious bot activity, and these tweets appear to be typical of normal spam/bot usage where people attempt to hijack trending terms (as #1917LIVE was on 7 November) rather than a co-ordinated attempt to boost the reach and impact of 1917LIVE. This challenges the notion that ‘Russian bots’ are key in amplifying all of Russia’s public diplomacy efforts online (Stukal et al., 2017), and at least in the case of 1917LIVE, it shows that reach and engagement was driven by people, not bots. Participatory forms of engagement have been key to successful forms of public diplomacy and soft power (Pamment, 2014; Pamment and Cassinger, 2018), and 1917LIVE appears to have resonated with Twitter audiences. The dominance of positive comments within our sample suggests that RT’s 1917LIVE social media re-enactment was successful in instigating a positive perception of Russian history and culture, and thereby had a soft power effect.

Audience interpretations of 1917LIVE

Joseph Nye (2005) argued that with the end of the Cold War ‘Lennon trumped Lenin’ (p. 50), yet the success of 1917LIVE with its Twitter followers demonstrates that Lenin clearly still has some soft power value for the Russian state. The participants in our focus groups had a variety of reasons for following the 1917LIVE project. These included a general interest in Russian history and/or a commitment to left-wing politics, to socialism and/or communism, and/or to revolutionary thought. Others had personal family connections to Russia and Eastern Europe. In each focus group, our participants had prior familiarity with RT and were either regular followers or used RT intermittently especially when Russia was involved in a news story. The latter used RT as one reference point, albeit among many others. One participant reported ‘I use it to find out what the Russians are thinking’ or ‘it’s important to hear different perspectives’. Another indicated ‘I’m well aware that it is biased like every other news source’, while another suggested it is ‘kind of propaganda’.

This last comment chimes well with a patterned response across our interviews with the more regular RT followers beyond this 1917LIVE project. The suggestion is that RT is not following the old Cold War conventions of propaganda. Some followers see RT as developing its own new style of edgy, counter-hegemonic, anti-Western, anti-American style, while others struggle to pin it down or define it. But among its followers on social media, at least RT is used as ‘just another news source’ when relevant and among those sceptical media audiences who see all state-funded news media as either untrustworthy or promoting its own national perspective. Our wider research and this case study suggest that RT’s presence in the international news media sphere is slowly being normalised at a time when others are also at the same time deriding it. It also supports other research that shows how the lines between Russian public diplomacy and propaganda are blurring in very different ways in different contexts (Rawnsley, 2015: 284; Yablokov, 2015).

RT’s 1917LIVE plugged a gap in media commemorations of the 1917 centenary. Across all three groups, participants felt that there was little coverage of the centenary in the media that they normally engaged with and suggested that the only mainstream coverage they had seen had been ‘under the radar’. Participants identified two reasons for this. The first involved ‘the reigniting of the Cold War mentality’ where the ‘Western’ media was reluctant to discuss Russian affairs in a sophisticated and nuanced way as ‘they would much rather use it as a bogeyman, like, ‘oh, you know . . . this is all scary Russia’. The second reason was the perception that the Russian state itself was reluctant to commemorate the event as

the revolution must be a difficult topic because . . . those ideas of revolution might overthrow you, but at the same time . . . what’s the one defining event that transforms Russia from this backwards peasant state to a superpower? It’s the Russian Revolution.

Indeed, one participant asked ‘how do you tell a neat story [about 1917] where the modern Russian state can draw any kind of legitimacy?’ Here, the appeal of 1917LIVE lies in how it (1) provided a sustained engagement with Russian history that audiences felt was not present elsewhere and (2) defied expectations of what RT – as the international broadcaster of the Russian state – would cover and did not resort to old-style propaganda. Participants felt that RT was attempting to ‘do some cultural things that you would associate with the BBC’ because, as another suggested, ‘the reason why [the BBC] is so popular and so respected around the world isn’t really because of BBC news, it’s because of the documentaries and the dramas’. RT was viewed positively in its move from reporting current affairs to focussing on history, despite the participants identifying the tensions between the Kremlin’s line on the revolution and RT’s commemoration of it. Participants suggested that RT created 1917LIVE in order to ‘rehabilitate its image . . . and that it might soften people’s perceptions of RT’ while also demonstrating ‘that they are a professional organisation’. Others felt that RT was commemorating the revolution simply because ‘it’s their story really . . . they were the best placed in the world really to cover this cataclysmic event’.

Our analysis shows how audiences of 1917LIVE were attracted to the project because they felt that ‘Western’ media failed to provide a sufficient engagement with Russian history and/or that their coverage was excessively negative and playing to Russophobia in and of the ‘west’. It highlights how audiences felt about the revolution and the desire to understand Russian history from a Russian perspective. Participants were intrigued by how RT would tell stories about the revolution, and they discerned no clear link between 1917LIVE and Russian state policy. Russian public diplomacy of this kind is clearly at its most effective when it lacks a direct instrumentalist political agenda. But what of the historical aspects? How and why did focus group participants engage with the re-enactment itself?

Experiencing the Russian revolution through 1917LIVE

Participants identified a variety of reasons associated with the unique aspects of historical re-enactments: (1) pastpresents, (2) history from below and (3) participatory experiences. Participants felt that RT made 1917LIVE relevant to contemporary society and politics through an effective use of Twitter’s style and convention – ‘the culture of Twitter’ – to portray the revolution in a way that was ‘almost as if rather than it being just historical’. This involved an effective characterisation of the 1917LIVE accounts and their personalities, and how these fit the tone of Twitter ‘because Lenin, you know, is catty enough that he fits quite well into Twitter’. Another agreed, suggesting ‘It’s very Internet-savvy . . . It’s like prime irony left-wing Twitter fodder’. Others also commented on how innovative 1917LIVE was, stating ‘I’ve never seen that kind of thing done before . . . you’ve got a historical event . . . live on the screen . . . It was gripping, it was absolutely gripping’. Throughout 1917LIVE, RT utilised visual archive material and VR videos effectively according to our participants who approved of the ‘colourised pictures’ where ‘the old photos were just fantastic’. Through innovations like these, RT has successfully used social media for participatory engagement in the service of public diplomacy (Miazhevich, 2018: 15). Subsequently, RT’s use of social media to represent the past can be seen to create positive perceptions in its audiences as it suggests that they viewed RT as a credible and savvy international broadcaster – something that is essential to effectively using public diplomacy to build soft power (Nye, 2008: 101).

Here it is worth a short but important aside that offers insights into some of the contingent and contextual factors that contributed to the attraction of 1917LIVE. RT’s social media offices at the time were based in Dublin amid a plethora of media companies and start-ups, including the Irish state broadcaster RTE (Raidió Teilifís Éireann – not to be confused as some do with RT). RTE (2016) had created an online and TV historical commemoration of Ireland’s 1917 Easter Uprisings. RT’s cultural and geographic proximity to such sites of innovative media production allowed not just for a cross-fertilisation of ideas but also helps understand how the slow but progressive normalisation of RT as an international media outlet is taking place.

Participants were also engaged by 1917LIVE’s account of ‘history from below’ that provided an historical insight beyond that of ‘Great Men’. They felt that this was done through the variety of character accounts and the ‘different voices and perspectives’ involved. This ‘bottom-up’ view of the revolution was ‘quite effective’ and our participants were engaged by ‘the different characters . . . people on the ground day to day seeing it through’. They discussed how 1917LIVE demonstrated that ‘there’s different actors in Russian society, like intellectuals, industrial workers, soldiers, sailors’ and featured ‘women’s stories’ alongside ‘nameless individuals and factory workers’. Participants felt that 1917LIVE ‘was actually saying Russian society was very divided, and very fluid’. They noted that 1917LIVE provided an insight into the everyday lives of famous figures such as Lenin and his ‘personal story . . . it showed that he wasn’t some almost god like figure’.

Here, 1917LIVE was understood to have ‘brought the revolution alive’ through drama and confrontation between characters which had a ‘slightly soap opera-y quality’. It was, as one participant stated, like ‘an online Punch and Judy show’. This attention to history from below, the personal drama between the character accounts and the focus on the everyday experience of the revolution ‘made it very human’. By using such a vernacular focus, 1917LIVE conveyed a sense of everyday experiences that audiences could relate to, and it highlighted how historical re-enactments on social media can function as tools of public diplomacy that do not provide ‘strategic narratives’ (Miskimmon et al., 2013) or clear policy lines. Rather, they can attract audiences because of how relatable they are. This was done by making participants feel as if they were ‘right there in the middle’, experiencing the revolution as it happened with a sense of ‘the zeitgeist . . . the mood, and the changing mood in places’.

Through the ways in which 1917LIVE provided a participatory reliving of the Russian revolution, audiences became engaged in what Withers (2014) refers to as ‘a time travelling, affective historical encounter that brings history alive in a continuous present where past, present and future interweave’ (p. 699). This involved sensory, affective forms of engagement such as atmospheres, moods and humour; as one participant stated that ‘it’s fun and you do learn a lot from it’. Our focus group study suggests that RT was effective in instigating an interest and affective investment in Russian history and culture.

Conclusion

1917LIVE stands as a clear example of new participatory digital forms of public diplomacy. The participation of audiences was a key aspect of 1917LIVE, drawing Twitter users into a compelling experience of reliving of revolutionary history. 1917LIVE marks quite a departure from conventional RT broadcast and social media content that so often focusses on holding the ‘West’ to account and portraying it as hypocritical and corrupt. Indeed, the use of a social media re-enactment seems to be directed at a different younger, media savvy, demographic and suggests that RT is attempting to engage with different and diverse audiences. Re-enactment lends itself to an active, participatory co-shaping of historical events and to a ceding of control over state-sanctioned official narratives and versions of history. This suggests that RT’s social media special projects – such as 1917LIVE – allow for greater experimentation and innovation than conventional broadcast news outputs and suggests that with such endeavours RT is moving towards the kind of smart public diplomacy that displays some ‘understanding of the roles of credibility, self-criticism, and civil society in generating soft power’ (Nye, 2008: 94).

RT was effective in engaging audiences by collapsing past into present through the sensation of ‘liveness’, directing attention to everyday stories of history and revolution, and provoking a participatory, affective intimacy with the characters that was at one and the same time informing, entertaining and educative. This kind of project can progressively help to normalise RT’s presence as a public diplomacy actor on the international broadcasting stage, albeit at a time when others are trying to undermine or derail it.

In deploying a cultural studies approach to analysing 1917LIVE, we showed how international broadcasters now deploy a whole host of digital resources, including social media re-enactments, as public diplomacy tools to create soft power effects. We analysed how RT sought to commemorate a significant event in its national history and the interactive and identificatory processes involved. We shed light on how such public diplomacy ‘special projects’ in the short term can contribute to soft power effects in the longer term. In inviting active participation on the part of the audiences, Russia’s 1917 revolution could be co-narrated, eschewing official state narratives of the revolution. As a result, RT’s social media re-enactment unfolded more unpredictably with humour and irony, as well as with an impressive cast of characters using of visual imagery that attracted audiences to co-shape a live performance.

Our analysis of 1917LIVE provided insights into how an interactive ‘history from below’ can work in more subtle ways than is suggested in recent scholarship on ‘strategic narratives’ in the service of public diplomacy. Our research highlights how public diplomacy can work in ways that eschew top-down foreign policy strategic messaging and instead involve audiences in much broader political debates – such as the role of revolution in contemporary society. Audiences were attracted to 1917LIVE precisely because it lacked an explicit strategic narrative about Russia – dislodging, even if only temporarily, common assumptions of RT as Putin’s mouthpiece. By projecting a view of history from below, 1917LIVE encouraged audiences to identify with ‘the people’, with the revolutionaries and to co-create a more open diverse set of interpretations of the 1917 revolutions. Audiences participated by reporting events ‘as if’ they were happening today as breaking news. This participatory aspect enabled the re-enactment to travel across Twitter and reach new audiences – traversing news, entertainment and educational genres.

While focussed on 1917LIVE, our study highlights how cultural commemorations are taking new and diverse forms in a digital age. Social media re-enactments are now important sites for broader investigations of how public diplomacy contributes to soft power in the digital age. Further research is needed in order to understand the contingent and contextual factors shape social media re-enactments of key historical events and their audiences in different national contexts. Nevertheless, 1917LIVE provides a telling example of how cultural commemoration, when combined with interactive didactic entertainment, can draw audiences in more closely to the characters and events. And in the case of RT, as a broadcaster that is widely disdained as mere propaganda, it allowed for subtle shifts in perception, drawing audiences closer to RT and by association directing attention and attracting audiences to Russian history. As the likes of RT continue to forge new kinds of interactive cultures of commemoration, it is imperative that we understand how their uses of history engage audiences in novel forms of participation, subtly, in ways that serve present-day political ends.