Having monitored Russia's war narratives since the invasion began, one thing is puzzling: some narratives quickly faded from broadcast media, yet remain in active circulation. How?
A short 🧵on the double lives of Russia's war narratives (aka my #APSA2022 paper) 1/9
(For background on previous findings from both federal and regional broadcast media, you can check out this earlier thread):
Looking at federal TV, we see a familiar tangle of war narratives. There's just one narrative that rises about all others: Ukrainian nationalists as Russia's enemy. Justifications for the war faded esp. after Mariupol. Schemes against Russia are reduced to sanctions. 3/9
The situation is even more stark on regional tv & radio, where only sanctions get significant notice. Every other narrative is reported less frequently than the weather, meaning in practice that they aren't all that salient in everyday life. 4/9
But even when narratives no longer register on tv, they continue to be circulated and amplifed online. For ex., the narrative that Russia invaded to stop genocide was loudly claimed at the start of the war and quickly abandoned on tv, but it took on another life online. 5/9
The majority of these references to genocide were driven by a handful of websites, with the top 3 websites accounting for as much as 50% of mentions. The top sites usually include RIA Novosti and another news site, but also pro-Kremlin blogs and special interest sites. 6/9
Most of these not only repeat the genocide claim but even replicate phrasing. Kommersant mentioned genocide 133 times in the last week of May. The same sentence could be found in paragraphs appended to 243 stories published online by "rusunlimited.ru" that same week.
7/9
One finds similar dynamics in mentions of the Ukrainian nationalists narrative. While it almost completely disappeared from regional tv & radio, it continues to thrive on regional websites in similar fashion to the genocide claim. 8/9
There's more to tell, but the upshot is that Russia war narratives take on double lives. They are seeded into national audiences on tv & radio and then move online for amplification and circulation...including well beyond Russia (but that's another story). 9/9
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My response (open access!) to this essay by Sarty: "Misreading Russia" is the latest in the tradition of "getting Russia wrong," in which the West worries incessantly about all the things it made Russia do by not understanding it.
2/ The most obvious point is that no serious person would argue that you don't need an appreciation of a country's history and culture to make good policy, Russia included. But it's a mistake to say that war in Ukraine resulted from the West's failure to appreciate Russia.
3/ Btw, there's a lengthy academic lineage to this kind of claim, most vividly in Stephen Cohen's fin de siècle "Russian Studies Without Russia" and Stephen Fish's rejoinder, "Russian Studies Without Studying."
But let's focus on the claims for now...
Navalny will be remembered as a martyr, but he left a significant imprint on Russian politics and our understanding of how autocracies work (and don't work). Here's a short sampling of how Navalny's been studied in academic research: 1/
2/ Plenty has been written on Navalny’s nationalism, but more important was his transformation into an anti-corruption populist & the “oppositional mirror image of Putin.” It made him effective. It’s also why he was distrusted by so many outside Russia. dx.doi.org/10.1080/096681…
3/ The Kremlin cut the purse strings for NGOs, activists, and opposition. Navalny pioneered crowdfunding in Russia as a way to support civil society. His success also spawned a wave of conspiracy theories that he was secretly funded by the Kremlin.
In my last 🧵, I showed how Russians were seeing less of the war on TV while war narratives reduced over time to NATO, Nazis, and humanitarian corridors.
But, who is Russia "liberating" from NATO and Nazis?
1/13
One of the ways that Russian TV talks about the war without calling it a war is by referring instead to territories in Ukraine as "liberated" - as in, liberated from Nazis, nationalists, and NATO.
The term is used a LOT, but how the term is used is particularly revealing. 2/13
For the first weeks, it was villages in the Donbass that were "liberated." Russian TV breathlessly listed them like a score sheet.
But soon, reports started to elide their locations, seemingly avoiding mention of Russia's push through Central Ukraine towards Kyiv. 3/13
Navalny's FBK team released new survey results looking at economic activity as a way to gauge actual support for the war in Russia. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the picture is rather depressing.
It's not hard to figure why: nearly half (49%) of respondents have no savings whatsoever. Only 18% have savings that could last them 3+ months. Nearly a quarter of respondents also reported that a close friend became unemployed in the last 3 months. 3/7
Russian media observation update: we see a lot of tweets about notorious talk show propagandists, but what are most Russians seeing on television?
This might surprise you, but the answer is more of the same about Ukraine, but a lot less about NATO and the West.
1/10
Let's start with Russia's declared war aims of "demilitarization" and "denazification" of Ukraine. These already dropped off viewers' televisions by April, with barely any mention since.
So what are the ways the war is presented and justified? 2/10
At first glance, Russia's various war narratives are highly confusing. It looks like someone threw a bunch of noodles against the wall to see what sticks. The first thing to note is that no narrative is fully abandoned. All persist with varying levels of intensity. 3/10