Abstract
Two themes echo from this book: First, the suggestion among Western critics that television broadcasters in Russia always kowtow to the official Kremlin line is not true, and, second, that Russia is struggling with an us-versus-them mentality in which the us is not as defined as one might expect.
Stephen Hutchings and Vera Tolz, both professors of Russian studies at the University of Manchester, argue that Russian television news and talk programs demonstrate that Russia is a conflicted and often desperate nation seeking to understand its political leadership, its identity, and its place in the world. They contend that though the media often acquiesce to the Kremlin’s demands, especially during times of crisis, they are apt to go off the reservation at other times. When they do, the absence of uniform reporting contributes to the uneasiness permeating Russian society.
A growing tension exists within Russia about who are Russians. Are they people born there but who now live in other places within the former Soviet Union (such as Ukraine)? Are they citizens of Russia? Must they be of Slavic origin? Must they support Orthodox Christianity to be considered real Russians?
Although the Kremlin speaks of Russia as a multiethnic and harmonious nation, ample evidence tells a different story. Hutchings and Tolz suggest that with the Kremlin unable to articulate a clear, purposeful and must-follow message regarding ethnicity, television broadcasters report on that topic in sometimes factual, sometimes controversial ways.
The question of supporting Orthodox Christianity has grown in importance because of the lingering war in the Caucasus and with so-called radical Islam on display in various parts of the world, including in Russia. Russian broadcasters, chronically adopting an us-versus-them mentality, seem content arguing that Russia’s challenges with radical Islam are more a factor of migrants refusing to assimilate and become Russian, whereas in the West, radical Islam is a by-product of hostile governmental policies. Absent in this argument of “we are better than the West” is any acknowledgment that non-Russians were trampled on during the Soviet era and treated as second-class citizens.
Confounding the issue of ethnicity is President Vladimir Putin’s intentional effort to make the Church untouchable and unassailable, which the authors show contributed heavily to the trial, conviction, and jail time given to members of the Pussy Riot punk band. Delivering a performance deemed sacrilegious and on the altar of one of Moscow’s most revered churches, Pussy Riot was characterized by the government as wantonly defiling the Church and therefore the state. Russian television thus cast the issue as one of morality, whereas the Western media framed the trial as a sham and as an example of an unfair Russian legal system.
The book also explores the government’s and television’s inability to drum up support for the Day of National Unity, to coalesce around a message that sternly speaks against violence without suggesting non-Russians are somehow prone to such acts, and how media away from the national capital depict these ethnicity and its underlying tensions.
Hutchings and Tolz provide a complex discussion about Russian television that could get lost among undergraduate students, no matter how familiar they might be with Russian politics, history, or media. As such this book, and its unfortunately hefty price, should be reserved for graduate-level courses exploring the sociology of international media or with a specific focus on Russia.