Political Criticism From the Soviet Kitchen to the Russian Internet: A Comparative Analysis of Russian Media Coverage of the December 2011 Election Protests

Abstract

The election protests in Moscow in December 2011 signified an important moment for Russian society. Political dissent, historically reserved for the private domain of Soviet kitchens and in recent years to the regulation-free space of the Russian Internet (RuNet), entered the public space of Moscow streets. Just like the protests revealed the long-held tension between the political discussion (and action) in Russian public and private spheres, the coverage of the protests by different media brought to light similar struggles in Russian journalism. This project combines the textual analysis of the protests’ coverage by two progovernment and two oppositional media with the analysis of their connections to the RuNet—a space that played an important role in the protests’ organization and coordination. The project aims to gain a deeper understanding of the role RuNet—a private space that increasingly becomes more public—plays in the development of Russian journalism.

Discourse of non-participation in Russian political culture: Analyzing multiple sites of hegemony production

“…Most big cities in Russia were flooded with aggrieved and disappointed citizens. Despite this fact, each federal TV channel first ignored these events, though later most of them framed the protests negatively (Popkova, 2014). This framing was supposed to ‘undermine public support for anti-regime activism’ (Lankina, 2016: 1).…”

Transitions to nowhere: Western teleology and regime-type classification

“…For instance, the allegation that the internet could serve as a trojan horse for the US meddling in internal affairs is one of the reasons presented by the Cuban government to justify restrictions to internet freedom (Khrustaleva, 2021). Putin's Russia also used national security as an argument to justify a law obliging that NGOs receiving foreign funding to declare themselves “foreign agents” (Popkova, 2016). Still, societies described as consolidated democracies also justify limits to the freedom of expression based on similar arguments.…”

Alexei Navalny and Protests in Russia: Growth of Online Activism Under the Authoritarian System

“…Murphy, F. (2017) states that tendencies such as widespread visual political irony, "slacktivism" 1 and horizontal communication structures can be considered inevitable difficulties with modern online communication and fundamental limitations of the internet itself as a political tool. Research on Russian internet as a 'revolutionary space' is conducted by Toepfl (2011), Popkova (2014) Ermoshina & Musiani (2017), Asmolov & Kolozaridi (2021). Furthermore, Lokot (2018)'s paper finds that Russian opposition activists place a high value on digital, media, and security literacy and that navigating the internet using security tools and protocols such as VPN, two-phase authentication, and encrypted messaging is increasingly seen as the default modus operandi for those participating in organized dissent in Russia to mitigate growing state surveillance.…”