War of words: the impact of Russian state television on the Russian Internet

How effective is Russian state television in framing the conflict in Ukraine that began with the Euromaidan protests and what is its impact on Russian Internet users? We carried out a content analysis of Dmitrii Kiselev's “News of the Week” show, which allowed us to identify the two key frames he used to explain the conflict – World War II-era fascism and anti-Americanism. Since Kiselev often reduces these frames to buzzwords, we were able to track the impact of these words on Internet users by examining search query histories on Yandex and Google and by developing quantitative data to complement our qualitative analysis. Our findings show that much of what state media produces is not effective, but that the “fascist” and anti-American frames have had lasting impacts on Russian Internet users. We argue that it does not make sense to speak of competition between a “television party” and an “Internet party” in Russia since state television has a strong impact in setting the agenda for the Internet and society as a whole. Ultimately, the relationship between television and the Internet in Russia is a continual loop, with each affecting the other.     

Elite recruitment and state-society relations in technocratic authoritarian regimes: The Russian case

This article argues that Russia has a peculiar form of authoritarianism that exhibits pronounced technocratic features. The analysis places in a comparative frame the bases of regime legitimacy and the paths to political, administrative, and economic power in Russia. By locating the Russian state in a matrix that considers the ideology of governance on one axis and the backgrounds of elites on the other, the article highlights areas of overlap and separation between state–society relations in Russia and other regimes in the developed and developing world. It also illustrates the ways in which technocratic elites in Russia differ from their counterparts in other parts of the world.     

The myth of equilibrium: winner power, fiscal crisis and Russian economic reform

It has become common to describe Russia as a state that has only achieved partial reform due to the influence of powerful economic forces, the ‘winners’ of economic reform, and to assume that the Russian state lacks autonomy. This paper questions how far reform in Russia has been compromised by the power of winners. The failure of economic reform between 1992 and 1998 is explained as a policy response by state officials unable to manage tendencies towards fiscal crisis because of the state's general helplessness in managing the Russian economy, rather than as a surrender of sovereignty to economic interests.     

A rise of state activism in a competitive industry: The case of Russian retail trade law of 2009

The paper is aimed at exploring the Russian state return to the highly competitive industry of retail trade by adopting restrictive industry-specific legislation in 2009. We reveal a new precedent model of governance using the liberal rhetoric of the competition protection to justify intervention in interfirm contractual relations. We use survey data collected from 843 retailers and suppliers in 2013 to demonstrate that the new legislation had not achieved the proclaimed goals. The paper concludes that instead of market facilitation, the new state activism leads to the further suppression of business and the subversion of antimonopoly policy.     

Russian hegemonies: historical snapshots, regional security and changing forms of Russia's role in the post-Soviet region

The broad purpose of this study is to exemplify changing forms of hierarchical rule manifested in post-Soviet Russia's varying provision of regional security related to military conflicts. Russia's regional role varies in form and in thickness. Although the endurance of Soviet legacy can be observed in four major areas (stabilising borders, economic interest, unification of fellow Slavs and fluctuating alliances), there is enough variance to suggest that over-deterministic theories about Russian regional foreign policy do not account for conjunctural factors that can contribute to change. Instead, we can view the Soviet and post-Soviet regional dynamic as one that is on a fluid anarchy–hierarchy spectrum.     

When the center can hold: The primacy of politics in shaping Russian democracy

Violations of rights, a weak Duma, political parties dominated by bureaucrats, and corrupt privatization are ordinarily taken as signs or even causes of the failure of democracy in Russia or at best as normal traits of electoral politics in a middle-income state. Yet all of these are natural consequences of introducing democracy in a country with the Russian electorate’s distinctive recent experience of a loss of a third of the state’s territory and half its population. In such a democracy only a centrist, not a liberal, strategy can block a return to authoritarianism, and such a strategy in Russia will subordinate rights to the task of privatization that a Duma weakened by ideological, demographic and geographic impediments to party development cannot conduct. Consequently what are taken as signs or causes of democratic failure in Russia are instead necessary effects of introducing democracy in Russia’s special circumstances.     

The Mordvins: Dilemmas of mobilization in a biethnic community

The paper negotiates ideas, views and beliefs of Bulgarians towards the ethnic minorities of their country published in the Bulgarian press during the period of 2005–2009. Through these aspects it becomes clear that three years after Bulgaria's accession to the European Union and despite various state attempts to integrate minorities – mostly initiated and funded by the EU and various governmental and non-governmental organizations – prejudice and racism have not been overcome, the Other is still differentiated and the way to multiculturalism is very long. The research field is limited to the Turkish and the Roma minorities, which are “visible” in the sense that they are officially recognized.     

The politics of recognition of Crimean Tatar collective rights in the post-Soviet period: With special attention to the Russian annexation of Crimea

This paper examines the process of how Crimean Tatars strived to attain group-differentiated rights since they have returned to their homeland in the early 1990s. Whereas the politics of minority rights were viewed through security lens in earlier literature, we emphasize the significance of cultural constructs in influencing the minority policies, based on qualitative content analysis of “speech acts” of elites, and movement and policy documents. Focusing on the interaction of the framing processes of Crimean Tatars with the Crimean regional government, Ukraine, and Russia, we argue that the “neo-Stalinist frame” has played a major role in denying the rights of Crimean Tatars for self-determination and preservation of their ethnic identity in both pre and post annexation Crimea. The Crimean Tatars counter-framed against neo-Stalinist frame both in the pre and post-annexation period by demanding their rights as “indigenous people”. Ukraine experienced a frame transformation after the Euromaidan protests, by shifting from a neo-Stalinist frame into a “multiculturalist frame”, which became evident in recognition of the Crimean Tatar status as indigenous people of Crimea.     

Centred discourse,decentred practice: the relational production of Russian and Chinese ‘rising’ power in Central Asia

Abstract

This paper challenges dominant understandings of ‘rising powers’ by developing a decentred, relational account of Russia and China in Central Asia. We ask whether Moscow and Beijing’s regional integrative strategies do not guide, but rather are led by, everyday interactions among Russian and Chinese actors, and local actors in Central Asia. Rising powers, as a derivative of ‘Great Powers’, are frequently portrayed as structurally comparable units that concentrate power in their executives, fetishise territorial sovereignty, recruit client states, contest regional hegemony and explicitly oppose the post-1945 international order. In contrast, we demonstrate that the centred discourse of Eurasian integration promoted by Russian and Chinese leaders is decentred by networks of business and political elites, especially with regard to capital accumulation. Adopting Homi K. Bhabha’s notion of mimicry (subversion, hybridity) and J. C. Scott’s conception of mētis (local knowledge, agency), and using examples of Russian and Chinese investments and infrastructure projects in Central Asia, we argue that in order to understand centring discourse we must look to decentring practices at the periphery; that is, rising power is produced through ongoing interactions between actors at the margins of the state’s hegemonic reach.     

Prince Adam Czartoryski as a liminal figure in the development of modern nationalism in Eastern Europe at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

In Polish history, Prince Adam Czartoryski is almost universally regarded as one of the most important Polish statesmen and patriots of the first half of the nineteenth century. In Russian history, on the other hand, he is remembered chiefly as the Foreign Minister of the Russian Empire, and a close personal friend of Tsar Alexander I. How did Czartoryski reconcile his commitment to the Polish nation with his service to the Russian Empire (a state which occupied most of Poland)? This paper will attempt to place Prince Adam's friendship with Alexander, and his service to Imperial Russia, in the broader context of national identity formation in early nineteenth-century eastern Europe. It will be argued that the idea of finding a workable relationship between Poland and Russia, even within the framework of a single state for a “Slavic nation,” was an important and forgotten feature of Polish political thought at the turn of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. By answering the question of precisely how Czartoryski was able to negotiate between the identities of a “Polish patriot” and “Russian statesman,” the paper will shed light on the broader development of national identity in early nineteenth-century Poland and Russia.     

Nomads under arrest: The nation-building and nation-destroying of Kalmyk nomads in Russia

Nomads are positioned outside of the modern conception of nations, which is based on a traditional or modern hierarchical model (Kuzio, 2001) which tends to “dehistoricize and essentialize tradition” (Chatterjee, 2010: 169). Using an analysis of the narrative construction of nomadic Kalmyk nationhood, particularly through historiography and culture, this article demonstrates that in spite of nation-destroying efforts from the Tsarist Empire and the Soviet Union, the Kalmyk nation has been flexible with reinventing cultural strategies in charting the nomadic national imaginary from Chinggis Khan to the Dalai Lama. It argues that nomadic nationhood contains a deeply imaginary response to nomads’ cultural and intellectual milieu which provided a way of freeing itself from Tsarist and Soviet modular narratives of national imagination, demonstrating how nomadic nationhood exists as a non-modular form of nationhood.     

The frustrating partnership: Honor,status, and emotions in Russia's discourses of the West

This paper analyzes Russia's presidential discourses and emotions of the West from March 2008 to December 2012. By studying the languages of inclusiveness and exclusiveness in annual addresses to the Federation Council and public statements, I have identified several distinct stages in the Kremlin's emotional evolution from fear to hope to frustration: the initial fear (March 2008–June 2009), hope (September 2009–the late 2010), and frustration (since the early 2011). The Russia's emotional shifts are shaped by the country's historically established social relations with the West and are not to be reduced to the dynamics of power and prestige/status. Russia's deep emotional connection to the West as well as Russia's own concept of national honor are the two factors that drive the nation's leaders' complex actions, feelings, and rhetoric. Russia displays emotions of hope each time it feels that its honor is being respected and those of frustration, fear and anger when in the eyes of Kremlin its identity/honor as not recognized.     

The ghosts of the past, the dreamlands of the future … or why fantasies are bound to fail in socialism and the market: The case of public health policy development in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia

The transition ‘from planned to market economy’ in the former Soviet Union and in several countries in post-communist Europe is one of the most sweeping social transformations of the second half of the 20th century. It is widely accepted that this transformation was driven by a shared belief in the market's superior ability to deliver economic growth, to create wealth and contribute to the well-being of the populations after the demise of the defunct socialist ideology. However, the element of utopian fantasy undergirding the grand projects of socialism and the market is usually ignored, often with detrimental results. The study draws on Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis to propose an alternative reading of the process of transition, as an exchange of one powerful fantasy for another. My key contention is that as long as the common utopian dream of social harmony underlying both projects will not be recognised for what it is, which is in itself an unattainable desire of the human psyche, the illusory dreamlands will continue to exist and so will their violent political consequences. The study uses the example of public health policy development in the Soviet Union and post-Soviet Russia to illustrate how unacknowledged fantasy leads to violent utilitarianism as it was manifested in socialism, and is now repeated differently but no less tyrannically in the market. In conclusion, I argue for integrating fantasy as a constitutive element of political projects and explore the possibility of the autonomous (self-determined) mode of governance that Cornelius Castoriadis (1987/2005) theorised on and juxtaposed to the heteronomous ways of organising ruled by master signifiers present in various ideologies.     

The Russian Revolution at 100: the Soviet experience in the mirror of permanent counterrevolution

Abstract

The Russian Revolution is analysed in this paper in the context of a conjuncture dominated by counterrevolution. Beginning with the repression of the 1850s, a process of permanent counterrevolution has become the over-determining trend of social-political history. The Russian Revolution was subject to several distinct aspects of this process. First was external counterrevolution, the attack on it from the outside. Whilst Anglo-America was the main bulwark organising it, the Nazi/fascist counterrevolution and invasion of the USSR was an example of counterrevolution that ran out of control and ended in a defeat in Europe that was only overcome through a long and risky Cold War. Internal counterrevolution affected the Russian Revolution as part of a longer process of adjusting socialist theory to successive defeats. In the Soviet case, Socialism in One Country was the decisive mutation in this respect and must be viewed as the decisive component of the triumph of counterrevolution. After the war, Anglo-America adjusted the counterrevolutionary strategy to surgical excisions of socialist tendencies until the USSR, isolated and ideologically exhausted, collapsed. Even so, several of its legacies continue to be relevant, notably the nationality policy and internationalism. Also, today’s information revolution casts a new light on the Soviet planning experience that must be studied now that capitalism is slipping into a systemic crisis.     

Assessing civil society in Putin’s Russia: The plight of women’s crisis centers

The article assesses civil society in Putin’s Russia through the lens of the small social movement working against gender violence. Based on questionnaires distributed to movement organizations in 2008-2009, we find significant retrenchment among the NGO segment of the movement, adding evidence to the claim of Russia’s turn toward authoritarianism. However, this innovative, midlevel analysis--not the typical society-wide surveys nor the small number participant observation--also shows that the women’s crisis center movement has made some in-roads in transforming the state, revealing that some democratic opportunities remain at the local level.     

School-based linguistic and cultural revitalization as a local practice: Sakha language education in the city of Yakutsk,Russian Federation

In the 1990s, efforts were launched in the Republic of Sakha (Yakutia) in the Russian Federation to support the revival of Sakha (Yakut) language education. This interdisciplinary study examines the evolution of school-based Sakha language education in the city of Yakutsk over a 25-year period beginning with the launching of the first reforms in the 1990s. Language education reform in the capital city has been shaped by a dynamic interplay between federal, regional, and local factors. Grassroots social and cultural activism continues to play a key role in school-based language revitalization in Yakutsk, influencing how policies have been received and implemented at the local level. Local community stakeholders are working together to counteract federal education policies, which direct school resources away from minority language education. This case study shows that the Sakha (Yakut) language revival has taken root in the capital city, and it provides important evidence that civic activism continues to develop in urban areas of the republic.     

The Role of the UPC as a Party of Government in Uganda

Given advances in digital cartography, mapmaking is straightforward, affordable, accurate and easy to scale. In the absence of reliable contemporary maps of pre-colonial sub-Saharan West Africa, scholars have been compiling paper-based illustrations of the continent for different regions, periods and purposes. In consequence, there is a large collection of maps thematically, spatially and temporally fragmented throughout the historiography of Africa and the African Diaspora. As a means of addressing this crucial problem, this article surveys hundreds of primary and secondary source maps related to the Bight of Benin hinterland in order to examine the inconsistencies of historical maps of pre-colonial Africa. This theoretical and methodological discussion about historical mapmaking is the first step to defragmenting key secondary source maps and improving upon our historical understanding about Africa's internal geography. Part of the solution is a remake of the political map of the Bight of Benin hinterland in c. 1780.     

The Public Sector as the Employer of Choice among Youth in Egypt: The Relevance of Public Service Motivation Theory

Young people in Egypt want to work in the public sector, even if they get less pay there than at the private sector. This article seeks to explain the attractiveness of public-sector jobs to this group, embedding this experience within the literature and theorization on public service motivation (PSM) and discussing its relevance. Issues of trust, respect, and social status are reflected in the discourse of interviewed youth about this job preference. A generation-held and culturally-ingrained appreciation among the educated to work in the public sector also contributes to this sector preference. Qualitative and quantitative data also show that extrinsic benefits of job security and stability are also pivotal to this preference. The analysis in the article suggests a holistic reading of motivational factors to join the public sector in contexts of job scarcity and labor surplus.     

The Role of Civic Engagement in Trisectoral Governance Approaches as Factors for Success in East German Municipalities

The demographic diminution and the special economic situation in the East necessitate flexible strategies that make use of all available on-site resources. This includes taking into account economic concerns in governmental and developmental strategies for the public sector as well as improved integration of ‘active citizens’, for whom the government must provide adequate basic parameters in order to assure lasting and effective participation. In this context, the following article presents the findings of a study on East German municipalities that clarifies the obstacles and specific potentials of a stronger cooperation between the various societal sectors that is characterised by trisectoral governance.