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The temporality of memory politics: An analysis of Russian state media narratives on the war in Ukraine
The British Journal of Sociology
Abstract
This paper seeks to enhance memory studies' conceptual toolkit by reconsidering established perspectives on “memory politics.” The paper theorizes various modes of temporal connectivity cultivated through politicized references to a shared past. Our empirical case is focused on a collection of roughly 5.000 recent articles about the war in Ukraine from major Russian state-aligned news outlets. We analyze and typologize the narrative and rhetorical gestures by which these articles make the Soviet “Great Patriotic War” and the post-Soviet “special military operation” speak to one another, both prior to and following the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The analysis demonstrates that even in contemporary Russia's tightly controlled, propagandistic mass media ecology, politicized uses of memory foster diverse temporal structures within the propaganda narratives. We present a typology of these relations, mapping the distinct modes and intensities of connections between past and present. At one end of the spectrum, we identify a mode of temporal organization that presents past events and figures as fully detached from the present, available solely for historiographic reflection. At the other end, we find narratives that entirely collapse historical distance, addressing contemporary audiences as participants in a timeless war drama, with stakes that transcend any specific historical period. We propose that the presented typology may be applicable beyond our specific case. As a tool for analyzing the hitherto understudied organization of time in politicized articulations of memory, it could be employed in various cultural and political contexts. Furthermore, our approach can serve as a foundation for future research into the actual persuasive and affective impact that specific temporal modalities may have on their target audiences.
The article examines the generation and deployment of visual narratives in Ukrainian and Russian digital participatory cultures, with a specific focus on internet memes in the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It analyzes the form, content, and functions of these memes and highlights their similarity in mobilizing and conveying political messages despite variations in their visual components. The study indicates that Ukrainian memes are used not only to promote political agendas but also serve as trauma coping and collective identity construction mechanisms in times of crisis, helping to promote new war narratives that are engaged in the construction of the self and the other.
This article examines the war discourse on Russian television, particularly in political talk show broadcasts aired after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine on February 24, 2022. The question of how the two conflicting parties, Russia and Ukraine, are portrayed verbally and visually in these shows is specifically emphasized. While the quantitative analysis traces a massive increase in Russian talk show broadcasts since the beginning of the war, the Critical Discourse Analysis demonstrates which strategies are utilized to demonise and defame the Ukrainian side and to legitimise the war. By comparing the current war discourse with the Ukraine discourse in 2014, this study shows that talk shows have undertaken a significant role in supporting the war and have become a puissant didactic tool to influence and manipulate public opinion by perennially repeating key governmental messages and efficiently orchestrating all visual, verbal, and non-verbal means at their disposal.
Contributing to the ‘narrative turn’ in International Relations and offering an answer to the question ‘What makes a strategic narrative efficient?’, this article adds to the methodological theorization of the formation and projection phases of the narrative’s lifecycle. We suggest that the impact of the constructed image in the narrative can be reinforced by the interplay of at least three projection properties: (1) content accentuation and priming, through iterations; (2) content contextualization, through historical and cultural resonance with the consumers’ memories; and (3) content verbalization, through narrative tactics that evoke a range of the consumers’ involved attitudes to the framed image. These properties, being intrinsic ingredients of the projected content, tend to enhance emotions. In our work, they get traction in the antagonistic narrative tailored by the Russian propaganda to depict Ukraine orientated towards the European Union (EU). The empirical case study analyses articles published on the Russian e-news platforms portraying the EU granting Ukrainians visa-free travel to the Schengen area in 2017, a milestone in Ukraine–EU relations. We define Russia’s narrative, created in reaction to this event, as antagonistic and consider it to be a precursor of the aggressive narrative crafted/employed by Russia to justify its 2022 military assault on Ukraine’s sovereignty.
The Russian Federation has been carrying out long-term and successful disinformation and propaganda activities against Ukraine. Due to its powerful, state-supported media structures, it is able to impose its vision of reality on its respective audiences. The purpose of this article is to determine the lexemes and topics of the “landscape” of analytical reports produced by Russia Today (RT) in 2018–2020. Lexemes and topics lay the groundwork for the RT propaganda discourse aimed at interfering and disbalancing Ukraine’s media space. This paper, based on quantitative and qualitative analysis, focuses on (1) the vocabulary structure of analytical materials, which may indicate Russian priorities, and (2) the thematic content (hidden topics) of RT messages. The RT analytical reports titles and relevant metadata were analyzed. The body of data was subdivided into periods of presidencies of P. Poroshenko and V. Zelensky. The authors argue that personalities do not play a significant role in the Kremlin’s attitude toward Ukraine; only the Ukraine-Russia opposition is decisive, in which the RF assigns Ukraine the only acceptable role as Russia’s “puppet.”
This introductory essay begins with a discussion of World War II memory in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus, in light of the recent and ongoing war in Ukraine. It outlines the main contours of the interplay between “memory wars” and real war, and the important “post-Crimean” qualitative shift in local memory cultures in this connection. Next, the essay sketches out the specifics of the war memory landscapes of the region, and then of each of the three individual countries, before moving on to introduce the key organizing themes and findings of the book.
This paper explores the hegemonic discourse on historical memory in contemporary Russia, in addition to its political implications. Furthermore, the role played by the Russian media system in the dissemination of the memory discourse endorsed by the Kremlin, and its impact, are also described. The analysis is carried out in a theoretical framework that advocates for the need for delving deeper into the intersections between communication and memory studies.
Objectivity in news reporting is one of the most widely discussed topics in journalism, and a number of studies on bias in news have been conducted, but there is little agreement on how to define or measure news bias. Aiming to settle the theoretical and methodological disagreement, the author redefined news bias and applied a new methodology to detect the Russian government’s influence on ITAR-TASS during the Ukraine crisis. A longitudinal content analysis of over 35,000 English-language newswires on the Ukraine crisis published by ITAR-TASS and Interfax clearly showed that ITAR-TASS’ framing of Ukraine was reflecting desirability of pivotal events in the crisis to the Russian government. This result reveals Russia’s strategic use of the state-owned news agency for international propaganda in its ‘hybrid war’, demonstrating the effectiveness of the new approach to news bias.
This article argues that fundamental controversial parts of the past – that since 1990 have been labeled as “catastrophic”, “post-traumatic”, “terroristic” and “haunting” – are overstretching the normal “historical” concept of “the past”. This is the case because historians normally presuppose that the past does "go away" - and therefore is distant and absent from the present. Thepresupposition that the “hot” present transforms into a “cold” past by itself, just like normal fires extinguish and “cool off” by themselves, has been constitutive for history as a discipline. This process of “cooling off” is often conceived of as the change from memory to history. The first part of this article connectsthe rise of history as the discipline studying “the past” to the invention of the “modern” future in the late eighteenth century and to the introduction of a linear and progressive notion of time. Next, the rise of memory as the central notion for understanding the past will be connected to the implosion of the future and of progressive linear time at the end of the twentieth century. This implosion was predominantly caused by the growing consciousness since the late 1980’s of the catastrophic character of the twentieth century. The second part argues that present definitions of the relationship between history and memory have typically remained ambiguous. This ambiguity is explained by the problematic distinction between the past and the present. Historians have been rather reluctant in recognising the fact that this fuzzy distinction represents a problem for the idea of history as a discipline as such.
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.
Through a close reading of media reports and public rituals in 2005-2011, associated with the remembering of the Great Patriotic War, the essay traces a sizable mnemonic shift - from the playful retrofitting of the past in the late 1990s, with its aesthetics of ironic noninvolvement, to the obvious attempts to envision "history" as an assemblage of emotionally charged objects, undertaken during the past decade. Following two phenomena - forms of memorialization realized in the process of embodiment, and a desire for historical connectivity fulfilled through acts of memorial linking - the article shows how these two kinds of mnemonic activity emerge as dominant ways of approaching and organizing the Soviet experience of the Great Patriotic War in postmillennial Russia.
Резюме:
В статье Сергея Ушакина анализируются различные форматы обращения к теме Великой Отечественной войны в прессе и публичные коммеморативные ритуалы 2005-2011 гг. В центре внимания - мнемонический сдвиг с игровой "ретроизации" 1990-х гг., с присущей ей эстетикой иронической дистанцированности, на попытки представить "историю" как набор эмоционально заряженных объектов. В статье рассматриваются два феномена: формы коммеморации, реализующиеся через наделение объектов эмоциональным содержанием, и создание ощущения исторической преемственности посредством акта коммеморативного увязывания. Ушакин показывает, как эти типы мнемонической деятельности функционируют в качестве доминирующих способов восприятия и организации советского опыта Великой Отечественной войны в России 2000-х годов.
This article analyses the discursive construction of collective and individual memories and the functions of commemorative events for the discursive construction of national identities through the example of Austrian post-war commemorative events. Thus, the various attempts to come to terms with the Nazi past in post-war Austria are illustrated in detail. The article will first summarize the socio-political contexts relating to the relevant post-war commemorative years in Austria (1988, 1995, 2005). Then we will consider sequences of a political speech by the then Austrian chancellor, Dr Wolfgang Schüssel, as one of many possible examples in 2005 which establishes a hegemonic stance towards the Nazi past. Finally, we will discuss our results and illustrate that, in addition to hegemonic discourses, competing narratives aim to provide different answers to the basic question `how should one come to terms with traumatic pasts?' Our results are such that in the hegemonic narrative of Austrian history after 1945, the political event of the Declaration of Independence is represented metaphorically as a `rebirth'; a metaphorical scenario which constructs a `creation myth', and by this anthropomorphization suggests that `newborn' Austria is to be perceived as innocent as a newborn child. On the other hand, the historical events before and after are placed in the cognitive frame of natural disasters or fateful events (`horror', `nightmare', `dark age') and a community of victims is discursively constructed comprising the victims of the Nazi terror as well as the soldiers waging the war of aggression. Discursive patterns apparent in this case study can, of course, be generalized to similar communicative events in many nation-states. The specific systematic and explicit linguistic/pragmatic and discourse-analytic methodology presented in this article lends itself to deconstruct official discourses which influence collective beliefs, opinions and ideologies.
Qualitative research is built on codes, and researchers must master the processes for creating codes and drawing insights from their analyses. In this chapter, the author discusses the various types of codes and approaches to coding. The quality of the output of qualitative data analysis is dependent on codes and the coding process. Codes may be relevant or irrelevant and the differences between them, and their significance, are explained in this chapter. The chapter discusses code categories and groups, and themes are derived from them. This chapter introduces coding cycle and Computer Assisted/Aided Qualitative Data Analysis (CAQDAS). After a brief overview, the author highlights the advantages and limitations of CAQDAS.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, which started on February 24, 2022, has marked a turning point in Russian-Western relations. While liberal democratic societies’ unanimous condemnation of that invasion was followed by unprecedented sanctions and a rupture of diplomatic and economic relations with Russia, some Western social and political actors supported, to some extent, the Russian rhetoric regarding the invasion of Ukraine. Consequentially, this paper not only reveals that Russian state discourses aimed to justify the invasion, it also identifies the selective dissemination of Russian state discourses by the AfD in Germany. Moreover, it compares the antagonistic discursive dynamics in the authoritarian pseudo-civil sphere and the similar discourses of the radical right in the democratic civil sphere, and examine their reception in Russia and Germany. Drawing on Multilayered Narrative Analysis, which relies on a combination of cultural sociological Civil Sphere Theory (CST) and mnemonic figurations developed in the historical sociology of Bernhard Giesen, this paper first describes the Russian state discourses intended to sacralize the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It then examines to what extent the populist radical right disseminated these in Germany, before analyzing and comparing the symbolic influence of such discourses in the Russian pseudo-civil and German civil spheres.
The article discusses the coverage of the two first months of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine by mass media in four countries, Russia, Ukraine, the United States, and the United Kingdom. In total, publications in seven mass media (online news portals and print newspapers) were content analyzed, along with war-related speeches of political leaders in those countries. An original method for assessing war propaganda effectiveness was used. It implies tracking the propagation of a political leader’s message through the mass media. The fewer distortions in the process, the more effective propaganda is. With the help of this method, it was determined that despite the severe restrictions imposed by the government, war propaganda in Russia appeared to be relatively ineffective. President Putin’s messages tended to be ‘lost in transmission.’
The use of disinformation and propaganda to brand the uprisings in East Germany 1953, Hungary 1956 and Prague 1968 as ‘fascist coups’ or a ‘NATO-plot’ constituted a prevailing element of Soviet policy against populations of the Eastern bloc and the West. In this article, the content and strategies of Soviet disinformation will be discussed. Overall, these untruths were disseminated to justify military interventions that the Kremlin prepared alongside its disinformation campaigns. Using these three case studies as a basis, an assessment will be given as to which degree disinformation distorts the politics of memory of these historical events. Furthermore, recent disinformation campaigns directed against Ukraine will be appraised and put into the historical context of the East-West conflict.
Current Russia’s policy towards Ukraine is a sample of regionalization and re‐territorialization based on (geo‐)political reasons only. Kremlin uses different ‘markers’ and tools to reshape Ukrainian regional identity. The main purpose of the article is to discover the role of media in creating and sharing the Kremlin’s narratives as a tool for the legitimization of its war on Ukraine and the manipulation of the citizens’ minds in both countries. The paper is based on the Regional Studies and Discourse Analysis methodology that enables it to be moved from the meta‐level to the level of discursive practices in which Russian officials’ rhetoric is changing the regional identity of the neighbouring countries. Therefore, the paper starts by arguing whether a place for critical thinking in Russian mass media. Then it identifies and describes key Kremlins’ narratives represented in the Russian media on ‘special operation’ in Ukraine 2022. The presented conclusions are grounded on a discursive analysis of the articles of major Russian daily nationwide quality newspapers and online news portals (Moscow times, Kommersant, Izvestiya, Rossiyskaya Gazeta). The article aspires to conclude that Russian officials’ rhetoric widely spread by Russian media is necessary to perceive as a tool of the Kremlin’s conscious task to reformat regional identity both Russian and Ukrainian. A shift from the ‘Ukraine loses the war’ to ‘Russia is at war with the West’ to save Ukrainians, to protect Russia, its identity and even civilization, and the introduction of a special glossary can be used for the re‐territorialisation that allows the existing geopolitical space changing.
Recognizing that the past does not necessarily pass of its own accord but rather is made to pass is crucial for understanding relationships between collective memory, temporality and the past. Analyzing processes of temporal negotiation reveals that changing the ending (or, in some cases creating one at all) requires re‐envisioning the entire sequence of events. Thus, the ending (if there is one) depends on the beginning. British prime ministers' references to 9/11 in public addresses demonstrate this process of temporal negotiation about whether and how to create an ending. Tony Blair constructed the attacks as a legacy, thus sustaining the past as part of the present. To unwind this construction and consign 9/11 to the past, Gordon Brown and David Cameron needed to disrupt the flow of contingent incidents in which Blair had embedded 9/11. By redefining the narrative's beginning, they made it possible to bring 9/11 to an end.
This article focuses on the ongoing conflict in Eastern Ukraine (Donbass) that started with the events on the Euromaidan and the swift annexation of Crimea by Russia. Our analysis of key speeches by Vladimir Putin regarding the annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbass demonstrates that in this case, populism extends beyond the dichotomy of the people against the establishment, since it relies on complex notions of enmity and alliance. We argue that the Russian political leadership deployed a discourse of Russian identity based on an overstretched definition of the Russian nation, a new discursive division of the political space, and the introduction of new and the reaffirmation of old symbols of unity. We also conclude that populism and nationalism were used interchangeably depending on the audience: the Russian leadership has used discursive strategies associated with populism to articulate this new vision of identity to residents of Crimea and nationalist ones when addressing domestic audiences.
This article explores how Russian television news deconstructed the narrative embracing Ukrainians as ‘brothers’ through repositioning them within an imagined social reality wherein Ukrainians assume the guise of a threatening ‘Other’. The research material comprises extracts from Channel One, which is one of Russia’s most significant and popular television channels. The data was collected from the channel’s website over two years from 1 November 2012 to 31 October 2014. The sample of 480 news stories was selected on the basis of tag words and engagement with the stories on social media. Frames comprising visual, auditory and textual streams were analysed to explore the narratives about Ukrainians that were promulgated both before and during the Ukrainian crisis. The data revealed that, prior to the conflict, the media portrayed Ukraine as Russia’s ‘little brother’. Following Euromaidan, Channel One replaced this guise with that of an enemy in order to appeal directly to the cultural and spiritual values of its audience. Applying the conceptual framework of strategic narrative, the study illustrates the dynamics at play in the transformation of one image into another.
The article offers an analysis of historical politics and political use of the “historical statehood” concept in the unrecognized republics of Transnistria and Donbass. It traces the use of the“historical statehood” by the Transnistrian and Donbass separatist leaders for legitimizing their cause, in their political struggle and expansionist pursuits, and in the appeals to the population of territories under the control of the central governments. A specific strategy of self-legitimization and self-representation, emphasizing multiethnicity and declarative rejection of ethnic nationalism, influences the way these separatist regimes employ historical politics and instrumentalize their “historical statehood.” I suggest naming this approach “internationalist separatism.”
Laws against Holocaust denial are perhaps the best-known manifestation of the present-day politics of historical memory. In Memory Laws, Memory Wars, Nikolay Koposov examines the phenomenon of memory laws in Western and Eastern Europe, Ukraine, and Russia and exposes their very different purposes in the East and West. In Western Europe, he shows how memory laws were designed to create a common European memory centred on the memory of the Holocaust as a means of integrating Europe, combating racism, and averting national and ethnic conflicts. In Russia and Eastern Europe, by contrast, legislation on the issues of the past is often used to give the force of law to narratives which serve the narrower interests of nation states and protect the memory of perpetrators rather than victims. This will be essential reading for all those interested in ongoing conflicts over the legacy of the Second World War, Nazism, and communism.
This article argues that accounts of the Russian media system that tend to view the time from Vladimir Putin’s rise to power in 2000 as a single homogenous period do not capture major qualitative shifts in state-controlled media coverage. By analyzing the output of Russia’s two main television channels during Putin’s third presidential term, we identify a range of distinctly new features that amount to a new media strategy. This involves a significant increase in the coverage of political issues through the replacement of infotainment with what we term agitainment—an ideologically inflected content that, through adapting global media formats to local needs, attempts to appeal to less engaged and even sceptical viewers. Despite the tightening of political control over the media following the annexation of Crimea, the new strategy paradoxically has strengthened the constitutive role played by the state-controlled broadcasters in the articulation of official discourse.
The Ukrainian–Russian conflict of 2013–2017 is characterized as ‘hybrid’ warfare, with a crucial role of informational component. Using ideological discourse analytic tools, this article demonstrates how two prominent Russian TV channels shaped the persuasive message, creating strong unity and mobilizing a high level of support among the national audience. Based on legitimation and de-legitimation patterns, Channel One and Russia-1 built ideologically polarized opposition between ‘Our’ and ‘Their’ sides of the conflict. The wide range of editorializing tools, socio-cultural and historical Soviet-time constructs, and references to gay culture served to promote one group and to debase the opposition. Close institutional ties between government and media in Russia sustain multiplicity and intertextuality of ‘general line’, thus eliminating discordant interpretations. The article shows strong evidence that the analyzed TV news programs present a typical illustration of ideological discourse, exploited by the Russian government in order to achieve its political goals.
Since Russia occupied Crimea in March 2014, the Western world has been searching for explanations how this operation was conducted and why it came as a surprise for many military and international relations subject matter experts. The Western media followed by NATO called the Russian activities a form of hybrid warfare, while the Russians spoke about non-linear warfare. One the most important elements in this way of warfare is ‘informationally’, meaning the content as well as the spreading of information. The majority of the Russian actions took place in the information domain. Deception warfare, being a substantial element of information warfare, generates surprise, one of the principles of war. Deception is most of the time a combination of hiding the truth (dissimulation) and showing falsehood (simulation). During deception warfare two variants are used: (1) ambiguity-increased or A-type deception, creating confusion so that the opponent is unsure what to believe, and (2) misleading or M-type deception, reducing ambiguity by offering only one attractive but wrong alternative. Russia developed its own methods of deception over time. Most Russian deception warfare is based on ‘maskirovka’, the reflexive control theory, agitprop and disinformation. These four elements were constantly used by the Russian government, secret services and armed forces during the conflicts in Crimea and Ukraine’s Donbass area in 2014, although Russia still denies every involvement in the latter operation.
Analysts of the post-Soviet memory wars in Ukraine have tended to focus overwhelmingly on the ways in which Ukrainian memory is shaped by regional differences. The regional dimension is certainly important here, but approaching Ukrainian memory exclusively through this lens can serve to obscure other aspects of the landscape. In this chapter, I aim to shift the perspective, with a view to emancipating the rich social reality of Ukrainian memory from the pressures of normative and essentializing schemas and one-sided reductive assessments. Focusing on the changing politics of memory during the presidencies of Leonid Kravchuk (1991–94), Leonid Kuchma (1994–2004) and Viktor Yushchenko (2005–10), I will show that this politics, far from having been structured and predetermined by rigid and entrenched regional fault lines, has in fact been deeply contingent and deeply contradictory. The search for a strategy that would legitimize the new independent Ukraine and its post-Soviet elite without provoking national, linguistic, and/or religious conflict, while all the time with an eye to Russia, was all about improvisation.
While memory can be both retrospective and prospective, referring to either what happened or what needs to be done, scholarship on media and collective memory has focused on retrospective memories. Shifting the focus to the news media as agents of prospective memory, this article develops the notion of mediated prospective memory. This new construct, which encompasses the various media practices by which collective prospective-memory tasks are shaped and negotiated, is intended to shed light on one facet of the complex relationships between past, present, and future in news discourse; create a much needed bridge between the theoretical frameworks of agenda setting and collective memory; and provide one possible answer to the question of what is unique about journalism's memory work.
Russian political elites have long been aware of the power of myths to forge national unity. However, the past six or seven years have seen core myths increasingly situated within a highly selective narrative of Russian history. This narrative is accepted as contextual information for policy discussion, and so sets cognitive parameters for evaluations of Russia's history, identity and role. This standard narrative of Russian history prioritises the state, supports gradualism and continuity, and dramatically reduces the potential for re-conceptualising Russia's role in contemporary international relations.
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