From a threatening “Muslim migrant” back to the conspiring “West:” race, religion, and nationhood on Russian television during Putin’s third presidency

Abstract

This article analyzes official discourse of the nation during Vladimir Putin’s third presidency, as reflected in Russian television coverage of Islam and migration. It argues that the replacement of earlier deliberately ambiguous definitions of Russian nationhood with clearly framed exclusive visions reflects the change in the regime’s legitimation strategy from one based on economic performance to one based on its security record. In this context, the systematic promotion of Russian ethno-nationalism for the purpose of achieving the regime’s general stability began not at the time of Crimea’s annexation, as it is often assumed, but at the time of Putin’s re-election amidst public protests in 2012. The goal of representing the authorities as attentive to public grievances in a society where opinion polls register high levels of xenophobia has prompted state-controlled broadcasters to use ethnoracial definitions of the nation that they had previously avoided. The media campaigns analyzed here also reflect abrupt changes in the precise identity of Russia’s main Others. Such instrumentally adopted sharp discursive swings are unlikely to constitute an appropriate tool for societal consensus management and for the achievement of political stability in the long term.

Keywords:

• Islam
• migration
• nationalism
• television
• official discourse

ORCID

Vera Tolz http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7118-9918

Notes

1. See, for example, the results of a national survey of May 2016 on the uses of the mass media in Russia, which was conducted by the All-Russian Centre for the Study of Public Opinion (VCIOM), http://wciom.ru/index.php?id=236&uid=115679 (Accessed 9 May 2016). Channel 1 is partially state-owned, whereas Rossiia is fully owned by the state.

2. Hybrid regimes are those that combine strong authoritarian traits with democratic ones (Hale 2011).

3. For the analysis of the anti-migration campaign, the article draws on the database of Vesti and Vremia reports which was compiled as part of the “Mediating Post-Soviet Difference Project” (see above). For a detailed discussion of the compiling principles, see Hutchings and Tolz (2015, 41–45). For the analysis of the coverage of the 2015–2016 refugee crisis, the author used Channel 1 and Rossiia’s digital news archives.

4. See, for example, “Vozvrat k proshlomu,” 29 May 2012, http://www.kasparov.ru/material.php?id=4FC49C5C35B59 (Accessed 13 June 2016).

5. On the broadening of the range of coverage that can be seen as Media Events, see, for example, Hepp and Couldry (2010).

6. See, for instance, Putin’s comments at a Valdai Club meeting in September 2013 (Putin 2013).

7. See, for example, the report assessing the impartiality of the BBC coverage, including of migration (BBC 2007).

8. For an excellent summary of debates over the usage of the term racialization as a tool of scholarly analysis, see Murji and Solomos (2005, 1–27).

9. According to this ROMIR survey, 35.8% of the respondents thought that Channel 1 and Rossiia offered coverage which well reflected reality on the ground; and 35.7% believed that the broadcasters downplayed the scale of the problems. See http://www.hf.uio.no/ilos/english/research/projects/neoruss/ (Accessed 11 June 2016).

10. Riots in Moscow’s southern district of Biliulevo proved to be a particularly important episode contributing to the restraining of anti-migration rhetoric on the two main television channels.

11. See also Vremia, 9 July 2015, which quoted a German politician as saying that the United States should fund the resettlement of refugees from the Middle East, as its policies destabilized the region. It should be noted that it is often impossible to hear the actual words which are uttered by the interviewed Western figures. What they allegedly say is articulated by television reporters in the Russian translation. This, however, cannot be trusted, given the manipulation of information to which state-aligned journalists resort.

12. The article which is referred to in this report was published by the Daily Express on 18 November 2015. http://www.express.co.uk/news/world/555434/Islamic-State-ISIS-Smuggler-THOUSANDS-Extremists-into-Europe-Refugees (Accessed 17 May 2016). The report called the newspaper Sunday Express.

13. See also Vremia, 18 January 2016, and 23 March 2016.

14. See also Vesti, 7 January 2016, 22 January 2016, and 1 February 2016.

15. See http://www.hf.uio.no/ilos/english/research/projects/neoruss/.

16. http://www.novayagazeta.ru/news/1697238.html (Accessed 11 June 2016).

Additional information

Funding

This article emanates from two research projects: “Nation-Building and Nationalism in Today’s Russia (NEORUSS),” which was funded by the Norwegian Research Council [project code 220599]; and “Mediating Post-Soviet Difference: An Analysis of Russian Television Representations of Inter-Ethnic Cohesion Issues,” which was funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council [project code AH/HO18964/1].