Mass media and the information climate in Russia

Abstract

This article explores Russian ‘information culture’, asking how information is shared and used in Russia. While the focus is on contemporary Russia, changes and continuities since the Soviet period are also discussed. In the Soviet Union, information was considered a privilege rather than a right while secrecy determined the general information climate. In post-Soviet Russia, the right to information is legally guaranteed, censorship is forbidden, and ‘state secrets’ are limited by law. In practice, however, secrecy and a lack of access to information is a problem much quoted by journalists and citizens alike. This ‘information culture’ is part of the environment the mass media have to work in, and have to cope with.

Notes

These were films and books considered not suitable for general distribution (see Benn 1992, p. 9).

IREX (International Research & Exchange Board), Media Sustainability Index 2005, available at: http://www.irex.org/programs/MSI_EUR/2005/MSI05-Russia.pdf, accessed 20 February 2007.

Data from 1998 onwards are available at: http://www.gdf.ru/monitor/, last accessed 8 October 2006. Earlier reports are published in book form (see Fond Zashchity Glasnosti 1997).

IREX (International Research & Exchange Board), Media Sustainability Index 2001, available at: http://www.irex.org/msi/index.asp, accessed 4 August 2003; and IREX, Media Sustainability Index 2005, available at: http://www.irex.org/programs/MSI_EUR/2005/MSI05-Russia.pdf, accessed 20 February 2007.

Presidential decree of 30 November 1995 (with amendments of 24 January 1998, 6 June, 10 September 2001 and 29 May 2002) extended the list of categories with, among others, information on nuclear weapons and the preparation of international treaties (Aslamazyan 1999, p. 4).

Omri Daily Digest, 13 February 1996.

Formerly the Ministry of Press, Television, Radio and Mass Communication (1999 – 2004) and Federal Service of Television and Radio and Ministry of Press prior to 1999.

A VTSIOM poll (Vserossiiskii Tsentr Izucheniya Obshchestvennogo Mneniya, All-Russian Centre for the Study of Public Opinion) at the end of 2000, for example, shows that 34% of the Russian population shares the idea that Russian media has to ‘fully support’ the president and no opposition is necessary (RFE/RL Newsline, 10 November 2000). See also Wyman (1997).

Interview with Jeremy Drukker, Transitions Online, 10 July 2000.

By reference framework is meant a world view, a value system, and a system of symbolic representation.

Pioneering research on this topic was done by Gabriel Almond and Sidney Verba (1963). The idea, however, is not new. Plato had already taught us that forms of government (oligarchy, democracy, aristocracy and tyranny) differ according to the dispositions of men (Störig 1985, p. 155). In the Soviet Union, the concept was introduced by F. M. Burlatskii in the 1970s. White (1979, p. 58) traces the term politicheskaya kul'tura back to Lenin, and more recently to Brezhnev. But it is obvious that it is in post-communist Russia that the use of the concept is developing the most. See for example Sergeyev and Biryukov (1993).

On the basis of the World Values Survey of 1991 a variable ‘universalism’ was composed and checked for 27 Western and Eastern European countries as well as for the US. The results show a clear pattern: first, there was a striking East – West opposition, only broken by Austria (which had until the 1960s an ambiguous status) and Portugal (which suffered under a long political isolation). The Northern countries (Netherlands, Denmark, Sweden and Norway) were the most ‘universal’, followed by the central group (France, Great Britain, Belgium, West Germany, Ireland and the US) and, at last, the Southern countries (Spain, Italy, Portugal). The ex-communist countries of Eastern Europe all had lower values on universalism than the Southern countries of Western Europe (Verbeeren 2000, pp. 6 – 15).

In Western liberalism, ‘state’ (government, president, army, security services) is considered as the antipole of ‘society’ (civil society). In the official Soviet discourse, however, state and society were as one, placed opposite the individual. Igor Kon (1996, p. 190) points out that neither the Soviet ‘Philosophical Encyclopedia’ of the 1960s nor the six successive editions of the ‘Ethical Dictionary’, published between 1965 and 1989, had an entry on ‘personal’ or ‘private’ life. Private life was only briefly touched upon, accompanied by the remark that it was not allowed to hinder public life.

Vladimir Putin, ‘Rossiya na rubezhe tysyacheleti’, 31 December 1999, available at: http://www.government.gov.ru/government/minister/article-vvp1.html, accessed 6 March 2000.

The use of the term ‘patrons’ refers to the patron – client relationships as discussed in Russian history by Geoffrey Hosking (2001).

Quoted in Whitmore (2000), available at: http://www.freemedia.at/publicat.html, last accessed 16 August 2002.