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Abstract
This essay investigates the relationship between habits of news consumption and geographical imaginations in Russia. It uses results from a survey of students at a Moscow university to demonstrate an association between the news sources used by respondents and their acceptance of the Russian authorities’ narrative about the West. Students who used at least one state-aligned news source were inclined to express greater agreement with the official (negative) narrative about the West than students who did not use any state-aligned news sources. However, some of the Russian authorities’ anti-Western claims resonated strongly even amongst the non-users of state-aligned sources.
Notes
I am extremely grateful to Jason Dittmer, Richard Mole, Peter Duncan, Allan Sikk, Paul Chaisty, Kanishka Bhattacharya, and participants in the 2015 ‘Popular Geopolitics’ workshop at UCL-SSEES who shared their thoughts and comments on earlier drafts of this essay. I would also like to thank the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Centre for East European Language Based Area Studies for the funding that made the research possible, Florian Toepfl for some invaluable practical help, and everyone at the Higher School of Economics in Moscow (teachers and students alike) for their assistance and cooperation at the data collection stage.
1 Voennaya doktrina Rossiiskoi Federatsii, 2014, part II, point 13v, available at: www.rg.ru/2014/12/30/doktrina-dok.html, accessed 21 August 2015.
2 Voennaya doktrina Rossiiskoi Federatsii, 2014, available at: www.rg.ru/2014/12/30/doktrina-dok.html, accessed 21 August 2015.
3 Russia internet users, 2015, available at: www.internetlivestats.com/internet-users/russia, accessed 21 August 2015.
4 It should be noted that only nine foreign countries featured in the study conducted by Semetko et al. (Citation1992).
5 ‘“Maidan”, Krym, sanktsii’, Levada Centre, 2014, available at: www.levada.ru/30-12-2014/maidan-krym-sanktsii, accessed 21 August 2015.
6 ‘Vneshnyaya politika Rossii: orientiry i kritika’, Levada Centre, 2015, available at: www.levada.ru/13-01-2015/vneshnyaya-politika-rossii-orientiry-i-kritika, accessed 21 August 2015.
7 ‘Federal’nyi zakon Rossiiskoi Federatsii ot 28 dekabrya 2013 g. N 398-FЗ’, 2013, available at: www.rg.ru/2013/12/30/extrem-site-dok.html, accessed 21 August 2015; ‘Federal’nyi zakon Rossiiskoi Federatsii ot 5 maya 2014 g. N 97-FЗ’, 2014, available at: www.rg.ru/2014/05/07/informtech-dok.html, accessed 21 August 2015.
8 The vast majority of HSE second years attend English-language classes, so there is a fairly close fit between the target population and survey population; excluded are students who already speak English so well that they are not required to attend classes and students who missed lessons on the days the questionnaires were distributed.
9 While a precise number of second-year students was not available, the HSE intake is estimated at roughly 3,000 undergraduates per year.
10 The degree programmes represented (with number of survey respondents) are: Advertising (10); Applied Maths & Cybernetics (41); Business Informatics (13); Cultural Studies (10); Economics (34); History (28); Journalism (31); Law (43); Management (38); Mathematics (23); Oriental Studies (3); Philosophy (41); Politics (10); Psychology (46); Sociology (36); Software Engineering (8); State & Municipal Administration (37). Programmes not included in the survey are Philology, Design, Linguistics, Logistics, International Relations, Global Economics, as well as two special BA programmes—one offered by HSE’s International College of Economics and Finance and one offered by the HSE in conjunction with the New Economic School. The reasons for omitting these programmes varied—either they run English classes independently from the three main English-language faculties that gave permission to run the survey, or individual teachers declined to participate.
11 Age, gender, the region of Russia and type of settlement where the respondent had spent most of their life, accommodation circumstances, whether the respondent considered themselves ethnically Russian, and whether the respondent considered the educational level and financial position of their family to be average, below or above average.
12 For examples, see O’Loughlin (Citation2001), Allison et al. (Citation2006), White et al. (Citation2006), White and McAllister (Citation2008).
13 To identify these recurring claims about the West, the researcher qualitatively analysed all 41 official statements made by Putin and Lavrov in June and July 2014 (from the transcript archives on kremlin.ru and mid.ru), as well as nine episodes of Vesti Nedeli from the same period (a popular 90-minute news and analysis programme, broadcast each Sunday evening on state channel Rossiya 1, archived on YouTube). The texts were coded using the CAQDAS tool Atlas.ti.
14 As defined by Vogel and Wänke, a Likert scale is ‘a multi-item attitude scale that consists of several evaluative statements about an object or issue. Respondents are asked to express their degree of agreement with each statement along a numerical response scale’ (Vogel & Wänke Citation2016, p. 61).
15 Cronbach’s alpha is a popular coefficient of reliability based on the intercorrelations of items (Vogel & Wänke Citation2016, p. 23); the formula can be found in Field et al. (Citation2012, p. 761).
16 The table of 60 was compiled on the basis of Rambler’s Top 100 ranking of ‘News and media’ (available at: http://top100.rambler.ru/navi/?theme=440, accessed 31 August 2014) and by conferring with local media experts. It was checked during a pilot of the survey questionnaire.
17 Some of the source options were residual categories (‘other Russian TV channel’, ‘other foreign website’, and so on), so the stated averages may underestimate the true number of sources used.
18 These are the television channels Pervyi Kanal, Rossiya 1, Rossiya 24, NTV; the website/news agency ria.ru, the newspaper Rossiyskaya Gazeta, the radio stations Mayak, Vesti FM and Radio Rossiya; the newspapers Komsomolskaya Pravda and Izvestiya and the television station Life News were also treated as state-aligned by virtue of their very loyal relationship to the Kremlin.
19 These are the internet-based television channel Dozhd, the radio station Ekho Moskvy, the websites slon.ru, snob.ru, grani.ru and BBC Russian, and the newspapers Vedomosti and Novaya Gazeta.
20 Categorising sources by their editorial policy is not straightforward; there is a degree of subjective judgement involved in identifying ‘alternative’ sources. Sources which are not owned by the Russian state or state-aligned organisations vary considerably. Some have no coordinated editorial policy by virtue of their nature (the web portals and social networks), some generally avoid political commentary (such as, Euronews, RBK), some regularly invite political commentary from the full spectrum of opinion (Dozhd, Ekho Moskvy), some actively favour an opposition point of view (slon.ru, Novaya Gazeta) or carry analysis that is critical at times but not outspokenly so (snob.ru and Vedomosti).
21 Boxplots display the median at the centre of the plot. The top and bottom of the ‘box’ represent the interquartile range (the middle 50% of observations). The ‘whiskers’ extending from the box extend to one-and-a-half times the interquartile range, or to the maximum/minimum values, if the latter fall within one-and-a-half times the interquartile range. See Field et al. (Citation2012, p. 128).
22 The term russkii implies Russian in an ethnic sense, rather than citizenship.