Symbolic state-building in contemporary Russia

ABSTRACT

Vladimir Putin has made state-building a central goal of his presidency and recent scholarship has demonstrated that Russian formal institutions have indeed been deliberately reformed. Unlike studies that ass’ess state-building vis-à-vis a particular outcome, our research examines what kind of state Russian political elites seek to build, and focuses on symbolic state-building strategies. To capture symbolic state-building in the Putin era, we examine the Pryamaya Liniya broadcasts: annual, high-profile TV broadcasts in which citizens pose questions to the president. We find that a broad range of formal institutions appear to be central to Putin’s state-building project, a finding that runs counter to claims that governance is largely deinstitutionalized, informal and personal. We argue that symbolic state-building seeks to reconcile personalism and institutionalism, by conveying a dual image of a state in citizens’ everyday lives – emphasizing both formal institutions, while also affirming Putin as the personal guarantor of the state’s authority.

KEYWORDS:

• Symbolic state-building
• post-Soviet politics
• media
• performative power
• Pryamaya Liniya

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank James Ng and Eric Morgan from the Notre Dame Center for Digital Scholarship for their thoughtful input, and Ruslan Lucero, Blake Lilek, Ravil Ashirov, and Alexandra Stott for their competent research assistance.

Notes

1. Lucan Way rates state-capacity under Putin as high, whereas Brian Taylor argues that Putin’s state-building efforts have not resulted in higher capacity. These efforts to assess the outcome of state-building largely model the Russian state against an ideal-type that deems Western liberal democracies as the most (perhaps only) functional and capacious state.

2. This turn to a processual account follows Anna Grzymala-Busse and Pauline Jones-Luong (2002), who have argued that state-building in post-socialist countries is an ongoing, dynamic and multisited project.

3. See a more detailed definition by Ed Schatz (2003) below.

4. Grzymala-Busse and Jones-Luong (2002) called for a distinction between personalistic and impersonal/institutional modalities of state-building in the post-Soviet region. In 2002, they characterized Russia’s state-building as autocratic and institutional, rather than personalistic. Since the publication of their typology, however, many observers have argued that Russia has shifted toward personalism and informal rule, as many formal institutions were weakened under Putin (Ledeneva 2013; Dawisha 2014; Hale 2014).

5. In this literature, however, the focus is on regime strength, and governance, the state, and state-building have received far less attention (noted by Petrov, Lipman, and Hale 2014).

6. They are widely viewed, with around 3 million viewers each year in recent years, and extensively publicized ahead of the airing and publically commented on and analyzed thereafter. Viewership and other information about the show, including transcripts, are available on its dedicated website: www.moskvaputinu.ru.

7. See the Appendices 1 and 2 for coding categories and the terms used in the word frequency analysis.

8. This finding contradicts arguments that state-building under Putin has shifted away from performance (i.e., economic) legitimacy (see Petrov, Lipman, and Hale 2014).

9. On this particular role of the media, see Roudakova (2017) and Wolfe (2005).

10. The field of communication studies has wrestled with the difficulty of measuring “media effects” directly over many decades. For an overview of those debates and an explanation of why “the search for immediate, measurable effects on the individual has led to a neglect of the role of the media in developing political and social cultures,” see Philo (1990, 1–7).

11. We follow Hill and Gaddy (2013) in applying Wortman to the Putin era.

12. On the impacts and intentions behind live media events such as Direct Line, the foundational work is Dayan and Katz (1994), particularly “Appendix: Five Frames for Assessing the Effects of Media Events” (1994, 221–234). See also Feuer (1983). For a review of the extensive literature that Dayan and Katz’s book generated, see Hepp and Couldry (2010).

13. Note, interestingly, that this applies to a growing range of states, across all polity types.

14. Green has pointed to the reciprocal nature of elite media performances, arguing that awareness of the citizen-spectator’s gaze limits the scope of actions for a democratic politician who makes him or herself available for public scrutiny. Indeed, Green finds that democracies could be strengthened if we were to take the power of seemingly passive public spectatorship and surveillance of officials in spontaneous situations more seriously (2009, 9–10). Clearly, the power of passive spectatorship is not limited to democracies, as we find in Russia an electoral authoritarian regime that wants to benefit from engaging in performances that allow mass media spectators to assess the personalities and abilities of its leaders. Indeed, the enormous institutional collaboration and resources required to effectively stage a media performance that appears spontaneous and reciprocal (even when it is clearly staged) represents a meaningful symbolic display of administrative and discursive power in its own right.

15. See also Danielle Lussier on forms of “elite-enabling participation”; she argues that this form of participation “increases […] the informal or formal authority of incumbents, thereby giving them greater resources for monopolizing and wielding political power” (2016, 8), and is consistently preferred in Russia.

16. Ella George argues that this is the case in Kemalist and Erdoğan’s Turkey: “Like Kemal [Ataturk], Erdoğan seeks to boost the power of the state while simultaneously transforming its institutions” (2018, 22). See also Schatz (2003) on symbolic state-building in Kazakhstan.

17. Scholars of socialist and post-socialist authoritarian systems in Eastern Europe have similarly argued that these regimes perceived an urgent need to learn about and respond to popular grievances in order to prevent the outbreak of public protests (Lussier 2011, 2016; Henry 2012; Dimitrov 2014; Petrov, Lipman, and Hale 2014).

18. Publicizing individual complaints and displaying the state’s response was a function of the Soviet press as well (Lampert 1985; 134–145; Remington 1988; 123–127). Key differences relative to the Pryamaya Liniya broadcasts include scale, the role of the president himself in answering complaints, and the effort to display data about total complaints back to audiences.

19. Though flexible in the sense that new issues can be incorporated each year (e.g., the Crimea) and different weights can be given to political questions, or concerns about corruption, we were also surprised by how many elements of the show remained constant. See discussion in the sections on “The Questions” and “The Answers”.

20. See also Pisano (2014). Spontaneous (though likely screened) calls are sometimes included in the show, as in a 2010 incident Pisano describes, in which an Ivanovo doctor, Ivan Khrenov, called in to describe the deceptions carried out by hospital administrators during a visit by Putin in 2010. Dr. Khrenov told an acquaintance that he in fact called in spontaneously, without advance coordination with producers (interview with Ol’ga Kuz’mina, Ivanovo, May 2014).

21. This element of authenticity and relevance to everyday lives arguably explains why they are widely watched. The broadcasts also follow a Soviet tradition of periodically airing genuine popular grievances and examples of local corruption (Roudakova 2017, 25–30).

22. This is also confirmed by statistics presented on the official Pryamaya Liniya website, which describe the questions submitted for the year’s broadcast (many hundreds of thousands more than the ones that are aired); see: http://moskva-putinu.ru/#page/history. Statistics seem to corroborate the producers’ claim that audiences are able to ask any question they want, though categories on the site are also very broad.

23. There are minor exceptions to this strategy; for instance, in two years, 2009 and 2014, no question from the North Caucasus appeared on the show. Occasionally, Russian nationals residing in other CIS countries are also selected for participation in the show. We located questioners by Federal Okrug not because we expected Russian citizens to identify with their okrug, but to (a) capture the geographical dispersion of questions using an objective measure of “region” and (b) to assess how many questions referred to specifically regional (rather than local or national) questions, i.e., problems of residents of the Far North.

24. This finding aligns well with Hill and Gaddy’s (2013) argument that the Pryamaya Liniya broadcasts seek to create national unity.

25. E.g., Pryamaya Liniya 2001, Question 34 about judicial reforms.

26. Note that the “economic” and “social” issues are difficult to disentangle, and we sometimes coded issues as both economic and social.

27. Interestingly, she stumbled over the terms of the question, leaving the impression that the question was crafted for her by a broadcaster who tried to combine the macroeconomic trend with an everyday concern.

28. This methodology likely overall underreports instances in which corruption is discussed, as corruption is frequently addressed through a description of a corrupt situation, not with the actual term. This makes it all the more surprising that the term corruption is used.

29. See Pryamaya Liniya 2003, Question 49.

30. Mentions were particularly high in the first two years, over 130 in 2001 and 2002; after that, mentions settled in at around 90 per year.

31. Existing scholarship and journalism on the Pryamaya Liniya broadcasts have largely focused on Putin himself, and to a lesser extent the citizens, focusing closely on Putin’s choice of language in particular (Maslennikova 2009; Ryazanova-Clarke 2013; Pisano 2014).

32. Before TV, question-and-answer formats were a widespread strategy in the radio age.

33. Indeed, the two years in which Putin did not conduct the annual broadcast were both years in which he was seeking reelection.