Issues for media theory in Russia’s transition from dictatorship

If we are to perform a level of democratic agency beyond formal democracy (let us say Canadian- or German-style), let alone beyond even more limited forms of the kind O’Donnell has described as a democradura (O’Donnell, 1992a) or ‘delegative democracy’ (O’Donnell, 1992b), then it necessitates our examining the roles of social and political movements in nurturing civic assertiveness, in which over the longer term media of a variety of kinds are likely to play a tremendous part. To understand those movements, then the roles within them and outside them of communication of all kinds, not least via their media, need to be highlighted and not just left to be imagined, as is so often the case in the scholarly literature.

The term ‘alternative’ applied to movement media is of course almost as loose as a goose. If we try to be more specific in using a term like ‘radical’ (or as Rodríguez (2001) prefers, ‘citizens’ media’), then we still have to acknowledge that there are many kinds of radicalism, and that in Russia of the late 1980s and early 1990s they included Molodaya Gvardiia, Nash Sovremennik, Literaturnaya Rossiia, and expressions even further still to the extreme right than those. The attribution of radicalism, too, depends even more on context and consequences than on the intentions of those who make such media. The content of such media can be politically ambiguous. At certain times however, in a highly repressive scenario, such media may be much more absolute in their opposition.

Radical media formats vary tremendously, from performance art and graffiti to newspapers with a century of more history to their name and the internet. They are, however, generally under-funded and small-scale in operation. They typically serve to express opposition vertically, and to build support and political networking laterally. Sometimes they try to be more democratic in their internal organization than conventional media. Sometimes they are entrancing, sometimes boring and jargon laden, sometimes frightening, sometimes brilliantly funny.
Rodríguez (2001: 165) nicely challenges the yearning to box them into a single definition:

‘Instead of assuming that the problem lies in not finding a unifying formula to define all the different forms that citizens’ media take, we must question our need for this type of definition. The problem should not be traced back to the object that rejects right definitions, but to the subject who tries to impose them, that is, to a subject who prefers rigid definitions as a condition to comprehend social phenomena.’

The history of challenge to entrenched power via samizdat, in the case of a number of the Soviet bloc’s nations, is well known, as is the role of foreign shortwave stations in amplifying samizdat, and tamizdat (i.e. books and media produced abroad and smuggled back into the USSR). Just as important was the more diffuse role of youth culture, especially in the form of popular music (magnitizdat).

Religious samizdat were also an element in the diffusion of non-regime and anti-regime materials. Because the circulation and ‘effect’ of these ephemeral media materials is very hard to establish with the tidy certitude insisted upon by empiricist social science, and because in general there is frequently found an arched-eyebrows syndrome when it comes to such materials – both religious culture and youth culture are common targets of dismissive amusement among academics - attention normally zooms to the big media. Even though there is quite often solid evidence that significant sections of the public really do not take mainstream news seriously at all.
This dismissal of radical media is analytically myopic.

I would propose in opposition (Downing, 2001) that such media are often tremendously significant in the political culture, especially at times when that culture is moved by intense distrust and cynicism both of the powers that be and of existing political and economic mechanisms. The last decade of the 20th century in Russia, Ukraine and in the great majority of former Soviet bloc nations was marked precisely by that distrust, and often for excellent reasons. There is a mass of Russian print alternative media, not only from before 1991 but also since, in two archives, one in St Petersburg and the other in Berlin, which indicates that this dimension of movement media activity continues to thrive.

To make one final observation on this topic: while research on such media is a major gap in the media studies literature, what research exists on them barely addresses their audiences and readers. Some of Rodríguez’ case-studies go some way toward exploring this question, but it pretty well remains terra incognita within terra obscura. It raises tremendously important questions about the relation between social movements and media uses, of a kind that the vast body of published work on mainstream audiences and readership hardly touches upon. Nick Couldry’s (2000: 123-74) recent analysis of British media activists represents a very promising beginning, but there is a subcontinent waiting to be explored, with the most direct implications for theorizing both media and democratization.

Minority nationalities or ethnic groups and media
Democracy and democratization are all too frequently addressed as though ethnic conflict, whether or not attended with large-scale social violence, is marginal, epiphenomenal. The secular republican tradition links arms with the philosophy of equal opportunity – in the USA, the ideology of the American Dream – and together they paint a picture of the democratic process in which social classes exist but are pretty well porous across generations. Limpet-like questions of ethnicity (and its related terms) are all too often wished off the agenda as irritating or embarrassing survivals in developing democratic structures,1 rather in the same way that Soviet or PRC ideologues used to describe what they considered inappropriate behavior among their citizenry as ‘remnants’ of feudalism or ‘traces’ of the bourgeois ethos.

Terms such as ‘nationality,’ ‘race’ and ‘ethnic group’ often encapsulate not fact but accident. A Jewish friend in Austin, Texas - mother-tongue Russian, born and raised for her first forty years in the USSR, but her nationality as a Soviet citizen defined as Jewish - first became called ‘Russian’ in the USA. Sometimes these terms reflect the power relations in which they are embedded: ‘race’ may signify both a capitulation to a spurious, politically derived genetics, and an acknowledgement of the tremendous tenacity of white power. ‘Ethnic group’ may signify something folkloric or something primordially bathed in blood, or – particularly objectionably – a group about whom it is thought appropriate to state that through terror and forced dislocation it has been ‘cleansed’ (Banks & Murray, 1999).

In this sphere perhaps more than any other, some post-Soviet and post-Federal-Yugoslav experience has rather cruelly treated the prophets of instant democracy who were so rife in 1989-91. Inability to incorporate the often harsh realities of ethnicity into the practicalities of democratic process, has of course cost citizens infinitely more dearly. In both regions, nationality struggles have taken both the form of a claim to a state ‘of one’s own’ and the form of a recovery of rights felt to have been suppressed within one’s own state (the latter being the case especially among Russians and Serbs).

Most often, mercifully, these movements have been conducted with little or no bloodshed, and to some degree it is true that extreme contrary cases such as Nagorno-Karabakh, Chechnya, Bosnia, have mistakenly been taken as representative. In 33 months within the former Soviet Union, 41 Union and Autonomous Republics declared themselves sovereign (Kahn, 2000: 59). At the same time, situations of protracted and brutal conflict, even if many fewer, do need explaining.

Brudny (1998), a number of the authors in Allen and Seaton (1999), and Scholdan (2000), take great pains to attack notions of primordial ties and vendettas erupting gratefully back into life once the authoritarian lid of the Soviet and Federal Yugoslav states had been lifted. They correctly point to the constructed, frequently manipulated, character of ethnicity. Seaton (1999: 56-57) is also right on target in flagging gangsterism and the public terror and compliance it induced as crucial elements in a number of the most publicized cases of civil strife.

Yet there is also, I suggest, an element of exorcism at work in some of these arguments. Keen (1999: 84), for instance, writes of the manipulation of ethnicity as a ‘distraction’ and as a ‘technique,’ and this, although a stronger formulation than among some of the other writers cited, evinces the problem, namely the overuse of a rational actor framework. Words like ‘primordial,’ ‘tribal,’ ‘ethnic,’ ‘racial,’ for all their clumsiness, misdirection and often racist connotation, are attempts to capture the reality, indeed the chilling pleasure for some, of destructive social impulses, of how deeply dyed these may become in the fabric of the everyday. We must not lose sight of this dimension, though we need to shun the terms often used to denote it as blurred and even racist.

In turn, the ongoing roles of media in this regard – not merely news, but also all kinds of entertainment media – can hardly be overestimated. This is the case both of media coverage within the national territory concerned, and also, when one or more major powers intervene, in the case of representations within their media of what they claim to be doing. As the tragic cases of Bosnia/Serbia/Kosovo and Chechnya all illustrate in their separate ways.2

This is not to say that there is somewhere a tidy little package of “good media stuff” that could be popped into newspaper columns or whizzed out over the air, which would then slice smoothly as a scimitar through all the numerous Gordian knots of conflict. It is to say, however, that the roles of media, actual or potential, destructive or constructive, are pivotal (Reporters Sans Frontières, 1995; Allen & Seaton, 1999).

An equally important but typically overlooked dimension of the ethnic dimension of media and democracy, is the question of time-frame. To understand the dynamics of media in this three-way relationship, it is essential to understand them not simply at a particular moment in time, defined most often as when people start shooting at each other, but over a sustained period of time beforehand. Brudny (1998) has identified how rightist nationalism in Russia was already achieving some public expression in the 1950s, despite official prohibitions, and what he says for Russia may shed light on other situations in the post-Soviet zone as well as in the post-Federal-Yugoslavia zone (cf. Norris, 1999). Particularly important across Soviet and Yugoslav territory from the late 1970s onwards was official encouragement of nationalism as a prop to support regimes whose self-legitimation as Communist was drawing ever less credibility. For, as Billig (1995), has rather convincingly argued, the daily cultural stimuli of nationalist sentiment are cumulatively powerful despite being, taken one at a time, quite often trivial and banal.

Regional power, democracy and media

This third topic is one which overlaps with the previous one in at least two instances. (1) In those cases where a region or locality is dominated by a group or groups with culturally distinctive traits and with a history of strife with the numerically dominant nationality or ethnic group. Chechnya is a strong example. (2) In cases such as the success of the Deutsche Volksunion and NPD in eastern Germany, and of the Front National in French rustbelt towns, where one element in local upsurges, even these rightist populist ones I condemn unequivocally as malignant, may be the impulse to wield power against the center, which in turn may be a pivotal component in their ability to mobilize the public. The roles of local media, including radical rightist and racist media, have profound implications for strengthening or subverting the democratic process, especially once the democratic principle is acknowledged to be joined at the hip with social justice for all.

However, whereas ‘ethnic’ issues are typically seen as the realm of the passionate (in whatever direction), regional issues are often seen as something of a yawn, the preferred sphere of the policy wonk. Yet, particularly as world population grows, the question of balancing local, regional and central power becomes ever more important for a functioning democracy. In very large nations such as the PRC, India, Russia, Brazil, the USA, the demographics probably do intensify the issue, but even in small nations certain regional specifics may play a very large cultural as well as economic and political role.

In other words, yes, I am arguing in favor of a classical anarchist principle, namely the radical fear of powerful centralized government and the conviction that democratic structures – once they are operative - work best at smaller levels, especially in very large nations. This does not mean there is automatic magic in federal structures, as the examples of Nigeria, Pakistan and indeed both the Russian Federation and the former Soviet Union all attest. Nonetheless, the principle of local power is critically important.

I am indeed not identifying the regional and local as a cosy utopia. One of the most astute moves of President Putin in 2001 - if simultaneously disquieting in terms of constitutional precedent - was the removal from power of Yevgenii Nazdratenko, the spectacularly unlovely governor of Primorskii Krai, the region surrounding Vladivostok, whose years-long corrupt and violent rule, blithely condoned by Yeltsin and his circles, constituted a national disgrace (Kirkow, 1998: 113-40). Nazdratenko was especially visible in his awfulness, but the Yeltsin regime had conceded powers to a significant number of provincial governors that wildly overrode democratic governance. For example, the degree of freedom for mainstream media visible in Moscow and St Petersburg, limited as it often was, was scarcely perceptible in many provinces.3

There are many such examples around the world. In the 1950s and 1960s in the USA, the cry for ‘States Rights’ against Federal Government anti-segregation interventions was in reality a determined bid to leave racial privilege and racist domination unscathed. Despotism may quite easily be regional, and central power may be needed to defeat it. Or the despotism of regional power may also be challenged more locally. In Russia in the post 1991-period many conflicts erupted between regional governors and city mayors, typically over who had access to tax funds, but also on wider issues – Nazdratenko, for example, was opposed by Vladivostok mayor Cherepkov (whom Yeltsin fired on resoundingly fictitious grounds). Very locally, some Russian towns and cities in that decade were effectively company towns run autocratically by the elite of a former unit of the military-industrial complex.

Nonetheless, the objective of making power accessible and therefore local in a democracy is not contravened by those examples. The fact that again and again in Russia, it was seized in the first instance by members of the old nomenklatura (Kahn, 2000) does not mean their grab has to be the end of the story for ever, disquieting and disheartening as the Russian 1990s were in democratic terms. Taking a longer view, Stepan (2000) argues, interestingly, that the fact the Russian federal government had 60% of public spending in 1992, but only 40% in 1998 (and that sum in turn was mostly swallowed up by fixed obligations such as debt, defense, pensions and salaries), meant that the return of a systematically autocratic centralized regime was made harder. He argues this despite making no secret of the fact that the relation in that period between center and regions was extremely dysfunctional for civic interests.

There is, clearly, a balance. It is vital for democracy to take flesh in regions and localities, for policies to be generated that reflect priorities in those places. I stress ‘regions’ and ‘localities’ as a quick index that by developing regional power and democratic process I do not have in mind a region as simply a given administrative unit, such as a province. My sense for ‘regional’ embraces the democracy (a) of inter-provincial networks and special-purpose alliances, as well as (b) of individual cities, towns and boroughs.

Although I am flagging the importance of the regional/local issue as regards media, so far as I know there is not much study available anywhere of this dimension of media in the post-soviet and post-federal-Yugoslav zones. Studies of local and regional media in other nations tend to be few, and even where they exist, are often merely descriptive and are rarely placed within this problematic. Robert Dickinson’s study (1997) of the British alternative press of the 1960s and 1970s in Manchester, which fuses a regional and radical media focus, could act as something of a trailblazer.

The internet and democratisation
This last section will be exceedingly brief, but it is hard to envisage any treatment of these issues without addressing the internet in Russia. The topics I will touch upon are the internet’s potential uses to mobilise politically in domestic issues, and the international potential of the internet in human rights scenarios.
Both of these are complex topics, partly because of their scope, partly because their relative novelty means that an evaluation of their impact is still inevitably on the speculative side. Naïve prophecies of a free flow of global information have run up against the energetic policies of the PRC and Vietnamese governments that have gone a long way toward muzzling this potential. The Russian government too threatened to require all Internet Service Providers to install a surveillance device in each server, with a high speed connection to the Federal Security Bureau, the KGB’s successor (Moffett 1998; Robertson-Textor 2000; Fossato 2000; Goble 2000). The acronym for the new decree, promulgated in January 2000, was SORM-2.

Even before this, it was widely assumed that SORM-1 had been used illegally by the FSB to monitor computer messages. Thus even though President Putin publicly backed off from finalising the decree, many observers concluded his retreat was deceptive.
Certainly Russian federal government policy had little impact on or apparent interest in expanding the overwhelmingly analogue telephone infrastructure which makes computer communication slow and very costly for ordinary users (Center for Democracy and Technology 2000). Indeed, most such communication takes place during office hours in corporate settings (Loukina, 2000: 5). Loukina cites data that suggest a steady expansion in internet use in smaller cities, among non-college graduates, and women, albeit concentrated among students and the professional and managerial strata.4

This basic infrastructural issue means almost by definition that internet surveillance is not spread widely in geographical terms, but we should still beware of underestimating the significance of Moscow in the Russian scheme of things. The capital has far and away the highest density of internet usage and connections, and is still, despite the growth of vying regional power centres, very much the nation’s centre. Resistance there is taken – as it always has been - as more of a threat, whereas opposition is considered easier to marginalise in the provinces. Thus, on both these grounds the FSB is highly likely to engage in internet surveillance in Moscow and St Petersburg.

The two Chechnya wars (1994-96 and 1999 to the present) were the single most prominent – though certainly not the only - human rights media issue in Russia. The internet dimension of this story was all the more important given the government’s adoption in the second war of the press pool system pioneered by Premier Thatcher in the Malvinas/Falklands war, and subsequently adopted by the Pentagon in Grenada, Panama, and the war against Iraq (Lambroschini 2000a, 2000b; Koltsova 2001). This enabled the government to mask Russian casualties, to bar independent journalists from the zone, to highlight Chechen atrocities and downplay or deny Russian war crimes.

Thus even before the purge of the independent television channel NTV in April 2001, the websites maintained by Russian human rights organisations such as the Memorial Organization, the Union of Committees of Mothers of Russian Soldiers, and the Islamist kavkaz.tsentr, now kavkaz.org, were key sources of independent information about both Chechnya and the conflict in neighboring Dagestan. The Russian government worked very hard to sabotage the Islamist site electronically, and it was subjected to repeated shutdowns, but still persisted (Krushelnycky 2000).
These brief considerations of the struggle for democracy in Russia may hopefully act to spur systematic and reflective analysis of (1) the democratic significance of radical media, (2) the roles of democratic media in ethnic conflict, (3) the democratic functions of local and regional media, and (4) the internet’s potential to subvert censorship and mobilize solidarity.

Revised version of a paper presented at the conference on ‘Democratisation and the Mass Media: Comparative Perspectives from Europe and Asia’, Bellagio, Italy, 9-13 April 2001. I thank Professor Colin Sparks for his advice to revise it.

Notes
1 Witness the firestorm that broke over Lani Guinier’s nomination for a Clinton Administration Justice Department office as a result of her honest attempt to wrestle with precisely this issue (Guinier, 1994).
2 On the former Yugoslavia, cf. de la Brosse, 1995; Gow et al., 1996; Thompson, 1999; Allen & Seaton, 1999; Gordy, 1999; Norris, 1999, 1-45; Downing, 1998; Hammond & Herman, 2000. On Chechnya, see Knezys & Sedlickas, 1999; Koltsova 2000; Nougayrède 1995; Downing 1996: 136-39; Scholdan (2000); Zassorin (2000).
3 ‘…governors in the existing 89 regions all have problems with local media and some of them are trying to exercise very tight controls. This is because in the regions there are major publications…the Moscow press has very little influence or no influence at all in the provinces. So at the same time you can witness the fast growth of local television stations. The complex and very controversial relationship between the local press and the local authorities is very typical of Russia… Russia is so big, so vast, and frankly speaking, knowing how big and far-reaching the influence of regional governors is…’ (Yevgenii Kiselev, then NTV news anchor and general director, interviewed in Druker, 2000).

4 Her data in this study are based upon a single six-month comparison in 1999. They are slightly confusing at one point, in that she acknowledges that in 1999 only 2% of the Russian public (i.e. about 1.5 million people) had internet access, but cites estimates of 2.5 to 5 million users (ibid: 2).

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John D.H. Downing is John T. Jones, Jr., Centennial Professor of Communication in the Radio-Television-Film Department of the University of Texas at Austin, USA. jdowning@mail.utexas.edu