The war in Ukraine and the Russian public sphere: mobilizing collective memory in cultural journalism


Nikolai Vokuev, Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières

The outbreak of the Russian-Ukrainian war brought about changes in the Russian public sphere. The authorities introduced censorship, de facto criminalizing public anti-war speech and criticism of the political regime. Journalists who remained in the country were forced to adapt to this framework, even to the point of using the word "special military operation" instead of the forbidden word "war," as approved by the authorities. Independent media, both old and newly created by journalists who left the country, focused on fair coverage of Russian military aggression. Changes also affected cultural journalism. Media outlets that continued to operate in Russia, such as the literary website Gorky.media or the magazine Kommersant-Weekend, often began to turn to historical analogies. Thus, stories about anti-fascist artists in Hitlers Germany, Germany after World War II, or the consequences of Japanese militarism became a way to conceptualize the crisis provoked by Putins regime and ways out of it. It is not difficult to see veiled anti-war statements in such articles. However, according to Yuri Saprykin, a regular contributor to Kommersant-Weekend, this is first and foremost one of the few ways, under conditions of censorship and repression, to reflect on what is happening: "This is an attempt to explain to others and to ourselves the point in history at which we find ourselves, an attempt to find support and, perhaps, consolation in the fact that people have already experienced similar situations.” Journalists of these media actualize, first of all, the cultural memory accumulated in narratives about the history of European culture and art. The appeal to these historical analogies implicitly highlights the authoritarian, if not fascist, character of Putins regime. At the same time, the colonial nature of the war it unleashed provoked the infiltration of previously marginalized post- and decolonial discourses into the Russian public sphere. In Russian society, as journalist and anthropologist Elena Srapyan, editor-in-chief of Perito.media, notes, there has been a "sharp decline in the prestige" of Russian identity and a "reversal of the ethnic hierarchy." The website Perito focuses on popularizing and applying postcolonial studies, including to Russian realities. It publishes, among other things, articles analyzing Russian memorial politics, recounting forgotten episodes of the colonial history of the USSR and Russia, and "autoethnographic" accounts of journalists and activists about their identities. In this way, Peritos publications mobilize the collective memory of colonized peoples and the individual memory of members of ethnic minorities. This brings it closer to another new cultural media, the more militant and academic website Beda.media, which tells the stories of peoples colonized by Russia and their resistance. According to the editors of this decolonial media, its main objective is to "map Russian imperialism." Thus, behind these two variants of mobilizing collective memory in cultural media are different intellectual formations and interpretive communities that explain Putins regime and the war in Ukraine in different ways. The tasks of commemoration also differ, ranging from adaptation and consolation to resistance to the regime. Although the discourses described here infiltrate the public sphere not only in the form of articles by journalists and researchers, but also in the form of public lectures and courses, I will focus specifically on the case of cultural journalism. My research is based on an analysis of the publications of the mentioned media and on interviews with its journalists and editors.

La guerre en Ukraine et la sphère publique russe : la mobilisation de la mémoire collective dans le journalisme culturel

This paper will be presented at the following session: