In a 2015 article for the New York Times, Gary Shteyngart spent a week in a luxury hotel and watched Russian television. Noting that the vast majority of Russians receive their news from TV and that most stations are state-owned, Shteyngart wanted to determine if a week’s worth of it was hazardous to his health. He survived, drank too much, and concluded that a generation from now we would find Russian state television from 2015 as ridiculous as Soviet television.
Shteyngart’s article illustrates the prevailing perceptions of Russian news in the Putin era: a fantasy assortment of doctored stories and vapid entertainment that might require visits from the therapist after too much exposure. In this important, detailed, and exhaustive study, Stephen Hutchings and Vera Tolz did not need therapeutic assistance, but they did watch television across a vital two-year period (September 2010 to September 2012). They also conducted interviews with 16 prominent television journalists (including the notorious Dmitrii Kiselev), and sorted through the various ways that television programs dealt with thorny issues such as nationalism, ethnic differences, race, and religion in post-Soviet Russia. Their work is certainly not a breezy read like Shteyngart’s, but the conclusions are all the more sobering.
Treating Russian television news as a consensus-management tool and a media form that attempts to shape nationhood, Hutchings and Tolz argue that dismissing it as simply “state-controlled” misses much of the point of how TV functions in Russia today. As they write, television reflects the broader struggles within Russia to stabilize, unify, and formulate policies. Television has also played decisive parts in creating “media events” and in “generating different, and often conflicting, modes of combining national unity and ethno-cultural diversity (16).” Television, in short, provides an important window into the ongoing conflicts over ethnic versus civic forms of nationhood and identities in contemporary Russia.
Hutchings and Tolz wade into the scholarly arguments about Russian nationhood before detailing how reporting on interethnic relations has proven to be difficult terrain, at best, for the media to traverse. As they argue, the Kremlin’s attempts to promote an image of harmony, one frequently expressed on TV, has produced a media landscape “replete with contradictions which manifested themselves in the approach taken to ethnicity-related questions” (67). Television reports mostly presented ethnic diversity as one of Russia’s unique qualities while simultaneously reporting issues such as migration and violence as problems associated with particular ethnic groups. Combined with a tendency to cover the Russian Orthodox Church as “an unchallenged pillar of Russianness which transcends national and religious identities” (68), Russian television both mirrors and shapes the contradictions, xenophobia, and hatreds growing within Russian society at large.
The book covers these themes through a series of case studies: the mostly unsuccessful attempts to commemorate the new “Day of National Unity” holiday (which turned into reports on blood donation campaigns); coverage of the December 2010 Moscow riots that began after the murder of a Spartak Moscow fan (where blame was shifted not just to the attackers but to the North Caucasus and its residents as a whole); the popularity of reality television shows such as Shkola (where xenophobic attitudes are frequently expressed); the initially subdued coverage of the 2011 protests and 2012 elections and how state media injected ethnicity into their reports; and the coverage of the Pussy Riot scandal as one that turned Christ the Savior Cathedral into a “supremely sacred space” (206) on the small screen, all serve as the focal points for Hutchings and Tolz to argue persuasively that Russian television again and again reified ethnic nationalism as the basis for Russian belonging today.
Many of the conclusions Hutchings and Tolz reach will be not too surprising to readers of this review, but they are backed by exhaustive research, detailed data, and an ongoing engagement with relevant theoretical literature. Russian television has both reflected and shaped the increasing authoritarianism of the Putin system after 2012, even if the coverage of events differs slightly across different channels. Russian journalists do not usually receive specific instructions on what to say and how to say it, but have to possess the ability to report the broad strategies of the Kremlin. Over the course of their two-year study, Hutching and Tolz conclude that Russian TV reports have increasingly grown more hostile toward ethnic, national, and religious minorities in Russia. In the end, their conclusion that official discourse has proven to be “neither coherent nor univocal” but has nevertheless contributed mightily to the “public sense of victimhood” (250) that in turn fosters an increasingly strong ethnic nationalism should make us all worry.
