Projecting Russia in a Mediatized World

Recursive Nationhood

Stephen Hutchings

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000538212
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Asiatisch-Amerikanische Studien

This book presents a new perspective on how Russia projects itself to the world. Distancing itself from familiar, agency-driven International Relations accounts that focus on what 'the Kremlin' is up to and why, it argues for the need to pay attention to deeper, trans-state processes over which the Kremlin exerts much less control. Especially important in this context is mediatization, defined as the process by which contemporary social and political practices adopt a media form and follow media-driven logics. In particular, the book emphasizes the logic of the feedback loop or 'recursion', showing how it drives multiple Russian performances of national belonging and nation projection in the digital era. It applies this theory to recent issues, events, and scandals that have played out in international arenas ranging from television, through theatre, film, and performance art, to warfare.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

1Well-mannered aliens brandishing new truthsPutin’s ‘Polite Green Men’ and the (non)-occupation of Crimea

DOI: 10.4324/9780429293061-2

Mediatized annexation

We live in a period in which war and conflict, like other aspects of our social world, have been mediatized, through and through. Rather than merely being central to the ways in which acts of war are communicated, sanitized, and explained, the media are now pre-inscribed within those acts from the very moment they are contemplated. As Couldry and Hepp (2017: 181) put it: ‘media and ways of reflecting on media become part of the stuff on which the social world [i.e. the nation] is built and larger collectivities come together as such’. Mediatization, as Couldry and Hepp clarify, means that the mediation of events becomes inextricably bound up with how those events play out. It is entirely logical that these principles should apply to the military domain. O’Loughlin and Hoskins (2015: 1323) describe mediatization in a military context as ‘the process by which warfare is increasingly embedded in and penetrated by media, such that to plan, wage, legitimize, assuage, historicize, remember, and to imagine war requires attention to that media and its uses’. An early instance of this can be identified in the pre-planned and active use by the US military of ‘embedded journalists’ in the 2003 invasion of Iraq, a strategy replicated by Russia in 2018, when BBC Moscow correspondent Steve Rosenberg accepted an invitation to join Russian troops on a combat mission in Syria (Rosenberg 2016).

A less obvious, but thoroughly compelling, earlier example of the phenomenon could be observed in February 2014. Here, the world was confronted by images of insignia-free, unidentifiable armed soldiers in green camouflage stationed at strategic points throughout Crimea, as Russia took steps to seize the peninsula from Ukraine, following what it saw as the illegitimate, and US-sponsored, overthrow of President Yanukovich by a popular rising in Maidan Square, Kiev. This act is now seen as a classic example of Russia’s growing strategy of hybrid warfare, in which traditional military might is combined with the use of special forces, local insurgencies, intelligence operations, psychological techniques of persuasion, and the affordances of digital propaganda. As Balasevicius (2017) put it:

Wha-t was remarkable about the annexation of Crimea and subsequent fighting in Eastern Ukraine was the fact that Russia’s conventional military forces, which traditionally lead such operations, played only a supporting role. Even Russia’s high-profile Special Forces, which organized much of the resistance, secured key infrastructure, and established many of the checkpoints that sprang up throughout the peninsula, were not the decisive element in this conflict. In the end, it was the extensive and well-coordinated use of intelligence, psychological warfare, intimidation, bribery, and internet/media propaganda that undermined and eventually collapsed Ukrainian resistance.

The Kremlin’s official explanation for the sudden appearance of these mysterious warriors was that they belonged to Crimean citizen-defence forces which had intervened to ensure that the hastily convened referendum on whether Crimea should secede from Ukraine, and rejoin Russia, unapproved by the new Ukrainian authorities, could be carried out peacefully. Few in the West were convinced by this account, not least because the soldiers were so well armed and because their appearance had coincided with the sudden emergence of Russian battleships in the Crimean straits. The sight of President Putin flippantly dismissing sceptical foreign correspondents enquiring about the provenance of the uniforms by suggesting that they were ‘freely available in local shops’ only confirmed that the denials of Russian involvement were barely intended to be taken seriously (Walker 2014). Fewer than two months later, at a similar international press conference, Putin brazenly acknowledged that the anonymous troops were indeed serving Russian military personnel who had been deployed to oversee the referendum at which, by this point, Crimea had voted overwhelmingly to re-unite with Russia, and the annexation had been completed (RT 2014).

There is little question that the Kremlin was taken aback by the turn of events in Kiev, and it struggled to produce a response that it considered feasible and appropriate. Nor is there much doubt about the illegality of the annexation. Nonetheless, that response was not merely mediatized in the sense that it was shaped from outside by the media-saturated environment in which the conflict unfolded. The very decision-making of its perpetrators was correspondingly mediatized, such that the actions they took were pre-inscribed with the meanings attributed to them by the various platforms on which they were reported.

The current chapter will elaborate on this contention. It will then examine the status and structure of the barefaced lie that the Kremlin told in relation to the identity of the ‘Polite Little Green Men’ who had occupied Crimea, arguing that it involved a form of knowingly contradictory double-voicedness in which the denial of Russian involvement was both true and not true. As Mickiewicz (2008: 104) has shown, Russian television viewers are well trained in recognizing the ‘multiple truths’ contained within the news narratives foisted upon them by state-owned channels, so Putin was operating on familiar territory as far as his domestic audiences were concerned. I will link this phenomenon to another feature of mediatization: its reliance on complex assemblages of hybrid media sources (Chadwick 2013) located at the centre, periphery, and extra-periphery of Kremlin discourse, some of which endorse that discourse, whether openly or ambiguously, whilst others mock or critique it, but all of which interact with, and react to, one another. Under these conditions, the process of configuring the assemblage outweighs the role of any one actor within it. Whilst downplaying the significance of notions of a linear campaign of disinformation, I acknowledge that assemblages reflect power differentials that enable dominant voices to prevail, especially in neo-authoritarian contexts. In this case, the emergent meme of the ‘Polite People’ was appropriated by official sources aligned with the Kremlin and, through a mythologization process, superimposed on the history of the annexation, such that the initial contradiction (the annexation was both ‘real’ and ‘not real’) is resolved via the concluding ‘Crimea is [and was always] ours’ meme.

I associate the ‘Polite People’ phenomenon with a form of stiob (the ambiguously hyperbolized over-identification with official discourse) which, through its grounding in grassroots culture, facilitates a mode of recursive nation-building based around the construction of an ‘in-group’ of compatriots (including sympathetic and unsympathetic Russian-speaking Ukrainians) able to ‘appreciate’ the double- and triple-voiced humour. It is recursive both because it re-enacts the key relationships around which Russian national identity-building has revolved: Russia and the West; Russia and the former Soviet Union; and because it does so on an ongoing, responsive basis: each counter-assault is incorporated in turn into new articulations which recognize and rebut that assault.

Finally, I expand my analysis beyond the Russian context by questioning the validity of the term ‘hybrid warfare’ (which retains the implied separation of military action and disinformation tools, subordinating the latter to the former as a ‘supplement’) to argue that the wider phenomenon of what is commonly referred to as ‘post-Truth’ news, which now extends to all corners of global media discourse, is in part always a product of complex media assemblages. I conclude by speculating that the consequent erosion of sharp distinctions between authoritative truths purveyed by respectable ‘objective’ mainstream news outlets and the lies and conspiracies propagated by grassroots online sources is evidence of the advent of what Davies (2018b) calls a ‘new regime of truth’. Unlike ‘post-Truth’, which implies a rejection of truth per se, this concept refers to ‘a different way of organising knowledge and trust in society’, one which replaces faith in ‘publically available facts’ with trust in ‘heroic truth-tellers’ who ‘break consensus’ to ‘call bullshit on the establishment’ responsible for generating and authenticating those facts (Davies 2018b). As Davies acknowledges, such heroic truth-tellers can be political leaders as well as internet trolls or Wikileaks activists, and the fact that their truths often fly in the face of the conventional facts in which mainstream liberal politicians deal testifies to their grasp of the principles of the new regime. Donald Trump was one such leader. In his own way, Vladimir Putin is another.

Truth, lies, polite (little green) men, and media assemblages

How, then, was mediatization inscribed within the very act of annexation? First, it is significant that the faces of the anonymous troops were carefully obscured by balaclavas and headscarves. As Yurchak (2014) argues, this tactic was aimed partly at preventing the identification of the individuals involved on social media platforms such as Facebook. It is certainly the case that, as Shevchenko (2014) suggests, the disguise constituted a contemporary example of the tactic of maskirovka which can be traced back to a century-old strategy of masking and making invisible instances of Russian military presence. But in this instance, anonymity was very different from invisibility; there is every reason why Russia would want to prevent individual soldiers from being identified via their online social media profiles, but, as the Kremlin well knew, neither the existence of the insignia-free soldiers nor their likely identification as Russian was likely to withstand the tide of online imagery and global rumour for long. As Yurchak points out:

These curious troops were designed to fulfil two contradictory things at once – to be anonymous and yet recognized by all, to be polite and yet frightening, to be identified as the Russian Army and yet, be different from the Russian Army.

(Yurchak 2014)

Mobile phone and other amateur footage of the mysterious troops soon swamped Western news reports, all of which openly speculated that the soldiers were from the Russian army. The comically perfunctory denials issued by Putin at the hastily convened international press conference following the annexation were distinctly, if instinctively, double-voiced: a superficial negation designed to maintain Russia within the parameters of legality in the eyes of the world press, combined with a defiant acknowledgement of the fact of Russia’s intervention – an act corresponding to what, for Putin, was the truth on another, higher, level (that of the US’s ‘shameful’ involvement in the overthrow of Yanukovich and of Crimea’s ‘rightful’ status within Russia). Putin’s doublespeak finds its corollary in what opposition blogger Aleksei Kovalev perceives as an ingrained tendency towards ‘doublethink’ within Russian media audiences:

There is a certain degree of doublethink in Russia … At any point in time, they believe two opposite things. For instance, there are no Russian troops in Ukraine, but we are winning the war … Because Russians can never lose. But there are no Russian troops in Ukraine. So whatever is broadcast, they will believe, because it’s instinctive. Even if it’s lies, we’ll believe them because it’s our guys who are telling the lies. Because everyone is lying, a...