Chapter 5: Soviet Communicative Control: Some Implications of Digital Activism in Contemporary Russia

The uncertain character of the post-Soviet Russian transition (which is increasingly discussed among scholars of Russian studies) is obvious. In different fields of the social sciences, we can find conclusions about electoral authoritarianism in Russia (Gel'man, 2005) and hybrid regimes (Petrov, Lipman, & Hale, 2014). In the field of media studies, we can find publications about the peculiarity of the Russian media system (Oates, 2007) and more recently about the general failure of the Russian protest movement of 2011–2012 (Denisova, 2017), which has previously been tied strongly to the rise in social media use (Bode & Makarychev, 2013).

General conclusions about state control over internal media (Vartanova, 2012) should take into account the general acceptance of such authoritarianism within Russian civil society. This acceptance requires in-depth analysis. There has been a lack of research on the historical and cultural basis of this acceptance, which has persisted decades after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Responses to this question from the media studies perspective are proposed in this chapter.