Alexander Rojavin ’20, Law & Public Policy Scholar
Alexander Rojavin is a multilingual intelligence, media, and policy analyst specializing in information warfare. He is currently working on a book on modern Russian cinema as a key battlefield in the Kremlin’s information war. He is also co-chair of the Symposium on Disinformation Studies. In his spare time, he moonlights as a published literary translator (Routledge, Slavica Publishers, forthcoming Academic Studies Press).
What follows is a brief overview of post-Soviet Russian media history and a branching prediction of this war’s effect on how we break this history down into distinct eras. This analysis is based on my own vision of how best to organize Russian media history after the disintegration of the Soviet Union.
While this exercise may seem like an academic pursuit first and foremost, it carries significant strategic implications for Western policymakers, analysts, and civil society. Understanding how the Russian information space is organized and functions is the only way the West can effect coherent intelligence, international development, and policymaking strategies to have any impact in Russia.
Note: when I use “information space,” I mean the totality of all digital and non-digital sources of information accessible by the inhabitants of a particular area—e.g. country, region, city. Any given information space includes the area’s newspapers, television programs, radio channels, accessible parts of the internet, etc.
Eras of Post-Soviet Russian Media History
Since 1991, Russian media history can be categorized into three distinct eras.
(1) The 1990s, which are characterized by privatization and media ownership diversity, a public desire for Western-style journalism, and freedom of speech and press mostly as understood by Western audiences.
(2) 2000-2014, a period characterized by the systematic takeover of independent channels unaligned with the Kremlin’s new inhabitants, censorship through ownership, and murder as an increasingly occuring, if still somewhat anomalous, means of censorship
(3) 2014-2022, eight years characterized by the Kremlin’s waging a full-blown international information war, censorship through criminalization, and murder as an expected means of silencing liberal or liberal-adjacent voices.
This is not the only way to break down post-Soviet Russian media history. But I would argue that it is the most logical in helping us understand the Russian information space’s trajectory in the past thirty years and offers us the most utility in predicting what comes next.
First Era: 1990s
The USSR disintegrated in 1991, and some industrious engineers and former black marketers quickly morphed into post-Soviet Russia’s oligarch class. Some of these fledgling oligarchs could genuinely be considered liberals—among them such names as Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky. They understood that a diverse media environment was instrumental for Russia’s future—a democratic future, requiring a robust independent media as part of the new democracy’s immune system. This was especially true coming out of 80 years of Soviet censorship and over 300 years of imperial censorship.
Consequently, many independent, private media enterprises were established. Among the prominent ones were the periodicals Lenta.ru, Gazeta.ru, and Kommersant and the TV channel NTV. Lenta and Gazeta were both launched in 1999 as sociopolitical online publications and were among the forerunners of the (relatively short-lived) independent Russian news on the internet. They attracted top journalistic talent and quickly gathered a loyal readership as the Runet (the Russian-language segment of the internet) was only gaining its footing. Kommersant, a Western-style business journal founded in 1989, took off after the end of the USSR, becoming a daily publication in 1992.
NTV, meanwhile, was perhaps most emblematic of the yearning for freedom of speech and press in the 1990s. NTV featured both Western-style news programs and entertainment, perhaps the most emblematic of which was Kukly (literally “puppets”). Run by satirist Viktor Shenderovich, Kukly ran from 1994 until 2002 and was essentially a puppet-based Russian version of Saturday Night Live, providing weekly satirical sketches based on the week’s political highlights. Kukly never pulled a punch, especially when an unremarkable Putin began appearing in headlines: in 2000, Shenderovich immediately wrote an episode depicting Putin as “Little Zaches,” drawing on a literary fairytale written by Ernst T. A. Hoffman in which a fairy takes pity on an ugly child named Zaches and casts a spell causing most others not to find him repulsive. Aside from demonstrating how logocentric popular Russian culture is, this episode is a distillation of how Russian media in the 1990s was unafraid.
The liberal media environment was not to last, of course.
Second Era: 2000-2014
The privatization of the 1990s was poorly overseen. There were no guardrails. And, as the century neared its end, a group of oligarch advisors in Yeltsin’s “Family”, including Boris Berezovsky and Sergei Pugachev, convinced Yeltsin to change his mind about his chosen successor. The unremarkable Putin, whom the oligarchs believed they could control, was brought to power.
They quickly realized that they made a mistake, but it immediately became too late. The oligarchs who brought Putin to power but who got second thoughts (Berezovsky, Pugachev) and others who advocated for a liberal media and liberal Russia (Khodorkovsky, Gusinsky) were all dispatched. Berezovsky fled to England in late 2000, where he survived multiple assassination attempts before he was finally found hanged in his home in 2013. Pugachev stayed in power for a while, but lost influence over time, obtained French citizenship towards the end of the decade, and moved to Paris, having renounced his Russian citizenship. Khodorkovsky put up a fight, but was arrested in 2003 on made-up charges, imprisoned, and his oil company Yukos, one of Russia’s most successful businesses, was forced to close in 2007. Finally, Gusinsky quickly understood where the winds were blowing and fled Russia in 2000.
During this era, the Kremlin sought to censor all outlets opposing through simple takeovers. Aleksei Miller, a Kremlin ally and head of the state-run Gazprom, forced Gusinsky out of NTV in 2001. Kukly was cancelled almost immediately and went off the air in 2002. Lenta and Gazeta passed ownership to Alisher Usmanov, another Kremlin ally and formerly the wealthiest man in Russia. (He is also the current owner of Russia’s most popular social media: VKontakte and Odnoklassniki). And Berezovsky was finally forced to sell Kommersant—also to Usmanov—in 2006. Censorship through ownership worked wonders for eliminating liberal thought.
And where censorship wasn’t enough, murder worked just fine. Between 2000 and 2014, several prominent journalists and activists were killed for their opposition to the regime—a string of murders that climaxed in the assassination of Boris Nemtsov in 2015.
Which leads us to…
Third Era: 2014-2022
Nemtsov, Russia’s last truly liberal opposition leader (Aleksei Navalny certainly merits support in his vocal resistance to the Kremlin, but there are nationalistic nuances to his worldview that cannot be ignored), is murdered a year into the third era of modern Russian media history—a period that, until February 2022, could be called the current era.
Nemtsov’s murder happened a year after Russia first invaded Ukraine in Crimea, and it cemented murder as a widely expected instrument of censorship. Murder was no longer anomalous. The Russian opposition, meanwhile, was left without a head. Shenderovich was the last clear-eyed commentator left in the country, but he was finally labeled a foreign agent in 2021, after which he left too.
However, this era of uninterrupted information warfare began in 2014 when Russia invaded Ukraine in an attempt to exact vengeance for the Revolution of Dignity (aka the Maidan Revolution). The Kremlin unfurled its information war machine both internationally and domestically.
Though it took some time, the Kremlin’s international information war strategy has now been, more or less, properly documented for Western audiences. Gone were the days of KGB-era precision disinformation strikes. The Kremlin’s new strategy for audiences abroad was to overwhelm the marketplace of ideas with nonsense and conspiracy theories whose purpose was not to ingrain a single alternative narrative in the marketplace, but to create an illusion that the marketplace itself—as were all Western democratic institutions—was unviable. My favorite example of the Kremlin’s strategy in this period is RT’s slogan: “Question More.” Don’t believe anything anyone is telling you. You don’t have to believe us—but you certainly can’t believe Western media, officials, or ideas.
During this time, all of the Kremlin’s disinformation operations abroad can be categorized in one of eight distinct narrative strains. I will write more on this in my next interlude report.
Domestically, meanwhile, the Kremlin now employed another censorship strategy: criminalization. By 2014, nearly every outlet that could be bought out had been bought out, but social media had become a new frontier in the information space, and even if VKontakte and Odnoklassniki belonged to a Kremlin ally, there needed to be more explicit “legal” grounds on which to take down content posted there.
Consequently, in this third era, modern Russian criminal law reached its final stage of evolution as a blunt instrument of the Kremlin’s will. A series of vaguely-worded law was passed over the last decade enabling Roskomnadzor (the Russian FCC) and the Office of the Prosecutor General to take down from the internet anything they pleased. Some of these laws began cropping up before 2014, but the frequency of such laws’ passage increased noticeably after 2014.
The Kremlin first passed a series of content-neutral laws: the 2012 amendment to the 2006 Law on Information and the 2013 Yarovaya Package empowered Roskomandzor to ban “illegal” sites and mandated that all the data of sites with a big enough quantity of Russian users must be stored in servers on Russian territory. Most companies acquiesced. A minority, LinkedIn being the most prominent, refused and was therefore blocked on Russian territory. Meanwhile, the 2012 Foreign Agents Law and the 2015 Undesirables Law landed a one-two punch that now enabled the Kremlin to label any organization receiving a cent of foreign funding a “foreign agent,” necessitating that organization to pay crippling fines that could easily cause it to close down, or to label an organization an “undesirable” and simply force it to close down without the fanfare.
Accompanying the content-neutral laws was a series of content-aware laws. They are many, and I will list here some of the standouts: the 2013 Insulting Religious Feelings Law, which forbade disseminating content that could offend the feelings of Russia’s religious orthodoxy; the 2013 Gay Propaganda Law, which forbade disseminating “gay propaganda,” which meant whatever the Kremlin needed it to mean; the 2015 Insulting Veterans’ Feelings Law, which forbade disseminating content that someone who served in WWII could find offensive; the 2019 Disrespecting the Government Law, which forbade exactly that; and the 2021 Enlightening Activity Law, which forbade engaging in “enlightening activity” outside of officially sanctioned classrooms.
Readers of this report will recall that the most recent such law was passed several days after the war began—it criminalizes spreading “fakes” about the Russian military and carries as a punishment fifteen years’ imprisonment.
All content-aware laws were intentionally vaguely-worded, which is either a sign of subpar legislating or of authoritarianism. You can guess which was at play here. (Hint: the answer is both).
So, synthesizing both its international and domestic information war strategy, the Kremlin began assaulting the integrity of information spaces abroad and consolidated its grip on Russia’s domestic information space almost completely.
2022 and Beyond
Where does that leave us now? How does the current war fit into the proposed breakdown of post-Soviet Russian media history?
The current Russian-Ukrainian war for democracy is an inflection point in modern Russian media history. What exactly that means remains to be seen.
I propose that one of two things is happening right now. Either:
(1) The war and the accompanying digital curtain descending on Russian information space are the apotheosis of the third era, which will end when the war ends and when the Putin regime is finally no more, and Russia enters a fourth era featuring its territorial disintegration and [some degree of] liberalization, or;
(2) The war and the accompanying digital curtain descending on Russian information space are the miasmatic dawn of the fourth era of Russian media history, which is marked by Putin’s survival, however long it lasts, and the near-total isolation of Russian information space—keeping in mind, of course, that no information space is ever truly isolated. This would mean that Russia’s post-Putin liberalization, no matter how marginal, will occur in the fifth era.
Why is this important?
Every new era has meant a mass realignment of media ownership and how the Russian regime exerts control over Russian information space. Consequently, every change in era signals that the West must reevaluate its own avenues of interaction with Russian information space. If the mass banning of media taking place during this war is merely the death spasms of a senile regime in its third and final era of rule, then the West must be prepared to adapt quickly to the turbulence of the impending fourth era of post-Putin information space and strategize how best to aid in the denazification of Russia, akin to what had to happen after the fall of the Third Reich. (And it must be understood that, as after WWII, this will not be a quick process—cultural memory and conscience take time to adjust).
If, on the other hand, this war is merely the beginning of the fourth era, then the West must have in place a plan to adjust to the new realities of a relatively firewalled Russia and adopt according strategies to penetrate it in a manner that is most effective in light of strategic goal—i.e. bringing about the fifth era, the post-Putin era as quickly as possible, for, as Shenderovich said in an interview on March 28th, no one has ever done more harm to Russian civilization than the insignificant psychopath cowering in the bunker beneath the Kremlin.
In either scenario, the West must be primed to adapt quickly. It is imperative the West seek and heed the counsel of those who have an intimate understanding of the Russian mindset, culture, language and history. I do not mean the DC think tank elite, many of whom argued that arming Ukraine was a waste of resources (I will not link to these arguments so as to avoid increasing their visibility)—I am speaking of native speakers, I am speaking of experts from post-Soviet space who have been accurately diagnosing Russia’s trajectory, past, present, and future for over a decade. I am speaking of people like Shenderovich, Kasparov, Khodorkovsky. The West has a wealth of qualified specialists and immigrants from post-Soviet space (and the rest of the world!) on whom to rely. They must be admitted into the West’s strategic goal-setting and policymaking processes.
I am also speaking of a generation of Westerners who have dedicated their academic and professional careers to studying other regions. It is unfathomable that some Western information operations are not run by polyglots—or even people without a glancing understanding of other regions’ histories. Specialists in the humanities are, as they have always been, of critical importance to the West’s success.
It is my hope that this interlude report and others that follow, no matter how brief they may be, will be helpful in understanding the realities and perspectives of Russia’s information space and the urgent need for a talent pipeline of specialists who understand other languages and regions to be involved in Western information operations.