“Creative” Bolotnaia and “Public” Poklonnaia: The Visual Representations of Protests in the Russian Media

Abstract

Beginning in December 2011, the Russian media has become a site for the construction of a particular metalanguage, through which journalists describe the current political context in general and the imaginaries of the protest movement in particular as a revolution of the “creative (middle) class.” The artificially generated opposition of categories of participants’ backgrounds in oppositional and progovernment protests circulates in “official,” government-controlled and “independent,” liberal media outlets alike. In these circumstances of the mediatization of society, political struggle is conducted with the help of concrete images. Many “successful” images turn out to have been structured in accordance with predetermined political goals. Similar to the nineteenth century government practice of mobilizing engravings  for  the purposes of crystallizing national  identity and the figure of the “enemy” during wartime,  in the twenty-first century videos and photographs  deployed  by  television  and  print media shape the message of the schismogenesis between “us” and “them.” In Russian.