Authoritarian Publics in Flux: Transformation of the Russian Media Landscape after the 2011ꟷ2012 Protests 'For Fair Elections'

In response to the massive street protests “For Fair Elections” that shook Russia in 2011/12, the country’s leadership implemented a range of measures aimed at curbing dissent. How, why and with what consequences have Russia’s political elites transformed the country’s media landscape in the years since 2011? In order to answer these questions, this paper leverages a recent theory of “authoritarian publics” proposed by one of the authors (Toepfl, 2018). According to this theoretical account, the multiple public sphere of contemporary authoritarian and hybrid regimes can be productively imagined as being comprised of a myriad competing partial publics of three types: (1) uncritical, (2) policy-critical, and (3) leadership-critical. The authors analyze through the lens of this framework the process of transformation of the Russian hybrid media system during the third presidential term of Putin. In particular, they explore how the transformation of three major elements of different publics – participants, environment, discursive practices – influenced the Russian public-at-large. The government used both covert and overt tools in order to control media and eliminate critical voices as well as to promote official discourse in the public-at-large, including i.e. restrictive legislation, economic measures, promotion of loyal editors. These actions resulted in restraining of oppositional discursive practices, shutting down of certain media environments and intimidating participants of critical publics. The authors conclude that the measures implemented by Russia’s leadership in the wake of the protests significantly reduced the audience reach of leadership-critical publics but did not entirely eradicate publics of this type that managed to occupy new media environments, like for instance messenger Telegram. On a more abstract level, the measures taken by the government are here interpreted as measures of “institutional gardening” deployed by the country’s ruling elites in order to fine-tune the balance between the three types of publics. By so doing, they created an authoritarian public-at-large that better met their reconfigured needs.