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I am a media scholar and a journalist. I study the ways in which contemporary propaganda operates in the settings of the major Russian media outlets. My broad scholarly interest relates to the concept of media endarkenment - the term I coined to describe the process of media influence that transforms (in different ways) critical thinking ability of the people who, as a result, are put in the “dark,” which is a state of limited view of the reality.
I’ve been working as a reporter, producer, anchor, and news writer for the Russian national networks in Moscow and for the local broadcasting companies in Siberia and in the Far East of Russia.
In 2012, as a Fulbright visiting researcher in Emerson College in Boston I started my academic path. Currently, I am a Ph.D. student in the UCSD Communication Department. Under the umbrella of my broad research interests, I am trying to define the subjectivity of people who live under the Putin regime. My publications appeared in such peer-reviewed journals as American Behavioral Scientist and Business Research Yearbook.
 


Genealogy of the concept of Media Endarkenment and research in progress

It was -58 degree in Fahrenheit outside, the microphone cord was frozen and could be broken in two pieces from any awkward touch, but the reporter and the interviewee didn’t care about the cold weather. They were fired up by a hot socio-political issue that was discussed in the Siberian city of Tomsk in the winter of 2006. This is just one of the multiple memorable episodes from my journalism background back in Russia. 
 
I moved to Siberia from the Far East of Russia, a town of Blagoveshchensk, which is right on the Chinese border. I was born there when this border was locked, the town was closed for free entrance as a strategic military object, and when there was a different country on that territory: the Soviet Union instead of the recent Russian Federation.
 
In this remote Amur region of Russia I was witnessing the collapse of the Soviet empire, chaos of the transitional period from socialism to capitalism, emergence of the independent media, and its influence of the social transformation. It was then that I decided to become a journalist who would be able to participate, or to be more precise, to mediate, the public discussion about the ways in which we could refigured our lives and the entire society. 
 
I received my Master’s in journalism from the Amur State University at the time when the so-called post-soviet subject had been almost formed. This kind of subjectivity was influenced by the liberal reforms of the 1990s, by the economic calamity of the soviet stagnation and the early post-soviet privatization, as well as by a gulp of freedom from the open borders, public rallies, and a new kind of journalism.
 
While studying journalism at the university (2000-2005), we’ve been taught the market model and the public interest model of the media. We learned from the work of the journalists of CNN, BBC, Newsweek, and the New York Times. We’ve been reading the western theories of the social disciplines (such as Bernays, McLuhan, Lippmann). And at the same time we’ve been trying to separate journalists from public relation specialists by practicing pluralism and objective journalism. However, this ideal perception of the profession soon shattered against the reality.
 
In order to maintain its license, the local television station of my hometown, where I started my career as a news reporter, had to be loyal to the local, as well as the regional and federal officials. And when I happened to report on the visit of the country’s Minister of Internal Affairs through the lens of “public interest,” after the broadcast I got phone calls from the network’s CEO and from the Federal Security Service (FSB, aka former KGB). Both highly “recommended” me to quit news reporting. Having not found any support among my colleagues and supervisors, I decided to move to Siberia to work for one of the best regional TV networks in the country – independent TV-2 station with a unique and outstanding journalist team.
 
Last year, in January 2015, TV-2 was shut down by the government that took away its broadcast license. The underlying reason for that was the adamant professional position of the TV-2 journalist team that all these years during the formation of the Putin’s regime refused to serve official propaganda and kept serving its viewers instead.
 
The government’s attacks on TV-2 started more than ten years ago. The activity of the TV-2 journalists was closely watched, including their personal phone conversations, social life practices, and intimate contacts. In 2006, I found myself on the FSB radar as well. The sense of solidarity among the members of our journalist team was very prominent. This support helped me to linger on TV-2 for one more year.
 
In 2007, I moved from Siberia to Moscow where I first work for the “CNBC style” Russian cable network RBC-TV and later on as a contributing reporter for CNN.
 
In the fall of 2008 I became a full time news writer for the Russian national over-the-air network NTV working for both morning and evening prime-time news shows. It was there where my illusions and hopes regarding professional standards of journalism gradually evaporated. I’ve been witnessing how state propaganda has been taking over replacing journalism to the point where there was no journalism left.
 
During the federal parliamentary election campaign of 2011 the state propaganda machine utilized almost all media resources in the country, including the Gazprom Media asset NTV. I’ve been witnessing how this propaganda system operated, how the Kremlin’s orders were imposed on the people who wrote the news, and what happened to those who hadn’t followed the orders. This kind of news coverage, as well as the election results themselves, triggered the mass protests in December 2011, right after the election day. However, the protesters with their demand to cancel or at least question the results of the elections believed to be fraudulent were not heard by the government. Moreover, in four months following the protests, in March 2012, Putin was reelected as a president.
 
Based on my experience of being under the pressure from state authorities and witnessing the effect of state propaganda, I coined the term “media endarkenment” that I first, in 2011-2012, understood as a process of media influence by which the intellectual level of media consumers decreases. I started to develop this concept in order to make sense of the situation in which my colleagues and myself have been trapped, to understand the logic of the Kremlin that imposed a particular agenda on the media outlets, and to identify the ways in which that particular discourse was produced by the journalists and other media specialists. Now, years later, I see the limitations of this solely structural approach. However, that was my entry point. 
 
I pitched my concept to the Fulbright committee, got the scholarship, and in the fall of 2012 went to Emerson College in Boston. Working with both Journalism and Communication departments there, I immersed myself in the critical cultural studies theory as well as the case study of the analysis of the U.S. presidential campaign and its media coverage. As a result of my Fulbright scholarship, I published a couple of articles (the latest one appeared in American Behavioral Scientist).
 
In the summer of 2013 I came back to Moscow where I continued working for NTV. It the fall of that year the Maidan protests in Kiev happened. The way the NTV news was made to cover the uprising revealed a new level of state propaganda that over the course of the last few years became ubiquitous and extremely powerful. We’ve been instructed by the Kremlin’s advisors what to write, how to frame, what to omit, and how to make something hardly believable looking plausible. Those journalists who tried to contest were simply fired. After the annexation of Crimea, the war in the Eastern Ukraine, and the MH-17 downing a lot of journalists (myself included) have chosen to leave NTV and the profession in general because there was no place left where journalists, not propagandists, were needed, since at that point the government has obtained control over almost all of the major Russian media. In the summer of 2014 I left Russia to pursue my PhD in Communication at UC San Diego.      
 
During my first years at UCSD I’ve immersed myself in the works of the critical-cultural scholars and complicated my initial structural approach, which implied the top-down flow of power and one-directional manipulation of public opinion, with the questions of how the audience reads and understands the media messages, what informs the ways in which the audience interprets those messages, and what the practices of media consumption are.
 
This ethnographic approach has also evolved from my thinking about the case that I found puzzling and paradoxical. I am trying to understand why, despite the economic calamities caused by the Putin’s foreign policy and his investment into the corrupt system run by his friends, Russian people support Putin even more than before the crisis that Putin himself triggered by his own actions. According to the All-Russian Public Opinion Foundation, Putin’s approval rating is more than 80 percent now. The majority of the population doesn’t acknowledge the connection between Putin’s deeds and growing prices at the grocery stores where consumers again, as during the Soviet times, encounter the deficit and empty shelves - as a result of anti-sanctions, imposed by the Russian government against the European agricultural producers.
 
My burning research interest now is to find out how this gap in comprehending a cause-effect relationship has emerged, why, and what are the conditions within a discourse that help to maintain this gap and even widen it. For thinking about the recent situation in Russia, I still find the term I coined five years ago useful. However, in order to avoid dialectical/dichotomic understanding of the concept of «media endarkenment,» it needs to be reworked and specified. At this moment, by «media endarkenment» I mean the process that transforms (in different ways) people’s critical thinking ability. The term “media” is used here in a very broad sense of any mediated communication. And the word “endarkenment,” even though it has been coined as an antonym to “enlightenment,” doesn’t tend to define or proclaim the whole era as well as doesn’t imply a totality of the brainwashing effect of the media or of the foolishness of people who meekly capture everything they have been told. Hence, by “endarkenment” I understand the result of transformed critical thinking ability that puts people in the “dark,” which is a state of limited view of the reality. By “enlightenment” here I mean the desire to analyze and understand the world around, as well as openness to different viewpoints. 
 
Following Bourdieu’s theory of practice, I see that besides all other forces that contribute to the critical thinking transformation of the contemporary Russian subject, the subject invests in its own “endarkenment” as well – through its everyday practices and its interpretation and internalization of the media messages. For deepening this area of my inquiry, I am looking at the Foucauldian framework regarding the capillary nature of the ways in which power operates within modern societies. Foucault’s notions of power, which is based not on ignorance, but on the production of particular knowledge, and his notion of a modern subject as the object of its own production are leading me to a question that might help to understand why the majority of the people in today’s Russia are capturing and internalizing the state propaganda messages in a way beneficial for the Kremlin. This question concerns the subjectivity of people living in the contemporary Russia that has been under the Putin’s regime for 16 years already.
 
I argue that this form of subjectivity is not identical to the form that is known as “a post-soviet subjectivity,” which was influenced by the abrupt transition from socialism straight to neoliberalism, as well as by a sense of loss and a sentiment of freedom (to travel, to speak up, to participate in a political process). I contend that nowadays this post-soviet subjectivity is undergoing a process of transformation. Some of the key shifts, as I hypothesize, happened in 2012 when Putin took the presidential office back from Medvedev and in 2014 after the annexation of Crimea.
 
The shifted form of subjectivity of the people living in Putin’s Russia might be hypothesized as a hybrid form that consists of four main components, namely: autocratism (aka tsarism), ressentiment (in Nietzsche’s conceptualization of this term), neoliberalism, and nationalism. Recently I am working on the genealogical analysis of the latter component, which I tend to compare with the nationalist discourse of the ongoing U.S. presidential campaign, particularly in the rhetoric of the GOP candidates Donald Trump and Ted Cruz.
 
However, I am aware that my attempts to define the transforming subjectivity of the contemporary Russian people and to generalize it to the particular components can fall short of nuanced understanding of Russians as a diverse entity. Thus, I also tend to account for the differences that play a very important role in people’s understanding and interpretation of the media messages. People’s perception would depend on a media consumer’s gender, sexuality, ethnicity, age, education, religion, whether he or she lives in a rural area or in a city, and so forth.