Print, power and personhood: Newspapers and ethnic identity in East Siberia
This PhD research investigates the relevance of non-Russian Siberian culture and identity both for the state institutions in the regions concerned, and for the Russian Federation’s central government. As the first chapter describes, Sovietera policy towards the Soviet Union’s non-Russian peoples brought about a massive cultural change, in the process generating a new awareness of nonRussian ethnic identity. Current ethnographic and sociological research on the former Soviet Union indicates that this awareness continues to develop, while remaining subject to politically motivated attempts at interference. Politicians, academics and journalists have pointed out the capacity of strong ethnic identities to hinder a popular identification with a multi-ethnic federal state, even as other commentators have accused politicians of deliberately encouraging personal ethnic affiliations. The interaction between political propaganda and personal perception within the changing awareness of ethnic identity in the Russian Federation has not yet been clarified, and neither has its significance for post-Soviet Russia’s state-building project. The introductory chapter explains the comparison of two Siberian nonRussian peoples, the Buryat and Sakha, and their respective territorial administrations, the Republics of Buryatia and Sakha (Yakutia), which is intended to isolate general trends in the development of non-Russian ethnicity. This comparison is based on the assumption that culture itself is a network of collectively held ideas that determines social practice, as it changes in tandem with the course of events. The perceptions of non-Russian identity that appeared over the Soviet period are thus understood to arise from changes in the collective understanding of cultural difference. Hence, this study identifies and then compares contemporary formulations of the Soviet-era terms connected to cultural difference in Buryatia and Sakha (Yakutia). The research method is a combined content and discourse analysis of regional newspapers. Both Buryatia and Sakha (Yakutia) contain self-sufficient newspaper markets, producing a flow of discourse determined both by the needs of their local populations, and their regional political establishments. The discursive practices in these Republics’ newspapers therefore reflect both popular attitudes, and those that underlie political strategies. Simultaneously quantifying and interpreting the ideas connected to Soviet-era notions of ‘ethnicity’ in these Republics’ mainstream newspapers shows how journalists and political publicists try to use their audiences’ ‘ethnic’ affiliations, in addition to the way they perceive their audiences to understand and value these concepts. The core material in this thesis consists of two chapters on each Republic, describing their respective regional newspapers, and the discussion of Buryat and Sakha ethnicity these newspapers produced. As the concluding chapter describes, the newspaper material revealed that the current development of Buryat and Sakha culture and identity is integrated into the development of their respective republican administrations. The newspaper discourse as a whole shows how rapid demographic change and inefficient governance poses challenges for both politicians and individual citizens – leading regional- and federal-level administrations to mask their inadequacies through appealing to personal ethnic identity, and their subject populations to elevate their ethnic affiliation into a quasi-religious commitment
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