Michael Gorham1; 1 University of Florida, United States
Discussion
If political opposition in Russia is most commonly perceived to be rhetorically enabled by digitally mediated communication, the online activity of Alexei Navalny has no doubt constituted a central manifestation of that relationship. Partly by design and part by necessity, Navalny has relied almost primarily on digital media to communicate, organize and persuade for the greater part of his career as corruption fighter and public political figure. And few if any among the "non-systemic opposition" have harnessed these tools as adroitly and consistently as he. In an effort to provide a broad-reaching rhetorical profile of Russia's most influential oppositional leader, I look, in this paper, at select case studies from his most impactful campaigns on LiveJournal, Twitter, and YouTube in order to identify both the persistent rhetorical devices that span all platforms, as well as medium-specific strategies that speak to his ability to adapt his political language to the evolving linguistic landscape of Russian (and global) social media. In the process, I delve further into the nature of the discursive relationship between politician and medium to better understand their relative impact on the political language culture of Putin-era Russia.
