Authors

Discussion

The term “post-soviet media system” became very used with renaissance of sovietology but until now remains unclear and criticizable. Few scholars tried to generalize this term and to find a unique logics of this post-soviet media world (see Jakubowicz, 2008; Dobek-Ostrowska, 2012) but until now the model remains still unclear because the difference between regime of media in Belarus of Lukashenka and Ukraine of Zelenski seems to be strongly different.

The pandemic of COVID-19 and infodemic as information dimension of such pandemic is a kind of global event which very affected all countries and thus can be a good case to examine differences between post-soviet media systems. Pandemic of COVID-19 questioned the degree of globalization of the world and as a result sharpened more national differences and local national protectionism measures as well as identity issues. As we might see in post-soviet world despite dramatic differences we can see a rise of common mediatized populism related with pandemic. In this paper we analyze such public discourse through key political appeals of authorities of such countries as: Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Hungary, Poland and Estonia. The strategy of analysis will be based on discursive theory of Laclaugh and Mouffe and especially on the concept of “other” (Laclau and Mouffe, 2014).