Authors

Oksana Ermolaeva¹;  ¹ Complutense University, Spain

Discussion

Recent events have shown that Russian history is prone to a regrettable cyclicity, based on the “longstanding life world” of “Soviet civilization” (Schlogel 2022), which has generated new monsters and marked Russia’s dramatic comeback to Stalinism—and even worse. In the face of the current resurrection of the “Soviet Leviathan,” the dark sides of high Stalinism—collectivization, repressions, ethnic cleansing, and denunciation practices—have acquired a renewed and macabre importance.

As some Russian political scientists have noted, politicians in the digital age in Russia have pursued aims defined by predecessors of the current regime. Russian authorities have tried to reshape the traditional system of state coercion and the mobilization of the citizenry by creating an automated mechanism of behavior control that does not so much involve citizens, legal representatives, or courts. In such a state-run digital control system, the rights enjoyed by citizens not only depend on level of their compliance with the regime, but non-compliance incurs the immediate “social death”. Russian society finds itself in a state of permanent ideological mobilization. The propaganda industry works non-stop to expose the messianic righteousness of the current regime in its struggle against the external enemies. The industry of political and social secrecy, suspicion, and suppression allows the masters and executors of political repressions to restrict the information flows within the country, and political and civil rights of the people. What is more important, a certain segment of the society is willing to actively collaborate with the regime.

The paper is a part of a book project, and investigates practices of political reporting with an assistance of a comparative temporalities approach. Drawing upon existing historiography of reporting and denunciations (Kiffer, 2020; Sukalo 2021; Viola, 2017; Muravyeva, 2014; Kozlov, 1996), it argues, that by the time of the emerging political crisis —repressive operations of 1937-1938, and of the Russian war on Ukraine — the society had been already well prepared for an active assistance to the regime in its “political cleansing” campaigns. It happened in the form of the program of “self-purification:” reporting on and expulsion from the social space of those previously stigmatized as “politically unreliable.” The research focuses on changing methods of the political reporting, and the role of the digital technologies in it. It investigates the students’ social networks targeted at creating mutually controlled denunciation practices, the cases of the “serial reporting,” and the “transgenerational” reporting practices.