Authors

Julia Lerner¹;  ¹ Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, Israel

Discussion

What happens when cultural figures speak publicly about their feelings in times of war? What political meanings do public expressions of sincerity have when a society is undergoing violent national convulsions? The paper addresses these questions by analyzing a particular genre of YouTube videos that appeared in the first months after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and aim to contribute to critical debates in cultural sociology about the ongoing (de)politicization embedded in ‘personalism’ and ‘emotionalization’ of reinterpretations of social reality.
Staged as long and deep dialogues between a journalist and prominent figures of contemporary Russian public life (artists, journalists, therapists, actors, entrepreneurs), these videos enthralled millions of Russian-speaking viewers around the world.  They present reflexive accounts of the troubled personal and collective mood resulting from the political shift and violent events of the war.  The media format within which the interviews are created is based on the genre of a 'sincere conversation', where a person and their emotional experience is the authority of knowledge and the source of truth. The genre, initially associated with dissident performance of anti-war, counter-hegemonic 'defiant talk', has gradually been adopted by pro-state patriotic narratives discussing the Russian cultural condition, political regime and violent events.  The emotions expressed in the subjects' reflections are political, and their political positions are expressed through the description of the emotional conditions. Informed by collective historical and ideological narratives on the one hand, and by intimate memories and personal moral dilemmas on the other, the genre of sincere emotional interviews has become a form of political defiance, moral collective therapy, but also performs the emotional work of political conformity and national loyalty. 
Thus, the analysis challenges the assumptions prevalent in both common sense and scholarship that sincere emotional personal expression is decoupled from politics and mainly conveys  a humanistic individualistic attitude. On the contrary, revealing the double appearance of personalized emotional expressions in both pro-war and anti-war Russian media, I show how public sincerity is involved in political and moral meaning-making, and moreover, how its political content can inform not only a liberal-critical cultural imagination but also a nationalist, conservative and even authoritarian one.