As I have already highlighted in the previous sub-section, Russianness relates to several topics that are studied especially in Russia’s neighbouring countries.
Marlène Laruelle (2019, 6) has expressed a concern that the tense state of international affairs is reflected in biases in Russian studies in Western states. However, there is a great volume of competent research touching the subject of Russianness. Relevant studies range from Vladimir Putin’s speeches (Laine 2020); the post-Soviet space (Zhurzhenko 2014; Skulte-Ouaiss 2015); everyday patriotism in Russia (Goode 2017; Kalinina 2017);
linguo-cultural imaginations (Makarychev 2012; Ryazanova-Clarke 2017);
immigration (Pöllänen 2014; Krivonos 2019); memory politics (Davydova-Minguet 2018; Wijermars 2019); elites (Müller 2012; Hudson 2012); and so on. However, unlike in many of these previous studies, the main attention in current research is not on the Russian idea but its discursive power. My initial idea and approach of examining discursive Russianness was inspired
in particular by Iver B. Neumann’s (1996; 1999; 2010) work on uses of the other: Russia vis-à-vis Europe and a normalising (international) social order.
Some conceptual choices need to be addressed briefly at this point before discussing them in more detail in the later sections.
As my research shows, people often find nationalist stigma aversive, even though it can be understood as a nation’s chief constructor and sustainer (Hirschi 2011:22): a finite, solidary, and sovereign imagined community (Anderson [1983] 2007) that the same people praise. For ethical reasons I have interpreted acts, not people, as nationalist. I seek to cover discursive nationalism and nationhood in the less evident contexts of people’s everyday lives. This approach should remedy the previously ignored dynamics and practices of dominant groups outside formal institutions (Billig 1995; Madianou 2005; Fox & Miller-Idriss 2008; Goode & Stroup 2015). Scholars have also encouraged the examination of counterforces of everyday nationalism using concepts such as ethnoscape (Appadurai 1996), everyday cosmopolitanism (Beck 2002), and transnationalism (Vertovec 2009). However, on the internet, for example, these forces do not always oppose but accumulate one another (Szulc 2017).
Through the prism of transnationality, that is, the active social interaction and bonds of non-state actors across state borders (Vertovec 2009:2), I wish to highlight the complexity of the counterforces facing, interacting, and challenging perceptions of nation-ness. Studies of transnationalism have faced the criticism that they are unable to depart from the nation as their basic unit of analysis (ibid., 20). The current research does not intend to provide a new
“real” or “nation-independent” discursive model to replace the national social order. Instead, it scrutinises the national and state territoriality of identities in contexts where the development of information and communication technologies (ICT) fundamentally transforms the knowledge and experience of socio-spatiality. Some of the media content in this research is produced in Russia, some in Finland or other states, but their cross-border transmission and consumption happen within the discursive transnational media space.
In this research I view discourses as socioculturally ordered and functional information (organised bodies of knowledge-power) resources that people
& Agnew 1992; Keller 2012). The epistemology of discourse entails that meanings are not immediate but mediated (Laclau & Mouffe 200: xi). Media discourse refers to the ordering of socio-spatial norms in communication mediated by technological broadcast platforms with non-present audiences.
These norms regulate subject relations for the presentation, distribution, filtering, selection, assessment, and reuse of media content.
In vernacular speech and even academic research, media is an easily overlooked concept. A plural of medium, media can be defined simply as a multiplicity of channels through which communication is mediated. This definition can become too inclusive for the social constructivist view that reality is not immediate but already socially mediated. In addition, ICTs are embedding in our social life in a historical accelerating process (Couldry &
Hepp 2016). Media can be categorised as press, television, radio, and online media or dichotomies like journalistic-non-journalistic, traditional/legacy-new/digital/online, public-private, and so on. Since newer and older methods of media communication are interconnected and mixed, media scholars have characterised contemporary media as “hybrid”, implying flux, in-betweenness, and their interstitial and liminal nature (Chadwick 2017:10). A decreasing amount of media operates strictly offline, whereas TV programmes can incorporate Twitter feeds to engage the audience, for example (Yagodin 2014; Floridi 2015a; Oivo 2021). In this thesis I distinguish between media platforms as discursive spaces, not according to the people who are involved in them. I refer to the televised programmes, newspapers, and web content of news agencies as “legacy media”. In “social media” I include blogs, discussion forums, and more established social networking sites such as Facebook and VKontakte. They all enable a low-threshold means of content production, sharing, and social interaction.
There are several cases in which the Finnish-Russian transnational media space presents instances of problematic ignorance concerning what Edward Said (1994) refers to as “contrapuntal reading”, that is, a multiplicity of positions and horizons from which a mediated reading may start. For example, in 2018 a Helsingin Sanomat article depicted a Russian passport next to a Finnish one in the lead-in picture for a report about an initiative enabling the denaturalisation of Finnish dual citizens who had committed a
felony (Luukka 2018). This led Finland’s Russian speakers to initiate a petition demanding that the publisher apologise and change the image, which they were concerned would stigmatise them in the eyes of Finnish media users.
This was characterised as part of a long-term trend (adressit.fi 2018; see also Kopylova 2018). In this dissertation, I seek to give more attention to the transnational multiplicity of user and producer positions in the contemporary Finnish-Russian media space. The following background section reviews the related regional and geopolitical contexts for this research.
1.2 Background: Russian-Finnish (trans-)national