ABSTRACT
In this chapter we project several themes from Chapter 1 into a new environment: that of the ‘media event’, a television genre allied to, but not coincident with the news bulletin. Thus, the fragility conferred upon the nation-building project by the performative function it must adopt in television news is further explored through the uneasy relationship between national and media traditions which emerges in the televised official celebration. Moreover, the tension arising from the adoption of pseudo-democratic global forms for profoundly non-democratic national(istic) purposes identified in our analysis of post-Soviet news strategies is found to acquire new complexity in the context of the organised media event. Upon the nexus formed by these two, now familiar, issues we superimpose a topic which will recur as a leitmotif throughout the remainder of the book: that of the importance of the localglobal-national axis in its specific, post-Soviet dimension. First, though we should introduce the subject of the present chapter in more detail. National identities rely upon the traditions that sustain them; nations
lacking a sense of continuity with a set of communal rites stretching seemingly unchanged from past to present will not cohere.1 The purpose of royal weddings, state openings of parliaments, and more popularly inspired phenomena like city marathons is to promote a sense of unity of purpose across the diverse factions making up the modern nation-state. We are encouraged to forget the barriers dividing us on these occasions, but also, as television commentary on the colourful mix of participants in city marathons confirm, to celebrate our mutual differences. All traditions develop and mutate over time, but in the case of post-Soviet
Russia, the 70 years of communist rule which ended in 1991 radically breached the continuity upon which tradition’s maintenance is predicated. The architects of official post-Soviet culture have been forced to pick up the threads of a long-lost set of rituals by generating a wave of nostalgia for all things tsarist, whilst, particularly under Putin, preserving and updating those Soviet rituals deemed worthy of retention, several of which, as recent scholarship confirms, themselves date back to pre-revolutionary times.2
