ABSTRACT
When New York’s twin towers fell, news broadcasts struggled to convey the enormity of this strike at the symbolic heart of the world’s sole superpower. Since 9/11, however, concrete features have been ascribed to the faces of the perpetrators of the Evil, stories of bravery have emerged from the rubble of the World Trade Center, and 9/11 has been inscribed into the narrative of post Cold War American nationhood, just as it has enabled Al Quaeda to fill the chasm vacated by the evil Soviet Empire. Tales of martyrdom amongst the passengers of the jet that was downed in Pennsylvania, the bravery of fire-fighters who returned repeatedly to the collapsing towers, and the final mobile phone calls to loved ones from those aboard the two jets which crashed into the World Trade Center all now feature prominently in 9/11 folklore. Since 2001 the 9/11 ‘brand’ has also been exported to other nations. The
Madrid bombings preceding the Spanish elections of 2004 have been dubbed ‘Spain’s 9/11,’ just as the Beslan school siege became known as ‘Russia’s 9/11,’ and the events in Britain of July 2005 are now referred to ubiquitously as ‘7/7’.1
Paradoxically, an event designed to shake the world’s superpower from its consumerist fantasies has itself taken the form of a consumer format! But it is a format with national specificities. In Russia’s case the Beslan outrage coincided with a new curtailment of media freedom; one of NTV’s flagship talk shows, Freedom of Speech (Svoboda slova), hosted by the prominent liberal journalist, Savik Shuster, was, in a development not directly related to Beslan, cancelled in the very same month. Shortly before this, Leonid Parfenov’s equally controversial current affairs magazine programme, Lately (Namedni), suffered a similar fate. Some commentators will point to post 9/11 and post 7/7 curtailments of free speech in the USA and UK, but in Russia the imposed constraints were not only much harsher; they were, moreover, happening well before the emergence of any hint that the country was about to suffer a terrorist outrage of this order. Russia also deviates from other ‘warriors on terror’ in that its nation-building project must navigate between a partially rehabilitated Soviet past and an ambivalently viewed, westerndominated present, and in the intensity with which recent terrorist outrages
have shaped that navigation. Writing before Beslan, Ivan Zassoursky suggests that the 1999 Moscow apartment bomb blasts which he refers to as the Russian equivalent of 9/11, ‘started the process of the almost instant reconstruction of the Russian mentality’ (Zassoursky 2004: 230). Unusual likewise is Russia’s television culture, emerging from (and now retracting back into) a controlled environment of mutually reinforcing, state-sponsored voices emphasising the inevitable, the ritualistic and the positive.2 Russian news broadcasts are still developing a set of generic conventions for the representation of anomalous, unanticipated catastrophes and, despite a sequence of recent disasters exposing media incompetence and/or inexperience (e.g. Chernobyl, the Kursk submarine disaster, the Nord-Ost theatre siege and the apartment bombs – all precursors of Beslan), in the 2004 school siege, they reached a milestone in this process.. Our exploration of how the approach to the problem adopted by Russian
news links with, and ultimately complicates, the national identity construction task it has been assigned focuses on certain challenges posed to a media system by its need to collude with a government regime which, authoritarian public image notwithstanding, is beset by profound ideological instability. Our analysis is based on six editions of Vremia (Time), the main evening news programme of Channel 1, now effectively (along with the RTR channel), Putin’s official mouthpiece. The sequence spans the event and its immediate aftermath (the siege itself lasted from 1 to 3 September, with 6 and 7 September declared as national days of mourning). Since our focus is the ideological, post-atrocity processing of meanings derived from Beslan, rather than the spontaneous representation of the atrocity itself, it is the bulletins of 4, 5 and 6 September which we draw upon most. Details of the times and dates of particular broadcasts referred to during the course of our analysis are given parenthetically in the text. Our argument proceeds thematically, focusing first on the key imagery and mythology to emerge from Beslan; then on aspects of the news discourse supporting it, arguing that both seemingly perform the (re)integration of a fragmented nation, before identifying within the representational strategies underpinning this process a tension between the requirement that the events be assimilated to familiar models, and the need to render them in their shocking, chronotopic alterity. We conclude with two brief, but hopefully instructive, post-Beslan epilogues. One draws parallels between the Russian media’s culture of terrorism and that of the BBC following the 7/7 London bombings. The other reinforces the paradox according to which the more tightly controlled a nation’s media is, the more unstable its war on terror discourse.
