ABSTRACT
Russia belongs to the so-called young democracies (even though the hundredth anniversary of parliamentarianism in Russia has already been celebrated), in which many institutes, including a civil society, are at a stage of formation and finding of maturity. In full measure, it concerns institutes of public diplomacy and mechanisms of formation and promotion of image of the country abroad. Unlike the USSR, which possessed a powerful information and propaganda machine and influential ideology, Russia not only has lost such a machine and ideology, but it appeared to find itself during the 1990s in a deep crisis of self-identification and facing a choice regarding its future development, which has clarified only now. As well as after the October revolution of 1917, after 1991, many things had to be started from nothing in terms of the new state and the transition (or more accurately ‘return’) to another social and political system. If the USSR was mainly object – Russia became during the 1990s the subject of information-ideological influence from the outside, above all from the West. After the collapse of the USSR, most of the new independent states
felt a need for self-identification and the establishment of their image in the world arena. Russia also faced this task, and the approaches to its solution in the last 16 years have undergone a noticeable evolution. First about self-identification. On the one hand, it was easier for Russia
with this than for many new states – after all Russia had behind it a 1,000year experience of state history and the status of successor to a superpower, the USSR. In addition, even in the Soviet 70-year period many people in the West, for example Charles de Gaulle, had only called the USSR ‘Russia’. That is there remained a continuity of the state and nation. On the other hand, there were difficulties as well: the breakup of the USSR had triggered off strong centrifugal tendencies, which had spilled over to Russia too, in particular in the form of manifestations of separatism (examples – Chechnya, Tatarstan). The conflicts that had flared up on ethnic grounds in the post-Soviet area and the virus of nationalism were a most dangerous factor for the stability of our multinational state. Finally, the ‘democratic revolution’ dealt a powerful blow not only to the Communist party, but to the entire state, with which the party had been in a state of symbiosis. Superimposed on all this was the acute internal
a shooting of the parliament building by tanks. Add to this the ‘shock therapy’, which had cast a whole generation of people of older age below the poverty line, the wild privatization ‘for our own men’, the 20-25 million Russians who had found themselves overnight and against their will outside Russia, the new boundaries that had narrowed the territory of the country to a state of 500 years ago, and the dubious legitimacy of the Belaya Vezha agreements to dissolve the USSR in the eyes of many people – and you will get the picture of a profound crisis of identity, of a crisis of the nation, its spirit and self-consciousness. So, it was not without reason that the task put forward by the former President Yeltsin of searching for a national idea remained but a declarative slogan. And because few people in the conditions of a permanent power struggle then, in the already distant 1990s, concerned themselves with state interests, so much the less was it the case with the image of the country. Left to its own devices, this image just ‘drifted’ – by virtue of the tradition of the personification of state authority peculiar to Russia – along with the contradictory image of Boris Yeltsin. The state had actually withdrawn from the sphere of ideology and
given up the implementation of information policy, turning everything over to market forces. And because a vacuum never occurs in this domain, it was quickly filled by product advertising, soap operas, crime films and catastrophe stories. The media themselves quickly fell under the control of oligarchic clans and began to be used by them for political and competitive purposes and for the propaganda of values alien to our society. By the logic of our narrative it should further be said – ‘but now Putin
came, and everything has changed’. Unfortunately, so far not everything – well, you cannot all at once clean the ‘Augean stables’ and repair the image. Yet, the signs of recovery did nevertheless appear, and they are quite a few. And, most important, an understanding has come of the need for serious, systemic work on improving the reputation of Russia. What is this due to? Above all, it is due to a recognition by all of the considerable harm
that is today being inflicted upon Russia by its image, which in many respects has become a hindrance to development and modernization. Russia’s reputation in the world is significantly worse than the country really is. Why did it happen so? Partly because up until recent years in our
country no one has seriously concerned themselves with the country’s image, and if some did, then it was not ourselves, but other information centers and in the way that suited them and not Russia. Partly our own media are to blame for this, having staked on mass instincts and low taste and having been carried away by negativism and the hyperbolizing of drawbacks. All this has damaged, rather than helped, the provision of objective and full information about developments in Russia. And image is the result of the information that passes.
