ABSTRACT
This chapter examines how the news coverage of Russia’s state television channel, Pervyi kanal (Channel 1), narrates the annual commemorations of the 2004 Beslan siege. It begins by identifying four salient themes in the coverage of the first anniversary commemorations: (1) silence and silencing, (2) ‘othering’ survivors and survival, (3) separation, and (4) abstraction. It then tracks ways in which these themes continue as key components of the Channel 1 coverage over subsequent anniversaries (2006–2019), arguing that this is a translation of the event of Beslan into a carefully constructed and highly controlled official narrative. Rather than positioning Beslan at the centre of a collective narrative of national unity and cohesion, this translation distances the town and its people from Russia’s collective memory in a manner that is indicative of the marginalization of civil society in Putin’s Russia.
