ABSTRACT
This chapter further illuminates the relationship between internal and external self-projection via an analysis of the scandal surrounding the banning of Russia’s disabled contestant, Iuliia Samoilova, from the 2017 Eurovision Song Contest held in Kiev. It reveals how the controversy highlighted the inextricable ties between (a) the post-Soviet identity dynamic intertwining Russia, Europe, and the former USSR (in particular, Ukraine – the contested borderland separating Russia from, and conjoining it to, Europe), and (b) the function of a transnationally interconnected media in providing the stage on which this dynamic is re-enacted. The scandal’s timeline, it is argued, plays out on in a sequence of outrageous Channel 1 talk shows, each of which traces the displacement of Samoilova, the vulnerable ‘person of limited abilities’, by Ukraine, a despicable non-nation of ‘invalids and morons’. On the symbolic terrain of its Ukrainian periphery (its distant, yet all-too-close, frontier), Russia’s response to Eurovision 2017 exposes its dual role of self-as-other (Europe) and other-as-self (Ukraine). In manipulating the Samoilova crisis, it articulates an identity formed recursively from how others see it, both positively (Russia in rule-bound, liberal European mode) and negatively (Russia as the inadequate peasant persona it projects onto Ukraine).
