ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 sets the scene for the comprehensive study of message control presented in this book by outlining the narratives deployed by officials in Nur-Sultan, Aşgabat, and Tashkent at the time of COVID-19. Operationalising a research design based on narrative framing, this chapter analyses at first 17 speeches delivered by the presidents of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan throughout the pandemic. The systematic investigation of these speeches—here studied in their Russian-language versions—unveils three main narratives cutting across the crisis communication practice crystallised in Central Asia between 2020–2022. The rhetorical importance of these narratives is then highlighted in the chapter’s second segment, which looks at the official representation of the pandemic in three Russian-language governmental mouthpieces (Kazakhstanskaya Pravda, Neitral’nyi Turkmenistan, and Pravda Vostoka). The chapter concludes that the systematic reproduction of presidential narratives in official media has represented a tool that exclusively aimed to amplify the outreach of the regimes’ pandemic messages.
