https://www.math.aau.at/talks/204/pdf

On February 24, 2022, Russian troops entered Ukraine. Many Russian cultural media condemned the military aggression, publishing similar statements on their websites and social media about the incompatibility of culture with violence and war. However, the tightening of censorship and criminalization of public denunciation of the war and criticism of Putin's regime have brought about changes in cultural journalism as well. Those media that continued to write about the war (Colta.ru, Syg.ma, Discours.io) were blocked in Russia. Others, willing to continue their reflection on actual topics, have mastered the "Aesopian language" and the art of historical analogies, seemingly forgotten since Soviet times (Kommersant-Weekend, Gorky.media). The war also exposed the colonial nature of the Russian political system, which led to the creation of new oppositional cultural media by researchers and journalists who had left Russia, adopting the discourses of postcolonial studies and decolonial theory. All these processes, however, will become clearer against the background of a broader panorama of transformations of cultural journalism in the context of Vladimir Putin's 3rd and 4th presidential terms, including its politicization in the early 2010s and the "educational turn" that followed the conservative turn in Kremlin politics and the instrumentalization of cultural canons by the regime. This lecture will discuss these transformations and the political aspects of Russian cultural journalism.