Toward a Tipping Point? Only Regional Media are Talking about Russia, Shtepa Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Feb. 28 – As Putin has taken Russia to war in Ukraine, something very strange has happened to the media in Russia: the Moscow media controlled by the Kremlin is no longer talking at all about Russia but only about other countries, leaving the regional media the only real source of information about the country, Vadim Shtepa says.

            Those who rely either voluntarily or by force of circumstances on the Moscow state media no longer know what is taking place in their own country: Putin doesn’t use the Internet and relies on the words of people he has installed, thus falling into the trap so elegantly described in the film “Wag the Dog.”

            And Aleksey Navalny, who languishes in a Russian prison camp and thus has access only to this same media, has complained that he no longer is getting any news about Russia but only about Russian attitudes toward Ukraine and the West (reforum.io/blog/2022/02/28/pochemu-segodnya-vremya-regionalnyh-smi/  reposted at region.expert/own-country/).

            Shtepa, a regionalist who edits the Tallinn-based portal Region.Expert, says that this situation in a paradoxical way “opens for regional media an unexpected window of opportunities.” If journalists in the regions can’t write independently about foreign affairs, they can concentrate on the problems of their cities, regions and republics.

            As happened in 1917 and again under perestroika and glasnost, that makes it likely that their coverage will help the peoples of the Russian Federation see just how different they are from one another rather than being locked into the Kremlin’s preferred world in which they are all the same and standing strong against a perfidious West.

            And when as it must Russia opens up again, these journalists and those affected by their writings will focus first and foremost not on Moscow and Russian foreign policies but on their local and regional interests and the need for new regimes to take action to address the problems that they do in fact face.

            Shtepa quotes with approval the observation of Aleksey Vorsin, an activist from Khabarovsk, who says that “if you live in a glass house, it is stupid t throw stones. While it is not too late, one must make peace, calls its military home, and begin to deal with the domestic economy” (facebook.com/alexey.vorsin/posts/4387860977982594).

            If Shtepa is right, and his argument on this point is convincing, the Putin regime’s media policies are setting up the Kremlin and its hopes for a future just like the past to defeat and instead aiding and abetting precisely those trends which will undermine the territorial integrity of the Russian Federation the defense of which the Kremlin leader insists is his primary goal.