Russian Media in Former Soviet Republics Not Promoting Russian World, Khatuntsev Says

Paul Goble

            Staunton, Oct. 17 -- Many in the non-Russian countries around the Russian Federation and many who analyze the situation there assume that the Russian-language media in those countries represents a kind of “soft power” for Moscow. On occasion that may be true, but a new survey of this media in three countries reaches the opposite conclusion.

            APN commentator Stanislav Khatuntsev says that “on the whole, in the ‘Russian’ press” of Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan, “there is nothing really Russian” besides the language and even that is being compromised and that what Moscow thinks is promoting pro-Russian positions in fact is promoting the reverse (apn.ru/index.php?newsid=40505).

            “There is absolutely nothing to be surprised at in this,” the Russian nationalist says. Today, the Russian state doesn’t promote Russian national interests but serves only as, in the worse of V.L. Tsymbursky, “a corporation for the disposal” of the natural wealth of “Great Russia.”

            Russia today “does not protect either the Russian media abroad or Russia’s deepest interests,” Khatuntsev says, “but only the interests of corporations like Gazprom and Rosatom and privileged members of this corporation.” It doesn’t both “even to formulate national interests,” as anyone who considers the Russian-language media abroad can see.

            In support of this argument, the APN writer gives examples from papers in Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan. In Ukraine, Argumenty i fakty. Ukraina doesn’t follow Russian orthographic rules but rather writes “v Ukraine” and not “na Ukraine.” But that is the least of its problems from a Russian point of view.

            It celebrates Ukrainian nationalists and Kyiv’s drive to become part of the West, it treats Russia as the enemy and talks about the Russian occupation of Crimea and the Donbass, and it presents only bad news about Russia while featuring positive stories about Ukraine itself and its Western “partners.”

            Before it was shuttered a month ago, Komsomolskaya prava v Belarusi was no better. It too violated Russian orthography by referring to that republic as Belarus rather than Belorussia as Russians do, and it did not display any positive sympathies for Russia preferring instead to talk about Belarus and the West, Khatuntsev says.

            Komsomolskaya pravda v Kazakhstane doesn’t violate Russian spelling rules as often but it promotes Kazakhstan values rather than Russian ones. It covers the Kazakh president almost as much as the Russian media in the Russian Federation cover Vladimir Putin, and it talks about Kazakhstan’s ties with the West rather than its historic links with Russia.

            Khatuntsev’s article represents a useful correction to the sometimes true but all-too-easy assumption that Russian media in the non-Russian countries is invariably pro-Moscow in its messaging at least from a Russian nationalist perspective. What is worrisome is that such articles in the Russian capital may be harbingers of a change in Moscow’s policies toward these papers.

            If that should prove to be the case and if they should become nothing more than Moscow mouthpieces, the odds are that they would see their readership decline even more than it has and that the Russian state would be forced to recognize that it has lost yet another channel for influencing opinion in these countries.