Thirty Years Later: Visions Of The Collapse Of The Soviet Union In The Television Journalism And The Internet Space Of Contemporary Russia

Abstract

The purpose of this article was a comparative analysis of the images of the collapse of the Soviet Union in television journalism and the comments of Internet users within the framework of commemorations of the thirtieth anniversary of the collapse of the Soviet Union. Based on the content analysis, as well as comparison with television projects of the late 1990s-2000s, not only a decrease in the total number of television projects dedicated to the collapse of the Soviet Union, but also the unequivocal dominance of television projects focused on the reproduction of traumatic discourse was revealed. It was concluded that the appeal to the events of the collapse of the Soviet Union on contemporary Russian television is not so much focused on the reconstruction of the events of 1991 as it turns out to be a historical illustration of the socio-economic and political transformations of the current government in the last twenty years. This can be clearly seen in the transformation of the images of the victim, enemies, as well as the strengthening of the rhetoric of reassessment of the events of the collapse of the Soviet Union. The analysis of the peculiarities of the viewer’s interest on the Internet also showed the dominance in terms of the number of views of television projects that reproduce traumatic discourse. The use of machine learning (ML) methods and sentiment analysis revealed the relative dominance of neutral comments and a rather high percentage of those who negatively assessed the collapse of the Soviet Union, where romanticization of Soviet everyday life, family experience and the influence of media figures of the Russian Internet turned out to be nostalgia factors.

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