THE STRATEGIC NARRATIVE WAR

How Russian Media Shifted Ukrainians From Brothers to Enemies

"The murderous attack on Ukrainians is also a kind of cultural and historical cannibalism." 

--Sophie Pinkham, in an emailed interview with Lucy Jakub, New York Review of Books, March 12, 2022

      

There is something universal about the reaction to Russia's wanton destruction of Ukraine, its unprecedented scale, the promiscuous bombing of civilian buildings, including but not limited to maternity hospitals, houses of worship, and even Russian historical landmarks: The continuing lack of belief that this could really be happening. As Pinkham, an American author and memoirist who first lived in the Ukraine in 2008, points out, "for Putin to bomb the city that’s home to the eleventh-century St. Sophia Cathedral, one of the only remaining buildings from Kyivan Rus' [the medeival origin of Russia] . . . is like bombing the grave of his own ancestors. I guess he doesn’t care."

Matisyahu sings at New York’s City Winery benefit for Ukraine

He's certainly bombing the graves of my ancestors. As Jews of Eastern European descent, my grandparents on both sides grew up in The Pale of Settlement, which marked the line that limited the parts of the Russian empire in which Jews were allowed to live. The YIVO Institute for Jewish Research's Enyclopedia of Eastern Europe cites laws passed in 1804 and 1835 that permitted Jewish habitation in: "the Ukrainian provinces of Volhynia, Podolia, Kiev, Chernigov, Poltava, Kherson, and Ekaterinoslav." ("Pale of Settlement" is where we get the phrase "beyond the pale," where those affected were not permitted; the term was also used to keep English landowners separated from "wild Irish" hundreds of years earlier.)

The Pale of Settlement also included many parts of some other familiar names in today's news: Belarus, Moldava, Crimea, Lithuania. Many of my generation, baby boomers who were children of assimilated Jews, grew up confused about exactly what country our grandparents were from. It depended, they'd say, dating back to imperial wars with the former Kingdom of Poland; the continual shifting of national or regional borders; and the scale of repression or enlightenment of whatever Czarist rules were on the throne at the time. My grandparents and great grandparents were sharecroppers anyway, serfs in rural fiefdoms, not to mention cannon-fodder for Cossacks in whatever war they were fighting. Mostly from Ukraine and Belarus.

And this was before the Nazis. The bombing by Putin's army a few weeks ago of the memorial at Babi Yar, reminded me I had skin in the game. Babi Yar was a ravine outside Kiev (Kyiv) in which the Nazis murdered 33,771 Jews, mostly women, children, and the elderly, who were not able to flee the advancing German Army, according to YIVO research. Nearly 34,000 people shot to death. . . in two days, Yom Kippur, 1941. Official recognition of this atrocity, despite Yevtushenko's courageous poem, "Babi Yar" (stanza below), and the inspiration for Shostakovich's Symphony No. 13, was denied by Russian leaders, until Gorbachev.

O, Russia of my heart, I know that you
Are international, by inner nature.
But often those whose hands are steeped in filth
Abused your purest name, in name of hatred.

There are still 250,000-350,000 Jews living and dying in the Ukraine.

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On Thursday, March 10, my colleagues at St. John's University in Queens, N.Y., held a video conversation, or webinar, about the media narrative underlying the large majority of Russians who support Vladimir Putin's war, at least so far, against Ukraine. It was sponsored by the KOTA Alliance, a New York-based center for gender-equity nonprofits, NGOs and organizations with similar interests.

The host was Dr. Minna Aslama Horowitz, a media scholar at St. John's's Insitute for International Communication, and the University of Helsinki. Until now, my communications with Minna have been about what streaming Finnish TV shows and movies my wife and I have been watching. We binged three seasons of what is called Bordertown and the standalone movie, Bordertown: The Mural Murders. The programs are Finland's breakthrough to the international market via Netflix. In Finland, the show is called Sorjonen; the character Kari Sorjonen is the name of the brilliant detective with a kind of Asperger's syndrome who goes to live in a small city near the Gulf of Finland on the border with Russia, only three hours by bus, train, or car from St. Petersburg. And his volatile, cunning and beautiful partner in many episodes is a former Russian FSB agent, a successor to Putin's beloved KGB.

 I mention all this because Finland is as clear and close a place for Russia-watching than any place outside the former Soviet Union. And Dr. Horowitz spoke Thursday with Dr. Irina Grigor, a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Helsinki, who has been following the Russian and Ukrainian media because that's what she does. On her Linked In page, Grigor describes her specialty, "strategic narratives" as "the instruments which help communicate bold and disruptive ideas and bring people together for a common goal."

This is different from propaganda, which in communications theory, as I interpret it, is a top to bottom operation: rally the people to hate the other as the enemy. Strategic narratives about a people are deeper, about changing "core values" of Russians as they related to Ukrainians.

 Dr. Grigor is Finnish-Ukranian. Putin used a three pronged strategic narrative through the Russian media against the Ukraine. Obsessed with NATO's potential consideration of Ukraine as a member state, and the general pro-Western tilt of President Zelenski, whose visibility and defiance during this war has made the Jewish, former Ukrainian TV comedian, the de facto leader of the free world, those three elements are:

• Anti-western, anti-European, anti-American representations in the media: "Russia is traditional kind and good; U.S. is weak, corrupt, and bad," Grigor said.

• The "sacred role" of World War II, in which Russia is portrayed as the nation that defeated Nazism and fascism. It's true that more than 20 million Russians died in that war. But they don't like to share credit for beating Hitler.

• Russia as the "big brother" [no pun intended] or leader of the Slavic nations, including the Ukraine.

 So how does Russia convince its people that Ukrainians are not members of "a brother nation," as it had been for decades, with shared, if not identical social, economic, and political values, and become the enemy?

First, to make media portrayals of Ukrainians the butt of jokes, as somehow being "silly," in Grigor's term, or dumber, in mine. My guess is that this humor would be on the level of "How many Ukrainians does it take to screw in a light bulb?"

Grigor said the portrayals of Ukrainians became more "ironic and sarcastic," for betraying Slavic (Russian) values, and embracing Western European values. Gradually, as I understand it, the irony and sarcasm began melting away, as Ukraine's "betrayal" of Russian values became "extremely negative through repeated negative portrayals through news and media."

Truth, facts, accuracy? Not involved here. "To be effective, narratives don't have to be based on facts," Grigor said. "The power of narratives depends on how it relates to peoples core values. These three narratives were tailored to this."

Outside Moscow and St. Petersburg, Russia is vast, rural, and aging. Older Russians get all of their news from Putin controlled TV, radio, and newspapers. Younger people in the cities have now lost most access to social media and alternative messaging. During the last few weeks, vestiges of media openness have disappeared: the few tolerated "opposition" media outlets have been either closed down or voluntarily shut themselves down, rather than risking 15 years in prison for calling the Russian incursion into the Ukraine a "war," or a number of other terms that would suggest anything other than a fraternal attempt at "de-Nazification" of the Ukraine, purified of its slide into "fascism." Protestors, as we have seen, are immediately and rudely arrested.

Where does it end? The closeness of Ukrainian and Russian people may have hardened into hatred by the millions of Ukrainians whose lives and homes are destroyed. It could take generations to bring those sister-countries, divided families, back together. When a questioner at the webinar asked Dr. Grigor about further escalation, her message was blunt, and disturbing.

"I'm very poor at predicting these things," she said. "I was certain Russia won't invade Ukraine. So now I only trust data. I want to believe though that it won't reach the extent of nuclear war, but I can't give any predictions, because the logic of Putin is so bizarre and unpredictable."

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Better times in Red Square: In August, 1987, I was having dinner in Moscow, across the street from the Kremlin, with some of my press colleagues at the end of Billy Joel's tour. The restaurant was the first decent meal many of us had in three weeks; there was black caviar and chilled vodka on the table. I was inside on the banquette, and on the other side of me, close enough to talk to, was the actor Roy Scheider (Jaws, The French Connection.) I introduced myself and asked what he was doing in the Soviet Union.

"Ted Turner made me an offer I couldn't refuse," he said. The idea was to make a 7-hour, three part documentary for Turner's TNT network that was called Portrait of the Soviet Union, including visits to the republics of Ukraine, Georgia, and Moldova. As we're talking, one of Scheider's people thought I was a fan interrupting his dinner. (We didn't have selfies back then.) Scheider brushed the guy aside, and told him not to interrupt us: "It's OK, he's from the Crocodile Dundee newspaper."

As I looked at my notes the other day, I wondered what he had been talking about. Crocodile Dundee (starring the Australian Paul Hogan) had been an unexpected blockbuster in 1986, and I didn't remember what Newsday had to do with it. Quite a lot actually: Linda Kozlowski plays Sue Charlton, an intrepid feature writer whose father owns Newsday, and she pursues a story into the Australian bush about a quintessential Aussie macho man. She brings him back to New York, like a Foster's-swigging King Kong. Kozlowski married Hogan in 1990, and she quit acting in 2001 after the third Crocodile Dundee movie. They divorced in 2013.

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I used to love short wave radio listening, and if the tubes on my Hallicrafters S-108 could be fired-up, I'd be listening to broadcasts from Eastern Europe. Start with the once ubiquitous English language service of Radio Moscow, big signal on every international shortwave band, telling its story, Ukrainian state radio countering with its story, and Radio Netherlands, from Hilversum, bringing some sort of balance or clarity. It was fascinating in 1968 to be switching from Radio Prague to Radio Moscow and back, as Russia invaded Czechoslavakia to end "the Velvet Revolution." One moment, Radio Prague was denouncing the approaching aggressors; an hour later, a different voice on that station was welcoming their fraternal liberators.

Last night I opened up my Tune In radio app on Roku, and tuned in to Ukrainian radio. The airwaves were lively considering that communications facilities are usually the first to be targeted by an invading army. Also, with a seven hour time difference between New York and Kiev/Kyiv, I was listening to stations broadcasting  between about 3 a.m to 5 a.m. local time.

Tune In breaks down the geography of Ukraine's radio stations by region, so I spent most of my listening in the Lviv/Lvov and Kiev/Kyiv regions. The good news was that so many of the stations were operating: Radio Sharmanka, FM Galychyna, Lux FM, even Radio Roks, whose logo made it look like it indentified with metal. Programs listed for Radio Sharmanka included Adam Beyer Presents Drumcode, which changed at an hour marker to Heaven's Gate: Deep Sessions, and there were flashes of some electronic dance music. But most stations, expectedly, focused on news, many carrying the same national news broadcast.

Radio Nezalezhnosti, named after the main square in Kiev, played a wide selection of danceable Ukrainian pop, until one song in English caught my attention. It wasn't exactly Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive," which I expected to hear on some station, but the message was not dissimilar. "I bang the drums to feel the life/Maybe we can make it to the other side... she gives me hope, she gives me fight." I didn't know the song, but I looked it up. It was "She Makes Me," by Rick Astley. Now I've heard that Rick Astley's entire body of work is some sort of cornball internet meme, that I don't quite get. But it just shows that sometimes, when listening to music, context is everything. At the moment, it seemed very Ukrainian patriotic positive.