Description:
This adult learning course explores the entangled histories of media and political power in Russia, from the invention of the Cyrillic alphabet to contemporary digital warfare. Participants will examine how successive media forms— alphabetic writing, print, telegraphy, television, and the internet—have functioned as “technologies of truth” that shape public discourse, state authority, and political subjectivity. Drawing on media theory, historical case studies, and contemporary digital culture, the course foregrounds the role of infrastructure in the making and unmaking of democratic possibility. Each week includes a suggested film that complements the themes of the session.
Class Sessions:
October 2: Scripts of Power — From Alphabet to Empire
Suggested Short Watch Before Class: Why Doesn’t Russian Use the Latin Alphabet?
October 9: Impressed Subjects — The Printing Press and the State
Suggested Watch Before Class: The Death of Stalin (2017) (Fitchburg Library online or DVD, or numerous streaming platforms)
October 16: Signals and Silences — Telegraphy, Objectivity, and Soviet Glasnost
Suggested Watch Before Class: Tetris (2023) (Apple TV or Amazon)
October 23: Spectral Screens — Television and the Crisis of Post-Soviet Democracy
Suggested Watch Before Class: Citizen K (2019) (Fitchburg Library online, or numerous streaming platforms)
October 30: The Red Web — From Dissident Bloggers to Troll Factories
Suggested Watch Before Class: Agents of Chaos (2020 2-part series) (HBO Max) or Inside a Ukrainian Troll Farm (2020) (YouTube)
Optional Background Viewing:
The Machine That Made Us (2008) (YouTube): The film follows Stephen Fry as he reconstructs Gutenberg’s press to show how movable type, materials, and financing produced a communications revolution. It provides a broader background for understand how the impact of the printing press was different in Russia than in Europe more broadly.
Putin’s Witnesses (2018) (Fitchburg Library online or DVD, Apple TV, Amazon): The film uses director Vitaly Mansky’s own archival footage from 1999–2000, when he was hired for the propaganda effort, to offer a critical insider account of Vladimir Putin’s initial rise to power. It directly connects to the course by showing a filmmaker grappling with his role in creating a state narrative, making it a powerful case study on media as a “technology of truth” that shapes political power and memory.
Mr. Jones (1993) (Fitchburg Library online or DVD, numerous streaming platforms): The film follows journalist Gareth Jones as he exposes the 1930s Ukrainian famine, the Holodomor, against a wall of Soviet denial and media complicity. It connects to the course by dramatizing the press as a battlefield, pitting independent reporting against state propaganda in a fight over historical truth.
Russian Ark (2002) (Fitchburg Library online, DVD, or BluRay, numerous streaming platforms): Russian Ark presents 300 years of Russian history as a single, dreamlike journey through the State Hermitage Museum, captured in one continuous, unedited shot. We might think of the camera itself as a “technology of truth,” presenting the museum as a cinematic ark that preserves a seamless, curated vision of imperial history and makes the medium of film an apparatus for shaping national memory.
Assa (1987) (YouTube): The film is a perestroika-era crime story where a young underground rock musician falls for a mobster’s mistress in Yalta. This film is considered to be a marker of perestroika reaching the general public, and shows how rock music as a technology that gave a powerful voice to a new generation demanding change.
Repentance (1987) (YouTube): A woman repeatedly unearths the corpse of a dead tyrant, forcing a surreal public trial over his Stalin-like crimes and the town’s complicit silence. The controversial film’s delayed release during glasnost performed the very unearthing of a buried past that its allegorical story dramatizes.
Man with a Movie Camera (1927) (Fitchburg Library, online or DVD, YouTube): The film follows a cameraman from dawn to dusk, using a dizzying array of experimental techniques to capture the kinetic energy of a modern Soviet city. By constantly showing the process of filming and editing, it turns the cinematic apparatus into the true protagonist, embodying the idea that media actively constructs, rather than just records, reality.
And of course, after the class is over, consider requesting my forthcoming book (Dec. 11) from a local library 🙂
In LiveJournal and Russian Disinformation, J.J. Sylvia IV analyzes the role of blogging platform LiveJournal in Russia’s information warfare strategy, examining its evolution and co-optation as a case study.
Through rigorous analysis, Sylvia demonstrates how epistemic sabotage became central to the Kremlin’s efforts to manipulate truth, and more broadly, how the ever-increasing reach of the internet and social media platforms can be weaponized by authoritarian regimes to disrupt knowledge systems and destabilize democracies. While the growing ubiquity of the internet and its networks have ushered in countless opportunities and benefits on individual, organizational, and international levels, Sylvia emphasizes the double-edged sword of the new risks that must be considered in turn. As fascism is on the rise worldwide and anti-democratic governments wield social media as a tool to stoke division and spread disinformation among greater audiences citizens worldwide – democratic countries being no exception – he contends that understanding this tactical shift is critically relevant not only to the Russian context, but also to the challenges of navigating truth and democracy on a global scale in the 21st century.
LiveJournal and Russian Disinformation coherently identifies, documents, and interprets the logics and implications of this evolution in warfare, leaving readers with a more nuanced understanding of the platform as an early battle in a new digital arena – one which is not likely to be the last.
