On Thursday, February 11, CERES program Jill Dougherty, CERES adjunct professor and CNN’s former Moscow Bureau Chief, hosted the latest installment of the ongoing Journalist Bootcamp series, “Taking it to the Streets: How protests in Russia and in the US could affect relations.” The panel discussion and Q&A featured distinguished journalists Susan B. Glasser, of The New Yorker, and Alexey Pivovarov, of Redaktsiya. The experts explored the ways civil society and the elites in Russia and the US each are perceiving and responding to internal political turmoil in each other’s states. They also attempted to determine the potential implications of these responses for the ongoing bilateral relationship between the Russia government and the new Biden administration. Following the panel discussion, the speakers fielded a series of questions on the aforementioned subjects as well as additional theaters of hard and soft power in the Russo-American rivalry. To watch the complete event, please go to our YouTube Channel. In the meantime, please read a summary of the event below:
The panelists concluded that Russian media, particularly televised state media, represented the January 6 assault on the US Capitol, and in some cases the Black Lives Matter protests in the latter half of 2020, as an indictment of American hypocrisy on just governance, stability and human rights. Although the speakers pointed out that this tactic of “whataboutism” stems from the deflection tactics of Soviet-era propaganda, they acknowledged its effectiveness in resonating with Russians who had lived during or through the USSR. Likewise, they observed that American coverage of the Navalny protests often devolved into false dichotomies of totalitarian bondage and righteous revolution, often lionizing the characters and overlooking the naked generational fragmentation that underpins much of the demonstrations. On the one hand, many young Russians consume far less political media than their seasoned counterparts and wish for a departure from two decades of Putin, while the older generation fears a reprisal of the chaos that defined the ‘90s. As such, both countries seem to have limited prospects for improving bilateral relations or influencing the landscape of each other’s lands, as the leadership and masses of each continue to engage a worldview tailor-made to reaffirm the worst assumptions each holds of the other.
Journalist Bootcamps are sponsored by Georgetown University’s Center for Eurasian, Russian and East European Studies (CERES) and funded by the Carnegie Corporation of New York.