On Tuesday 26 April join us at Pushkin House for a panel discussion about the state of media in Russia and contemporary Russian propaganda.
Since the full-scale Russian military invasion started on 24 February 2022, the Russian authorities have managed to completely desolate the domestic media landscape. While Russia had never been high on the list of countries supporting freedom of speech, in the past weeks its government has managed to shut down almost all independent voices. Many Russian and foreign journalists have had to leave the country, and those who have remained have to operate under the branding of ‘foreign agents’. All of this has created a distorted vision of reality for many Russian citizens as the Russian propaganda machine remains, unfortunately, highly effective.
Academics and journalists, including Dasha Afanasieva (Reuters), Andrew Roth (The Guardian) and Prof Vera Tolz (University of Manchester) will present their overview of how information circulates in Russia, how the Russian government silences independent journalists, and if there is any chance for the West to win the information war inside Russia. The event will be moderated by Dr Ben Noble (UCL).
About the speakers
Dasha Afanasieva is a columnist at Reuters Breakingviews, specialising in Russia and Turkey. Previously she was a financial reporter and Turkey correspondent with Reuters. At the BBC, she was a producer at the Russian Service, the Today programme and Newsnight.
Dr Ben Noble is Associate Professor of Russian Politics at University College London, and an Associate Fellow of Chatham House. He is the co-author of Navalny: Putin's Nemesis, Russia's Future? (Hurst and Oxford University Press), which has now been translated into eight languages and was selected as a politics book of the year in 2021 by the Financial Times and The Hill.
Andrew Roth is a Moscow correspondent at the Guardian.
Prof Vera Tolz is Sir William Mather Professor of Russian Studies at the University of Manchester, United Kingdom. She has published widely on various aspects of Russian nationalism, the relationship between intellectuals and the state in the imperial, Soviet and post-Soviet periods and on the politics of the media. Her books include Between Professionalism and Politics: Russian Academicians and Revolution (1997); Russia: Inventing the Nation (2001); and Nation, Ethnicity and Race on Russian Television: Mediating Post-Soviet Difference (2014). Her book ‘Russia’s Own Orient’: The Politics of Identity and Oriental Studies in the Late Imperial and Early Soviet Periods (2011) was published in a Russian translation by Novoe Literaturnoe Obozrenie in 2013. In 2012-2016 Tolz was Co-Director of the UK’s national Centre for East European Language-Based Area Studies. She is an elected Fellow of the UK’s Academy of Social Sciences.