Russia’s Politics, Propaganda & Memory
Coverage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has, disproportionately, focused on President Vladimir Putin and attempts by the West to divine his intentions. Such a focus ignores the complexity of Russia’s political system and the multiplicity of the drivers of Russian behavior. At the same time, the West sees Russia’s propaganda efforts—denying atrocities at Bucha or the promotion of “Z”—as all about itself, ignoring the importance of the domestic audience within Russia. On May 4, Dr Jade McGlynn and Dr Ben Noble will join CSPC for a virtual discussion and provide a deeper insight into the complexity of Russian political behavior, drivers of its propaganda campaign, and the importance of historical memory (and its misuse) within Russia. Such a deeper understanding is now more important than ever, and the dangers of oversimplifying Russian behavior could potentially have greater consequences for not just Ukraine, but Europe, as well.
Speakers
Dr Jade McGlynn is a Senior Researcher at the Monterey Initiative in Russian Studies, where she is also the co-director of the Monterey Summer Symposium on Russia and director of the Monterey Trialogue Initiative. She holds a DPhil in Russian from the University of Oxford, where she worked as a Lecturer from 2018-2020. Her research focusses on Russian state media discourse and political uses of history in Russia and the wider eastern European region. She is the author of a forthcoming book on the politics of memory in contemporary Russia, ‘The Kremlin’s Memory Makers’, due out with Bloomsbury in 2022 and is currently writing a second book, Putin’s Unreality, outlining how the Kremlin came to believe its own propaganda about Ukraine, culminating in the invasion. Her work is informed by her experiences living and working in and across Russia for five years. She speaks fluent Russian and Spanish and is proficient in Ukrainian, French and Serbian.
Dr. Ben Noble became an associate fellow of Chatham House in December 2020, joining the Russia and Eurasia programme. An expert on Russian domestic politics, he is a lecturer in Russian politics at the UCL School of Slavonic and East European Studies, and a senior research fellow at the National Research University Higher School of Economics, Moscow. Dr Noble frequently provides commentary and analysis on Russian domestic politics for academic, policy, and general audiences in public events, as well as for the media. In 2019, he was awarded a Rising Star Engagement Award by the British Academy for a project on the closure of legislatures in non-democracies. Before joining UCL, he was Herbert Nicholas Junior Research Fellow at New College, University of Oxford. He received his BA (PPE), MPhil (Russian and East European Studies), and DPhil (Politics) from the University of Oxford. He is also a co-author of “Navalny: Putin's Nemesis, Russia's Future?”