TARTU – During the Cold War, the Soviet government often jammed Western radio programming by broadcasting its own signals right on top of or just next to the same wavelengths used by the foreign „voices.”
Now, the Russian authorities appear to be using an analogous process to deal with anniversaries that some residents of that country may want to celebrate but that the Kremlin does not entirely approve of.
The authorities are scheduling commemorations for anniversaries whose values they want to advance either on virtually the same date or very near the same time that other groups have scheduled the commemoration of events that at least some in Moscow apparently hope to play down.
This new system if it in fact reflects a concerted policy might be called „cultural jamming.” It clearly does not prevent people and groups from marking their desired holidays, but at least in some cases, it appears intended to drain much of the energy away from those events by providing an alternative and approved celebration for people to take part in.
President Vladimir Putin’s decision to make November 4th rather than November 7th the key fall holiday in the Russian Federation is perhaps the most prominent of such efforts. Putin’s predecessor Boris Yeltsin had tried to redefine the anniversary of the November 7 Bolshevik revolution into a Russian day of national reconciliation.
By playing up November 4th as the chief national holiday, a date that marks the anniversary of the beginning of the expulsion of the Poles from Moscow almost four centuries ago, Putin may succeed where Yeltsin did not in further lowering the importance of November 7th for many in the Russian Federation.
But the same process appears to be at work more generally, to judge by the announcement last week by Moscow Patriarch Aleksii II that he will go to Tatarstan and Kaliningrad this summer to take part in two such paired anniversaries.
He said he will travel to Kazan to take part in both the 1000th anniversary of the establishment of the city of Kazan and the 450th anniversary of the Kazan eparchate of the Russian Orthodox Church. The first of these events, of course, is intended by its Tatar organizers to be a celebration of the antiquity and continuing importance of Tatarstan and the Tatar nation, something Moscow is loathe to see. (Indeed, the Russian authorities this week have again raised the issue of the Kryashens – Tatars who have accepted Christianity – as a way of weakening Tatar consciousness.)
But both the Russian government and the Russian Orthodox Church are quite interested in playing up the eparchate’s anniversary Aleksii II will attend, one far more closely associated with tsar Ivan Grozny’s conquest of Kazan and the Kazan khanate in 1552 than with those aspects of Tatar history many Tatars hope to stress.
Patriarch Aleksii will also visit Kaliningrad for another pair of anniversaries. Many of its residents plan seek to mark the 750th anniversary of Königsberg, but others backed by Moscow want to play up the 60th anniversary of the Kaliningrad oblast - the name Stalin gave to that city and Germany’s East Prussia when he incorporated them into the USSR at the end of World War II.
Again and paralleling the situation in Tatarstan, the former holiday appears likely to cause some residents of this non-contiguous part of the Russian Federation to reflect on their links to Germany and Europe, something Moscow is nervous about, while the latter one is clearly intended to reaffirm that Kaliningrad is and will remain within Moscow’s orbit.
Just as the Soviet jamming of radio signals did not always prevent people in the USSR from hearing the foreign signals, so too this kind of cultural jamming will not always work as intended. Indeed, on occasion, it may even prove to be counterproductive, unintentionally raising the importance of the celebrations Moscow hopes to downgrade.
On the one hand, these pairs of holidays are not always so close together than the content of the one will in fact drown out the message of the other. And on the other hand, supporters of the commemorations Moscow wants to overshadow may be able to turn the tables, drawing energy away from events backed by the Russian government.
But it is intriguing that the introduction of November 4th as a „national” holiday right next to the old „Soviet” one may be less a one-time action than an indication of how the current Russian government plans to deal with other holidays as well – especially those that might cause celebrants to look not towards Moscow but away from it
A new kind of cultural jamming
Archived Articles | 29 Apr 2005 | Paul GobleEWR
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