From controlling military information to controlling society: the political interests involved in the transformation of the military media under Putin

Abstract

This article demonstrates how the Russian state's reconstruction of the communication network for the armed forces and information services served two purposes: firstly, to silence the free media and exert control of information on a nationwide level, and secondly, to draw upon the armed forces to reinforce its patriotic discourse. The relative liberalization of the media in the early 1990s led to a media defeat of the Russian army during the First Chechen war. Consequently, in the second war, renewed control of the media was progressively established, the goal of which was to deny access to independent journalists, on one hand, and to set up a more efficient communication network, on the other. This restructured network encompassed the internal network of the armed forces but was also destined to serve the outer civilian world – the Rosinformtsentr was created to this end. The implementation of these measures intensified over the summer of 2000, finally culminating in the adoption of the Information Security Doctrine, the revamping of military media and the placement of siloviki members in certain media posts. By putting the army back on center stage and giving it a prominence that it had lacked ever since the end of the USSR, the government attempted to mobilize society around a nationally sanctioned idea. The army, which easily fell into its historically familiar role, which it had actually never fully relinquished, has been able to easily reactivate this military-patriotic tendency in the public and to thus propagate a form of traditional military thinking that tends to be resistant to reform.