Практики конструирования локального прошлого и сибирской идентичности в региональных медиа

Abstract

This article presents a textual analysis of media materials from the Volga region, the Urals, Siberia, and the Russian Far East published between 2020 and 2023, dedicated to local historical memory. It examines how media communications shape public perceptions of Siberian history and Siberian identity in contemporary Russia. The novelty of this research lies in the study of a multi year corpus of media data from local online outlets in the eastern part of Russia to analyze the narratives of local identity, primarily in the context of local historical memory. Identity in this study is viewed as a conditional discursive construct that establishes a sense of sameness within a given social group. Thus, the study is conducted within a social constructivist framework using tools of communication theory. The textual analysis is based on a corpus of texts from regional online sources from 2020-2023, selected according to key phrase markers: «Annexation of Siberia,» «Conquest of Siberia,» «Development of Siberia,» and «Siberia and Russia.» The total data volume exceeded 1.2 million characters. After the formal reorganization of the texts, a lexical frequency analysis was carried out, along with context and discourse analysis, which made it possible to identify evaluative characteristics of media discourses regarding historical events and figures. The textual analysis generally demonstrated the predominance of local toponyms and lexemes in the analyzed media texts, the dominance of territorial over ethnic lexemes, and the prevalence of references to social groups associated with «the people» over those connected with «the elites.» The analysis of evaluative characteristics of historical events and figures shows that their descriptions are generally neutral in tone. The narratives disseminated by local media do not feature unambiguously positive «heroes» or negative «enemies» (for example, the «hero» Yermak, who liberated Siberia from the «usurper» Kuchum); most characters are described in predominantly neutral terms. From this, it can be concluded that local events and heroes do not function as actors in constructing a specific historical myth; instead, they remain on the «margins» of Siberians’ collective historical memory. This study contributes to ongoing discussions about Siberian regional identity by allowing an analysis of the relationship between established sociological characteristics of Siberians’ local self-stereotypes and the narratives conveyed by local media. Since the analyzed texts are dominated by neutral descriptions of past heroes and events, within the social constructivist approach it can be concluded that local media discourses lack a clear distinction between «us» and «them.» Consequently, these narratives cannot serve as a firm foundation for the construction of a distinct local identity; on the contrary, they blur it within the broader Russian national myth, emphasizing the secondary nature of the local past. The local media discourses fail to reconstruct a coherent picture of the common historical past of the country’s eastern regions. Thus, it is demonstrated that contemporary regional media contribute more to the diffusion and deconstruction of Siberian identity than to the development of local identities that could present an antagonistic potential to the overarching Russian historical myth.