Framing the personality of Joseph Stalin in contemporary Russian media: Contexts of memory and forgetting

Abstract

The article examines how information about the period of Stalin's rule is presented in the contemporary Russian media, as well as what role his figure plays in media representation of the era of his rule. The corpus used is based on a query in the “Medialogia” database with two keywords: Stalin and Stalinism. Proceeding from the position that any information circulating in the media field, including such that affects memory processes, will be explained not so much by the mechanisms of memory as by the way of presenting information, in particular, by framing, the author identifies four main ways of framing Stalin's personality: an ambivalent attitude, critical assessment, positive assessment, correction of the memory of the personality. The author examines in detail groups of texts showing an ambivalent attitude towards Stalin and aimed at correcting perceptions about him. The proposed typology can serve as a starting point for further clarification and more detailed analysis. Analysis of the third and fourth groups of texts showed that representation of an ambivalent attitude to the person and the era allows, to a lesser extent than unambiguous framing, to keep silent about significant events, thereby constructing the effect of forgetting, which is necessary in those cases for building a coherent discourse.