Slovo 26.1 by SLOVO Journal

SLOVO, VOL. 26, NO. 1 (SPRING 2014), 1.

Editorial EUGENIA ELLANSKAYA Executive Editor, Slovo, 2013-2014 Slovo is an interdisciplinary academic journal managed and edited by postgraduates at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London. The journal covers a whole spectrum of academic discussions: from history, anthropology, literature and sociology to economics, politics, and international studies. Based at one of the world’s leading departments on Eastern, Central and South-Eastern Europe, Russia and Eurasia, the journal too follows these regional contours, with papers on, and from, these areas. A biannual, peer-reviewed journal, Slovo has historically offered its authors what is often their first publishing opportunity. Yet, the journal equally welcomes experienced academics and independent scholars. Now, as a digital publication, Slovo is able to reach out even more to the diverse regions it appeals too. In the current issue we share with you the truly multidisciplinary scope of our contributions. The volume comprises of two academic papers, which have made it to publication following the delicate and uneasy choices throughout the editorial process. The first ‘Comparative media: Vremya’s manipulation of foreign conflict reporting in Russia in the context of Western news providers’, by Emma Heywood, is an original comparative study of the media landscape across Russia, France and the UK. Heywood draws on what is undoubtedly a poignant ground for exploration – media in modern culture, its techniques of delivering and framing our understanding of events. By comparing the three countries’ reporting of Israel’s 60th state anniversary, the paper analyses the cultural premises for a reporting, while also leading the reader to dwell upon the repercussions of such reports, in particular their significance for identity politics in Russia today. The second paper ‘China in Central Asia: The Beginning of the End for Russia?’ is another thought provoking research looking this time at Eurasia, exploring the economic dynamics between Russia, Central Asia, and China. The author, Garret Mitchell, questions the much heralded authority of China in Central Asia in the past five years, suggesting that deeper than assumed cultural and economic relationships lie at the heart of the RussianCentral Asian collaboration. We are happy to have this paper on board as a well-grounded research coming from an unhackneyed regional background. Last but not least, we are delighted to include Slovo’s traditional Book reviews, led by Nikolay Nikolov, joined this year by a new Film reviews section, led by Inese Strupule. I would like to conclude by taking a chance to thank all the contributors. You have made it a great journey so far. I would equally like to thank the editorial board who have made a great effort of contributing by editing and managing Slovo, despite the challenge of a postgraduate degree. I am indebted to Deputy Editor Joris Zantvoort for his help and support, to our dedicated General Editors Ben Phillips, Olivia Humphrey, Tom Mclenachan and Ed Johnson, and to our Film Editor Inese Strupule for their time, advice and dedication to Slovo. We have been lucky to have Caroline de Boos and Olivia Humphrey as our enthusiastic PR duo, helping us organize two wonderful film screenings this year. Finally, this issue would not have had such a smooth journey to publication without the prompt and professional advice of Slovo’s former Executive Editor Kristen Hartmann, who has helped us throughout.

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Comparative media: Vremya’s manipulation of foreign conflict reporting in Russia in the context of Western news providers EMMA HEYWOOD University of Manchester Celebrations surrounding Israel’s Sixtieth Anniversary were held 8 May 2008 and were attended by heads of state and government officials from all over the world. It was reported widely in many countries and was marked by a two-day national holiday with memorial services, military displays, and concerts. This paper uses these events as a case study to analyse the cultural shaping of foreign conflict television coverage and compares the foreign news reports of Vremya – the flagship evening news provider of Russia’s Channel 1 – with that of two other European broadcasters from France and the UK, which are obliged to adhere to strict guidelines. The case study seeks to demonstrate how the Russian state-aligned news provider can promote its home country, whilst negotiating the complex combination of the influential Russian-speaking diaspora in Israel and Russia’s multi-layered cross-cultural connections. The paper also discusses how varying constraints imposed by broadcasting regulations can result in differing portrayals of the same event.

INTRODUCTION Foreign conflict reporting has been widely discussed in academic scholarship particularly in the post-9/11 era, with coverage of the Iraq War being examined in detail.1 Yet, to a large extent, much of this scholarship has focused on American media and its responses to wars in which the US has directly participated. Crosscultural comparisons of television – rather than printed – news media are less common. A valuable contribution to the existing scholarship is therefore made by comparative research, excluding America, but including a media system not conventionally considered Western, such as that of Russia. A cross-linguistic approach is additionally beneficial, as this allows for commentaries and reports, which are not solely based on English language sources. The many advantages of comparative studies are explained by Hallin and Mancini, who advocate the view that such studies enable a shift from ethnocentrism and incorporate the experiences of other national media, rather than generalising those of just one country. 2 The 1

See the following: War and the Media, ed. by Daya Kishan Thussu and Des Freedman (London: Sage, 2003); Andrew Hoskins and Ben O'Loughlin, Television and Terror: Conflicting Times and the Crisis of News Discourse, New Security Challenges series, ed. by Stuart Croft (Hants: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009); Philip Hammond, Framing Post-Cold War Conflicts (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007). 2 Daniel Hallin and Paolo Mancini, Comparing Media Systems - Three Models of Media and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).

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comparison of the representations of war and conflict by Russian, French and UK television media systems is therefore valuable. This particular combination is rare, although comparative analysis of news coverage by broadcasters from these countries has been conducted focusing on Islam and security rather than on military conflicts.3 The case study used for this article is part of a larger comparative project which analyses a catalogue of over 30,000 news programmes from the above news providers, recorded between November 2006 and September 2008. These news programmes were analysed to compare the foreign conflict reporting of three broadcasters from different countries to examine their news values and the many influences on their coverage in the post-9/11 and post-Cold War era. The news providers are: Vremya, from Russia’s Channel 1, a national state-aligned broadcaster; News at Ten from the nominally independent BBC, representing a British public service broadcaster; and the more centrally oriented 20 Heures, representing France, another EU member and also a public service broadcaster, from a media system with a long history of state intervention. Using a comparative approach, it will be possible to highlight certain characteristics of Vremya which might not be revealed if analysed in isolation. Also, similarities and differences in reporting may be determined with the other two news providers, both of which are European, so as to either confirm or challenge the conventional perception of Russian state-aligned television The principal case study used by the project to analyse foreign conflict reporting is the Middle East. Although there are many definitions of this region, for the purposes of this analysis, this term is applied as being inclusive of Israel, the Palestinian territories, and Lebanon. The region is subject to an on-going conflict, with origins pre-dating the change in East-West relations and also the events of 9/11 and acts as a meeting point of many of the geo-political and post-imperial global struggles facing the three selected news reporting countries, domestically and internationally, forcing them also to confront political legacies inherited from previous regimes. 4 Lebanon was included due to the effects of, and portrayal of, the Lebanon-Israel war of July 2006, immediately prior to the current period of study, as it continued to be covered for many months by the broadcasters and represented an integral part of many of their reports on Israel and the Palestinian territories. The events under analysis in the 2006-2008 comparison period occurred at a time when the media was not only about to enter a period of significant change in view of technological developments (i.e. in social media, social networks, and citizen journalism in its infancy), but also when political change in the region was looming in the shape of the Arab Spring in 2011. This is not to say that this period 3

Chris Flood, Stephen Hutchings, Galina Miazhevich and Henri Nickels, 'Between Impartiality and Ideology: the BBC’s Paradoxical Remit and the Case of Islam-Related Television News', Journalism Studies, 12 (2011), pp. 221-38. 4 Louise Fawcett, International Relations of the Middle East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

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represented a lull in global war and conflict climate. Far from it, given the fallout from the events surrounding 9/11 including the then on-going situation in Afghanistan and Iraq and the many acts of violence, such as attacks and bombings, which occurred globally.

THE REPORTING COUNTRIES The choice of the three reporting countries for the analysis is compelling, given their many cultural parallels with the Middle East region. They have all suffered from rising domestic Islamophobia and anti-Semitism, occurrences of which increase in response to flashpoints in the Middle East. 5 France has the largest Muslim and Jewish communities in Europe (3.8 million and 0.48 million people respectively),6 with the UK not far behind (2.7 million and 0.29 million people respectively). 7 All three support the so-called War on Terror, and Russia aligns itself with the West in this because of its conflicts with Chechnya, the acts of terrorism in Russia, and the rise in Islamic militancy and nationalism within the country.8 Media representation of Britain’s military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan has resulted in widespread portrayals of Muslim Otherness, despite the government’s policies on multiculturalism and integration. In France the then controversial ban on wearing hijabs (and other religious symbols) in French state schools led to public unrest and

For background data on Islamophobia, see: ‘Synthèse du rapport sur l’islamophobie en France, 2008, Report’, (Collectif Contre l’Islamophobie en France, 2008), <http://www.islamophobie.net/rapports/synthese-rapport2008.pdf> [accessed on 12 March 2012]; Roland Dannreuther, ’Russia, the Middle East and Political Islam: Internal and External Challenges’, in Russia and Eurasia Programme Seminar Summary (Chatham House, 2009); ‘Understanding Muslim Ethnic Communities’, Summary Report (Department for Communities and Local Government, HM Stationery Office, 2009). 6 For statistics on Muslim population in France, see: Jerome Fourquet, ‘Analyse : 1989-2011, Enquête sur l’implantation et l’évolution de l’Islam de France’ (Institut Français d’Opinion Publique, 2011); for statistics on Jewish population in France and the UK, see: ‘The Jewish Population of the World’, Jewish Virtual Library (2010) , <http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/jewpop.html> [accessed on 7 February 2012]. 7 For statistics on the Jewish population in the UK, see: ‘What does the Census tell us about religion in 2011?’, 2011 Census (Office for National Statistics, 2013), <http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/census/2011census/detailed-characteristics-for-local-authorities-in-england-and-wales/sty-religion.html> [accessed on 9 October 2013]; ‘The Jewish Population of the World’. 8 For a range of opinions on Russia’s approach to the War on Terror see: Stephen Blank, 'An Ambivalent War: Russia's War on Terrorism', Small Wars & Insurgencies, 14 (2003), pp. 127-150; John Russell, Chechnya Russia's 'War on Terror' (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007); Nathan Thornburgh, 'Russia's Long (and Brutal) War on Terror’ (2010), <http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2008890,00.html> [accessed on 1 February 2013]; Simon Shuster, 'How the War on Terrorism Did Russia a Favor’ (2011), <http://content.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2093529,00.html> [accessed on 1 February 2013].

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allegations of discrimination.9 The shift from Chirac’s pro-Arab policies to Sarkozy’s more centrist strategy, and even to a pro-Israel stance, aimed to promote France’s diplomatic role, shapes a complex approach to Jews and Muslims within the French secular and egalitarian legislative framework. Finally, Russia has close links to the Islamic world through its historically embedded indigenous Muslim population, and its various economic and military relations with many of the Middle East’s neighbours. 10 It also appears keen to extend its cultural ties to the substantial Russian-speaking diaspora in Israel. As will be demonstrated below, analysis of reporting over this period showed certain fundamental differences in the broadcasters’ representations of the Middle East as a result of their individual framing practices. News at Ten stood apart by prioritising coverage from within the Palestinian territories, emphasising conflict coverage, and humanitarian issues to the exclusion of most general interest news stories. Indeed, the Middle Eastern conflict had been selected as the principal case study because of the very fact that it did not just include violent displays of fighting, but also the daily lives of those in the region, something which is predominantly ignored by News at Ten. 20 Heures provided broader coverage showing information about events in Lebanon, everyday life in Israel, and various religious events. Particular importance was attached to news stories with any link to France, its leaders or its citizens, highlighting the close links between France Télévisions and the French state;11 while Vremya aired an even broader scope in its reporting by including many non-conflict related stories, particularly covering Israel and its Russian-speaking diaspora. Again, the Middle East is not purely a site of conflict, yet Vremya uses the conflict narrative, interwoven with Israel’s anniversary celebration, to emphasise the close connections between Russia and the Russian-speaking diaspora in Israel, the role of its leaders, and of Russians in general.

FRAMING This paper uses the concept of ‘framing’, developed by Dietram Scheufele after Robert Entman, as its methodological tool – a technique seen to be used by news providers to help viewers ‘make sense’ of the world by filtering vast amounts of

'Loi N° 2004-228 Du 15 Mars 2004 Encadrant, En Application Du Principe De Laïcité, Le Port De Signes Ou De Tenues Manifestant Une Appartenance Religieuse Dans Les Écoles, Collèges Et Lycées Public’, Legifrance.gouv.fr website, <http://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/affichTexte.do?cidTexte=JORFTEXT000000417977&dateTexte=> [accessed on 12 January 2012]. 10 Dannreuther, 2009. 11 Raymond Kuhn, The Media in Contemporary France (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2011), pp. 89-100.

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information and contextualising it in terms of background frames of reference.12 This results in the omission of material and the manipulation of the remaining material to provide a constructed version of an event which coincides with, and is shaped by, the reporting country’s cultural values. Frames, or framing, is described by Edelman as a process during which the ‘character, causes and consequences of any phenomenon become radically different as changes are made in what is prominently displayed, what is repressed and especially in how observations are classified’.13 This is supported by Entman who defines this practice as being the selection of ‘some aspects of a perceived reality [making] them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation’.14 Frames can be influenced by society’s values, the ideology and policies of journalists and elites, and can complement the public salience of a topic by media emphasis on certain attributes of that topic.15 In the case of foreign conflict reporting, negative or positive emphasis may be placed on either of the conflicting sides, on particular leaders, or on particular strategies, whilst others may be omitted altogether therefore reducing their corresponding salience. Thus, news channels can selectively frame, or shape news items using various techniques such as omission, images, voices, verbal texts, and via the use of juxtaposition, all of which will be examined here.

CASE STUDY The Sixtieth Anniversary of the state of Israel was celebrated on 8 May 2008 with military displays involving warships and aircraft, parachute landings onto Tel Aviv beaches and other public events. The three news providers examined here used similar amounts of airtime in covering the occasion. This one-day event was portrayed differently by the three news providers, resulting in the respective domestic audiences receiving varying representations of a single occurrence. It is a useful event to discuss as it afforded the news providers wide-ranging opportunities for differing representations, as they had a choice of focusing either on Israel, the

Dietram Scheufele, 'Framing as a Theory of Media Effects', Journal of Communication, 49 (1) (1999), pp. 103-122. 13 Murray Edelman, 'Contestable Categories and Public Opinion', Political Communication, 10 (1993), pp. 231242. 14 Robert M Entman, 'Framing: Toward Clarification of a Fractured Paradigm', Journal of Communication, 43 (4) (1993), pp. 51-58. 15 Scheufele; Pamela Shoemaker and Timothy Vos, 'Media Gatekeeping', in An Integrated Approach to Communication Theory and Research, ed. by Don W. Stacks and Michael Brian Salwen (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), pp. 75-90.

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history of Israel, the repercussions of Israel’s creation for the Palestinians, or the situation following its creation. Initial introductory information on the anniversary provided by the broadcasters was similar, but differences quickly became apparent as their own framing techniques and practices emerged: News at Ten provided a report about Israel’s creation in 1948 using images from a kibbutz but then went on to discuss and interview Palestinians who had had their property confiscated as a result. It provided editorial summaries about the present-day situation and possible solutions to the on-going conflict. 20 Heures reported on the activities of a group of Israeli volunteer doctors travelling to the Palestinian territories to provide medical care to Palestinians. However this section of the news item appeared unrelated to the celebrations introduced at the start. Vremya’s reports focused purely on Israel throughout describing the celebrations and providing information from before, and during, the War of Independence in 1948. The case study shows how Vremya appears to use an event and manipulate it in order to divert attention from the conflict as a whole to concentrate on Russian ties with the region. In order to provide a contextual comparison for Vremya’s coverage of the events, and emphasize certain characteristics of Russian state-aligned foreign news provision, the article will now discuss the reports by News at Ten and 20 Heures.

NEWS AT TEN16 A specific and distinguishing characteristic of the BBC, represented here by its evening news programme News at Ten, is the requirement to ensure ‘due’ impartiality which, according to its Editorial Guidelines, ‘lies at the heart of public service and is the core of the BBC's commitment to its audiences’.17 This same section in the Guidelines goes further stating that, ‘news in whatever form must be treated with due impartiality, giving due weight to events, opinion and main strands of argument’.18 Despite this, extensive criticism from all sides has been directed at the BBC and its news provision with regard to bias and lack of objectivity, of which its Middle East reporting is a vivid example. The latter has been subject to widespread discussion in academic literature,19 and many enquiries have been conducted into both anti-Israeli and anti-Palestinian biases. The Balen report, an internal report 16

'BBC News at Ten', BBC 1, 8 May 2008, 10pm. ‘Section 4: Impartiality’, in Editorial Guidelines, BBC (2013), <http://www.bbc.co.uk/editorialguidelines/page/guidelines-impartiality-introduction/> [accessed 8 January 2013]. 18 Ibid. 19 See, for example: Greg Philo and Mike Berry, Bad News from Israel (London: Pluto Press, 2004); Greg Philo, and Mike Berry, More Bad News from Israel, ed. by Glasgow University Media Group (London: Pluto Press, 2011). 17

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written in 2004 by Malcolm Balen about the BBC's coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, resulted in the appointment of a Middle East Editor – Jeremy Bowen – ‘to enhance our audience's understanding of the Middle East; and to provide extra commentary, focus and analysis to an increasingly complex area of the world’.20 This very notion of impartiality, important here and in the analysis to follow, will illustrate how it significantly contributes to, and results in, the specific framing of the events covered here. News at Ten’s coverage of these events was, in fact, not simply a short report as part of the news schedule, as was the case with the other two broadcasters. It was taken from an hour-long documentary, shown on BBC 2, entitled ‘The Birth of Israel’ and presented by Jeremy Bowen – an indication of the importance attached to this state by the broadcaster beyond the single anniversary event. The three-minute news item on News at Ten was characterised by the latter’s endeavours to adhere to its impartiality guidelines and by its continual technique of juxtaposing themes concerning the Israelis and the Palestinians. This resulted in the events being framed so that the humanitarian aspect of war and its futility was emphasised. In fact, the on-going ‘futility of war’ narrative permeates the overall news agenda and extends to the general programming schedule, illustrating the influence on the news agenda of the UK’s ongoing participation in other conflicts. The introductory words from the anchor, initially accompanied by black and white footage of the 1948 celebrations, then by images of current festivities, leave no doubt about the economic and military success that Israel has achieved since its creation. Yet, there is then an immediate contrast as solemn marches by Palestinians are described verbally and shown visually, being held to mark the Nabka – the displacement of Arabs because of the creation of the state of Israel – instantly raising the issue of the inevitable sacrifices of war and Israel’s statehood. Such comparisons are found throughout the news item, superficially implying that both sides of the conflict are being covered and that the guidelines are being adhered to, but in fact, News at Ten’s principal contention concerns the tragedy of war. The current Israeli celebrations are juxtaposed with the following images: a 1948 battlefield, preserved at a kibbutz museum; the images of an economically prosperous Israel are contrasted with shelled and impoverished areas in Gaza; an elderly former Israeli soldier who fought for the creation of Israel is contrasted with an elderly Palestinian who lost his home as a result; the Israeli achievements shown at the beginning of the item are contrasted in the end with the images of Israel's spoils of war being framed both visually and verbally as ‘only a few bits of rubble’. Jeremy Bowen, as the

'BBC News Appoints Jeremy Bowen as Middle East Editor’, BBC Press Office (2005), <http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2005/06_june/16/bowen.shtml> [accessed on 9 November 2012].

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Middle East Editor, then speculates on the desperation of the situation, linking this conflict to the BBC’s ongoing narrative concerning the futility of war. News at Ten shapes its reports so that there are no winners or losers in war. Yet, despite ensuring that both sides of the argument are represented, it is careful to omit the important context which might remind the viewer of its reporting country’s involvement in the conflict. Neither the anchor nor the Middle East editor makes any reference to Israel prior to 1948. Any suffering caused to Jews at the time is shown to be either the result of fighting from one of the ‘five Arab states that invaded after Israel’s declaration of independence’ or the Holocaust. Whether or not it observes the impartiality guidelines, this reporting by News at Ten demonstrates the influential role played by television news in reprogramming cultural memory as it manipulates the remembering and forgetting of an existing reporting country’s role in a conflict.21 Due to the purposeful omission of Britain’s connection to the region, Britain appears outside the conflict. News at Ten, therefore, provides a complex news report justifying the creation of Israel whilst portraying it alongside Palestinian displacement and dispossession. Because of its prevailing technique of juxtaposing contrasting frames, it appears that both sides in the conflict are represented, yet the broadcaster also manages to implicitly convey the evaluative message of the ‘victors and victims’ of war. Thus, News at Ten frames an event – which could have been just a short report acknowledging an anniversary – in such a way that the focus is shifted to make the conflict a central part of the item.

20 HEURES22 Although the concept of impartiality is not stressed to the same extent in France Télévisions’ Charter as it is in the BBC Guidelines, 20 Heures, as a public sector broadcaster, is still obliged to ensure the independence of its reports from pressure from ideological, political, economic, social, and cultural groups. 23 French public broadcasting does, however, have a long history of state intervention, and ongoing challenges, apparent here, emerge in its reports which oscillate between supporting state policy and maintaining its own independence. 24

Maurice Halbwachs. On Collective Memory (London: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 'Journal de 20 heures', France 2, 8 May 2008, 8pm. 23 'Charte Des Antennes De France Télévisions’, France Télévisions (2010), p. 65, <http://www.francetelevisions.fr/downloads/charte_des_antennes_web.pdf> [accessed 25 April 2012]. 24 For a history of state intervention, see: Raymond Kuhn, The Media in France (London: Routledge, 1995); Raymond Kuhn, The Media in Contemporary France (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2011). 22

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Since Sarkozy came to power in 2007, the President in spite of France wanting ‘to be involved in advancing an Israeli-Palestinian agreement’,25 frequently made statements such as ‘Israel’s security is a clear red line that is not negotiable’, 26 and ‘Israel can count on my support to spur, under the – well-timed – upcoming French Presidency, new momentum in its relationship with the European Union’,27 marking a shift in policy from Chirac, his predecessor. When emphasising France’s commitment to the Quartet and the EU, Sarkozy also clearly implied that he was prepared for France to negotiate with Palestine, but that the latter would not include the democratically-elected Hamas. He instead focused on the Palestinian Authority and its President who, according to Sarkozy, ‘know my feelings of friendship and respect towards their people [my translation]’.28 It is in accordance with this stance that 20 Heures’ support for Israel and the latter’s security emerged throughout its news items, demonstrating, on one hand, a level of alignment with state policy – potentially greater than that found on News at Ten – and highlighting, on the other, its reporting country’s pursuit of a new diplomatic role, either alone or in association with the EU. However, tensions do emerge in 20 Heures’ portrayal as the broadcaster struggles between presenting Sarkozy’s pro-Israeli stance, apparent in many of its news items, and one which questions the benevolence of the Israelis, represented here by the work of association Physicians for Human Rights – Israel.29 As on News at Ten, a positive portrayal of an economically successful Israel is shown in the introduction but then, rather than continuing its focus on the celebrations, 20 Heures reports on the work of this Association and follows its mainly Israeli volunteer doctors as they set up temporary pharmacies and clinics, offering medical care to those in the West Bank. Images of the ‘three hundred patients awaiting them [my translation from here onwards]’ are shown in an isolated village with close-ups of infants being examined and also minor surgery being carried out. This association is used as the main voice of the item and is portrayed as the human face of Israel, providing much-needed medical attention to Palestinians. It is, 25

Aluf Benn, 'Sarkozy Tells PM: Palestinian Refugees Will Not Return to Israel’ (2007), <http://www.haaretz.com/news/sarkozy-tells-pm-palestinian-refugees-will-not-return-to-israel-1.231605> [accessed 13 June 2011]. 26 Roni Bart and Limor Simhony, 'Israel and the International System', in The Middle East Strategic Balance 2007-2008 (2008), pp. 11-20; Beatrice Patrie and Emmanuel Espanol, Méditerranée: Adresse Au Président De La République M. Nicolas Sarkozy (Paris: Sinbad, 2008). 27

'Text of French President Nicolas Sarkozy's Speech at Crif’, AJC Global Jewish Advocacy (2008), <http://www.ajc.org/site/c.ijITI2PHKoG/b.3908711/> [accessed 02 October 2012]. 28 'XVème Conférence Des Ambassadeurs’, France Diplomatie website, 27-29 August (2007), <http://www.diplomatie.gouv.fr/fr/les-ministres-et-le-ministere/evenements-11561/conference-desambassadeurs/precedentes-conferences/xveme-conference-des-ambassadeurs/article/allocution-de-m-nicolassarkozy-a> [accessed 02 October 2012]. 29 ‘Mission & History’, Physicians for Human Rights – Israel (2011), <http://www.phr.org.il/default.asp?PageID=145> [accessed 13 April 2011].

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in fact, a human rights organisation whose mission statement declares that ‘Israel’s prolonged occupation over Palestinian territory is the basis of human rights violations […] [f]or this reason we oppose the occupation and endeavour to put an end to it’,30 yet any context about it is omitted and, as a result, it is not clear that its actions are not necessarily those of the Israeli state. Information about the conflict itself is also omitted: there is no context about why the work of this Association is needed, or whom it is caring for. Even the patients, who receive treatment from these volunteer doctors, are not suffering from conditions which are conflict-related, distancing Israel from any part in the present-day fighting. Indeed, following the short introduction, further details, current or past, about Israel as a state, are omitted and the main part of this item appears unrelated to its introduction. Thus, 20 Heures, appearing to be in alignment here with state policy, provides an incomplete and complex representation in which Israeli role in the conflict is ignored, yet its apparent role in assisting those now living in hardship because of the conflict appears to be lauded. Because of this framing, both sides in the conflict, superficially, appear to be represented in an equivalent manner: the Israelis, through this association, are presented positively, extending a hand of friendship to the Palestinians, and the latter are portrayed gratefully accepting a momentary solution to their lack of access to medical care. Yet, the practice of using contrasting frames, visual images and omission results in the two sides in the conflict not being presented in an equivalent manner and an interpretation, which appears to be pro-Israeli, is supported by the words of a young Palestinian man who states, after he has received medical assistance from the association, that, ‘there are good Israelis who treat Palestinians humanely’. 20 Heures, however, also includes his next sentence, which could easily have been omitted, that ‘other [Israelis] want us to leave’, illustrating how the news provider remains independent of the prevailing stance of Sarkozy’s government, an important characteristic as 20 Heures strives to confirm its impartiality as a public broadcaster. The correspondent reinforces this stance by casting doubt on, and even being critical of, Israeli actions, again quoting this same patient and his family, stating that ‘they say that not all the Israelis are necessarily bad [my emphasis],’ using reported speech to distance the news provider from such a sentiment. 20 Heures contrasts the care provided by the Israelis with the statement that it is the latter, however, who determines whether the young man will receive permission to return for further treatment, with the implication that, far from being the benefactor, this situation only serves to reinforce their control over the lives of the Palestinians who, in turn, can only be perceived to be the victims. This lack of equivalence continues to emerge as differences in material portraying the Israelis and the Palestinians are 30

Ibid.

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emphasised in images, including the many physical barriers and roadblocks which encumber the Palestinians’ lives, accentuating the Palestinian cause and the hardship suffered by its people. In accordance with its remit, 20 Heures endeavours to present two sides of the conflict. However the disparity in the coverage, the omission of context and editorial interpretation, which could have been used to clarify such gaps, result in an unclear message. On one hand, the news provider’s reports appear to highlight the state’s pro-Israel stance in presenting it, via the association, as a benefactor providing aid to the Palestinian civilians who are allocated a purely victim status. Yet, on the other hand, the coverage appears critical of the appropriateness of Israel’s magnanimity in a situation to which it is a major contributor.

VREMYA31 It is against the context of these public sector broadcasters, that Vremya’s framing of foreign news and promotion of its home country, either explicitly or by disparaging others, can be discussed. The date of this anniversary coincides with the run-up to Victory Day celebrations in Russia, held on 9 May – an event which has been elevated by Putin in order to promote unity within his country and re-introduce a sense of identity and pride, missing after the collapse of the Soviet Union and Russia’s economic crisis in the 1990s. The 2005 Sixtieth Victory Day celebrations, held only three years earlier in Red Square and throughout Russia, were on a monumental scale. 32 The Victory Day is in apparent juxtaposition to Israel’s Anniversary celebrations in Vremya’s coverage of the event. The commemorations in Israel, although not necessarily negatively covered by Vremya, are framed using techniques such as inclusion, omission, verbal, and visual emphasis to promote the Russian state, reflecting Vremya’s role as state-aligned broadcaster. Vremya makes no reference to Israel’s success, economic, military, or otherwise. This is in stark contrast to the other two news providers where its accomplishments are lauded, if only in the introduction. Instead, Israel’s attempts at celebrations are disparaged, not necessarily as a deliberate act of belittlement, although this is indeed possible given the state’s close ties to the US and the anti-US sentiment which permeates Vremya’s news schedule, but rather so that they can be

'Vremya', Channel 1, 8 May 2008, 9pm. For details of this commemoration as a media event, see: Stephen Hutchings and Natalia Rulyova, 'Commemorating the Past/Performing the Present: Television Coverage of the Second World War Victory Celebrations and the (De)Construction of Russian Nationhood', in The Post-Soviet Russian Media: Conflicting Signals, ed. by Birgit Beumers, Stephen Hutchings and Natalia Rulyova (Abingdon: Routledge, 2009), pp. 137157. 32

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used as a reference against which Russia’s parallel superior celebratory efforts can be measured. The Israeli celebrations are not viewed in isolation. Implicit verbal comparisons [appearing from here onwards in my translation], by both Vremya’s anchor and its correspondent, are apparent from the outset throughout the report. Phrases, such as ‘for little Israel [my emphasis]’ and ‘it even had [my emphasis]’, show astonishment at the Israelis’ achievements and celebrations, yet disparage them instantly with the statement ‘the Israeli parades for the country’s independence are far removed from the parades in our traditional understanding of the word’. Vremya’s reporter, Yevgenii Sandro, reminds the viewer of Russia’s great parades as he describes Israel’s attempts as having ‘no formations of marching soldiers along the streets or lines of military hardware transported through squares’. Indeed, the comparison goes further and the Israeli celebrations, initially admired in the introduction by the anchor as being ‘an impressive presentation’, are reduced to being ‘more like a show for tourists and holiday makers’ and ‘true, it wasn’t without its crises’. The reporter proceeds to highlight errors in the celebrations. For example, a parachute landing, which is part of the display, is mistimed resulting in several injuries and is rendered even more dramatic by supporting visual images. Again, the diminutive portrayal of Israel is raised as Sandro describes the landing site on the beach as ‘quite small’ and ‘surrounded by the crowd’ implying that it is ambitious, even foolhardy, to attempt such a feat and that dangers to the crowd are inevitable. The visual images show the wounded being transported away in a convoy of ambulances whilst the reporter provides statistics of the numbers injured. The manner in which this comparison is used to reinforce a ‘superior’ Russia, rather than the country of focus, exemplifies the latter’s identity crisis, and the implication emerges that this situation would not have occurred during Russian parades. Similar criticism of the lack of detail when organising the celebrations emerges in Sandro’s comments that the official display of Israel’s maritime fleet, despite including submarines and naval vessels, happens to be accompanied by yachts which ‘appears to be some form of a mistake’ and resorts to quoting senior naval officials who state, ‘it was meant that way’. If this were not sufficient, Vremya then provides footage of an interview with a flotilla commander whose appearance serves purely to justify the ostensibly bizarre presence of such small yachts in an important maritime parade. A further framing technique used by Vremya is that of omission, as a result of which attention is deflected from the Middle East conflict to Russia. In this item, there is scant mention of the Palestinian territories, the effect of the creation of Israel on these territories and the Palestinians, or the ongoing conflict. One short sentence by the reporter that ‘the conflict is the longest in the world and that the Palestinians are still waiting for their state’, is the only occasion when Vremya mentions the © School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, 2014.

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Palestinians despite the large indigenous Muslim population in Russia and its own close relations with Arab States. By omitting the Palestinian territories and the Palestinians from the report, Vremya raises the salience of Israel – however much it disparages it – as a homeland, like other countries, with everyday events and lifestyle as befits the Russian-speaking diaspora, rather than as just a site of conflict which appears to be the case with News at Ten. Vremya is, therefore, careful to balance its anti-Israeli criticism – the disparagement of which it uses as part of a prevailing approach to raise Russia’s national identity – and its pro-diaspora reporting, as Russia recognises the potential influence of this sizeable Russianspeaking community in the geopolitically important Middle East. This technique of omission is not exclusive to Vremya. For example, throughout the discussion about Israel’s creation in 1948, News at Ten, unsurprisingly, makes no reference to Britain’s involvement as the Mandatory authority in Palestine. In contrast, Vremya pointedly states that Britain governed this territory and that, according to the UN resolution, two states should have been created. This is not just reported in the verbal text but is reinforced by black and white footage of British officials in the region at the time and also of the UN in session. This framing allows Vremya to ‘diagnose’ the problem by incriminating Britain for not adhering to the UN resolution and to make ‘moral judgements’ and, although Vremya does not go so far as to ‘offer treatment for their problems’, this approach of attributing blame to Britain also distances its own reporting country from the current conflict.33 Being a state-aligned broadcaster, these events in Israel hold little interest to Vremya in themselves as they do not contain any aspect which directly concerns Russia. The broadcaster, therefore, has to find any angle to promote Russia and achieves this by continuing its disparagement of other countries. Israel and Britain are not alone in receiving this treatment and soon the attention of Vremya’s implicitly disparaging statements is targeted against the US where, rather than using the technique of omission which is apparent on the other two news providers, Vremya opts for inclusion. No mention is made of Israel’s economic success, but instead its military prowess is foregrounded with statements such as ‘the main heroes of today’s festivities are the military’ and ‘dozens of army bases have organised open days and […] holiday makers have even been able to meet agents from the secret intelligence school’. Yet this information is included so that it can be associated, however briefly, with the US’s provision of arms to Israel. No editorialising comments are provided by the reporter regarding these US-Israeli relations or the military strength of this state, but the mere inclusion of this information is significant as according to Entman ‘even a single unillustrated appearance of a notion in an obscure part of the text can be highly salient, if it comports with the existing 33

Entman, p.53.

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schemata in a receiver’s belief systems’.34 References to US-supplied F-15 and F-16 fighter jets, Hercules transport aircrafts, Apache and Blackhawk helicopters all reinforce the assertion that Israel is the ‘main ally of the US in the region’ and the ‘modern Israeli military equipment is mainly American’, serving to emphasise the US’s influence in the region and contributing to the anti-US message found in Vremya’s reports. There are instances when Vremya can promote Russia directly, for example, in a short interview with a veteran of Israel’s 1948 War of Independence. In order to introduce the veteran, the reporter provides further black and white footage of the fighting and states, in his voice-over, that the illegally formed groups of Jewish fighters were forced into hiding from the British administration, reiterating the latter’s association with the region. In the interview, rather than discussing the fighting, or the creation of Israel, the veteran instead is used to convey the positive influence of Russia in their fight for independence: ‘We were entranced by the Russian partisan movement, we wanted to be like them, we even sang Russian songs’. The emphasis is on ‘Russian’ and all associations with, and references to, ‘Soviet’ have been omitted allowing all credit, or recognition, for contributing to the creation of this state – whose celebrations are the focus of this news item – to be given to the current regime in Russia. Vremya does provide some information about the anniversary. As mentioned above, it refers to the state of Israel leading up to its creation and also to the celebrations but it could be speculated that, had it not coincided with Victory Day in Russia – an event which is stressed as being culturally important for its national identity – it might not have been considered sufficiently newsworthy to be aired. In fact, in contrast to the other two news providers which represent, to whatever degree, both sides in the ongoing conflict, possibly in recognition of the ethnic composition of their respective populations, Vremya’s promotion of Russia appears more important than the possible domestic repercussions of omitting information about Palestine following the creation of Israel. This does, indeed, appear to be representative of Vremya’s coverage of the conflict, and an ongoing narrative centred on promoting Russia at the expense of arousing possible domestic tensions is apparent. Although this case study demonstrates Vremya’s desire to endorse Israel as a suitable location for the Russianspeaking diaspora, this approach of promoting the reporting country equally emerges in other items including Israel and the Palestinian territories, either together or in isolation. In such reports, and in contrast with the News at Ten’s approach of ensuring that the conflict is the focal point, Vremya ‘de-conflictualises’ the events it 34

Ibid.

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covers and re-frames them to include an angle on Russia. This reflects the manner in which this state-aligned news provider focuses on promoting Russia’s status and the extent to which this appears to take priority over the complex combination of the influential diaspora in Israel and Russia’s multi-layered ties to the Islamic world.

CONCLUSION By comparing Vremya’s framing of events with those of News at Ten and 20 Heures, this article has illustrated how the Russian broadcaster manipulates its coverage to divert attention away from the conflict itself to focus on its own country. Differences and similarities between the broadcasters’ representations have emerged in two main areas: the first of these relates to their regulatory structures and the second concerns their framing practices. The influential role played by the broadcasting regulations imposed on News at Ten and 20 Heures emerges in their reports as they endeavour to adhere to their impartiality and independence remits. Both, to an extent, present the two sides of the conflict thus respecting their various guidelines and procedures. However, despite these constraints, their framing techniques and practices result in reports which still emphasise particular aspects favoured by the news provider. The duration of each news item is only slightly longer than three minutes, yet the broadcasters managed to include large quantities of information and to shape it in such a manner that each presented a totally different view of the Anniversary events. Their practices largely concur with definitions of framing as they placed negative or positive emphases on certain culturally relevant aspects of the events, thus highlighting the influence of their own reporting country’s values and policies on television news reporting. News at Ten framed the report, in particular, by juxtaposing images to highlight its prevailing futility of war narrative whilst 20 Heures, through its use of both omission and contrasting visual images, appeared torn between representing the pro-Israeli stance of the then French government and questioning the actions of the Israelis in its coverage of Israeli volunteer doctors. Vremya, in contrast, being a state-aligned broadcaster, rather than a public sector broadcaster, was not subject to the same stringent journalistic regulations. It was therefore able to manipulate its coverage of events to include an angle which would be beneficial to Russian identity. Omission was the dominant tool used to frame the events which proved effective as Vremya only presented one side of an argument, without comment or interpretation. It did not provide context to the ongoing conflict and the viewpoint of the Palestinians was absent. Vremya, in this instance, portrayed Israel as a discrete state with no connections to the broader Middle East or the conflict regardless of how this might impact on its diverse © School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, 2014.

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relations with both the Islamic and the Arab World. Instead, counter-arguments, which might have eclipsed the item’s message, were simply omitted. This was particularly apparent when contrasted with the two-sided arguments proffered by News at Ten and 20 Heures. Vremya also, unsubtly used the reporter’s text and visual images to boost Russia generally through the constant disparagement of other nations. Vremya, thus, manipulates this single event to promote its own identity. Although principal information is conveyed to the viewer – the news provider is in part more informative than News at Ten, particularly when covering the pre-1948 period – the manner in which this information is represented serves to promote Russia. Perceiving this manipulation of television news by Vremya merely to be state propaganda, however, would mean contributing to the widespread and increasingly anecdotal use of this term, which is an oversimplification of the media landscape of Russia and does little to acknowledge the disguised instability of the post-Soviet identity. While the relatively more stable national identity of Britain and France allowed 20 Heures and News at Ten to focus on a foreign country’s affairs, for Russia identity building remained a priority. It would, perhaps, be more accurate to suggest that Vremya’s foreign conflict reporting, as demonstrated by this analysis of its coverage of Israel’s Sixtieth Anniversary, stands for the state’s unsubtle urge to promote and secure Russian identity at all costs, often lapsing into an undisguised and simplified promotion of its own nationality to secure the diverse and truly complex post-perestroika identity. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-commercial-Share-alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License. This license allows for redistribution and alteration, commercial and non-commercial, as long as credit is given to the author. To view a full copy of this license, visit: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View.

SLOVO, VOL. 26, NO. 1 (SPRING 2014), 18-31.

China in Central Asia: The Beginning of the End for Russia? GARRET MITCHELL George Washington University With China continuing to make economic forays into Central Asia, attention has simultaneously turned to Russia’s privileged position in the region. A cursory glance through many articles concerned with the ‘Russia - Central Asia - China’ dynamic provides a misleading impression that Beijing’s strengthened ties with the countries of Central Asia are coming at the expense of Moscow’s influence. This paper will show that events, conventionally characterized as breakthroughs in the ‘China - Central Asia’ relationship in the last four to five years, are in fact part and parcel of larger economic trends that began long before the inking of the energy and trade deals. The reality of China’s growing economic influence in Central Asia is not disputed. What this paper will argue is that despite the heralded dislodging of Russia by China, Russia will continue to play a substantial role in the region through a combination of energy, culture, and military bonds that run much too deep for Beijing to sever in the short to medium term. INTRODUCTION For Central Asia watchers 2009 seemed to mark a watershed for the region, for it was then that the spigots on the long discussed Turkmenistan-China natural gas pipeline were at last opened. The 1833 km pipeline, running through Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, was heralded not only as a precursor to further regional integration and a feat of engineering – being built in just 18 months – but was also accompanied by discussions of the simultaneous ascendency of China in Central Asia and the end of regional hegemony for Moscow.1 That China’s influence in Central Asia has grown exponentially in the previous decade is undeniable. 2010 saw Beijing establish itself as the region’s primary trading partner – negotiating deals worth an estimated €23 billion ($30 billion),2 increasing impressively from only $572 million in 1992.3 The numbers exceeded the EU’s trade figures, but also Russia’s, which, alarmingly for Moscow, fell to third place at €17 billion ($22 billion).4 Amid the myriad of figures concerning pipelines and trade, it would be prudent to begin by asking what exactly China seeks in Central Asia. In an area that has seen its importance rise precipitously since the terrorist attacks of 11 September, the attendant dialogue of the region post-2014 falls into speculation of what China’s rise means for each country in Central Asia and, indeed, for the Russian Federation. 1

Stephan Blank, ‘The Strategic Implications of the Turkmenistan-China Pipeline Project’, China Brief, Volume 10, Issue 3 (2010), <http://www.jamestown.org/programs/chinabrief/single/?tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=36010&tx_ttnews%5BbackPid%5D=4 14&no_cache=1#.UofDeNJmiSo> [accessed 16 November 2013]. 2 Sebastian Peyrouse, Jos Boonstra and Marlene Laurelle, ‘Security and Development Approaches to Central Asia: the EU compared to China and Russia’, EUCAM (2012), p. 11, < http://www.eucentralasia.eu/uploads/tx_icticontent/WP11.pdf> [accessed 11 November 2013]. 3 ‘Central Asia: Report Looks at China’s Role in Central Asia’, Eurasianet.org (2013), <http://www.eurasianet.org/node/66607> [accessed 16 November 2013]. 4 Peyrouse, Boonstra and Laurelle, p. 9.

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In a paper for EUCAM’s Security and Development project, Sébastien Peyrouse, Jos Boonstra, and Marlène Laruelle identified China’s four main interests in Central Asia, in no order of priority: 1) militating against Uyghur separatism; 2) keeping its western neighborhood stable to decrease the risk of a situation that would necessitate Chinese intervention; 3) gaining access to energy and raw materials; 4) opening up Central Asian markets to Chinese companies and products.5 While the first two issues are largely Sino-specific, governments in Central Asia have been keen to exploit Beijing’s desire for reliable sources of energy and market share, seeing the burgeoning economic relationship as reciprocally beneficial. For China’s Communist Party leadership, energy is critically important in order to maintain stability and growth. Faced with numerous challenges, including environmental degradation and rampant corruption, keeping the lights on and factories producing are essential elements in controlling public disaffection. As over half of Asia’s overall energy imports travel through the narrow three-mile-wide Malacca Straights, a significant maritime dispute in South East Asia carries the potential to reverberate far into the Chinese hinterland. Thus Beijing’s acquisition of Central Asian energy is not merely sound business policy, but an insurance against a serious threat to its foreign energy links in Africa and the Middle East.6 Thus Beijing’s current motivations in Central Asia are quite clear, and follow the similar arrangements established all over the world. The countries comprising Central Asia are strategically located on, or very close to, China’s western border. For all of China’s progress in Central Asia, it would be premature to believe that it carries enough momentum to dislodge Russia from the traditional position of significance it has maintained with its southern neighbors since the collapse of the Soviet Union. While platitudes about a new Great Game arising in Central Asia make headlines and panel discussions more sensational, the facts surrounding China’s prevalence belie the contemporary narrative of its dominance that seems to focus entirely on Turkmen energy contracts (notoriously difficult for all parties involved) and wider regional trade deals.

CASE STUDY The following pages will attempt to show that Moscow’s status in Central Asia, albeit diminished as a result of nearsighted policies, high energy prices, and a rising China, will nevertheless remain dominant in the short to medium term. This is expected not only on account of legacy ties, but is also supported by the fact that Central Asia represents one of the last locations in the world where Russia exercises soft power. Substantive Chinese inroads into the Central Asian economy should not be discredited. On a bi-lateral basis, however, taking into account the importance of foreign remittances, language, fuel transfers, pipeline networks, and security contacts, Russia continues to husband a privileged regional position. 5

Ibid., p. 11. Kent E. Calder, The New Continentalism: Energy and Twenty-First Century Eurasian Geopolitics (Yale University Press, 2012), p. 35. 6

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To begin, Turkmenistan’s 2011 agreement to supply up to 60 billion cubic meters (bcm) of natural gas annually to China, as a result of the completion of the Central Asia-China gas pipeline two years earlier, followed the fashionable narrative of Russian decline in Central Asia.7 But seen within the context of previous Turkmen-Russian business negotiations, as well as energy relationships Ashgabat fostered prior to the opening of the Central Asia-China pipeline, the deal need not necessarily be viewed as a bellwether for greater regional change at the expense of Russia. Much has been written about the bizarre nature of Turkmenistan’s orientation during the rule of the late President Niyazov, with one filmmaker going so far as to characterize the country as a ‘dictator’s Disneyland’.8 Yet behind the personality cult of Turkmenbashi replete with rotating golden statues was a savvy energy and foreign policy that provided the small desert nation of around five million people the wherewithal to forge an independent path early on after the fall of communism. Only four years after achieving independence, Turkmenistan’s self-pronounced policy of international neutrality was formally accepted by the U.N. General Assembly in December 1995.9 Although this did not preclude Ashgabat from staying within the former Soviet orbit, joining as an unofficial observer nation in the Commonwealth of Independent States, its relations with other member countries have been rocky as evidenced by the establishment of a visa requirement for CIS citizens in 1999.10 Exhortations to join additional Russian-led regional organizations have fallen on deaf ears. In 1997, long before Chinese forays into Central Asia, Turkmenistan opened Central Asia’s first pipeline outside the former Soviet space southwards to Iran.11 Little notice was taken of these events at the time, and despite a series of proceeding energy agreements between Ashgabat and Tehran, including the January 2010 completion of a second pipeline which expanded Turkmen export capacity to Iran to 424 bcf/y, 12 discussions about Turkmen gas have remained focused on the anticipated zero-sum competition for regional influence between China and Russia.13 One could certainly be sympathetic with the perceptions of a Sino-Russian rivalry considering that the completion of the 2009 Central Asia-China pipeline was followed by an agreement between Gazprom and Turkmen officials the year after, increasing the price

Tom Balmforth, ‘Turkmenistan: China Export Deal Undercuts Gazprom’s Leverage’, Eurasianet.org (2011), <www.eurasianet.org/node/64609> [accessed 16 November 2013]. 8 President for Life (Journeyman Pictures, 2005), <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KNJS2-Zv-Tc > [accessed 16 November 2013]. 9 ‘Latest Developments’, Embassy of Turkmenistan in Vienna website, <http://www.botschaft-turkmenistan.at/en/news.htm> [accessed 27 April 2013]. 10 Martha Brill Olcott, Anders Aslund and Sherman W. Garnett, Getting it Wrong: Regional Cooperation and the Commonwealth of Independent States (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2000), p. 19. 11 Jim Nichol, ‘Turkmenistan: Recent Developments and U.S. Interests’, in Congressional Research Service Report (2012), p. 7, <https://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/97-1055.pdf> [accessed 16 November 2013]. 12 ‘Country Analysis Brief: Turkmenistan’, US Energy Information Administration website (2012), p. 8, <http://www.eia.gov/countries/cab.cfm?fips=TX> [accessed 16 November 2013]. 13 Ibid., pp. 7-8.

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Russia’s state-owned energy giant paid for Turkmen gas imports to $220 - $250 per thousand cubic meters.14 Going back into the business relationship between Turkmen and Russian authorities, a pattern emerges which presents Gazprom’s acquiescence to higher prices following the construction of the pipeline to China as not an entirely reactionary move by Moscow hoping to curtail further Chinese inroads into Central Asia. Rather the agreement was part and parcel of a long standing dispute over the price of Turkmen gas that began years prior. Russian purchases of Turkmen, and indeed Central Asian, gas before 2009 were representative of a larger strategy, articulated by the Carnegie Endowment’s Martha Olcott, who wrote: Central Asian reserves provided Moscow with the cushion it would need to maintain its external market position, while Russia’s energy industry was first reorganized and then new assets [were] exploited to secure Russia’s position in the global energy market for the first half of the 21st century.15

Throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, at a time of low energy prices and when Central Asian nations struggled to build up nascent professional capabilities and remained reliant on the Soviet era pipeline infrastructure, the arrangement described by Olcott worked exceedingly well for Russian energy companies. Richard Ericson writes on Gazprom’s relations with Turkmenistan as having been ‘able to exploit its monopsony position to pay extraordinary low prices,’ in a strategy that ‘included securing other FSU producers of natural gas to support its supply to Europe, using control over all the export pipelines out of the region’.16 For Turkmenistan, this agreement began in earnest in 2003 with a 25 year accord between Gazprom and Turkmen authorities for Russia to purchase natural gas at $44 per thousand cubic meters (tcm).17 The agreement stipulated that price negotiations could periodically be revisited, something the then President Niyazov used to his full advantage in 2005, when Turkmenistan demanded an increase to $65 per tcm and again in September 2006, when Niyazov successfully lobbied Gazprom to raise the export price of Turkmen gas to $100 per tcm during 2007-2009.18

Vladimir Socor, ‘Russia Resuming Gas Imports From Turkmenistan on a Small Scale’, The Jamestown Foundation website (2010), < http://www.jamestown.org/single/?no_cache=1&tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=35866> [accessed 16 November 2013]. 15 Martha Brill Olcott, ‘Russia, Central Asia, and the Caspian: How important is the Energy and Security Trade-Off?’, James Baker III Institute for Public Policy website (2009), p. 14, <http://bakerinstitute.org/files/519/> [accessed 16 November 2013]. 16 Richard E. Ericson, ‘Eurasian Natural Gas: Significance and Recent Developments’, Eurasian Geography and Economics, Volume 53, Issue 5 (2012), p. 632, <http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.2747/15397216.53.5.615?journalCode=rege20#.UofWj9JmiSo> [accessed 16 November 2013]. 17 Olcott, p.16. 18 Sergei Blagov, ‘Russia Bows to Gas Pricing Demand’, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology website (2006), <http://www.isn.ethz.ch/isn/Digital-Library/Articles/Detail/?ots783=4888caa0-b3db-1461-98b9e20e7b9c13d4&lng=en&id=52430> [accessed 16 November 2013].

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Considering that during this period of fitful negotiations Gazprom was selling natural gas to consumers in Europe at a substantial markup in the range of $210-230 per tcm, repeated Turkmen entreaties for price hikes in the mid 2000s were not in danger of undercutting Gazprom’s bottom line.19 Moreover these protracted discussions are indicative of a pattern that contradicts the assumption that Turkmenistan’s insistence on market based prices in 20092010, which led to Gazprom agreeing to pay $220 - $250/ tcm, was a direct result of China’s pipeline leverage that did not exist before.20 The period 2009-2010 is significant, however, in that Russia’s policy of benign neglect of Turkmenistan, specifically, and Central Asia generally began to show signs of vulnerability in relation to the Kremlin’s regional strategy. Much of the blame for the Kremlin’s perceived and real weaknesses in Central Asia lay with the Russian state itself. At the height of the world economic crisis in 2008-2009 European demand for Russian natural gas atrophied, quickly exposing Russia’s brittle economic foundations that relied excessively on hydro carbon exports. Cheap gas from Central Asia, which had always buttressed Moscow’s dual approach of subsidizing domestic consumers while sending the remainder to lucrative markets in Central and Western Europe, was suddenly redundant. When European demand abruptly shrank in 2009 and natural gas prices inevitably fell, Moscow attempted to put the brakes on with regards to the Turkmen gas imports, fearing an oversaturated market would depress prices further. This unilateral and ill-conceived decision taken in April 2009 reduced Gazprom’s imports from Turkmenistan substantially, causing a rupture in the Central Asian Center (CAC) pipeline at a location near the Turkmen-Uzbek border.21 Whether this event was an impartial mistake or deliberate act of sabotage remains a source of debate on both sides. Regardless of culpability, Russian imports of Turkmen gas didn’t resume until almost a year later. Russia’s reduced purchases of Turkmen gas from a high of 41.6 billion cubic meters in 2007 to 10.7 billion cubic meters in 2010 was remarkable.22 The result left Gazprom’s reputation as a dependable buyer of gas in doubt and caused major financial hindrances for Ashgabat which was reported to have lost a billion dollars a month during the ordeal.23 All told, the misfortune is estimated to have cost Turkmenistan one fourth of its annual GDP in 2009.24 19

Henrik Bergsager, ‘China, Russia and Central Asia: The Energy Dilemma’, The Fridtjof Nansen Institute website (2012), p. 15, < www.fni.no/doc&pdf/FNI-R1612.pd> [accessed 16 November 2013]. 20 John Daly, ‘Green Eyed Gazprom Attacks Turkmenistan's Natural Gas Resources’, Oilprice.com (2011), <http://oilprice.com/Energy/Natural-Gas/Green-Eyed-Gazprom-Attacks-Turkmenistans-Natural-Gas-Resources.html > [accessed 16 November 2013]. 21 Ibid. 22 ‘Gas Purchases, Strategy’, Gazprom.com, < http://www.gazprom.com/about/production/central-asia/> [accessed 27 April 2013]. 23 ‘Turkmenistan: Desperate for a Gas Market’, Forbes.com, 29 April (2010), <http://www.forbes.com/sites/energysource/2010/04/29/turkmenistan-desperate-for-a-gas-market/ > [accessed 16 November 2013]. 24 Deirdre Tynan, ‘Turkmenistan: Gas Flows Again to Russia while Discontent Simmers’, Eurasianet.org (2010), <www.eurasianet.org/departments/insight/articles/eav011410.shtm> [accessed 16 November 2013].

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Under these circumstances, Turkmenistan’s appreciation for China’s consumer market as an alternative destination for its gas was as much about economics as it was about strategy. It is relevant to note, however, that despite all the problems attributed to the CAC pipeline explosion in April 2009, including China’s role as subsequent Turkmen benefactor, Russia continues to be an important transit point for Turkmenistan’s energy exports.25 Chinese advances into Russia’s ‘near abroad’ have been spurred on in part by a protracted dispute between Moscow and Beijing over the price of energy. Writing a recent article in The Diplomat, Scott Harold and Lowell Schwartz summed up the dilemma facing Russia and China as both seek to gain the upper hand in energy trade negotiations: In the realm of bilateral energy trade, China’s goal is to acquire as much cheap and reliable energy as possible without relying too heavily on any single-nation source, which could be disrupted by an unexpected bilateral crisis. For its part, Moscow wants to retain as much leverage as possible over the price of the natural resources it sells and to avoid becoming dependent upon China as a destination for its energy exports.26

While the relationship is flourishing in terms of oil - China is poised to become Russia’s largest petroleum export market from 2018 onward – a natural gas agreement, being negotiated without an international pricing scheme, has been exceedingly difficult to finalize.27 This has led Chinese leaders to seek sources of energy from a variety of regions, including Central Asia. Talk of a renewed energy focused ‘Great Game’ in Central Asia between China, the West, and Russia must be tempered with statistics to give a more contextual picture of Central Asia’s contributions to China’s overall energy strategy. Looking closely at the numbers, it is apparent that Central Asia accounts for a small fraction of China’s overall energy portfolio. According to the U.S. Energy Information Agency, in 2009 natural gas made up just 4 percent of the country’s total energy consumption, with oil and coal dwarfing that figure, representing 19 and 70 percent respectively.28 Moreover, China’s leading exporter of oil emanating from Central Asia in 2011 – Kazakhstan which supplied 224,000 barrels per day, was itself surpassed by the Russian Federation, which shipped 395,000 barrels per day eastward.29 In light of the speculation concerning long-term European demand, coupled with forecasts that China’s internal oil consumption may reach upwards of 17 million barrels per

‘Country Analysis Brief: Turkmenistan’, p. 5. Scott W. Harold and Lowell Schwartz, ‘A Russia-China Alliance Brewing?’, The Diplomat website (2013), <http://thediplomat.com/2013/04/12/a-russia-china-alliance-brewing/> [accessed 16 November 2013]. 27 Zachary Keck, ‘China’s Changing Oil Calculus’, The Diplomat website (2013), <http://thediplomat.com/chinapower/chinas-changing-oil-calculus/> [accessed 26 April 2013]. 28 ‘Country Analysis Brief: China’, US Energy Information Administration website (2013), <http://www.eia.gov/countries/cab.cfm?fips=CH> [accessed 16 November 2013]. 29 Ibid. 26

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day by 2030, Sino-Russian energy cooperation is likely to increase over time.30 Indeed, viewing China as a reliable and growing export destination, Russia’s elites have called for expanded trade opportunities between the two nations.31 With regards to the economic activity in Central Asia, Beijing appears to be employing tactics similar to those used in resource-rich areas like Africa and Latin America. These regions are characterized by their high demand for a ‘no strings attached’ development assistance, labor, and cheap products. For the countries of Central Asia, the flood of relatively inexpensive Chinese goods has not only allowed poorer residents in countries like Kyrgyzstan to obtain basic necessities like fruits and vegetables,32 but has also spawned a lucrative cross-border trade by enterprising individual merchants in cities like Almaty.33 Yet in the area of mutually beneficial trade, China’s presence in the region has, fairly or unfairly, attracted criticism from Central Asians sources, which complain of a shrinking domestic manufacturing base, poor quality consumer goods, and the low public esteem of Chinese businessmen.34 Part of the problem with Chinese companies operating in Central Asia may lie in what the International Crisis group describes as a ‘[failure] to connect to their host communities, preferring to concentrate on developing relationships with power brokers in the capitals or, as need be, at the local level’.35 Whatever the discord is between Chinese business practices and Central Asian residents, the sentiments are not entirely one-sided, with Chinese workers describing Kazakhstan as a ‘highly unpleasant place to work’, on account of preconceived prejudices against workers from China.36 Taking the aforementioned global developments into consideration, the expansion of Chinese trade with Central Asia does not necessarily prefigure the wholesale expansion of Chinese influence over the region. While trade has indeed increased from 1992 levels of $572 million to $30 billion in 2010, these numbers are commensurate with additional trade associations Beijing has been pursuing. For example, Sino-Japanese trade has risen three-fold since 2000 to more than $300 billion and trade with Vietnam grew by $9 billion in a single year

‘Rossiya uvelichivaet postavki nefti v Kitai na 9 milionov tonn’ , Russkaya sluzhba BBC, 25 February (2013), <http://www.bbc.co.uk/russian/business/2013/02/130225_russia_china_gas_dvorkovich.shtml> [accessed 22 February 2014]. 31 Anna Solodovnikova and Natalia Skorlygina, ‘Zhyostkih pravil uregulorivaniya ne budet’ Kommersant website, < http://www.kommersant.ru/doc/2229666?isSearch=True> [accessed 25 February 2014]. 32 Charles Recknagel, ‘Aging Farm Machinery Hampers Central Asian Productivity ‘, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty website (2013), < http://www.rferl.org/content/central-asia-aging-farms/24976547.html> [accessed 16 November 2013]. 33 Ainur Alimova and Antoine Blua, ‘On The Road With Kazakhstan’s Women Shuttle Traders’, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty website (2013), < http://www.rferl.org/content/kazakhstan-women-shuttle-traders/24974097.html> [accessed 16 November 2013]. 34 Marlene Laurelle and Sebastien Peyrouse, The Chinese Question in Central Asia: Domestic Order, Social Change, and the Chinese Factor (Columbia University Press, 2012), pp. 168-171. 35 ‘China’s Central Asian Problem’, in Asia Report, Number 244 (2013), p. 14, <http://www.crisisgroup.org/~/media/Files/asia/north-east-asia/244-chinas-central-asia-problem.pdf > [accessed 16 November 2013]. 36 Ibid., p.15.

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from 2010-11 to $36 billion annually, yet it would be hard to characterize relations between Beijing, Tokyo, and Hanoi in terms of imminent economic takeover.37 Geographic proximity will certainly play in China’s favor when discussing Sino-Central Asian trade links and there is no doubt that Moscow is financially incapable of matching Beijing’s ability to dole out huge loans on favorable terms. In the realm of security influence, however, China has continued to lag behind Russia.38 The Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) traces its roots back to an organization first established in the mid 1990’s. Described as ‘the only multilateral organization that has been set up by China’,39 ostensibly to substantiate its regional presence, the SCO has failed to engender the type of dialogue and collaboration Beijing had originally hoped for. Indeed, in the area of drug interdiction, despite ‘officials from the SCO states counter drug agencies meet[ing] regularly to discuss the status and prospects of joint efforts against trafficking’,40 narcotic flows continue unabated out of Afghanistan through Central Asia.41 The literature exploring the inherent weaknesses of the SCO is substantial, but it suffices to say that cultural barriers remain a huge impediment to development. There is perhaps no better example of this than the training conducted by Chinese military academies for Central Asian officers which must be conducted in Russian, as both sides share a dearth of knowledge concerning their counterpart’s respective languages.42 Returning to Turkmenistan, it should also be noted that Ashgabat has thus far refused membership in China’s premier Central Asian club, notwithstanding deepened economic ties. Curiously, the Chinese government has also taken a hands-off approach to military hardware sales. Whereas Central Asian economic and energy opportunities have been of major concern to state-run companies and banks, Beijing has been content to limit regional joint training exercises and cap equipment transfer values at a few million dollars.43 The lack of

‘China-Japan Dispute Takes Rising Toll on Top Asian Economies’, Bloomberg.com, 09 January (2013), <http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-01-08/china-japan-dispute-takes-rising-toll-of-asia-s-top-economies.html> [accessed 16 November 2013]; ’Vietnam Says China Must Avoid Trade Weapon in Maritime Spat’, Bloomberg.com, 03 December (2012), < http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-02/vietnam-says-china-must-avoid-trade-weapon-inmaritime-disputes.html> [accessed 16 November 2013]. 38 Olga Dzyubenk, ‘China to expand C.Asian presence with $10 bln in loans’, Reuters.com, 05 December (2012), <http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/12/05/china-centralasia-idUSL5E8N59DS20121205> [accessed 16 November 2013]; Wenren Jiang, ‘China Makes Strides in Energy “Go-out” Strategy’, The Jamestown Foundation website (2009), <http://www.jamestown.org/programs/chinabrief/single/?tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=35309&cHash=4c510fe3b9> [accessed 16 November 2013]; Alexander Sodiqov, ‘China Boosts Investment in Tajikistan’, Central Asia-Caucasus Institute Analyst website (2009), <http://old.cacianalyst.org/?q=node/5141> [accessed 16 November 2013]. 39 Marlene Laruelle and Sebastian Peyrouse, The Chinese Question in Central Asia (Hurst Publishing, 2012), p. 27. 40 Julie Boland, ‘Ten Years of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization: A Lost Decade? A Partner for the U.S’, The Brookings Institution website (2011), p. 13, <http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2011/6/shanghai%20cooperation%20organization%20boland/06_s hanghai_cooperation_organization_boland.pdf > [accessed 16 November 2013]. 41 ‘Opiate Flows Through Northern Afghanistan and Central Asia’, United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime website (2012), p.7, < http://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/Studies/Afghanistan_northern_route_2012_web.pdf> [accessed 16 November 2013]. 42 Peyrouse, Boonstra and Laurelle, p. 13. 43 ‘China’s Central Asian Problem’, p. 21.

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an arms trade is surprising given the reported appetite of nations like Uzbekistan to acquire more modern kit for their security personnel.44 We have seen that China’s position of strength in Central Asia is not monolithic, yet it is undoubtedly carving out a place for itself in territory Moscow believes to be its backyard. This begs the question: does China’s rise necessarily presage the decline of Russia’s prevalent position in Central Asia? If relying on comparisons of trade figures and loan packages, the answer would have to be in the affirmative. But the Russian government can rest assured in the mid-term knowing their position in Central Asia is upheld through significant historical/cultural ties, military alliances, and a unique form of economic leverage. Combined, these links currently outweigh the inroads China has made in Central Asia in the previous decade. The number of ethnic Russians residing in Central Asia has notably decreased since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Their combined total currently stands at roughly 7 million. The vast majority continues to live in Kazakhstan, with over 4 million Russians, despite a decline in the percentage of the total population. Ethnic Russians make up 12 percent of the population in Kyrgyzstan; 6 percent in Uzbekistan; 4 percent in Turkmenistan; and 1 percent in Tajikistan.45 Despite the diminished position for ethnic Russians in the Central Asian republics, the Russian language remains central to daily communication in Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan where it enjoys constitutional protection and maintains a viable role for the educated elite and foreigners in the larger cities of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Turkmenistan.46 A 2010 paper by the Central Asia Data-Gathering and Analysis Team (CADGAT), a joint research project between the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs and the OSCE Academy in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, sheds more light on the issue of language in Central Asian cultural life. Their findings provide a picture of a region that has seen steady growth in the use of native languages, but also one in which Russian continues to be an indispensible element.47 As an example, CADGAT describes Russian as predominant in the Kazakhstani media landscape, noting that out of 215 radio and television channels a mere five are broadcast in the Kazakh language.48 In neighboring Kyrgyzstan, the Russian channel Pervyi (1st Channel) was consistently found to have the largest numbers of viewers in the country.49 Further south in Tajikistan, 90% of foreign films and television shows were found to be translated only in 44

Andrew Kramer, ‘As NATO Prepares for Afghan Withdrawal, Uzbekistan Seeks War’s Leftovers’, The New York Times website, 31 January (2013), < http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/01/world/asia/uzbekistan-wants-natos-leftovers-fromafghanistan.html> [accessed 16 November 2013]. 45 Azad Garibov, ‘Russia and Central Asia: Do all Central Asian roads still lead to Russia?’, The Journal of Turkish Weekly website, 13 April (2013), < http://www.turkishweekly.net/news/149055/russia-and-central-asia-do-all-central-asian-roadsstill-lead-to-russia.html> [accessed 16 November 2013]. 46 Gulmira Kamzieva and Erkin Kamalov, ‘Russian language still important in Central Asia’, Central Asia online (2011), < http://centralasiaonline.com/en_GB/articles/caii/features/main/2011/10/26/feature-01> [accessed 16 November 2013]. 47 K. Aminov, V. Jensen, S. Juraev, I. Overland, D. Tyan, Y. Uulu, ‘Language Use and Language Policy in Central Asia’, Central Asia Regional Data Review, Vol. 2, No. 1 (2010), < http://www.osceacademy.net/upload/file/language_use_and_language_policy_in_central_asia.pdf> [accessed 23 February 2014]. 48 Ibid., p. 23. 49 Ibid., p. 25.

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Russian, while in terms of print, the majority of books were composed in Russian, with the availability of Tajik literature being described as very limited.50 Print media in Uzbekistan also showed significant Russian influence. It was estimated that thirty to forty percent of magazines and newspapers in Tashkent were printed in Russian, while nine in ten books in the country were produced in Russian.51 Only in Turkmenistan, where the state controls many facets of life, has the Russian language seen a steep decline.52 Yet even here Russian remains in vogue among members of the Turkmen state apparatus and business community.53 The leadership of Central Asian governments also shares extensive ties with their Russian counterparts in that most cut their teeth in the previous Soviet era bureaucracy, with some, like Kazakh President Nazarbaev and Uzbek strongman Islam Karimov, inheriting their positions of power as a result of being communist party functionaries. Turkmenistan’s leader Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov was a member of the socialist youth organization Komsomol and also attended university for a number of years in Russia.54 While a collective Soviet past has not kept Central Asian governments from establishing ties with China and the West, it does provide Russian and Central Asian elites with a level of mutual intimacy that is currently non-existent for Chinese powerbrokers hoping to further consolidate their role in the region. The familiarity with Russian culture is perhaps one reason for the vast northward flow of Central Asian migrants who are estimated to number approximately 3.5 million of those seeking work in Russia due to a lack of job prospects in their home countries.55 While SinoTajik bilateral trade runs over half a billion euros ($658 million) and Bishkek ranks Beijing as its number one trade partner with bilateral trade just shy of €3.5 billion ($4.6 billion), these numbers must be considered alongside the annual remittances emanating from the Russian Federation.56 According to the World Bank’s Migration and Development Brief, in 2011, 49 percent of Tajikistan’s GDP consisted of foreign remittances, while in the same year the Kyrgyz Republic relied on 29 percent of its overall GDP from migrant workers.57 Foreign money transfers were reported to have made up around 10 percent ($4.5 billion) of Uzbekistan’s GDP in 2011.58 Jumping ahead to early 2014, these trends appear to be continuing, as it was recently reported that half of all remittances sourced in Russia flow to Central Asia, with Kyrgyzstan, 50

Ibid., p. 26. Ibid., p. 29. 52 Ibid., pp. 20, 28. 53 Ibid., p. 20. 54 Andreas Heinrich and Heiko Pleines, Challenges of the Caspian Resource Boom (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), p. 155. 55 Garibov, p. 2. 56 Peyrouse, Boonstra and Laurelle, p. 13. 57 ‘Migration and Development Brief ‘, Worldbank.org, Number 19, Box Figure 2 (2012), <http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTPROSPECTS/Resources/3349341288990760745/MigrationDevelopmentBrief19.pdf > [accessed 16 November 2013]. 58 Daria Anichkova, ‘Central Asia’s Migrant Headache’, (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, 2012), <http://carnegieendowment.org/ieb/2012/06/21/central-asia-s-migrant-headache/c41a> [accessed 16 November 2013]; ‘Country at a Glance: Uzbekistan’, Worldbank.org (2011), <http://www.worldbank.org/en/country/uzbekistan> [accessed 16 May 2013]. 51

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Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan receiving the lion’s share of those money transfers.59 Returning to the Chinese bilateral trade figures for a moment, when comparing the dollar amount of total trade versus Russian sourced remittances in side by side analysis, Chinese economic dominance comes into question. In 2011, Tajikistan’s total GDP was approximately $6.5 billion60, meaning Sino-Tajik trade ($658 million) comprised around 10 percent of Tajikistan’s Gross Domestic Product. Compare this to the almost 50 percent of GDP which came from Russian-sourced remittances. Uzbek remunerations of $4.5 billion also far surpassed trade between Tashkent and Beijing, which totaled approximately $2.4 billion the previous year.61 Among the Central Asian nations, Kyrgyzstan, with a GDP of around $6.2 billion, is the only one that could be considered to have a dependent trade relationship with Beijing. In terms of percentage of the population employed as migrant workers in the Russian Federation (and to a much lesser extent Kazakhstan), Central Asia appears highly reliant on north-south labor flows. At the peak in the years between 2004 and 2008, 2.5 million Uzbeks, 1.5 million Tajiks, and 800,000 Kyrgyz were reported to have left their homes in search of northern work, the majority ending up in Russia, many of whom ultimately found jobs in a booming construction sector.62 Any discussion on Russia’s economic influence in Central Asia must also consider the implications of the recently established Customs Union (CU). This entity, formally launched in 2010 as an agreement between the governments of Russia, Belarus, and Kazakhstan, seeks to create a single economic space among the three nations. With a set of agreed upon import tariffs, common rules related to documentation, and the elimination of some internal border controls, the hope is to foster regional assimilation through streamlined processes by which goods and people between CU member states can move.63 Its goal is to eventually draw more nations into the fold, thus increasing its economic power to act as a balance against entities like the EU. Having only been up and running for a few years, it is premature to say if it will portend greater regional integration, with Moscow serving as the guiding vehicle. At the moment it appears that Tajik and Kyrgyz entry into the Customs Union are the most likely in the short term, with both governments seeming bullish about their prospects. Tajikistan’s Ministry of Economic Development and Trade has said that ‘[t]he admission of Tajikistan to the Customs Union will be a significant step towards economic integration with Russia and 59

'Polovina perevodov deneg iz Rossiyi uhodit v strany Srednei Aziyi’, Izvestiya.ru, 21 Feburary (2014), < http://izvestia.ru/news/566273> [accessed 21 February 2014]. 60 ‘Country at a Glance: Tajikistan, 2011’, Worldbank.org (2013), <http://www.worldbank.org/en/country/tajikistan> [accessed 16 May 2013]. 61 Peyrouse, Boonstra and Laurelle, p. 13. 62 ‘Central Asia: Migrants and the Economic Crisis’, International Crisis Group Asia Report Number 183 (2010), p. 1, <http://www.crisisgroup.org/~/media/Files/asia/centralasia/183%20Central%20Asia%20Migrants%20and%20the%20Econo mic%20Crisis.pdf> [accessed 16 November 2013]. 63 Rilka Dragneva and Kataryna Wolczuk, ‘Russia, the Eurasian Customs Union and the EU: Cooperation, Stagnation or Rivalry?’, Chatham House Briefing Paper (2012), pp. 4-7, <http://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/default/files/public/Research/Russia%20and%20Eurasia/0812bp_dragnevawolczuk.pdf > [accessed 23 February 2014].

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other Customs Union members’.64 Former acting President of Kyrgyzstan Rosa Otombaeva also commented in a 2011 speech on the possibility of Bishkek’s accession, saying that Kyrgyz entry ‘is highly important to us’.65 Certainly President Putin has not been averse to leveraging the economic wedge of Central Asian remittances in his quest for new Customs Union members. Speaking at the Russian state of the nation address in 2012, Putin made it clear that citizens of Custom Union nations hoping to enter the Russian Federation would not be subject to travel document enhancements that are scheduled to be in place by 2015.66 The cultural and economic links Russia retains in Central Asia are real and extensive, but considering that Chinese trade and investment have begun to surpass levels that took Russia two-hundred years to establish and nurture should certainly give Moscow cause for concern. Yet in the two other spheres mentioned earlier, security and energy, Central Asia remains firmly placed in the Kremlin’s orbit.

CONCLUSION In Central Asia, energy, economics, and security are often mentioned as three disparate issues with a common denominator. We return again to Sino-Turkmen energy cooperation to see what that relationship has meant for Russia in the wider framework of its regional energy interests. Following an agreement signed in June 2012 between Turkmenistan’s national gas company and the CNPC, future Turkmen gas deliveries are slated to eventually reach 2.3 trillion cubic feet/ year.67 This development, coupled with the thirty-five year production sharing agreement between Turkmenistan and China which confers on the CNCP the status of ‘the only foreign company with direct access to an onshore development’ in Turkmenistan, is indicative of Ashgabat’s outlier status among its neighbors concerning energy relations with China.68 Turkmenistan aside, it is apparent that Moscow is still the dominant regional energy player. Kazakhstan’s two largest oil pipelines with a combined export capacity of 1.42 million bpd both terminate on Russian territory – in Novorossiysk and Samara, respectively.69 This is

David Trilling, ‘Putin’s Advance Team Preps Tajikistan for Customs Union’, Eurasianet.org (2012), <http://www.eurasianet.org/node/65968> [accessed 16 November 2013]. 65 ‘Kyrgyzstan: The Customs Union Cometh’, Eurasianet.org (2011), <http://www.eurasianet.org/node/62987> [accessed 16 November 2013]. 66 David Trilling, ‘Putin to Central Asia: Join Customs Union, Nudge Nudge, Wink Wink’, Eurasianet.org (2012), <http://www.eurasianet.org/node/66290> [accessed 16 November 2013]. 67 Nichol, ‘Turkmenistan: Recent Developments and US Interests’, p. 8. 68 ‘Country Analysis Brief: Turkmenistan’. 69 Jim Nichol, ‘Central Asia: Regional Developments and Implications for U.S. Interests’, Congressional Research Service Report (2013), p. 42, < http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/row/RL33458.pdf > [accessed on 23 March 2014].

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compared to the Kazakh-China pipeline which after a planned expansion will have an export capacity of 400,000 barrels per day.70 Tajikistan remains heavily reliant on Russia for domestic energy needs, importing 90 percent of all petroleum products from the Russian Federation,71 while neighboring Kyrgyzstan brings in 92 percent of its fuel from Russia.72 Uzbekistan, with the region’s largest population of 28 million people, consumes most internally produced natural gas but sends more than half of its remaining gas export capacity through Russia.73 In classical fashion, the Russian government, unlike their Chinese counterparts, has been able to deftly maneuver in Central Asian energy affairs, economics, and culture to maintain a small yet regionally significant military alliance with its former Soviet partners. It must be said, however, that the Chinese leadership remains wary of extending itself too deeply into any situation that could result in armed conflict, and their lack of engagement in this respect has likely been calculated. Under the auspices of the Collective Security Treaty Organization (CSTO), Moscow continues to sell military hardware to Central Asia at discounted rates, maintaining ‘a near monopoly on arms sales to the region’.74 The International Crisis Group notes that through the penury of the Tajiks and Kyrgyz, Russia has retained basing rights in each country, maintaining the 7,000 strong 201st Division in Tajikistan and continuing to control the Kant airbase outside Bishkek.75 The former represents one of Moscow’s largest foreign troop contingents in the world.76 Finally, in 2001 the Russian military, together with Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan developed a small rapid reaction force headquartered in Kyrgyzstan totaling around 5,000 troops.77 This force is yet to be tested in a real security threat scenario and has been the source of criticism that compared it to a paper tiger following outbreaks of revolution and ethnic violence in Kyrgyzstan. But undoubtedly the security cooperation among Russia and its southern neighbors is far ahead of China’s military links through the SCO, who’s ‘obsession with consensus and for maintaining the status quo has hampered [its] effectiveness’.78 70

‘Country Analysis Brief: Kazakhstan’, US Energy Information Administration website (2012), <http://www.eia.gov/countries/cab.cfm?fips=KZ> [accessed 16 November 2013]. 71 Konstantin Parshin, ‘Tajikistan: Dushanbe Feeling an Economic Squeeze’, Eurasianet.org (2011), <http://www.eurasianet.org/node/63364> [accessed 16 November 2013]. 72 ‘Central Asian Nations Feel the Pinch of Dwindling Fuel Supplies As Russia Tightens Supplies’, Europeandialogue.org (2011), < http://www.eurodialogue.org/Central-Asian-nations-feel-the-pinch-of-dwindling-fuel-supplies-as-Russia-tightenssupplies> [accessed 21 April 2013]. 73 ‘Country Analysis Brief: Uzbekistan’, US Energy Information Administration website (2012), <http://www.eia.gov/countries/cab.cfm?fips=UZ> [accessed 16 November 2013]. 74 ‘China’s Central Asia Problem’, p. 21. 75 Ibid., p. 21. 76 ‘Tajik Lawmakers Ratify Russian Military Base Lease’, Ria novosti website, 01 October (2013), <http://en.ria.ru/world/20131001/183878412/Tajik-Lawmakers-Ratify-Russian-Military-Base-Lease.html> [accessed 01 April 2014]. 77 Nichol, ‘Central Asia: Regional Developments and Implications for U.S. Interests’, p. 9. 78 Peyrouse, Boonstra and Laurelle, p.12.

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The alarmist reaction to China’s presence in Central Asia seems to flow from the same narrative that assumes that China, with its hulking land mass, increased military spending, and seemingly inexhaustible supply of human labor, is destined to one day control the world. That Central Asia – a vast, sparsely inhabited area with a wealth of natural resources placed directly west of China’s borders – should be consumed by its giant neighbor seems a natural progression of what has been a remarkable journey for the Chinese since economic liberalization began in the late 1970s. Taken at face value, Chinese investments in Central Asia are indeed outstripping the United States, the European Union, and Russia. Because of the geographic distance in the case of the EU and America, or the shrinking population and lopsided economy of Russia, it is doubtful that any player will be able to match China on a dollar for dollar basis in the coming years. Yet, as has been discussed, relying only on figures concerning outsized Chinese FDI and bi-lateral loan guarantees masks a much more complex dynamic. Beyond the superficialities, it is clear, that twenty years after the collapse of the Soviet Union Russia’s position in Central Asia is far more dominant than is often reported. Pundits may grant that Moscow’s security arrangements with Central Asia are more extensive and superior to those held by China, but when discussing energy and economic cooperation the headlines should be more circumspect. With the exception of Turkmen gas exports and Kyrgyz bilateral trade, China remains eclipsed by Moscow’s shadow in Central Asia. Were it not for foreign remittances springing from Russia, the economies of Tajikistan and Uzbekistan would suffer major contractions. Furthermore, without the Russian controlled energy pipeline network, Central Asian states like Kazakhstan would be extremely hard pressed to transport its major commodities to market. Through the millions of ethnic Russians who still call Central Asia home, as well as the ubiquity of the Russian language and satellite television programs, the Kremlin has been able to maintain a cultural beachhead in former Soviet Asia at little cost. Perhaps aware of the security vulnerabilities that have arisen due to the inability to reach regional consensus, Central Asia’s leaders have also been content to rely in their military preservation on Moscow, which is more than happy to assume the role of protector. If another Great Game is already afoot in Central Asia, China has shown itself to be a worthy competitor, but Russia, with a significant head start, will be hard to catch in the foreseeable future. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-commercial-Share-alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License. This license allows for redistribution and alteration, commercial and non-commercial, as long as credit is given to the author. To view a full copy of this license, visit: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View.

SLOVO, VOL. 26, NO. 1 (SPRING 2014), 41-42. Red Gas: Russia and the Origins of European Energy Dependence. By PER HÖGSELIUS. Pp. 294. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2013. $30.00. Paperback. ISBN: 9781137293718. Per Högselius’s monograph Red Gas is a historical enquiry into a complex chain of events that led to the establishment and development of the natural gas pipeline system stretching across Europe. The book's main purpose is to answer the question of how and why Europe’s much-publicised dependence on Russian natural gas has come about and what is the nature of that dependency today. A historical study utilising archival sources in five different countries, Red Gas produces a perspective of transnational history, a refreshing and informative way of examining a phenomenon to which national histories hardly do justice. Högselius is able to track the development of the gas network through governmental and company archives, the latter of which proved especially enlightening; it is clear that nudges from German and Austrian gas companies were as vital to the project as political favour. The book also analyses the European gas market in the present day, paying special attention to the concept of ‘energy weapon’ and its historical underpinnings. The book is divided into twelve chapters, ten of which are detailed chronological analyses of the emergence and development of the East-West natural gas system from the late 1960s all the way to Putin’s Russia. Högselius’s use of a wide range of archival material allows him to dissect the various interests of governments, individual bureaucrats and energy companies, which is one of the main attractions of the study. For example, the gas exports across the Iron Curtain was partly triggered by the Soviet Union’s need for high quality pipes for expanding its domestic gas network. Moreover, exporting to the capitalist bloc was an opportunity for the Soviet gas officials to improve the bureaucratic standing of their trade. In the West, crucial factors that allowed the system to be built ranged from the annulment of a NATO export embargo on large steel pipes to the waning lobbying power of the North German coal industry, all the way to Willy Brandt's Ostpolitik, preferring engagement with the East to isolation. Furthermore, once gas first started flowing, growing demand in Western Europe provided the economic incentives for a number of expansions of the system – exports grew from 1.5 billion cubic meters per year in the early 1970s to 63 bcm in 1991 and 107 bcm in 2004. The two remaining chapters of the book remind the reader of the importance of energy relations in the history of Europe and connect the historical narrative with the present day. Högselius stresses how resilient the system has been to political currents, enduring the occasional pressure from the US and even the collapse of the Soviet Union. The economy of the EastWest gas trade was proven during the Cold War. Of particular interest in Red Gas is also the much-debated question of whether Russia, in the option of turning off the taps, possesses an energy weapon pointed at Europe. Interestingly, Högselius finds no evidence of Moscow ever considering such a course of action. The dependency, after all, © School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, 2014.

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worked both ways; eastern gas came to play an important role in the Western Europe’s energy supply and the Soviet Union desperately needed the hard currency earned from gas exports (the lack of which eventually contributed to its demise). The Kremlin did see the potential for sowing disunity among NATO countries using energy, but the opportunity was never properly seized. There is more to the story, however. The book concludes that even though the actual strength of the energy weapon was negligible, its perceived existence is clear – system builders in Western Europe did prepare for intentional supply disruptions with storage facilities and alternative suppliers. As for the present day, Högselius argues that the situation has changed little. Despite the significant role energy plays in Russian foreign policy, the actual uses of the energy weapon, as defined above, are limited to post-Soviet countries, which Högselius admits are in a drastically different situation, again, owing to decisions made decades ago. Red Gas is a fascinating study into the background and nature of Europe’s energy dependency on Russian natural gas. The volume benefits from a dispassionate treatment of a commendable breadth of archival sources, producing a prime example of transnational history, rich in present-day relevance. Occasionally, the narrative goes on to describe the minutiae of various meetings and organisational developments to a level of detail perhaps not required by the research questions, but the defect is minor. Everyone interested in energy issues or Cold War history will find this book easily approachable and interesting, bringing depth to a debate often monopolised by think tanks and media. VESA AHONIEMI University of Oxford

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-commercial-Share-alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License. This license allows for redistribution and alteration, commercial and noncommercial, as long as credit is given to the author. To view a full copy of this license, visit: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View.

SLOVO, VOL. 26, NO. 1 (SPRING 2014), 32-34. Writing Postcommunism: Towards a literature of East European ruins. By DAVID WILLIAMS. (Ser. Palgrave Studies in Modern European Literature). Pp. 231. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. 2013. £50.00. Hardback. ISBN: 9781137330079. Writing Postcommunism is David Williams’ personal odyssey. It combines his interest in comparative literature with reflections on his time spent working and travelling in Bosnia, Croatia, Germany, and Serbia in the late 1990s and 2000s. Williams argues that a significant body of post-communist literature is characterised by the semantic field of ruins, with recurring themes of melancholia and nostalgia, remembering and forgetting. He proposes the term ‘Trümmerliteratur Redux’ as a literary-historical framework for a ‘literature of the post-1989 East European ruins’ and the ‘post-1989 ruins of East European literature’. From the outset, Williams states that he is not attempting a comprehensive survey in the manner of Andrew Wachtel’s ambitious work on post-1989 Eastern European literary developments, Remaining Relevant after Communism: The Role of the Writer in Eastern Europe (2006). Instead, Williams uses particular writers as entry points into a discussion of East European and (post-)Yugoslav ‘literature of ruins’. In Chapter 1, Williams sets up the theoretical framework for his discussion, which centres on Heinrich Böll’s 1952 essay ‘Bekenntnis zur Trümmerliteratur’ (‘Commitment to a Literature of the Ruins’). Williams explores the return of Böll’s themes of war. Ruins are reimagined and reframed in post-1989 writings against the backdrop of the literary-critical traditions of Kriegsliteratur (‘war literature’), Heimkehrerliterature (‘returnees’ literature’), and Trümmerliteratur (‘rubble literature’, ‘literature of the ruins’). Chapters 2 and 3 apply these theories to two post-Yugoslav novels by Yugoslav/Croatian émigré Dubravka Ugrešić, whose works Williams has translated into English: Karaoke Culture (2011)) and Europe in Sepia (forthcoming February 2014). Chapter 2 – ‘The Museum of Unconditional Surrender’ – is about the siege of Sarajevo and post-Wende (‘post-unification’) Berlin, and Chapter 3 – ‘The Ministry of Pain’ – is about ‘Yugo-nostalgia’ among émigrés in Amsterdam. Chapter 4 attempts to broaden the currency of ‘Trümmerliteratur Redux’ as a literary-historical framework by looking at the shared thematic concerns in key works by the former East Germans Ingo Schulze and Clemens Meyer, the Czech Jáchym Topol, and the Franco-Czech Milan Kundera. This chapter finishes with a discussion of Ugrešić’s novel Baba Yaga Laid an Egg, which Williams suggests is the beginning of a departure from the ‘literature of the East European ruins’. The book concludes with an epilogue comprising several anecdotal reflections on the theme of ruins. The book benefits from Williams’ extensive knowledge of German and Yugoslav literature, especially evident in his in-depth analysis of Ugrešić’s work. Due to the relatively small amount of secondary literature available, Williams makes particularly effective use of cultural and literary essays by East and Central European writers, such as Ugrešić, Kundera, Brodsky, Miłosz, Christa Wolf, Ivan Klíma, and Jana Hensel. Williams’ study provides an important literary

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perspective on historical research in the last decade, on individual and collective memory in post-communist Europe. However, despite Williams’ argument for an East European ‘literature of the ruins’, his ability to make broad statements about post-1989 literary trends is limited by his predominant focus on the work of a single author. The central two chapters are almost exclusively about Ugrešić and her work is also discussed in the other chapters. Accordingly, the book reads more as a contextualisation of the post-Yugoslav writings of Ugrešić among other East European writers, rather than as a thematic overview of post-1989 East European ‘literature of ruins’ to which Williams aspires. Moreover, Williams’ use of the ‘ruin’ metaphor is mainly applied to discussions of memory, nostalgia, and melancholia. Passages on architectural ruins specifically, such as the anecdote about his trip to the ‘forgotten city’ of Eisenhüttenstadt, near the German-Polish border, are a welcome addition. The book as a whole would have benefited from more material on literary representations of architecture and urban landscapes. While in his introduction Williams defines what he means by ‘ruins’ (p.6) and ‘[E]astern Europe’ (p.20), he never interrogates his use of the term ‘postcommunism’, which leads to his problematic assumption of 1989 as a critical juncture or Stunde Null (‘zero-hour’) (p.26). Consequently, there are few attempts to contextualise the post-1989 works discussed with pre-1989 literature in the region. On a stylistic note, Williams’ obvious passion for languages comes through in the imaginative flair of his prose. For example, his use of the term ‘ostalgia’ (p.99) derived from the German Ostalgie (nostalgia for aspects of life in East Germany) and Croatian Jugonostalgija (Yugo-nostalgia). However, at times, this tendency can become overbearing, such as in his reference to ‘the specific museal sensibility of Ugrešić’s novel’ (p.74), presumably derived from the German Museal (museum-like). To avoid the pitfalls of post-communist East European ‘catastrophe tourism’, the impression of a post-1989 literary Sonderweg, or the stereotype of economic and cultural ‘ruin’, a discussion of the contemporary popularity in Western Europe, and indeed worldwide, of ruinophilia and (post-)apocalypse literature is much needed. Surely the internationally best-selling and widely translated works of Tatyana Tolstaya, Michel Houellebecq, David Mitchell, Cormac McCarthy, Margaret Atwood, and Haruki Murakami, to name but a few, can be seen as forming part of a wider ‘literature of the twenty-first century world in ruins’? Nonetheless, Williams’ book remains a welcome contribution to English language scholarship on post-1989 Croatian literature, Ugrešić studies, and, more broadly, post-communist cultural studies. CATHERINE GIBSON School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-commercial-Share-alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License. This license allows for redistribution and alteration, commercial and noncommercial, as long as credit is given to the author. To view a full copy of this license, visit:

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http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View.

ÂŠ School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, 2014.

SLOVO, VOL. 26, NO. 1 (SPRING 2014), 35-36.

Performing the East: Performance Art in Russia, Latvia and Poland Since 1980. By AMY BRYZGEL. Pp. 303. London and New York: I.B. Tauris. 2013. £59.50. Hardback. ISBN: 9781848859487. Performance art in the West is frequently defined through its rejection of the art object in a capitalist commodity market. This raises questions regarding the conditions, possibilities and motivations of performance art in Eastern Europe: if countries within the ‘Soviet sphere of influence’ (p. 14) – such as the nominally socialist countries – did not have an art market or commodity culture in that sense, then how could, and how did, performance art develop in this sphere? Furthermore, how did its mechanisms change after the collapse of the Eastern bloc and the shift to capitalism from the 1990s onwards? In six case studies divided into three chapters, Amy Bryzgel seeks to illuminate these questions by looking at East European performance from the 1980s through to the 2000s, charting a graph of its role in transitional economies from socialism to free-market capitalism. In the first chapter, Bryzgel focuses on questions of national identity in Russian performance art in the first years after the fall of the Soviet Union. She begins by discussing Sergei Bugaev’s (known also under his artistic pseudonym, Afrika) Crimania project, spanning several years from 1993 onwards. This is followed by an analysis of Oleg Kulik’s Russian Dog performances from between 1993 and 1997. The second chapter looks into questions of public appearance and media in Latvia before and after the introduction of capitalism. Miervaldis Polis’ Bronze Man performances ran from 1987 to 1992, and Gints Gabrāns carried out his Starix project between 2000 and 2004. Bryzgel’s third and final chapter considers Polish video art – which she conceives of as filmed performance art – and its inquiry into gender. She begins by looking at Zbigniew Libera’s How to Train the Girls from 1987, and then moves on to Katarzyna Kozyra’s 1997 The Women’s Bathhouse and 1999 The Men’s Bathhouse. Bryzgel presents a clear chapter structure and her choice of performers and performances is exciting and convincing. She is at her strongest in the description of these works, supplemented both by black-and-white photographs and a section of twelve coloured plates. It is, however, precisely the strength of the volume’s conceptual arc and its descriptive specificity which expose an occasional weakness in performance analysis. This may be due to the fact that Bryzgel seems to source her interpretative conclusions mainly from interviews with the artists, employing an ‘oral histories’ (p. 28) methodology. An example of such an approach might be the following: ‘his [Kulik’s] search resembles Afrika’s in that it is a personal, inward-looking j0urney that the artist hopes will translate into a collective healing and harmonic coexistence for all of mankind’ (p. 69). Bryzgel fails to annotate or expand upon what appear to be Kulik’s and Afrika’s rather banal and idealising verbal interpretations of their own performance, leaving out the cruel, brutal, and wounding qualities of this work. Indeed, she simply takes over their notion of performance as a ‘healing process’ (p. 35) as her own analytical thrust for the Russian chapter as a whole. In the subsequent chapters, too, she repeatedly places all emphasis on therapy, enablement and liberation, as if the performances she presented provided © School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, 2014.

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easy answers and did not, in the first instance, establish resistant and challenging questions or problems. In the Latvian chapter, she argues that Gabrāns’ Starix project, in the course of which the artist turned a homeless man into a reality TV star, could serve as an inspirational model for ordinary citizens: ‘Gabrāns [...] gives his viewers the tools and motivation to become the artists and creators of their own fame, and their own lives, themselves’ (p. 150). Bryzgel neither touches upon possible ethical problems with taking a homeless man off the streets for a sustained art action, nor considers any parodic spark in Gabrāns’ project. The argument that the artist simply provided a self-help toolkit for becoming famous in a freshly Westernized TV culture, and the implication that the introduction of such a culture is ultimately nothing but enabling for the individual, work to undermine the critical relevance Starix might have had. In the same vein, Bryzgel concludes an initially critical and important discussion of the dominant role of the Catholic Church in Poland by asserting that ‘if the capitalist system introduced was the enemy of the Church, it was certainly the friend of the artist in terms of freedom of expression and speech’ (p. 162). An analysis along the lines of ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’ insufficiently simplifies the complexity of Poland’s economic transition as well as the artistic responses to this transition. It seems underwritten by an all too well-meaning belief in the degrees of freedom, apparently afforded by or affordable in capitalism. The lack of precise and critical performance analysis, paired with an approach that sometimes reads like a pro-liberal Westerner’s account of East European performance art, ultimately disappoints the expectations set up towards what might have been far-reaching theoretical and historical implications regarding performance art under socialism, as well as under capitalism. But in spite of its shortcomings, the volume constitutes a crucial contribution to the study of performance art in its de-marginalisation of work from ‘the East’. The performances Bryzgel describes, and her own archival care in doing so, deserve attention from a wide readership among those interested in the region and/or in contemporary performance and video art. LISA JESCHKE University of Cambridge This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-commercial-No-derivatives 2.0 UK: England & Wales License. This license allows for redistribution and alteration, commercial and non-commercial, as long as credit is given to the author. To view a full copy of this license, visit: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View.

SLOVO, VOL. 26, NO. 1 (SPRING 2014), 37-38.

The Invisible Crises. By GEORGI GOSPODINOV. Sofia: Janet 45. 2013. Pp. 200. £5.00. Paperback. ISBN: 978-954-491-905-4. On the power of aesthetics and our invisible crises It didn't require great character at all our refusal disagreement and resistance we had a shred of necessary courage but fundamentally it was a matter of taste. Zbigniew Herbert (The Power of Taste) The Invisble Crises is a collection of stories and essays by Georgi Gospodinov, which have originally been written for a wide array of Bulgarian and European publications over the recent years. For the first time these stories have been published together, conjoined by the given title, at the beginning of 2013. The book is conceptually split into two parts: The Negated World and Marked by Literature. The theme is telling and topical – these are stories of events, which are lacked and have never occurred; words of our ubiquitous miss-timings with history, the history of ourselves. They have no claim to fill the black pages of the Bulgarian contemporaneity; on the contrary, they aim to make them seen, to problematize the notion of their very existence, to lead each and every one of us to dig deep and search within ourselves for our one (in)visible crisis. The personal is political and, as such, the private stories are of great importance to Georgi Gospodinov, who with his characteristically light and sensitive style of writing, so graciously captures their intimate relevance and contribution to the truth: their contribution to being different, being heard, and being shared. In The Negated World, we clash headstrong with what has happened and has not happened during the years of socialism in Bulgaria; with the dreams of the negated Europe, so often regarded as that Other and Foreign land, unthinkable to the imagining subject. The reality and the dreams of the Bulgarian individual are equally dependent on this inherent process of negation and gradually she becomes isolated within a no man’s land, a limited and limiting space, where the intersection with difference and otherness is not only a solely antagonistic relationship in itself, but one whose very existence is, in principle, impossible. Together with the irony and disappointment we can gaze into the contours of that 1968, which remained invisible to the Bulgarian subject, and which was also the inauguration of the author’s biography. While Prague is blossoming and the French students are rebelling in the Latin Quarter in Paris, while the Bulgarian tanks penetrate the borders of Czechoslovakia and the soundtrack of Europe is one of protest and freedom, co-written by The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and Jimi Hendrix, life here in Bulgaria is ‘always elsewhere’ – slowly and linearly flowing into the ticking steps of the day-by-day. ‘The censorship in Bulgaria obstructs the possibility of noticing the censorship in Bulgaria’ and this, most likely, creates one of the worst kinds of invisible crises – that, in which the absurd is gradually masked by the sign of normality.

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‘Sometimes time and geography are violently mismatched’ and this is painfully true for a nation like Bulgaria. 1968 is an event that happens everywhere in the West, yet the otherness of the Bulgarian then-contemporaneity refuses to let it slip into its repressive reality. 1989, for a large majority of the people, as well as for uncle Peycho, sole hero in one of the stories, occurs there, on the TV screens: ‘On November 10, we were told by the TV, that we were now free’. He awaits change with an equivalent patience, as he remains within the depths of his private oasis materialized by his chair; he awaits sobering up into a new and different world. A wait, which can, and does, last a lifetime and which by no means should be seen as bearing no guilt. These are the stories not only of our negated past, but of our stolen past, stories of the enforcement of a foreign subjectivity upon an obedient nation. The invisible crises show the black hole of the Bulgarian reality but also find the ability to offer solace and hope. This truly resonates in the second half of the book. There we find a diagnosis and also a way out of this existential crisis of the given epoch. That exit lies dormant within the literature and the ability to know yourself within your surroundings – both in the past and in the present; within the sharpening of the aesthetic recognition of the beautiful; within the implicit path of a nation like Bulgaria to progress of as a part of Europe, ‘secured by literature’, a Europe in which the fundamental values of freedom, justice, and equality have not lost their universality. A Europe as culture and identity. My first encounter with The Invisible Crises was personal and, as I see it now, monumental. I read it in a single breath, a day before the initiation of the summer protests in Bulgaria. It was my entry ticket and guide into the Independence Square. Then, in the first days of the protest, my decision to walk there alone and understand the nature of the situation, was incredibly eased by these 200 pages of personal sadness for the invisible Europe, which I must have, unknowingly, carried with(in) me. There, on the yellow brick road in central Sofia, the crises began emerging and forming knowable objects in front of my eyes; they found their limbs, speech, memory. Today, seven months later, I still wonder if we have a better institution for those critical limits, which define us in time and space. Are those crises of our unknowable past capable of being recognised? Can we speak, name, and think them as our own? Have we succeeded in overcoming the culture of silence and amnesia, hammered into us with brutal precision year by year? In weathering the storm, one is never left the same. That is also its true purpose – instant metamorphosis. The same holds for those crises – we must overcome ourselves; produce ourselves as new autonomous subjects. The rest, I believe, is a question of taste. RAYA RAEVA University of Sofia, St. Kliment Ohridski This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-commercial-Share-alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License. This license allows for redistribution and alteration, commercial and non-commercial, as long as credit is given to the author. To view a full copy of this license, visit: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View.

SLOVO, VOL. 26, NO. 1 (SPRING 2014), 39-40.

Ukrainian West: Culture and the Fate of Empire in Soviet Lviv. By WILLIAM JAY RISCH, Pp. 374. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Harvard Historical Studies, Volume 173. 2011. $49.99. ISBN 9780674050013. Soviet Lviv as a Shifting Phantasmagoria In Ukrainian West: Culture and the Fate of Empire in Soviet Lviv, William Jay Risch provides a detailed and nuanced account of the transformation of the Western Ukrainian city of Lviv, known as L’vov, Lwów, and Lemberg. Risch describes the transformation of Lviv from a center of the Halych-Volyn Principality of the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland, to a multiethnic town in the Habsburg Empire, and finally, to a unique Western Ukrainian Soviet city in the post-war Soviet Union. The story of Lviv’s transformation, he argues, does not follow a neat, linear path, but rather, is one complicated by shifting narratives, discourses, and allegiances. Despite Soviet state efforts to foster a ‘generic Soviet Ukrainian identity’, Risch argues, literary, linguistic, and cultural movements coalesced to shape a ‘specific Western Ukrainian Soviet identity’ of the city of Lviv (p. 4). In the first section of the book, Risch outlines post-war Soviet politics and the transformation of Lviv as a ‘Soviet city’. After the death of Stalin, the Soviet secret police chief, Lavrenty Beria, issued a report to encourage ‘localism’ and soon thereafter, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union passed a resolution calling for the election of ‘locals’. In keeping with the resolution, the first Party secretary for Ukraine, L. G. Melnikov, an ethnic Russian, was forced to relinquish his position to an ethnic Ukrainian (35). Through official policy, the Soviet state co-opted the ‘local’ …what? and was propagated as being closely aligned to Western Ukraine. However, during the period of Brezhnev’s ‘Thaw’, integrationist policies spurred the arrival of as many as 45 000 former nationalist guerrillas in Western Ukraine and this period of relative openness allowed for the formation of the Sixtiers Movement Shistdesiatnytstvo, which alongside other nationalist supporters, continued to oppose Sovietization (p. 24). Risch provides in-depth accounts of the changes in demographics and the transformation of urban spaces that effectively asserted a ‘Soviet’ Western Ukrainian identity upon Lviv. Despite measures to de-Polonize Lviv, post-Stalin generations in the city viewed Soviet state imposition as foreign and the pre-Soviet era intelligentsia helped to solidify a local sense of Western Ukrainian identity, which did not hinge on constructed Soviet historical myths. Though host to these differing factions, Lviv did not foster a simple binary opposition between Soviet and antiSoviet allegiances. Rather, Lvivians were engaged in some forms of public Soviet life, while simultaneously maintaining private Ukrainian nationalist positions. Lvivians accommodated public sphere Soviet state rhetoric while retaining ties to Galician perceptions of Ukrainian identity. The practice of accommodation by its residents allowed Lviv to become an arena in which public discourse was not a manifestation of private sentiment, but, rather, a performance. Risch describes this practice as ‘preference falsification’: publically suppressing private opinions for those deemed ideologically sound (pp. 4, 181). Through such accounts, Risch prodigiously renders simple binary oppositions problematic and, instead, carefully

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draws attention to the layered historical contexts, discourses, and practices that simultaneously shaped Lviv. Lviv, Risch writes, resembled a ‘deceptive, shifting phantasmagoria…which took on multiple contradictory images…evading stable meaning’ (p. 22). To color his account of Lviv as a ‘shifting phantasmagoria’ (p. 22) in the second part of the book, Risch delves deep into the literary, linguistic, and cultural movements in the city. Risch poignantly describes how young Lvivians, particularly those who came of age after Stalin’s death, challenged the culturally dominant conception of being Western Ukrainian. Members of the Writers’ Union, and other authors alike, championed greater use of the Ukrainian language in public institutions and schools, while publications in the literary journal Zhovten’ challenged Soviet ‘official’ histories (p. 120). Ukrainian poet Dmytro Pavlychko, once allied with the OPU nationalist underground movement, was a proponent of teaching the Ukrainian language and was credited with stemming Russification in Lviv (p. 122). Collective memory of pre-Soviet times, Risch argues, was also perpetuated through folk songs, artwork, literature, and other performances. Yet, even the literary and cultural movements were not uniformly united in their Galician or nationalist Ukrainian claims. Rather, a cacophony of ambivalent and apathetic movements existed alongside the actively subversive, so while some were actively anti-Soviet, others were enveloped in the benign pleasures of football matches and pop music concerts. Throughout the book, Risch skilfully weaves together historical and cultural narratives into a broader account of the multi-faceted and complex interactions that together shaped the formation of Lviv. Through these rich accounts, collected over the course of a decade, Risch enables the reader to gain a sense of the complicated dynamism through which Lvivians shaped the city’s idiosyncratic identity. STACY TOPOUZOIVA University of Oxford This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-commercial-Share-alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License. This license allows for redistribution and alteration, commercial and non-commercial, as long as credit is given to the author. To view a full copy of this license, visit: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View.

SLOVO, VOL. 26, NO. 1 (SPRING 2014), 47-48.

Sector Sarajevo (2013) Documentary film, colour, 66 min. Directed, written and narrated by BARRY STEVENS. Cast: Lewis MacKenzie, Scott J. Casey, Greg Alkerton, Martin Bell. Canada: 52 Media Inc. Language: English Every year since 1931 on 11 November Canadians celebrate Remembrance Day, a holiday that commemorates the men and women who served and continue to serve in the armed forces during war. Last year as part of the commemorations, History Television, a thematic channel subsidiary of the media corporation Shaw, aired a documentary recounting the Canadian forces’ involvement in the Bosnian War in 1992. The aim of the documentary is straightforward and resonates with the celebration it was chosen to commemorate. If the people in Canada ‘have no concept of what took place there’ (as claimed by one of the interviewed soldiers), then the intention behind Sector Sarajevo is to make them aware of their bravest fellow countrymen, involved in what was ‘the longest siege in modern history’. Similarly straightforward is the narrative twist that the documentary pivots upon: the Canadian regiment, guided by General Lewis MacKenzie, entered Sarajevo on 2 July 1992 on a peacekeeping mission but, due to extreme circumstances, they eventually had to renounce the UN’s Chapter Six resolution, which stipulates that peacekeepers should not use force unless under direct attack. Despite its commemorative mandate, Sector Sarajevo avoids dwelling upon the emotional realm. The impact of the events of July 1992 on the lives of some of the Canadians involved is addressed 1 , but appropriately this remains peripheral to the piece. However, director Barry Stevens spares us an expected happy-end manoeuvre. Instead, the brutal events of 11 July, when snipers shot children approaching the United Nations for candy, are brought into question. Some of the Canadians allege that this was actually Bosnian Muslims firing at their own people, in an effort to stir the international community to take a position against the Army of Republika Srpska. The greatest merit of Sector Sarajevo is that, while revisiting the traumatic war zone experiences and paying tribute to the Canadian involvement in the siege, it does more than simply sympathize with MacKenzie’s regiment. By looking at the way the Canadian peacekeepers who were distributing food and medical supplies under fire, but ended up being treated as enemies by both sides of the conflict, the documentary questions the effectiveness of the United Nations policies in scenarios such as Sarajevo. The finale of the piece is dedicated to the question ‘Was it worth it?’ — a question that each soldier and survivor answers in a different way.

For example, Corporal Greg Alkerton turned to self-medication to overcome post-traumatic stress, while others took their own lives. © School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, 2014. 1

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A final remark should be made about the self-reflexive aspect of the documentary. The date 13 July marked the greatest crisis in the Canadian involvement in Sarajevo. On that day, the Bosnian militia had surrounded Canadian tanks, which had been ordered to the outskirts of the city to distribute provisions. With rifles pointed at them, accused of smuggling weapons to the enemy, the Canadians were asked to surrender their weapons and either give up their armoured tanks or stand their ground and die. The United Nations headquarters did not supply MacKenzie with any helpful advice on how to proceed (he claims that the person who picked up the line in New York did not even know where Sarajevo was). However, he ultimately resolved the crisis by acquiring footage of the ongoing standoff from the BBC correspondent Martin Bell and showing Bosnian President, Alija IzatbegoviÄ&#x2021;, how the incident would be portrayed in the media. This crucial final aspect becomes a great testimony to the positive ethical power documentary filmmaking and news reporting can, at times, exercise over the modern world. In this respect, Sector Sarajevo is as inspiring as it is disturbing, given its subject matter. GIACOMO BOITANI Independent Scholar This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non-commercial-Share-alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales License. This license allows for redistribution and alteration, commercial and non-commercial, as long as credit is given to the author. To view a full copy of this license, visit: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View.

ÂŠ School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, 2014.

SLOVO, VOL. 26, NO. 1 (SPRING 2014), 45-46.

Portret v sumerkakh, ‘Twilight Portrait’ (2011) Drama, colour, 105 min. Dir ANGELINA NIKONOVA. Written by ANGELINA NIKONOVA and OL’GA DYKHOVICHNAIA. Cast: Sergei Borisov, Ol’ga Dykhovichnaia, Sergei Goliudov. Russia: Baraban Film. Language: Russian Angelina Nikonova’s debut feature film, Portret v sumerkakh (‘Twilight Portrait’), is a tale of moral and state corruption set in an unremittingly bleak modern-day Russia. Together with lead actress and co-writer Ol’ga Dykhovichnaia, Nikonova etches a portrait of a listless society in which institutional apathy and individual indifference are accepted constants. Beset on this backdrop is the sombre existence of counselling psychologist Marina (Dykhovichnaia) who, discontent with her life in middle Russia, maintains an ungratifying extra-marital affair and distances herself from her milieu. The heroine’s materialistic nature is put to test when she is the subject of a robbery, to which she receives no sympathy from passers-by or the police. Enduring a similar traumatic experience as one of her patients, Marina is subsequently the victim of police brutality and rape, whereupon the film embarks on a psychological evaluation of the heroine, yet offers no clear diagnosis for her behaviour. As night encroaches on the city, we follow Marina’s irresolute movements as she turns into a social somnambulist and seems to lose all desire for rehabilitation. Roving through the streets, she purchases a second-hand camera with a ‘twilight portrait’ function, foreshadowing future events and giving the film a meta-cinematic element. Pictures stored on the camera present her with a glimpse into the previous owner’s lacklustre life, which works to intensify this episode of introspection. The pivotal moment for her character comes when she happens to see one of her attackers, hardened police officer Andrei (Sergei Borisov), in a café. She stalks him from the shadows as he returns to his apartment block and then, arming herself with a broken bottle, follows him into the elevator. The camera, and through it Marina’s gaze, inspects the neck of the unsuspecting Andrei, looking for the best place to strike, yet hesitates. Instead of taking advantage of this chance for revenge she lovingly embraces her attacker. The story descends deeper into a cycle of perversion as she begins a masochistic relationship with her assailant and domesticates herself within the household of his dysfunctional family. The film opens itself up to a variety of feminist and psychoanalytical readings but retains a certain ambiguity throughout. Cinematographer Eben Bull’s use of handheld photography on a Canon 5D MK II gives the viewer an unashamedly intimate view of Marina and her consciousness. The cinematic style evokes an interesting depiction of the two rape scenes whereby the screen is completely blackened, as if the gaze of the camera does not dare to witness such horror, while the persistent sound of the attack in isolation leaves a formidable and lasting impression. This obscuration works to represent the victim’s clouded consciousness during her trauma and likewise a black-spot in the memory of her attacker as he fails to recognise her later in the film. This sense of realism is further emphasised by the fact that Borisov is not a trained actor but is a police officer by profession. Ultimately the characters are not self-reproachful, just as the film offers them no counselling or a chance for atonement. © School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, 2014.

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Portret v sumerkakh received its world premiere at the 2011 Kinotavr Open Russian Film Festival and has since undergone a modest circuit of European film festivals. It is scheduled for DVD release however details of this are yet to be announced at the time of publication. Nikonova and Dykhovichnaia’s second project together, Velkom khoum (‘Welcome Home’), is currently in post-production and is due for release in 2014. THOMAS MCLENACHAN School of Slavonic and East European Studies University College London

SLOVO, VOL. 26, NO. 1 (SPRING 2014), 43-44.

Paradjanov (2013) Drama/Biographical film, colour, 95 min. Directed by SERGE AVEDIKIAN and ELENA FETISOVA. Written by ELENA FETISOVA. Cast: Serge Avedikian, Yuliia Peresild, Zaza Kashybadze. Ukraine: Interfilm Production Studio. Languages: Ukrainian, Russian. Sergei Paradzhanov’s films regularly provoke passionate responses among committed cinephiles. His mistreatment and premature death conferred upon him the status of modern-day martyr. Avedikian and Fetisova’s biopic of the director is obviously born of this same enthusiasm for his art and sympathy for his travails. Paradzhanov’s former students and collaborators were involved in the project (Roman Balaian is listed as creative producer and Iurii Mechitov is thanked in the credits), further testifying to the fact that this biopic is a labour of love. Despite palpable respect for its subject, the film, however, fails to achieve the lofty heights of Paradzhanov’s own work. In this case, using the medium of cinema to explore the life of one of the art form’s greatest auteurs ultimately results in a gap between the film at hand and Paradzhanov’s sublime oeuvre. The lack of a subtitle indicates not that this is the definitive Paradzhanov, but rather that the film lacks an authoritative take on its subject. Paradzhanov’s statue in Tbilisi, although cast in metal, conveys more of the man’s exuberance and personality than we see in the early part of the film, where he comes across as temperamental and unreasonable. The directors use segments from Paradzhanov’s own films, at one point cutting leading actor and co-director Serge Avedikian alongside existing footage in such a way that he appears to be directing Sofiko Chiaureli, gesture by gesture, during the making of Tsvet Granata (‘The Colour of Pomegranate’, 1968). However, this technique merely reinforces the impossibility of understanding the unique aesthetic behind Paradzhanov’s visualization of Saiat-Nova’s life story as an associative montage–poem. The tragedy of Paradzhanov’s life — his truncated and neglected career — is dealt with in the middle section of the film, where negatively-coded governmental authorities imprison Paradzhanov on account of his ‘nationalism’ and alleged homosexual conduct. Regrettably, the film does not illuminate the motives of the authoritarian ideologues which incarcerate him. This trope of the heroic individual struggling against the repressive state apparatus is well known, especially to admirers of Soviet cinema, leaving the viewer yearning for a deeper insight into Paradzhanov’s oppressors and the forces that motivated them. The film finds its feet once Paradzhanov has left the shadowy confines of prison and returned to his birthplace, Tbilisi. At this point, Avedikian bears a strong resemblance to Paradzhanov, with his halo of grey hair and sweeping gestures. The atmosphere of Tbilisi with its steep streets, crooked staircases, and colourful balconies is conveyed perfectly. At first Paradzhanov is a broken, uninspired man, seen gutting a fish while bemoaning his mistreatment. A visit from Marcello Mastroianni changes his mood, and subsequently his fortunes. The camera sweeps majestically around Avedikian’s Paradzhanov as he entertains his guest and makes a series of toasts, all while bathed in shadows and candlelight. This sequence masterfully conveys the energy of Paradzhanov’s personality and his films. His artistic impulses are then © School of Slavonic and East European Studies, University College London, 2014.

REVIEWS: FILMS

reanimated as he embarks upon his next masterpiece Legenda o Suramskoi kreposti (‘The Legend of the Suram Fortress’, 1984), this time set in the Georgian countryside. Many important episodes of Paradzhanov’s life are left out or passed over, but this is inevitable due to him having led such a complex and transnational life. The Caucasus, which was Paradzhanov’s birthplace and the inspiration for three of his major films, is given appropriate weight in this biopic. Much of the second half of the film was shot on location in Georgia, and it is here that the film begins to shed some light on the filmmaker whose artistic style still remains bewildering to some viewers. The film’s unusual and poignant coda depicts Paradzhanov at the Centre Pompidou in 1988, where he is being honoured with a retrospective of his works. He tells the assembled Parisian intelligentsia that he loves living in a leaking, dilapidated shack because it reminds him of films by his heroes Fellini and Tarkovskii. Dwarfed by the postmodern architecture of the city, and overwhelmed by the grandeur of the Paris skyline, Paradzhanov ends the film as a curiously anachronistic figure: a master of cinema, the definitive twentieth-century art form, and yet decidedly not at home amongst the trappings of the late twentieth century. JOHN RILEY Independent Scholar PhD from Birkbeck College, University of London

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