Talk • The Mediated Navalny: A Rhetorical Analysis of Russia’s First Digitally Networked Politician

When trying to make sense of Vladimir Putin’s slow, persistent, marginalization and torture of Alexey Navalny, which culminated in his tragic death on February 16th of this year, many analysts point to one of two factors that made him so potent and dangerous a political foe—Navalny’s laser focus on rampant corruption among Russia’s political elite, and his ability to mobilize large swaths of the population from diverse political, demographic, and geographic corners of Russia. In “Mediated Navalny,” I examine a third critical factor that arguably made the first two possible: his unique ability to harness the internet and social media to build an alternative, “networked public sphere” that could break through and challenge the more authoritarian, top-down model of political communication emblematic of the Putin regime. Focusing on Navalny’s use of three social media platforms over his 18-year political career (LiveJournal, Twitter, and YouTube), I trace the rhetorical trajectory of his emergence as a viral political force, and offer insights into the language and communication strategies that fueled his political achievement and ultimate demise.

Michael Gorham is Professor of Russian Studies at the University of Florida and currently Archie K. Davis Fellow at the National Humanities Center. He received his PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from Stanford University and served for 12 years as Associate Editor in charge of literature and culture at The Russian Review. Gorham is the author of two award-winning books on language culture and politics: After Newspeak: Language Culture and Politics in Russia from Gorbachev to Putin (Cornell U.P. 2014) and Speaking in Soviet Tongues: Language Culture and the Politics of Voice in Revolutionary Russia (Northern Illinois University Press, 2003), and co-editor of Digital Russia: The Language, Culture, and Politics of New Media Communication (with Ingunn Lunde and Martin Paulsen, Routledge, 2014), and a special issue of Zeitschrift für Slavische Philologie (2017, nos. 72:2–73:1) dedicated to “The Culture and Politics of Verbal Prohibition in Putin’s Russia.” His most recent scholarship has focused on matters relating to language culture and political communication on digital media (the internet and social networks in particular), including the book manuscript he is currently completing at the National Humanities Center, Networking Putinism: The Rhetoric of Power in the Digital Age.