Local and Imperial Discourse in the Regional Mass Print Media of the Tsarist Russian Far East 1898 – 1899

Abstract

By 1900, in a moment of international crisis, Russians saw themselves as a people under siege rather than as subjects of an empire under siege by the “Yellow Peril.” This shift in attitudes of Russians towards themselves and their Northeast Asian neighbors represents an empire-wide social revolution, a visible transformation of Prudkogliad’s “values orientation” that, in a different context, presaged the 1917 Revolution. Russianness centralizing race and ethnicity over the Tsarist political and class hierarchy. Connected with violence committed by Russians against non-Russian populations throughout the empire in the same period, this revolution merits as much attention as the political revolutions of 1905 and 1917. This essay examines the transformation of the Russian media and the discourses that influenced the public sphere, to describe how Russians under Tsarism saw themselves and their non-Russian neighbors. Using Fairclough Critical Language Analysis of selected news items from the regional Russian Far East press, and preceding discursive trends in literature and the printed mass media of European Russia, this essay describes a significant shift from Russians identifying themselves as Russian subjects to Russian nationals, through their relationship with non-Russians.