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 Russia’s 9/11: Performativity and Discursive Instability in Television Coverage of the Beslan Atrocity Stephen Hutchings When New York’s Twin Towers fell, news broadcasts struggled to convey the enormity of this strike at the symbolic heart of the world’s sole superpower . Since 9/11, however, concrete features have been ascribed to the faces of the perpetrators of the Evil, stories of bravery have emerged from the rubble of the World Trade Center, and 9/11 has been inscribed into the narrative of post–cold war American nationhood, just as it has enabled al Qaeda to fill the chasm left by the dissolution of the evil Soviet empire. Tales of martyrdom among the passengers of the jet that was downed in Pennsylvania,the bravery of firefighters who returned repeatedly to the collapsing towers, and the final mobile phone calls to loved ones from those aboard the two jets that crashed into the towers all now feature prominently in 9/11 folklore. Since 2001, the 9/11 “brand” has also been exported to other nations. The Madrid bombings preceding the Spanish elections of 2004 have been dubbed “Spain’s 9/11,” just as the Beslan school siege became known as “Russia’s 9/11,” and the events in Britain of July 2005 are now referred to ubiquitously as “7/7.”1 Paradoxically,an event designed to shake the world’s superpower from its consumerist fantasies has itself taken the form of a consumer format. But it is a format with national specificities. In Russia’s case the Beslan outrage coincided with a new curtailment of media freedom: one of NTV’s flagship talk shows, Freedom of Speech (Svoboda slova), hosted  stephen hutchings by the prominent liberal journalist Savik Shuster, was, in a development not directly related to Beslan, canceled in the very same month. Shortly before this, Leonid Parfenov’s equally controversial current affairs magazine program, Lately (Namedni), suffered a similar fate. Some commentators will point to post-9/11 and post-7/7 curtailments of free speech in the United States and the United Kingdom, but in Russia the imposed constraints not only were much harsher, they were in effect well before the emergence of any hint that the country was about to suffer a terrorist outrage of this order.Russia also deviates from other “warriors on terror”in that its nation-building project must navigate between a partially rehabilitated Soviet past and an ambivalently viewed,Western-dominated present,and in the intensity with which recent terrorist outrages have shaped that navigation . Writing before Beslan, Ivan Zassoursky suggests that the 1999 Moscow apartment bomb blasts, which he refers to as the Russian equivalent of 9/11,“started the process of the almost instant reconstruction of the Russian mentality.”2 Unusual too is Russia’s television culture, emerging from (and now retracting back into) a controlled environment of mutually reinforcing, state-sponsored voices emphasizing the inevitable, the ritualistic, and the positive.3 Still developing a set of generic conventions for the representation of anomalous, unanticipated catastrophes, and despite a sequence of recent disasters exposing media incompetence and inexperience (e.g., the Chernobyl nuclear power plant leak, the Kursk submarine disaster, the Nord-Ost theater siege,the apartment bombs—all precursors of Beslan),Russian news broadcasts confronted in the 2004 school siege a milestone in this process. My exploration of how the approach to the problem adopted by Russian news links with and ultimately complicates the national identity construction task it has been assigned should be read in parallel with the essays of Birgit Beumers and Anna Brodsky, who, referring to different manifestations of Russia’s “war on terror” against Chechen rebels, likewise broach that war’s myth-generating and nation-building capacities in the context of a specifically Russian cultural discourse on terrorism. My own angle on that specificity focuses on certain challenges posed to a media system by its need to collude with a government regime that, authoritarian public image notwithstanding, is beset by profound ideological instability. My analysis is based on six editions of Vremia (Time), the main evening news program of Channel 1, now effectively (along with the RTR channel) Putin’s official mouthpiece. The sequence spans the event and its immediate aftermath (the siege itself lasted from September 1 to 3, with September 6 and 7 declared national days of mourning). Since my focus is on the ideological, post-atrocity processing of meanings derived...

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