Core post 3: hashtags in Russian sociopolitical discourse

Losh’s discussions of hashtags with slogans as speech acts aiming to bring a new order into existence, as “performatives,” or magic spells that can reshape reality made me think about cultural grounds of the effectiveness and specificities of application of hashtags in modern Russia’s sociopolitical discourse.

It seems as though hashtags have found in Russian culture a prepared ground. The written and spoken word historically has held a formative power in Russia - presumably because originally the written, literary Russian language was shaped on the basis of translations of Greek holy scripts, so the “divine” aspect of it might have fixated as dominant in the collective cultural consciousness. Throughout history, Russian intellectuals relied upon this transformative potential of the word; its application in literature and journalism would, in fact, substitute politics and make up for the absence of democracy. In the early XXth century, towards the Revolution of 1917, this belief in the word leads to a situation where slogans and placards, as well as Futurist declarative poetry,  started to gradually transform the people’s consciousness and the political scene.

The power of hashtags today seems to fit perfectly in the tradition. In the absence of justice, a hashtag as a part of citizen campaign may help to free an innocent journalist from a fabricated prosecution, as happened this summer 2019 (the hashtag #FreedomToIvanGolunov and #WeAreIvanGolunov). In 2017, after the terrorist act on a subway station in Saint Petersburg, when the city metro was closed, the social network Vkontakte launched the hashtag #Home. By using it, the citizens found those headed in the same direction and gave them a free lift.

Perhaps these cases themselves do not differ much from similar ones elsewhere in the world, inter alia those discussed by Losh (for instance, associated with the Ukranian Maidan). However, the ways hashtags have been working in Russia over the last few years sometimes strike me as miraculous - taking into consideration the problematic political system, the condition of institutes of justice, and the lack of institutional social services.

Hashtags and social media discourse seem to shape a powerful tool of creation of civil society, especially when it comes to the crunch. In a sense, hashtags are contemporary revolutionary slogans, where revolution unfolds in the digital space.