Making Sense of Russian Strategic Narratives : Affect and Reception Among Young Russian Speakers in Latvia

This dissertation explores the reception of Russian strategic narratives among Russian-speaking youth in Latvia. Bringing together media and communication studies, international relations and Baltic studies, it approaches narrative persuasion and its reception from a cultural perspective. The primary data for this study consist of 12 focus groups and 13 individual follow-up interviews with 69 young Russian speakers aged 18–30 in Riga, Daugavpils and Liepāja between 2021 and 2022. Drawing on the conceptual framework of strategic narratives, such narratives pertaining to history, freedom of speech and language were identified and analysed in Russian foreign policy documents, press briefings and Sputnik Latvia media texts. The media ecology in which these narratives were projected and received were studied using thematic analysis, focusing on participants’ media use and perception of news as a social and cultural context for the reception of narratives. Using Carolyn Michelle’s reception model, participants’ sensemaking of these narratives was analysed on denotative and connotative levels of meaning. By adapting Michelle’s model, this study adds affect as a factor that influences the reception of narrative texts. It demonstrates that affect serves as a force that increases narrative persuasion, pushing participants to skip denotative levels of meaning and move directly to connotative levels. It is also a force that can push a reader into a mediated mode and become critical of the text because of its emotional content. Heightened or diminished affect facilitates shifts. Findings reveal that young Russian speakers in Latvia are a far from homogeneous group. Generally, they are neither critically opposing Russian strategic narratives nor uncritically taking them to heart. The reality is rather somewhere in between. As such, this research project brings nuance to a situation where censorship, ‘us versus them’ thinking, and polarisation are increasingly taking over public discourse.