Scholarship for Master's Students — Anastasia Krovitskaya

This research represents the first approach to analyzing the construction of Jewish ethnicity in the Soviet periodical press. Despite the fact that the Jewish revival in the USSR from the late 1980s became the impetus for the creation of numerous Russian religious and cultural Jewish organizations and institutions, Jewish ethnicity during the revival and formative period of late Soviet and early post-Soviet times has not been studied until now.

The empirical basis of the work consists of articles from the late Soviet periodical press, held in the Vaad Archive — the only organization in Russia that systematically stores information on the development of Jewish cultural life during the late Soviet period. The sample includes materials not only from central USSR newspapers ("Za Rubezhom", "Sovetskaya Rossiya", "Izvestiya", "Komsomolskaya Pravda", "Literaturnaya Gazeta", "Pravda", "Trud"), but also from newspapers of the Soviet Socialist Republics ("Kommunist Tadzhikistana", "Sovetskaya Estoniya", Yerevan's "Komsomolets", "Sovetskaya Moldaviya", "Molodezh Moldavii", "Molodezh Azerbaidzhana", "Sovetskaya Belorussiya", "Vecherniy Minsk").

The work is structured around an analysis of media frames — stable (recurring) patterns in the coverage of Jewish topics in the late Soviet press. The identified set of frames can play both an independent role in developing an understanding of how Jewish ethnicity was constructed by Soviet journalists over a 10-year period and serve as a solid foundation for conducting comparative analysis.

The research was carried out with the financial support of A. Klyachin.

Work on the project has been completed.