Rise and Fall and Rise and Fall of Russian Media — a talk by Ilia Krasilshchik
-
Despite the increasing state control over free speech, the Russian media market is still alive — and huge. There are tens of independent online media with a multimillion audience and each year we get more. How do you survive on the internet when it is controlled by the state? How do you find professional journalists when there are no decent schools of journalism? How do you manage a media outlet when you do not know what is going to happen tomorrow? Publisher of the popular Russian language online media outlet Meduza Ilia Krasilshchik will explain how the world of Russian media works.
Image
After dropping out of university at 21, in 2008 Ilya Krasilshchik became the editor of the then most influential Moscow entertainment and city life magazine Afisha. During his five-year tenure, Afisha published more than 100 issues, including specials like “Oral History of the Russian
Media” and “Oral History of the Russian Internet” and a “Coming Outs” issue (as an answer to the ”LGBT propaganda” law adopted by the Russian State Duma). He stepped down in 2013 to become the Product Director at Afisha publishing company, launching three separate web-based media and а TV streaming service in one year. In October 2014, he finally left Afisha, and together with two partners launched Meduza, a groundbreaking Russian language web news outlet based in Riga, Latvia. By December 2015 the monthly readership of Meduza exceeded 3.5 million unique visitors, with 320,000 app downloads and more than 500,000 followers on social media. Seventy percent of Meduza’s audience is based in Russia.
Ilia Krasilshchik
Publisher
Speaker
Meduza.io
Lectures
Cécile earned her Ph.D. in French Literature from the University of Reims in France in 2003 and joined the faculty at Stanford University that same year. Her research interests include the history and mythology of national and ethnic identities since the Renaissance, far right ideology and rhetoric, the relations between cultural, literary, and medical discourses on gender and the body in early modern Europe, poetry and poetics, narrative forms and their discontent, French cinema, and contemporary French literature. Cécile's most recent book, Marine Le Pen prise aux mots. Décryptage du nouveau discours frontiste [Marine Le Pen taken to her words. Decoding the new national front discourse], co-authored with Stephanie Wahnich, examines the rhetoric used by the National Front leader, Marine Le Pen, and compares it to that of her father and former National Front leader, Jean-Marie Le Pen. Casual observation of far right politics in France suggests that there has been a significant change in the National Front program following the 2011 leadership change to Marine Le Pen from Jean-Marie Le Pen and his 2015 ouster from the party. Marine Le Pen has taken great efforts to distance herself from her father, who infamously and repeatedly characterized gas chambers as "a detail in the history of World War II." The party has also enjoyed increasing electoral support in recent years. Against this backdrop, the book examines two fundamental questions: what is Marine Le Pen actually saying, and why does her speech resonate with French society today? To answer these questions, Alduy and Wahnich have analyzed over 500 speeches given by Marine and Jean-Marie Le Pen. This analysis reveals that there is significant continuity between the political agenda and ideological content of the Le Pens. In contrast with her father's blatantly radical speech, however, the younger Le Pen employs careful phraseology, replete with allusions, ambiguities, and double entendres, in order to "de-demonize" the party and make its platform appear more palatable to a modern French audience. In spite of programmatic continuity, this rhetorical rebranding appears to have facilitated greater electoral support for the National Front. Marine Le Pen prise aux mots has received significant media coverage, including a feature in 
Camilla is an anthropologist who is interested in using network analysis to examine the social arrangements "mega-sites" - large settlements that originated with small, settled hunter-gatherer communities - during the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB) and Pottery Neolithic periods. In her current research, Camilla is evaluating these social arrangements with new evidence from Çatalhöyük, a dense agglomeration of mudbrick houses occupied for 1,400 years and located in modern-day Turkey. Approximately the size of a town, Çatalhöyük lacks many of the characteristics of a modern town, including specialized areas, communal buildings, and centralized functions. Moreover, the spatial arrangement differs significantly from other PPNB settlements. In summer 2015, Camilla conducted field research, partially funded by The Europe Center, at the site of Çatalhöyük. During her four weeks at the site, she explored ways of modeling the site's networks by collecting data focused on patterns of similarity of material culture features. This data will be used to examine the site's internal organization as well as the arrangements of social relationships therein. In addition, she spent time studying some of the recently-excavated buildings, using architectural features to study ties among entities.
The Europe Center is pleased to introduce to you Lina Eriksson, a Fulbright Scholar who is visiting Stanford University from the Department of Government at Uppsala University and the Center for Natural Disaster Science (CNDS), Sweden. Lina holds an MA in Ethnic Conflicts and Conflict Resolutions, Asylum Immigration and Integration from University of Waterloo, Canada and an MSc in Political Sciences, Economics and International Development from Jönköping International Business School (JIBS), Sweden. She is broadly interested in the politics of natural disasters. In her dissertation, entitled Natural Disasters and National Politics, Lina examines the electoral effects of the 2004 Boxing Day Tsunami and the 2005 Storm Gudrun on Swedish parliamentary elections. Part of this research, forthcoming in Electoral Studies, finds that the Swedish Social Democratic Party's poor crisis response to Storm Gudrun resulted in a significant decrease in support for the Social Democratic Party in the affected regions, leading to the largest change in partisan support in Swedish history. We invite you to visit our 
Working in conjunction with the WSD HANDA Center for Human Rights and International Justice, The Europe Center is pleased to announce a talk by Emily Arnold-Fernández, Founder and Executive Director of Asylum Access. During her visit to Stanford, Ms. Arnold-Fernández will discuss the rights of refugees and obligations of states under international law more generally before focusing on how European Union law affects these rights and obligations. Discussants James Cavallaro and Jenny S. Martinez, both of whom are professors of law at Stanford Law School, will further explore how international law has influenced the ways in which Europe and the larger international community has addressed the latest refugee crisis.
Peter earned his Ph.D. in Economics, Finance, and Management from the Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Spain in 2011 and joined the faculty at Stanford University that same year. In his research, Peter uses historical evidence to shed light on the functioning of financial markets, focusing specifically on asset prices in the short and long run and on the role of bankruptcy protection on risk taking and investment. His recent article in the
Leonardo is a historian who is interested in the emergence and historical development of peripheral regions of empire. His current research uses the case of the Portuguese empire to examine the mechanisms that European empires developed to administer their colonies in the Early Modern period. The European colonial powers created vast imperial structures designed to administer distant parts of their empires. Yet the communication technology of the time resulted in both leaders in the imperial capital and administrators in far-flung territories making decisions in the absence of complete information. Scholars have sought to understand the decision-making process of authorities under these conditions of inconsistent communication and unreliable information, and some have argued that this led decision-makers to be indifferent to local knowledge. In research at Lisbon's Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, National Archive Torre do Tombo, and Biblioteca Nacional, partially supported by The Europe Center, Leonardo uncovered evidence to the contrary. His archival research suggests that local knowledge - transmitted to the imperial capital via letters from litigants seeking dispute settlements in distant parts of the empire or petitions to the king by mobile vassals - served as an important source of information for those administering faraway domains.
Europe is facing a dynamic and evolving geopolitical situation, with conflicts on two fronts. To the east, Russia seeks to expand both its territory and its power; to the south, the Syrian civil war continues to generate refugee flows into Europe. In his November visit to Stanford, General Philip M. Breedlove, Supreme Allied Commander Europe, spoke about these threats and discussed the central role of NATO in buttressing European security. General Breedlove drew attention to the nexus of these two security threats, positing that Russian involvement in Syria is intended to promote the image of Russia as a world power and to foster in the region regimes supportive of Russia. While Russia argues that its intervention in Syria is intended to promote global peace by helping to end the Syrian conflict, General Breedlove suggests that the sincerity of this claim is undermined by Russian intransigence over Georgia and Ukraine. Ultimately, he argued that maintaining security in the contemporary geopolitical context requires a continued commitment to NATO and the Transatlantic security apparatus. Following his presentation, General Breedlove engaged in a lively question and answer session with the audience, fielding questions on topics such as the ability of NATO member states to meet their 2 percent military spending commitment, how to engage with Russia without playing into the narrative that the west is surrounding them, and the prospects for Afghanistan. To watch General Breedlove's talk and the following question and answer period in full, please visit our 
The Europe Center is delighted to welcome Distinguished Visiting Austrian Chair Professor, Herlinde Pauer-Studer, to Stanford University. Dr. Pauer-Studer is a professor of philosophy at the University of Vienna and her research interests include ethics, political philosophy, and legal philosophy. She earned her Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Salzburg. During her time at Stanford University, Dr. Pauer-Studer will be teaching in the Department of Philosophy and working on a book about the normative distortions in the National Socialist legal system, focusing on the period 1933-1939. Please join us in welcoming Dr. Pauer-Studer to The Europe Center and Stanford University.
Jason is a political economist who is interested in political risk, the politics of public finance, and economic history. His dissertation examines how newly-independent states finance themselves, focusing on former British colonies. Analysis of the London Stock Exchange in the quarter century following World War II reveals a surprising trend: colonial debt bond prices remained remarkably stable throughout decolonization. In his research at the British National Archives in London, funded in part by The Europe Center, Jason found that price stability was an insufficient indicator of investor confidence. Far from reflecting investors unperturbed by the uncertainty of decolonization, Jason's research uncovers evidence that investors were indeed concerned about the effects of independence on their investment. In fact, investor concerns manifested in higher interest rates, fewer colonial debt bond issues, and lower subscription rates relative to earlier periods. His archival research further uncovers factors that explain why colonial debt bond prices fail to reflect investor sentiment. Chief among these was the British government's intervention in the market. Its strategic purchase and holding of colonial debt bonds ensured price stability despite investor concerns.
In his recent visit to Stanford University, former NATO Secretary General Anders Fogh Rasmussen painted a bleak picture of global politics. The hope of the Arab Spring has been replaced by new authoritarian regimes, civil war, and ISIS. Russia is becoming more internally authoritarian and externally aggressive. According to one measure, global levels of freedom have been in decline for the past nine consecutive years. "It looks", he said, "as if a Pandora's box of religious, ethnic, and political strife has been opened, and many nations have plunged into chaos and extremism." According to Rasmussen, successfully navigating these global challenges requires a concerted effort among liberal democratic states, spearheaded by American leadership. In order to create a strong global community of liberal democracies, he advocated strengthening the Transatlantic alliance. In addition to the existing military alliance forged through NATO, he proposed the creation of a Transatlantic Free Trade Area (TAFTA) and a Transatlantic peoples program, which would foster educational, scientific, and cultural exchanges among the partner states. More than 150 people attended the talk, which was held on September 25. To watch Rasmussen's talk in full, please visit our 