The focus of Emil Edenborg's valuable and carefully organized study is how the Russian government's “projects of belonging” are operationalized by regulating what may be made visible in the public sphere. Edenborg understands that Russia's media environment is multifarious and has both “a streamlined and compliant public sphere” (3) dominated by “state-aligned” media, as well “alternative media,” such as online TV, news websites, and blogs, “discursively cut off” (3) from the privileged state-aligned realm, but allowing a safety-valve in a segmented, complex society (198). He asks how we can “understand the role of visibility in the production and contestation of belonging to a political community” (4). Arguing that rather than expecting public visibility of protest as ineluctably leading to political challenge, we should consider “visibility as an object of continuous regulation and contestation” (7), and examine the management of frames and narratives, the boundary-work that creates “Russian media as a space of appearance” (48).

Edenborg discusses the terms of this analysis lucidly and in ambitious amplitude in two theoretical chapters following the introduction. Chapter 1 traces theories of the politics of belonging through constructivist, feminist, and post-colonial models of the nation. Following Judith Butler, Jacques Rancière, Roger Silverstone, and Sarah Ahmed, Edenborg constructs a rich theoretical basis for analyzing Russian contests over what may be seen. Chapter 2 deepens the theoretical analysis of Russian media as “spaces of appearance” (citing Silverstone) with a review of the history of Russian media, its distinctiveness from Soviet media, and its “nihilist approach to truth” (57). The Kremlin has adapted nimbly to a digital information universe, learning how to contain, amplify, and contest visibility of narratives (58–65).

Edenborg examines three case studies: the 2013 “homosexual propaganda” debate (Chapter 3); the 2014 Sochi Olympics (Chapter 4); and the Ukraine war in 2014–15 (Chapter 5). The first two cases study large samples of content from state-aligned mainstream media and demonstrate their success in “containing” or “amplifying” specific narratives. The “homosexual propaganda” debate, Edenborg shows, effectively mobilized emotions about demographic renewal, about pedophilia as a “sticky association” (84, citing Ahmed) with homosexuality, and about Russia's “civilizational” vocation to uphold “traditions” and reject western yardsticks. A minority allied to a “global elite” purportedly threatened the “vulnerable majority” (86–87). The state's narratives left few “tensions” for the opposition to exploit (95–98), with the homophobic murder of Vladislav Tornovoi in Volgograd in May 2013 as one spectacular moment when the “vulnerable majority” narrative nearly collapsed. Nevertheless, the state's “dominant arrangement of visibility” managed to enfold contradictions and contain and marginalize opposition (99).

The Sochi “media spectacle” furnishes a case of “efforts to amplify visibility” while suppressing counter narratives (106). Sochi presented Russia as triumphantly returning to the world stage after years of weakness, telling a story of national harmony, a rising economy, and biopolitical resurgence. The Olympic “sport is non-political” myth served to drown out contending perspectives about Russian treatment of minorities in the South (Circassian claims as victims of Imperial Russian “genocide” [128–29]); and about LGBT protests, which were efficiently ridiculed or discounted as western impositions (134). The mainstream media apparently simply did not report on jihadist terror threats to the Olympics. Critics of Sochi were “ignored or distorted” in state media, and their views dissipated “in the cacophony of voices” in alternative outlets (139).

Chapter 5 on the Ukraine war uses Russian alternative media sources to ask how the state's “project of belonging” may be resisted. Focusing first on satirical memes that attack the notion of Ukraine as enemy, these mock state-aligned media's gendered signals about subordinated, feminized Ukraine between “masculine Russia” and a degenerate Europe; often, the person of Putin himself embodies sexualized jokes about penetration in the Donbas (158–61). The chapter turns to a second case, that of alternative media's successful breaking of the story of “secret funerals” of Russian soldiers whose deaths were clumsily denied to evade admissions that the country was active in the Ukraine war. Conventional gender helped to topple state-led media narratives, as mothers and wives of these soldiers called for recognition and support (171–82). Photographs of the “secret” graves, speedily circulated online, were supposedly instrumental in breaking state denial too.

This book offers an interesting account of why and how the Kremlin tolerates disparate voices and alternative media, while retaining the commanding heights of media capacity. It shows how a populist-authoritarian regime exploits contradictory and illogical media narratives to frame particular emotional responses. It suggests how and why opponents of the Kremlin struggle to achieve effective traction in the public sphere. More work needs to be done on the mechanisms behind these effects, but as a study of media content and its control over visibility, this is a compelling investigation.