Registration REQUIRED by 4pm on April 2, 2025 in order to attend this event.
Please join the Harriman Institute for a Russian History Workshop with Michael Gorham.
Few political actors in Putin’s Russia illustrate the impact that digitally mediated communication has had on political rhetoric as dramatically as Evgeny Prigozhin. From his early days as “Putin’s chef” and head of the Internet Research Agency (aka “Russian troll factory”) to his ultimate failed rebellion against Russia’s top military leaders, Prigozhin was a key player in the production of online mediated political discourse in the interest of the state, at least as he perceived it. Serving as the epilogue to my forthcoming monograph (“Networking Putinism: The Rhetoric of Power in the Digital Age” [Cornell U.P. 2026]), “Wartime Runet” begins with more general reflections of the impact of Putin’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine on Russian internet policy, then examines more closely the role that Prigozhin’s communicative style and the social networking platform Telegram played in his meteoric rise to global notoriety and equally spectacular collapse.
Michael Gorham is Professor of Russian Studies at the University of Florida and the recent Archie K. Davis Fellow at the National Humanities Center. He received his PhD in Slavic Studies from Stanford University and served for 12 years as Associate Editor of the The Russian Review. Gorham is the author of multiple award-winning books and edited volumes on language and politics, including “After Newspeak” and “Speaking in Soviet Tongues,” and is currently completing a book on the impact of the internet and social media on Russian political communication, called “Networking Putinism: The Rhetoric of Power in the Digital Age.”
Interested participants should contact Taylor Zajicek (tcz2107@columbia.edu) in advance of the session for a copy of the paper.
