Discussion

The 1993 constitutional crisis is a topic that the Kremlin has never been willing to discuss, given its traumatic and divisive nature. Contrary to the silence of the official discourse, a myriad of other critical voices has established a strong presence in Russian cultural environment over three decades. Even Kremlin-aligned mass media dwell on the ‘Black October’, often proposing narratives that do not seem to be beneficial to the political elite. This contribution, however, argues that the story proposed, despite memorialising the crisis in extremely negative terms, contributes to anti-Western and anti-liberal discourses, which have significantly come to the fore in the 2010s. The focus on documentaries as a form of soft-news media and the analysis of their narratives allows to highlight the importance multi-directionality and narratological structure have in making mediatised memory a tool of politicisation.