Four Russias in Communication: Fragmentation of the Russian Public Sphere in the 2010s

Today, Russia is a fundamentally fragmented society (Auzan 2011, Zubarevich 2011), with post-industrial, industrial, rural and migrant/Caucasian communities showing divergent patterns of consumption and involvement into public deliberation, including patterns of media use and formation of closed-up communicative milieus in online/hybrid media (Chadwick 2013). The ‘third’ and ‘fourth’ Russias are seriously underrepresented in the media system; recently, a major cleavage between the public spheres of the ‘first’ and ‘second’ Russia has openly shown up. Our research upon media use patterns of participants of ‘For fair elections’ protest rallies of 2011-2012 (Bodrunova&Litvinenko 2013) shows that there’s a link between communication and media use patterns in post-industrial urban ‘public counter-sphere’ (formed of intelligentsia, ‘creative class’, studentship, and ‘white collars’) and their perceived political freedom and online political behavior. The research is expanded by contrasting perceived political behavior in social networks Facebook and Vkontakte, as Russia is ‘world’s top1 networking community’ (Comscore 2012).