The Image of Russia and Russians in the Krakow Press in 1918. A Cultural Perspective: Encoding – Decoding and Re-coding

The years of dependence fixed a specific picture of Russia and the Russians. This was conditioned by enmity against the invaders on the one hand and – by the need of auto-creation and painting a positive picture by the very czarist Russia, on the other hand. Newspapers, as opinion-forming tools, became a stage for the struggle between such a creation of the image of the world in which Russia had a positive and prevalent role, and such forming the image in which freedom and patriotism were of fundamental significance.

The year 1918 brought significant changes due to the fact that the qualities of the eastern neighbor were being transformed. The resurgent Poland created its identity upon the basis of the endogenous components which were known in advance, such as: independence, honor and freedom and struggle for it; and also by referring to the exogenous ones. The new Russia was one of them.

A cultural perspective has been adopted in this paper. The applied methodology would help to reveal the mechanisms typical for a culture at the moment of sudden changes: to unveil the hidden codes, to confront their contents with the declared ones (official) and re-coding. The latter one is necessary to enable the culture to absorb or reject cultural influence from the neighbor who has changed some of its cultural patterns. 

The years of dependence fixed a specific picture of Russia and the Russians. This was conditioned by enmity against the invaders on the one hand and – by the need of auto-creation and painting a positive picture by the very czarist Russia, on the other hand. Newspapers, as opinion-forming tools, became a stage for the struggle between such a creation of the image of the world in which Russia had a positive and prevalent role, and such forming the image in which freedom and patriotism were of fundamental significance.

The year 1918 brought significant changes due to the fact that the qualities of the eastern neighbor were being transformed. The resurgent Poland created its identity upon the basis of the endogenous components which were known in advance, such as: independence, honor and freedom and struggle for it; and also by referring to the exogenous ones. The new Russia was one of them.

A cultural perspective has been adopted in this paper. The applied methodology would help to reveal the mechanisms typical for a culture at the moment of sudden changes: to unveil the hidden codes, to confront their contents with the declared ones (official) and re-coding. The latter one is necessary to enable the culture to absorb or reject cultural influence from the neighbor who has changed some of its cultural patterns.