How can we observe (un)certainty not only in institutions and policy, but in everyday cultural practices? This paper offers a case-based comparison of reading as a vernacular technique for managing uncertainty under constraint. Rather than tracing a full trajectory, I place two cases side by side to develop an initial hypothesis about continuities and transformations in “reading between the lines” across late Soviet and post-2022 Russian-language contexts. I examine how literary engagement can produce micro-conditions of certainty—shared meaning, moral orientation, and communicability—when direct speech is risky or feels futile, and how these practices change when they move from private ego-documents to platformed publics. Case 1 draws on a small cluster of reader diaries and recollections about reading and book circulation, complemented by book summaries/notes produced under constrained conditions, including in detention (used in anonymised form). I focus on moments where summarising and re-narrating stabilise experience and encode evaluative judgments through indirect, literature-mediated language. Case 2 analyses extended post-2022 “reading episodes” from an anonymous forum and a Facebook reading community with a concentration on pseudo-historical popular fiction. Here, interpretation unfolds in fragile environments shaped by visibility, moderation, screenshotability, and blurred public/private boundaries; uncertainty becomes explicit in meta-comments about caution, trust, and credibility. Across both cases, I trace a recurring repertoire of indirectness (double-coded evaluation, quotation-as-shield, irony/overidentification) and show how the digital case adds platform-conditioned practices—warnings about screenshots, norm-setting on what counts as “too direct,” and collective gatekeeping. Drawing on these cases, I propose that hiddenness does not disappear online but changes form: in platformed publics it becomes a practical repertoire of indirect speech and is collectively managed through shared codes, norms, and platform-specific tactics.

This paper explores the deliberate production of uncertainty as a central instrument of Russian strategic narrative power in contemporary information warfare. Departing from traditional models of propaganda based on persuasion or ideological alignment, the paper argues that Russian state-sponsored communication increasingly prioritizes ambiguity, contradiction, and narrative excess as strategic objectives in their own right. In this framework, uncertainty is not an accidental outcome of information conflict, but a calculated political resource designed to destabilize meaning, weaken interpretive authority, and exhaust audiences cognitively. Building on strategic narrative theory and critical discourse analysis, the paper conceptualizes uncertainty as both a discursive practice and a structural condition actively generated through communication. Russian information strategies frequently rely on the simultaneous circulation of incompatible explanations, shifting frames, and overlapping justificatory logics. Rather than resolving contradictions, these narratives accumulate and coexist, producing an epistemic environment in which truth claims become provisional, contested, and ultimately interchangeable. The resulting cognitive overload diminishes the capacity of audiences to evaluate information critically and undermines trust in institutions traditionally associated with epistemic authority, such as independent media, expert communities, and international organizations. The empirical section focuses on selected narrative patterns surrounding Russia’s war against Ukraine, with particular attention to the oscillation between legalistic, historical, moral, and civilizational frames. These shifts are analyzed not as signs of inconsistency or communicative failure, but as deliberate techniques aimed at maintaining informational dominance by keeping multiple interpretive possibilities permanently in play. By saturating the discursive space with uncertainty, Russian strategic communication reduces the effectiveness of fact-checking, weakens counter-narratives, and complicates normative responses at both domestic and international levels. The paper further argues that uncertainty functions as a form of power projection in the informational domain, shaping not only perceptions of specific events but also broader expectations about the nature of political reality itself. In this sense, uncertainty becomes a governance mechanism that regulates how meaning is produced, contested, and ultimately suspended. By reframing uncertainty as an active and intentional mode of political action, the paper contributes to current debates on information warfare, epistemic security, and the role of narrative in international politics. It also aligns with the broader thematic focus on Un-Certainties by demonstrating how uncertainty can be strategically manufactured, sustained, and instrumentalized as a tool of contemporary state power.

Russian underground theater has witnessed the rise of television as a medium of power from the 1960s until today. In my talk, I will explore in three steps how dramas and plays, by critically engaging with television, develop new forms and poetics that reveal a peculiar vortex structure emerging from a deconstruction of socialist realism and growing into the institution of television and the political system of Putin’s Russia. Firstly, Soviet utopia as articulated in socialist realism is deconstructed by television. Dramas like Aleksandr Vampilov’s “Cemetery of Elephants” (Kladbishche slonov, 1965) or Vladimir Sorokin’s “Happy New Year” (S novym godom, 1987) show with their poetics how TV splits the ideological fiction into a metaphysical emptied real and a regressing consciousness; the “positive hero” is dissolved; language is driven by performative speech acts and affects; the ideological close spaced is transformed into centrifugal and centripetal movements; the socialist “eternal future” is replaced by a strive towards presence and a return to an initial past. Secondly, television as an institution changes between 1999 and 2003. The genre of reality television arises and TV companies as “NTV”, “TNT” or “Video International” are linked to the new Putin administration. Concurrently, theater movements such as “Novaya drama” and “Teatr.doc” emerge. Documentary plays like Rodion Beletsky’s “Free Television” (Svobodnoe televidenie (STV), 1999) and the “The Big Feast” (Bolshaya zhrachka, 2002) by Alekandr Vartanov and Ruslan Malikov examine TV-shows like Mikhail Lesin’s “I am my own director” (Sam sebe rezhisser, 1992-2019, Russia-1) or Valery Komissarov’s “Windows” (Okna, 2002-2005, TNT) and reveal their coercive social and economic mechanisms central to “Putin’s people” (Belton 2020). The third step concerns the political that is transformed by television as a “technology of the soul” (Schmid 2015). While Varvara Faer’s “BerlusPutin” (2013) diagnoses a schizophrenia of the political body, Vladimir Sorokin’s “The White Square” (Bely kvadrat, 2018) shows a return of the “Leviathan” (Hobbes 1651) in the form of a “blood-sucking loose”. At the same time, theater becomes an object of political repressions when directors like Kirill Serbrennikov or Evgenia Berkovich are imprisoned. I will relate the increasing vortex of television to postmodern theories such as Hans-Thies Lehmann “Postdramtic Theater” (1999) or Erika Fischer-Lichte’s “The Transformative Power of Performance” (2004). Furthermore, I will discuss the poetics of television with regard to Jurij Murašov’s (2023) model of telecratic power that interlinks singularization, the embodiment of language, a return of the religious, neoliberal consumerism, and the personalization of political power. In doing so, I argue that in “the age of anxiety and of electric media” (McLuhan 1964) theater enables to observe and to describe a new totalitarianism that shapes our time.

In Central and Eastern Europe, political conflict increasingly unfolds within the affective and symbolic registers of popular culture, where aesthetic form and networked media environments shape how polarizing antagonisms are sensed, intensified, and publicly negotiated. Over the past decade, political music videos in CEE have functioned as barometers of regional culture wars, registering shifts in populism, gendered conflicts, moral anxiety, and normalized hate speech. This paper argues that, rather than articulating stable ideological positions, these videos operate as sociocultural events in which political tensions and uncertainties are actively reconfigured through affective arrangements linking audiovisual form, mediated visibility, and public controversy. Conceptually, the analysis builds on the framework of culture wars as public struggles over values, identities, and moral order (Barša et al. 2021), situating these dynamics within recent debates on post-socialist illiberalism and its cultural formations (Imre 2020; Kalmar 2022; Mark et al. 2019). Drawing on the concept of the “affective arrangement” (Slaby 2019), the paper foregrounds rhythm, atmosphere, gesture, and audiovisual dissonance as operations through which antagonism becomes socially felt and politically consequential. Attention to circulation and platform afterlives, especially on YouTube, with view counts frequently in the hundreds of thousands or millions, allows CEE music videos to be approached not as mere “media texts” but as culturally salient events whose political significance unfolds through interaction, amplification, and backlash across digital publics. Focusing on Polish and Czech cases across indie pop, rap, and funk, the paper identifies two barometric moments articulated through political music videos by artists such as PSH, Maria Peszek, Quebonafide, and Monkey Business. In the wake of the 2015–2016 so-called “European migration crisis,” Czech and Polish productions mobilize blunt gestures of refusal, sexuality, and historical analogy to confront populist fearmongering, homophobia, and morally sanctioned hate speech. Around 2020, as culture wars became routinized within digital media environments, the register of conflict shifts toward irony, ambivalence, and grotesque exaggeration: protest imagery, transnational references to racial violence, pandemic isolation, and post-socialist afterlives of political violence are folded into affective configurations that redirect political meaning through rhythm and spectacle. Taken together, these controversial works reveal a key paradox of contemporary networked audiovisual culture: while political music videos challenge hegemonic narratives and moral orders, their very modes of dissent are simultaneously shaped and constrained by the algorithmic logics and commercial imperatives that both enable and delimit their circulation, producing a persistent tension between creative resistance and platform acquiescence.