Albert Razin’s protest self-immolation in Russophone media coverage
Keywords:activism, epistemic injustice, Indigenous peoples, power of knowledge, ethnicity, languages.
On 10 September 2019, Albert Razin, an Udmurt humanities scholar and activist, set himself on fire in protest against the Russification of educational policies. Russian federal media and experts framed his act in highly peculiar ways. First, Razin’s actions were extensively medicalized, with fabricated claims about his age, private life, and alleged physical and mental health conditions. Second, public commentators invoked the so-called custom of tipshar, a purported tradition of ritual suicide, to explain his actions. According to this narrative, drawn from the colonial discourse, ethnically non-Russian peoples of the Volga-Ural region are said to be predisposed to suicide as a means of inducing guilt in their adversaries. This article seeks to unpack the colonial undertones inherent in the ritual suicide narrative, which, rooted in imperial ethnography, is utilized by both pro-Kremlin and ostensibly independent Russophone media to deny the significance of Razin’s act of resistance. Through discourse analysis, this paper reveals the mechanisms of epistemic violence exercised over colonized Others. Specifically, it examines how the media’s portrayal reduced Razin’s political agency to a “traditional ritual” of a Neopagan, thereby undermining his act of resistance. By applying the concept of epistemic injustice, the study exposes the persistent colonial tropes employed by various public actors when discussing Indigenous peoples – tropes that ultimately prevent them from speaking for themselves.
Maria Vjatšina(b. 1990), MA, Udmurt studies scholar, maria.vyatchina@gmail.com
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