Conclusion

In the mid-August 2014, as my manuscript was nearing completion, I came across a remarkable interview on an independent St. Petersburg- based news resource. What made the piece noteworthy was first of all the personality: Alexander Nevzorov burst into the media scene in the late 1980s with his blockbuster news show 600 seconds, which was strongly oppositional to the Soviet and, later, Russian authorities. During the 1990s, Nevzorov was a soldier of the empire: he fought against the government during the Moscow riots in 1993 and on the pro-Russian side in nearly all armed conflicts in the post-Soviet space. In parallel, he produced strongly propagandistic documentaries, full of pro-Soviet nostalgia and demonising the anti-imperial forces, from Chechen separatists to pro-Western liberals. He was elected to the Duma in 2000 and re-elected for three more consecutive terms, but kept a much lower profile throughout the 2000s, having immersed himself in horse breeding. During the presidential campaign of 2012, Nevzorov became one of Vladimir Putin’s authorised representatives and currently keeps this status, despite being an outspoken opponent of the annexation of Crimea and the intervention in Eastern Ukraine. He claims he has cleaned himself of the ‘imperial addiction.’: he supports the Ukrainian government in its military offensive against the separatists, while most of his friends fight on the other side, and a few of them have been killed. Paradoxically, he says he still supports Putin.