Online Talks on Eurasian Media – the collaborative initiative between TaRC and the Russian Media Lab (University of Helsinki) – continues on Tuesday 9 December with the last presentation of 2025!
This time, we will hear from Margarita Zavadskaya, who presents her study Different Worlds? Media Consumption of Russians inside and outside the Country. The talk examines the patterns of media consumption and levels of trust in media among two groups of people: 1) Russian residents and 2) Russians who have left the country after February 2022.
Drawing on public opinion polls conducted inside Russia, the first part analyzes dominant media diets, trust in state and non-state media, and perceptions of credibility under conditions of censorship and repression.
The second part focuses on wartime migrants, using original survey data and semi-structured interviews to explore changes in media use, information-seeking strategies, and trust after emigration. By comparing these two information environments, the paper asks whether Russians inside and outside the country inhabit increasingly divergent media worlds, and how mobility, access, and political context shape media trust.
The findings contribute to broader debates on media trust, authoritarian information control, and the transnational dynamics of public opinion in times of war.
Speaker bio:
Margarita Zavadskaya holds a PhD in Social and Political Sciences from the European University Institute (Fiesole, Italy, 2017).
She has worked at the Electoral Integrity Project (Universities of Harvard and Sydney, 2015), the European University at St. Petersburg (2016–2022), and the Aleksanteri Institute at the University of Helsinki (2018–2022) as a researcher and lecturer. From 2019 to 2022, Zavadskaya served as PI for the research project ‘Electoral Malpractice, Cybersecurity and its Political Consequences in Russian and Beyond (ElMaRB)’.
Zavadskaya has published broadly on the role of elections in authoritarian states, mass protests and public opinion in journals such as Democratization, East European Politics, Post-Soviet Affairs, Russian Politics, Europe-Asia Studies and many others.
She is the editor of the book Politics of the Pandemic: Blame Game and Governance in Russian and Central-Eastern Europe (forthcoming) and co-editor of Electoral Integrity and Political Regimes: Actors, Strategies and Consequences (Routledge, 2018).
Currently, Zavadskaya focuses on the political impact of Russian emigration in receiving countries, including EU member states, under the auspices of the OutRush research project.
Event info:
This Online Talk will be held on Zoom on Tuesday 9 December 2025, 12.00–13.30 Finnish time (GMT+2). Discussion will be moderated by Dr Olga Dovbysh (University of Helsinki).
Participation in the event requires registration. Please registrate via this link before Monday 8 December 2025, 23.45 Finnish time.