Paper long abstract:

Russian cultural industries have been dominant across media landscapes in majority of post-Soviet Central Asia countries as Russia remains the main economic and cultural power in the region. Tajikistan, as Central Asian's poorest nation with a strong economic dependency on Russia, has found it especially hard to adapt to a disproportionately powerful one-way media flow. "Orel i Reshka" ("Heads and Tails") has been one of the most popular TV travel shows among Russian-speaking audiences across the region. Originally produced in Ukraine, the show is broadcasted through the private Russian TV channel "Piatnitsa" ("Friday") and involves collaboration with Russian media producers, celebrities, bloggers and models, which makes it a hybrid product of Russian-Ukrainian media industry. "Orel i Reshka" has made two episodes centered in Dushanbe, Tajikistan, attracting a lot of attention and critique from the local audiences and authorities. The first episode of the show in 2014 was met with strong criticism from the local publics for creating an image of Tajiks being backward and uncivilized. During the show's second visit in 2018, Tajikistan Tourism Ministry collaborated with the show's team and played an active role in shaping the show's agenda by providing recommendations of touristic sights and activities for filming as well as financial support.

By conducting a critical discourse analysis of both episodes and audiences' responses on social media, this paper suggests that while Tajik audiences recognize the problematic nature of representation, they also internalize long standing orientalist stereotypes while seeking an "objective" representation from the show's creators and from the Russian-speaking audiences across the post-Soviet space, and especially in Russia. Audiences, along with local authorities, also recognize the show's significance in construction and promotion of a "modern and civilized" positive image of the country locally and abroad. In Tajikistan, such shows become important in negotiating modernity, national and cultural identity. Analysis builds on Said's critique of orientalism (Said, 1978) and critical scholars' work on post-Soviet Central Asia (Abashin, 2007, Tlostanova, 2015) and argues that "Orel i Reshka" is appropriating Eurocentric narrative and orientalist discourse to construct Central Asians as the exotic "other" in contrast to the white Russian-speaking audiences in Russia and Ukraine. Paper further emphasizes the significance of analysis of power dynamics in post-Soviet media system as phenomenon of "otherness" is rooted in the historic imperial and Soviet context of Russian dominance over the predominantly Muslim Central Asia, which further reflects the contemporary world system.