A VISUAL ANALYSIS OF THE COMMUNICATION PERSUASIVE FUNCTION IN THE COVERAGE OF THE RUSSIAN FEDERATION VICTORY DAY PARADE

Abstract

This article is an attempt to present the visual persuasive mechanisms observed in official communications of the Russian Federation on the example of materials published on the website of the President of Russia (Russian: Президент России) concerning the events related to the Victory Day celebrations. After Vladimir Putin came to power - since the military parade in 2005, i.e. on the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II in Europe - it became the most important national holiday and a high-profile social event in Russia. The material analyzed in this paper illustrates the events that took place in Red Square in 2022, being even more interesting - as the paper’s authors intended- when realizing the historical and geopolitical context in which they were set. The starting point of the conducted visuality analyses was the tradition of Soviet avant-garde art of the first decades of the twentieth century, understood after Wassily Kandinsky as the relationship in which the point and the line remain in relation to the plane (Kandinsky 1986). It has been shown that in the visual messages presented, a conscious and planned management of the observer’s perceptual processes is carried out using these tools (point, line and division of planes). The dynamics of points and lines distribution on the plane, the perspective used, the way the narrative is built, geometrization and symmetry - in our understanding - in terms of visual propaganda mechanisms of strength, power and unity of the Russian Federation.

Keywords

• visual communication
• visual military propaganda
• constructivism
• perceptual processes