Protest in Putin's Russia E-Book

Mischa Gabowitsch

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 771

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

The Russian protests, sparked by the 2011 Duma election, have been widely portrayed as a colourful but inconsequential middle-class rebellion, confined to Moscow and organized by an unpopular opposition. In this sweeping new account of the protests, Mischa Gabowitsch challenges these journalistic clichés, showing that they stem from wishful thinking and media bias rather than from accurate empirical analysis. Drawing on a rich body of material, he analyses the biggest wave of demonstrations since the end of the Soviet Union, situating them in the context of protest and social movements across Russia as a whole. He also explores the legacy of the protests in the new era after Ukraine�s much larger Maidan protests, the crises in Crimea and the Donbass, and Putin�s ultra-conservative turn.

As the first full-length study of the Russian protests, this book will be of great value to students and scholars of Russia and to anyone interested in contemporary social movements and political protest.

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Dedication

Title Page

Copyright

Acknowledgements

Note on the English edition

1 Introduction: March of Millions

A microcosm of Russian protest

Opening the black box of protest

The sociology of regimes of engagement

A middle-class movement?

Nasreddin’s Fallacy and other biases

The PEPS (Protest Events, Photos and Slogans) database and other sources

Chronology and terminology

Structure of the book

Notes

2 Putin’s Regimes

What is a regime?

Addressing Putin

Political communication in the age of the power vertical

Consolidation and national unity

Stiob

, cynicism and neo-liberal regimes of the self

Emotional regimes

Notes

3 Insurgent Observers

Voting day shock

Election monitoring as a social movement

Election law and electoral fraud

The local roots of election monitoring

Citizen Observer

Whence the wrath?

Notes

4 Scenes and Solidarities: Opposition and Grassroots Protesters Before 2011–13

Opposition and grassroots protest: Aleksey Navalny and beyond

Parties in a managed democracy

Extra-parliamentary coalitions and the new political protest scene

Oppositional milieus

Grassroots protest and local self-organization

Grassroots protest: against monetization

Grassroots protest: new local movements

From Vladivostok to Kaliningrad

Spaces and places of protest

Notes

5 Crossed Purposes: Opposition and Grassroots Protesters in the 2011–13 Protest Wave

Opposition parties

The extra-parliamentary opposition

Representation

Organization

The Coordinating Council of the Opposition

Hybrid grammars of engagement

Notes

6 Pussy Riot and Beyond: Art, Religion and Gender Regimes in Russian Protest

Punk Prayer

Pussy Riot – Protest, opposition and counterculture

Music, art and politics

The transformation of the Russian Orthodox Church

Religious protest

Feminism and homophobia

Notes

7 Cognitive Spaces of Protest

Cognitive spaces

Counting protesters

Protesters and explorers

Geographies and choreographies of protest

Notes

8 The Transnational Dimension

Agency

A new Russian diaspora?

Transnational anti-corruption campaigning: the Magnitsky Affair

Developments since 2013

Notes

9 Conclusion: Protest in Putin’s Third Term

Protest since 2011: state and opposition

Grassroots protest and political activism

Protest in Russia and beyond

Notes

Bibliography

Index

End User License Agreement

Guide

Cover

Table of Contents

Begin Reading

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To Jacob, and to the memory of Jim Clark (1931–2013)

Protest in Putin’s Russia

Mischa Gabowitsch

Translated from the German and Russian, and revised and updated, by the author

polity

First published in German as Putin kaputt!? Russlands neue Protestkultur,© Suhrkamp Verlag, 2013This English edition © Polity Press, 2017

Polity Press65 Bridge StreetCambridge CB2 1UR, UK

Polity Press350 Main StreetMalden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-9629-4

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Names: Gabowitsch, Mischa, 1977- author.Title: Protest in Putin’s Russia / Mischa Gabowitsch.Other titles: Putin kaputt!?. EnglishDescription: Cambridge, UK ; Malden, MA : Polity Press, [2016] | “First published in language as Putin kaputt!?, (c) Suhrkamp Verlag, 2013.” | Includes bibliographical references and index.Identifiers: LCCN 2016020510| ISBN 9780745696256 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780745696263 (pbk. : alk. paper)Subjects: LCSH: Protest movements--Russia (Federation)--History--21st century. | Russia (Federation)--Politics and government--1991-Classification: LCC HN530.2.Z9 S62413 2016 | DDC 303.48/40947--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016020510

The publisher has used its best endeavours to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.

Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com

Acknowledgements

The German version of this book owes its existence to Katharina Raabe, the editors’ editor if ever there was one. She persuaded both its author and its original publisher, Suhrkamp, of its usefulness, kept me on track through near-weekly meetings and untiringly dispensed reassurance, advice and real-time copy-editing. At Polity Press, I thank John Thompson, Clare Ansell, Elliott Karstadt and especially George Owers for their unflinching patience with the slow pace of the translation and revisions, which contrasted unfavourably with the impressive speed with which they organized the production process. Ian Tuttle was the ideal copy-editor – eagle-eyed yet laid-back. My great regret is that Jim Clark did not live to read the English manuscript. Jim was an exceptionally sunny and unpresumptuous man who was always willing to place his expertise and experience from an outstanding fifty-year career as an editor of social science books at the service of budding authors. He died days before I completed the German text.

Nor would I have been able to produce either version of this book without the unqualified support of my colleagues at the Einstein Forum, unmatched by anything I have previously experienced at workplaces in six countries. Working with Dominic Bonfiglio, Matthias Kroß, Susan Neiman, Martin Schaad, Andreas Schulz, Goor Zankl and Rüdiger Zill is a constant source of intellectual pleasure rivalled only by the efficiency of Antonia Angold, Gabriele Karl and Liane Marz. Special thanks are due to Susan Neiman, whose long-standing encouragement and backing has been crucial to all my intellectual endeavours for a decade, and to Goor Zankl, who put in countless hours to help with PEPS.

The German edition owed a great deal to the Hamburg Institute for Social Research and the Berlin Colloquia on Contemporary History, and in particular Bettina Greiner, Bernd Greiner and Martin Bauer, who let me try out some of my ideas in various settings. Similarly, this revised edition benefitted in numerous ways from the support of the Research Centre for East European Studies at Bremen University and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, which covered the costs of several workshops and meetings with Russian colleagues. I also wish to thank colleagues at universities and other institutions in Basel, Berlin, Bremen, Bucharest, Frankfurt (Oder), Hamburg, Lyon, Minden, Moscow, Paris, Potsdam, Saint Petersburg, Tübingen, Vienna and Zurich for letting me present some of my ideas at seminars, conferences or in public lectures as I was preparing the English manuscript. Special thanks are due to participants in panels and workshops on the qualitative and quantitative analysis of slogans and protest events that I organized in Berlin (2012), Boston (2013) and Moscow (2014), the latter with invaluable help from Yulia Skokova, who also commented on portions of the manuscript, as did Laurent Thévenot, whose intellectual support has been one of the great blessings of my life as a sociologist. I am also deeply grateful to three anonymous reviewers, who read the whole manuscript, for their nuanced comments and helpful criticism.

For comments and advice on various points, in person or in writing, I thank Alexandra Arkhipova, Joseph Boyle, Olga Bronnikova, Karine Clément, Donatella della Porta, Jan Matti Dollbaum, Yekaterina Khodzhayeva, Ivan Klimov, Alexey Kozlov, Björn Kunter, Alexey Levinson, Andrey Makarychev, Nikolay Mitrokhin, Zara Murtazaliyeva, Olga Nikolaeva, Asmik Novikova and Irina Soboleva. Helena Flam and Jan Plamper provided valuable suggestions on uses of the history and sociology of emotions. Ansgar Gilster and Jan Philipp Fiedler created the map of Moscow used in this book. Olga Rosenblum provided a constant stream of new material on protest events in Moscow in particular, and conducted additional interviews based on my guide. Olga Sveshnikova, at Bremen University, has been my most important collaborator in building and maintaining PEPS, and a team of assistants, above all Manarsha Isayeva, made vital contributions to data collection. Felix Hermann helped transfer the database to an online format.

An invitation by the Centre for Cultural History at South Ural State University enabled me to carry out fieldwork in Chelyabinsk. For helpful information on politics and protest in the Chelyabinsk region, I thank Anton Artemov, Rozaliya Cherepanova, Kirill Gontsov, Daniil Maltsev, Igor Sibiryakov, Natalya Zaretskaya and Konstantin Zharinov.

Engaging in the study of protest in Russia provided welcome opportunities to continue years of stimulating conversations with Alexander Bikbov. Alexander and several other members of the Independent Initiative for the Study of Protest generously exchanged interviews and observations with me. So did members of the Collective for the Study of Politicization and the Laboratory for Public Sociology (Ksenia Ermoshina, Anna Kadnikova, Maxim Kulayev, Artemy Magun, Ilya Matveev, Andrei Nevskii, Olga Nikolaeva, Natalia Savelieva, Natalia Sherstneva, Inna Silova, Maria Turovets, Dilyara Valeyeva, Svetlana Yerpyleva, Anna Zhelnina, Oleg Zhuravlev) and several members of the Folklore of the Snow Revolution research group. Andrey Semenov as well as several other members of the Centre for Comparative History and Political Studies in Perm provided a constant stream of references and ideas, as did Olessia Lobanova, in Tyumen, the main contributor to protestrussia.net.Several members of the iDecembrists also provided help at crucial stages of my work.

I also wish to thank my colleagues from ten years as editor of NZ, Laboratorium and kultura, as well as their authors, whose work contributed in countless ways to my background knowledge about Russian society.

Last but not least, I owe a debt of gratitude to the many protest participants who agreed to be interviewed for this book, either in person or by various means of electronic communication, as well as the numerous assistants who helped transcribe the interviews.

My greatest debt, however, is to my family. Jacob’s enthusiasm, encouragement and patience have been far more important than he suspects. Nestor has provided comic relief at crucial moments, but remains blissfully unaware of this book’s subject matter even though he has regularly attended protest events since before his birth. Without Dascha’s angelic disposition, I would have been crushed by the pressures of the academic life; she makes me happier than words can express.

Note on the English edition

The first edition of this book was published in May 2013. Written in German at the request of my publisher, Suhrkamp, it was the first booklength study, in any language, of the 2011–13 wave of protests in Russia. It was also the first overview that discussed political, social and artistic protest under Putin under one heading, and the first scholarly book to analyse Pussy Riot.

Since then, numerous studies of various aspects of protest in Russia have appeared in a number of languages. Reflecting a variety of disciplinary approaches, some of them have made crucial contributions to understanding the subject. To do full justice to them would have required writing a new book. However, I have done my best to refer to them in this edition, just as I had previously drawn on many of the excellent case studies carried out by colleagues in Russia and abroad. The intense and unselfish collaboration between many scholars of protest in Russia has been one of the great pleasures in writing and revising this book. My website protestrussia. net offers additional resources relevant to the scholarly study of protest in Russia, and access to some of the data from PEPS, the database of Protest Events, Photos and Slogans that was a major source for this book.

Suhrkamp asked me to make the book accessible to a general audience. To do so without sacrificing rigour, I decided to start each chapter with a narrative profile of an actor involved in (or observing from afar) the ‘March of Millions’ in Moscow on 6 May 2012, in many ways the central event of the protest wave – a device I adapted from the book by Theda Skocpol and Vanessa Williamson on the US Tea Party (2012). I have decided to retain this structure in the English edition, if only because the self-perpetuating media narrative of the protest wave as merely a revolt of a Muscovite ‘creative’ or middle class has proven impervious to the results of empirical study. Perhaps a more individualized presentation might help counter this reductionist view. Generally, the book is written with both scholars of Russia and non-specialists in mind and provides historical, cultural and political context where necessary. Theoretical and methodological discussion is largely restricted to the first chapter.

This is a thoroughly revised and updated version of the original German book; all chapters have been partly or entirely rewritten or at least updated. Two chapters – on non-violence in Russian protest and on state repression against protesters and the security apparatus – had to be omitted for reasons of space even though they had been at the heart of my interest in the topic. As a result, the book now focuses almost entirely on the logic, meanings and internal tensions of protest itself, rather than the state’s response to it or interaction between protesters and the police. This is in no way to diminish the fundamental importance of state actors for the dynamics of protest in Russia, and I hope to publish my research on these topics in English in due course. However, from a top-down perspective at least, excellent English-language studies already exist of the security apparatus (Taylor 2011) and the role of political elites in structuring protest (Robertson 2011).

All Russian quotes were translated directly from the original sources.

The transliteration largely follows the BGN/PCGN standard. Outside of references to sources, spellings are sometimes simplified for readability (Navalny instead of Naval’nyy). I use people’s preferred Latin spellings of their names whenever I am aware of such preferences.

Central Moscow. Sites of the largest protest events in 2011–13

Map courtesy of Ansgar Gilster and Jan Philipp Fiedler

Chapter 1Introduction: March of Millions

On 7 May 2012, Vladimir Putin was to be inaugurated for a third term as president of the Russian Federation. He had been head of state between 2000 and 2008, then spent four years as prime minister while the presidency was in the hands of his friend and long-standing collaborator Dmitry Medvedev. The elections to which he owed his return had taken place in unfair conditions and were accompanied by large-scale fraud. Activists of the extra-parliamentary opposition announced a demonstration to challenge his legitimacy, to take place on 6 May. The city authorities approved Bolotnaya Square as the venue for the rally – the place where the first massive protest against electoral fraud in the recent parliamentary election had taken place on 10 December 2011. The sprawling, park-like square is located in central Moscow, in plain view of the towers and spires of the Kremlin, normally a short walk away across the Great Stone Bridge. Its name literally means Swamp Square. In order to drain the swamps that would form there every spring when the snow melted, Moscow’s governor-general Count Zakhary Chernyshev and his successor, Count Yakov Bryus (James Bruce), had a canal dug between 1783 and 1786. The Drainage or Water Bypass Canal created an elongated, boomerang-shaped island roughly parallel to the Moskva River’s bend; Bolotnaya Square is located on the western half of that island. To the left, as one gazes from the south across the Great Stone Bridge towards the Kremlin, the legendary, now closed Udarnik cinema comes into view. The cinema is part of a monumental constructivist edifice, the House on the Embankment, which served as a luxurious abode to Communist Party functionaries after its completion in 1931, although many of them fell victim to Stalin’s Great Terror just a few years after moving in.1

Its central yet isolated and readily surveyable location makes Bolotnaya Square easy to police. The city administration therefore frequently reroutes opposition, civil rights and other protests there, often from more symbolic spots along Tverskaya Street in central Moscow, which starts opposite Manege Square in front of the Kremlin, intersects Pushkin Square on the Boulevard Ring, and reaches the Garden Ring at Triumph Square.

Causing dissent and derision among the protesters, not to mention their critics, the formal organizers had titled the demonstration the ‘Million-StrongMarch’ or ‘March of Millions’, in reference to events in Cairo on 1 February 2011 (rather than Washington, DC, in 1995). It was the first time since mass protests against electoral fraud began in December that citizens from provincial Russia were actively encouraged to come to Moscow instead of organizing parallel events at home. Participants came to Moscow by train, coach or plane, shared rides or hitchhiked, some of them from distant parts of Russia, all the way to Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, 6,000 kilometres away.2Their primary means of communication was vkontakte or vk, a Facebook clone whose reach in the Russian-speaking world surpasses that of the original. Using vk, some participants organized cross-country motorcades to the capital. One such motorcade, titled ‘I want to see for myself what has become of the Motherland’, reportedly drew drivers from 55 cities, mostly supporters of the politician, esoteric folk healer and conspiracy theorist Svetlana Peunova.3

As early as April, an initiative had been set up in Samara on the Volga that collected donations online to enable volunteers from across Russia to travel to Astrakhan in the Volga Delta in support of mayoral candidate Oleg Shein, who had declared a hunger strike to protest against electoral fraud there. Shortly before the March of Millions the initiative was revived, this time in order to buy train tickets to Moscow for provincial dwellers.4Many residents offered free accommodation to outside protesters, who often used regional networks to establish first contact with Muscovites originally hailing from their own cities. Even at the march itself people from the same region would find each other through posters or chance conversation. During and after the march, one could occasionally see elderly ladies with signs offering accommodation to non-Muscovites. There were regular reports of protesters from provincial Russia being intimidated by state bodies or their employers, prevented from travelling – with or without explanation – before they even set out, or stopped or shadowed by the police along the way. Drug checks often served as pretexts. There were also reports of men between the ages of 18 and 27 being drafted into the army immediately upon their arrest.5

The largest Moscow protests between December and March had been officially registered by a group that included many journalists and writers, who had formed a non-partisan Voters’ League in January. The discussions of the committee that had organized the mass rally on 24 December 2011 had been broadcast live online, and their correspondence with the authorities was also published. This time, only activists of the extra-parliamentary opposition acted as formal organizers.6There was disagreement as to the purpose of the demonstration. An alliance titled ‘Campaign for Just Power’ had called for the occupation of Manege Square on the eve of the inauguration in order to prevent the ‘thief’ from even entering the Kremlin: real protest, the activists argued, should refuse to be squeezed into a policed reservation.7A number of prominent figures, including members of the legal opposition parties, had declared that they would stay away from the march. The previous mass demonstrations, they said, had failed to attain the desired results, and now it was important to focus on other forms of protest, on painstaking everyday efforts or on forthcoming elections.8The flamboyant writer and seasoned protester Eduard Limonov, leader of the unregistered Other Russia party, called the protest half-hearted and belated. Its bourgeois leaders, hewrote, had stolen and ‘flushed’ the revolution, giving the police enough time to seal off Manege Square and prevent a tent camp.9The Communist Party, nostalgic for the Soviet Union, and several smaller left-wing groups focused on events for 1 May (Labour Day) or 9 May (Victory Day). A group of croppy-haired ultranationalists staged their own protest on Theatre Square on 6 May; as they exited the metro station, the police were already expecting them with a prison van.10On Friday night, two days before the March of Millions, the All-Russian Popular Front had declared that it would celebrate its one-year anniversary on the same day on Poklonnaya Hill. This union of pro-Putin organizations, which largely existed on paper and had yet to hold its inaugural congress, had been founded the previous year as a potential replacement for the increasingly unpopular ruling United Russia party. It countered the protesters’ miting (meeting, or rally) with a tightly organized and policed Puting, which the news on state-controlled TV presented as the larger event and which included paid or coerced participants in addition to volunteers.11

Nevertheless, the March of Millions drew a great deal of attention. The formal organizers had applied to hold a 5,000 person rally for purely technical reasons: that is how much the square was supposed to hold according to the official density restrictions then in place. Inevitably, a number war broke out regarding the actual number of participants. The police spoke of 8,000; the BBC quoted 20,000 according to the organizers. The land surveyor Nikolai Pomeshchenko, who had come to specialize in calculating participant numbers at mass events over the course of the protest wave, counted approximately 60,000.12What makes a high estimate plausible is that regular protest participants, organizers and the police all expressed surprise at the high turnout.13After all, the date of the inauguration, as has been the tradition since Putin first acceded to the presidency in 2000, was two days before the Day of Victory in the Great Patriotic War of 1941–45, de facto Russia’s most important national holiday.14The period starting on 1 May is traditionally seen as a holiday week, allowing those who can afford it to relax at the Turkish Riviera or spend time at their dacha. Pointing to forthcoming rehearsals for the Victory Day parade, Moscow’s city government had approved the protest only two days before 6 May. This caused speculation that the march could be cancelled or moved – which, according to many protesters, was exactly why the decision had taken so long.

Most of the participants who had assembled outside Oktyabrskaya metro station since mid-morning were not affiliated with any of the political groups represented by the organizers. Using banners, flags, posters, buttons, balloons, leaflets and costumes, they identified as residents of specific cities, as environmentalists, human rights defenders, LGBT rights advocates, supporters of social justice, left-wing activists, anti-WTO or anti-NATO protesters, ultranationalists and members of a wide range of mostly small political parties and associations. As at previous marches, there were a number of ultranationalists sporting black-gold-and-white tricolours; about 100 members of the fringe Great Russia party left in protest after making a quick appearance at the beginning of the march and shouting anti-liberal slogans.15The majority, however, brought no distinguishing signs, or wore only the white ribbon that had become the main symbol of the electoral protests sinceDecember, and, for some, the black-and-orange St George’s Ribbon for Victory Day. The signs, too, overwhelmingly featured individually worded messages rather than standard slogans. There were many elderly protesters, some children, and several disabled people in wheelchairs. In addition to dozens if not hundreds of journalists with professional equipment, there were thousands of citizen reporters with cameras or mobile phones. Many of them started posting images on Facebook, vk or twitter at the beginning of the march, or offered live broadcasts on UStream. On the platform inside the metro station, social scientists were trying to determine the ratio of lone protesters and groups during a given period in the stream of those arriving. Professional ethnographers, political scientists and sociologists, myself among them, as well as amateur researchers mingled with the crowd or stood at the roadside – observing, counting, comparing; taking pictures, notes and interviews. Several hundred policemen clad in the riot gear of the OMON special units accompanied the march; many of them were stationed in closed ranks on the island, backed by soldiers of the Internal Troops with armoured vehicles blocking the Great Stone Bridge. Officers in plain clothes were instructing the police, and some of them positioned themselves at the start and end points of the march.16Some policemen were also equipped with cameras or small camcorders. A helicopter was circling above the crowd.

Following a shower of rain, the sky turned a brilliant shade of blue. At 20 degrees centigrade, the weather was almost summery. The procession filtered through a battery of metal detectors before walking almost two kilometres down Yakimanka and Bol’shaya Polyanka Street to Bolotnaya Square, recreating the non-confrontational atmosphere that had become the hallmark of the protest movement since the previous winter. Small provocations could not sully the mood: thus, someone had paid a group of drunk homeless people to bawl loudly in front of TV cameras near the rallying point, but marchers hardly paid them any attention. The ‘march’ resembled a giant spring stroll. Some groups would repeatedly break into chanting. Popular slogans included ‘Thieves and crooks, you have five minutes to pack your things!’ and ‘We are the power!’ – allusions to well-known quotes by the national-liberal anti-corruption blogger Aleksey Navalny. A group of nationalist temperance activists chanted ‘Russian means sober’. A neighbouring column of LGBT activists shouted ‘Free Pussy Riot!’ Most participants, however, were busy conversing with friends or making new acquaintances. To rest or to quench their thirst, some sat at outdoor tables of a Coffee House chain café, stopped in at the Irish Pub or bought drinks at the upmarket Azbuka vkusa (Alphabet of Taste) supermarket. Having confiscated glass containers at the metal detectors, it took the police over an hour to have the glass-bottle shelves at the supermarket covered too. Most participants seemed less interested in the closing rally than in the march itself and the opportunities it provided to talk to others in the crowd: even at the first mass protests in December, only a fraction of those present had paid close attention to what was happening on stage. Many participants left the march as soon as they reached the Lesser Stone Bridge across the canal, leading to Bolotnaya Square.

About two hours into the march, just after 5 pm, a bottleneck formed on that bridge. As the first speakers and musicians appeared on stage, riot police blockedaccess to the main part of the square counter to a prior agreement with the organizers that had been published online, and tried to channel everyone into a narrow strip of embankment. A group of activists, including well-known figures such as Aleksey Navalny, Sergey Udaltsov of the Left Front and the liberal politician Ilya Yashin responded with a sit-in in front of the police lines. This in turn prevented new arrivals from moving on. Some protesters attempted to break the ranks of uniformed men. The OMON not only blocked these attempts, but began forcefully pushing the entire crowd back. Clashes ensued. The front lines included activists and thrill-seekers who had clearly been ready for violent confrontation with the police from the outset.17Yet there is also photographic and video evidence of members of Kremlin-sponsored youth groups in the crowd who apparently fuelled or escalated the violence.18Following the first clashes, the police began to pick out protesters throwing plastic bottles and other objects at them. However, they also detained numerous peaceful demonstrators. In wedge formation, holding each other by the shoulders, the uniformed riot police would bludgeon their way into the crowd, snatching individuals and quickly retreating with them behind their own lines. They would then hand them to regular police units, who bundled them into prison vans and drove them across the Great Stone Bridge to stations all across Moscow. Some, especially younger, protesters were fighting back, ripping helmets off the police and throwing them into the river to cheers from the crowd. Some protesters toppled portable toilets, trying to build a barricade. Plastic bottles rained down on the police, as did stones and, later, even occasional pieces of asphalt. Several policemen were injured.19

This continued for a while. Then the OMON started gradually driving the entire crowd back from the island across the Lesser Stone Bridge and the pedestrian Luzhkov Bridge that starts in the central part of Bolotnaya Square. In a process that lasted several hours, the riot police gradually pushed the entire mass of remaining demonstrators from the bridges to the nearest metro station, Tretyakovskaya. Wielding their batons and wedging themselves into the crowd again and again, they broke it up into smaller, easier-to-control segments, a riot control tactic originally developed by the French equivalent to OMON, the CRS. The physical and verbal confrontation never abated: protesters tried to resist, cried ‘fascists’ and attempted to wrest back those the OMON had dragged out of the crowd in either targeted or random fashion. Some threw coins at the police, shouting ‘Take this, since all you want is money!’ Others chanted: ‘The police are with the people! Don’t serve the monsters!’ Still others interrupted their animated conversations only briefly, trying to escape yet another baton attack – only to resume them a few minutes later. All in all, over 650 people were arrested. Many civil rights defenders and lawyers specializing in the freedom of assembly had been lulled by the previous months’ peaceful marches and rallies and were therefore unprepared to rush to the police stations and fight for the release of hundreds of citizens detained without justifiable grounds.20One man’s head was smashed so badly by the police that he was left lying on the ground, believed dead; yet the day’s only verified casualty was a photographer who had tried to get a view of the march by climbing a fire escape ladder and fell to his death. Amateurphotographers in the crowd continued capturing the violent dispersal of the demonstration until its end.

The confrontation continued into the late evening. By the time the police had pushed demonstrators past the Tretyakov Gallery, the office of Commerzbank, the EU delegation and the restaurant verandas in the pedestrian areas of Lavrushinsky and Klimentovsky Lanes, all but a few hundred people of various ages had been dispersed or arrested. When the police asked demonstrators to clear the traffic lanes of Bolshaya Ordynka, a young man started a flash mob where several dozen protesters would march back and forth on a zebra crossing whenever the light turned green; another young man drove a car through the police line and blocked a traffic lane for about half an hour to cheers from the surrounding crowd. Following this brief respite, the police dispersed the remaining protesters by physically shoving them down the stairs to the metro. Several unwitting foreign tourists found themselves in the guided stream. Throughout the clashes, individual protesters – including elderly citizens who were calling for calm – were constantly being brutally arrested and taken to police stations in avtozak prison buses.

Protest actions collectively referred to as ‘White City’ continued the next day, as planned. Putin’s inauguration took place in a completely deserted city centre. It was closed to the public except for select guests. At the same time, thousands of people wearing white ribbons went for walks in central Moscow. Some of them formed a round-the-clock mobile protest camp, accompanied by drummers, whose alternating participants temporarily numbered in the hundreds. The arrests also continued: between 7 and 10 May, more than a further 1,000 people were detained; without any legal basis, the police were instructed to arrest anyone wearing white ribbons. Those detained included journalists and well-known opposition figures. On the day of the inauguration, the OMON stormed a McDonald’s restaurant on Tverskaya as well as the Jean-Jacques café and the John Donne Pub on Nikitsky Boulevard.21Navalny and Udaltsov, who had already been detained for 24 hours at the March of Millions, were again arrested on the night of 7/8 May and given 15 days’ administrative detention. Another short-term detainee was Kseniya Sobchak, a well-known socialite and reality show host who is the younger daughter of Saint Petersburg’s former mayor and Putin’s mentor, Anatoly Sobchak. Since December 2011 she had regularly appeared at protests; while many participants refused to take her seriously and even booed her, the blonde ‘it girl’ nevertheless became one of the faces of the protest movement for apolitical consumers of Russia’s glamour culture.22

On 9 May – Victory Day – the mobile camp moored itself to the statue of Kazakh national poet Abay Qunanbayuly installed six years earlier on Chistoprudny Boulevard. Via Twitter, the camp became known as #OccupyAbay. Similarly to Occupy camps in the US, there were assemblies, lectures, group discussions, concerts, film screenings and exhibitions. Some of these served to put events in Russia in global context. The school teacher Tamara Eydelman gave a lecture on the history of non-violent resistance, to thunderous applause. The poet and performance artist Alexander Delphinov, who splits his time between Moscow and Berlin, held a seminar on drug policies in authoritarian states. The writerand journalist Sergey Kuznetsov compared the Russian protests with the global student unrest of the 1960s. Yet there were also seminars on birdsong, potholes, education policies and workers’ movements. The camp’s infrastructure included a WiFi network, a communal kitchen, book stalls and an improvised security service.23

Those helping maintain the camp included anarchists, some of whom had taken part in similar camps abroad and had made prior attempts to bring back methods of direct democracy.24People returning from the March of Millions started similar camps in other cities. In Saint Petersburg, for example, a similar Occupy camp started in front of Saint Isaac’s Cathedral on 7 May. The police moved it first to Alexander Garden and eventually to Arts Square, where it was finally dissolved at the end of May in the course of another wave of arrests. Barnaul, Ivanovo, Yekaterinburg, Kaliningrad, Kirov, Krasnoyarsk, Nizhny Novgorod, Novosibirsk, Penza, Samara, Saratov, Ulyanovsk, Vladivostok and Vologda also saw smaller camps – in some cases not much more than collective walks or permanent discussion circles around park benches. In Chelyabinsk in the Southern Urals, local activists met every evening for a month in front of the Orlenok (Little Eagle) monument to young communist heroes of the Civil War, a local landmark. They called their meetings Occupy Orlenok.25

In Moscow, the best-selling writer Boris Akunin published the following appeal in his LiveJournal blog on 9 May:

Attention! Deadly stunt: ‘Control Walk’! Only in our city! Since in Moscow, as it turns out, it is forbidden to stroll along boulevards and public gardens [. . .], a group of reckless citizens, mostly litératteurs, have decided to perform a forced march along the Boulevard Ring from the Pushkin monument on Pushkin Square to the Griboyedov monument on Chistoprudny Boulevard. Here is an alphabetical list of these kamikazes: [. . .] Pretending to engage in peaceful discussions of literature (but in fact trembling with fear), we shall stroll from one Alexander Sergeyevich to the other. Our last wills have been made, our last songs have been written [. . .] The mayor of Moscow, the members of Moscow’s City Duma, as well as anyone else willing to observe this risky operation codenamed Control Walk are invited to the Pushkin monument this coming Sunday, 13 May, at noon. Warning: we do not take any responsibility for the life and well-being of any spectators who should come too close. As they say: at your own peril! The aim of the experiment is to find out: are Muscovites, after all, free to stroll through their own city, or do they need some sort of special pass?26

The literary control walk proceeded without obstruction; several thousand participants joined the writers and eventually arrived at the OccupyAbay camp, swelling its size and notoriety.27Nevertheless, on the morning of 16 May, the police disbanded the camp, ostensibly in response to requests by local residents who felt disturbed. Occasional shorter protest camps and walks, including a ‘travelling museum of contemporary art’, continued for a few days, and on weekends there were more assemblies and lectures next to the statue of Abay. On 31 May, the police in several cities across Russia used the usual force to break upthe traditional Strategy-31 demonstrations in support of the freedom of assembly.28In Moscow, a short respite began for most protesters until the next March of Millions on 12 June.

A microcosm of Russian protest

This book is, first and foremost, a sociological and historical study of the wave of street protest that swept through Russia during the long year 2012. Throughout, the first March of Millions features as a microcosm of the 2011–13 protests. Starting with portraits of participants or bystanders at the March of Millions, each chapter explores different aspects of the protest wave. In turn, placing the fair-elections protests in context, I use them to analyse protest in Russia during the entire Putin era. I also discuss the aftermath and effects of the 2011–13 cycle of mobilization, both before and after Russia’s annexation of Crimea and involvement in the Donbass war.

Russia’s abortive Snow Revolution took place in the middle of a global protest season which, between late 2010 and early 2014, included the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement and the European anti-austerity protests, as well as Turkey’s Gezi Park protests and Ukraine’s Euromaidan. All of these dwarfed the Russian demonstrations numerically and overshadowed them in the international media. They also made it tempting to pay only cursory attention to the facts and portray Russia’s protests as a middle-class movement limited to Moscow. In fact, in most Russian cities, despite modest absolute numbers, the fair-election and anti-Putin protests were the largest since perestroika and the break-up of the Soviet Union, even though in the years before 2011 there had been numerous grassroots protests, two major regional, several interregional and at least one countrywide protest movement.

The March of Millions, with its thousands of participants from across Russia, was a turning point in the protests. Coming, as it did, the day before Putin’s formal return to the presidency, the brutal police response made the limits of contention abundantly clear. Not only did it destroy the last hopes anyone may have nurtured of preventing the inauguration or even building up decisive pressure for swift regime change. Judging by interviews with protesters, it also broke the emotional dynamic of the fair-elections protests that had begun, to most observers’ and participants’ surprise, after the rigged Duma elections of 4 December 2011. Some had turned away in disappointment after the first synchronic mass demonstrations on 10 December 2011, hastily improvised in a matter of days. Yet for most protesters, the rallies throughout the winter months had been buoyed by a sense of amazement, curiosity and liberating exuberance. Those most surprised were the participants themselves. Many, if not most of them, had no prior experience with politics or activism; they often felt isolated in a society that they experienced as atomized, uncivil and lured by TV into a self-delusion of unity and stability. They were overwhelmed when they discovered how many others seemed to share their discontent. Given the dearth of public spaces, the marches and rallies, many of which took place in bone-chilling cold, became temporary places of warmth and ad hoc community, powerful displays of solidarity across political divides. Yet they were also platforms for presentations of the individual self. Spilling over from online discussions, kitchen conversations and small grassroots protests, the dissatisfaction with Putin and the ruling United Russia party took myriad humorous and original expressions. Although specific demands – fair elections, new elections, freeing political prisoners, saving a particular forest or historic building from destruction – were sometimes voiced on stages and protest signs, most participants seem to have experienced the demonstrations as moments of acquaintance, self-discovery and newfound agency – as eventful protests (Della Porta 2008) rather than strategic opportunities for regime change. Many protesters stated that they felt like social actors where they had previously been disenfranchised voters in rubberstamp elections or foot soldiers in struggles between rival political and business clans. Peaceful and joyous even where the police responded with violence, the protests had a keynote of law abidance: constantly repeating calls for evolution instead of revolution, participants invoked the rule of law against a system they saw as corrupt, authoritarian and threatening in its unpredictability. Speakers at the pro-Putin rallies organized in response to the protests accused the white-ribbon activists of ‘rocking the boat’; yet many protesters, like their critics, stressed that they came out in defence of stability (Bikbov 2013). The difference – often the only major difference apart from habits of media use (Soboleva 2013a, 2013b) – between supporters and critics of Putin and United Russia was that the former saw them as bulwarks of stability, and the latter as threats to it.

Attempts to carry the enthusiasm of the winter of protests over into the new Putin era shaped the follow-up to 6 May. The protest walks and camps became new demonstrations of solidarity and unity in diversity; many younger protesters experienced them as something like a romantic revolutionary spring. Over the summer, what euphoria had been left gave way to a sense of disillusionment and routine. ‘Enthusiasm doesn’t last long’, political scientist Grigorii V. Golosov (2012) commented after the third March of Millions on 15 September. ‘Routine is more reliable. But it is clear that to some, the main value of the protest movement was enthusiasm. Such people are leaving the movement.’29 Outside Moscow in particular, participant numbers had dwindled by then, though not quite to pre-December 2011 levels. At the same time, with each new wave, some people who had missed all previous marches and rallies joined in, and smaller protests multiplied, often in support of those imprisoned on 6 May or earlier. In Moscow, the second and third March of Millions took place without major incidents. Meanwhile, attempts continued to forge new institutions out of the rallies, marches and pickets. Political activists in particular, who had been trying hard to frame the protests as an opposition movement against considerable resistance from unaffiliated participants, invested considerable efforts into elections to a Coordinating Council of the Opposition, with some of them drumming up support for the initiative during a car rally-cum-speaking tour across Russia titled ‘White Stream’ in August and September. Once elected, the Coordinating Council was paralysed by struggles between factions and reprisals against many of its members, and faded into insignificance. In Moscow, to the extent that mass mobilization continued into 2013, it reflected the fact that those outside the liberal camp, and many unaffiliated protesters, had left. Both nationalist and left-wing activists largely refused to join the March Against Scoundrels on 13 January, the last truly massive event of the 2011–13 protest cycle. The march was a response to the Duma’s decision to ban US adoptions of Russian children, itself a reaction to US sanctions against Russian officials suspected of involvement in a high-profile murder. That seemingly asymmetrical but in fact well-calculated move made it easy to frame critics as unpatriotic and immoral, marking a success of the morality turn that had already been tested as a new strategy of regime legitimation in the highly public trial of Pussy Riot (Smyth and Soboleva 2014). The summer of 2013 saw a coda to the protest wave: the national-liberal politician and anti-corruption blogger Aleksey Navalny, who had emerged out of the protests with a debatable reputation as an opposition leader, managed to mobilize large numbers of supporters in the campaign for the Moscow mayoral elections of 8 September, in which he came second.

Yet the most lasting consequences of 6 May were in providing the state with a pretext for increased coercion in response to protest in general. Despite the overall impression of peacefulness, from the very first days of the protest wave a number of demonstrations in many provincial cities, but also in Moscow, had been violently dispersed, but this was the first time the police had made such massive use of batons and detained so many protesters. Overall, about 650 people were arrested on 6 May itself (OVD-Info 2013). Before the next March of Millions, parliament swiftly passed a set of restrictive amendments to the law on the freedom of assembly, threatening organizers with ruinous fines for minor violations. Opposition Duma member Gennady Gudkov, who attempted to filibuster the law with a handful of supporters, was soon stripped of his mandate under a flimsy pretext.30 Shortly before 12 June, investigators searched the flats and offices of several prominent opposition figures – ostensibly as part of an inquiry into the instigators of the ‘unrest’ on 6 May.31 One left-wing political activist who fled to Kiev and asked for political asylum was kidnapped by the Russian secret services as he briefly stepped out of the local office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees during the application process. Overall, over 30 individuals were indicted as part of what became known as the Case of 6 May or the Bolotnaya Case, facing penalties ranging from house arrest to long imprisonment. Most spent several months in pre-trial or coercive psychiatric detention, and several received prison sentences of up to 4.5 years. Those indicted included novice protesters as well as left-wing, nationalist, liberal and anarchist activists born between 1955 and 1992. As of November 2015, eight of them remain behind bars while others have been granted amnesties or parole; yet others have fled abroad to escape prosecution.32 The long trial generated its own protest movement: in both 2012 and 2013, protests in support of political prisoners were the number one type of protest event in Moscow among those that that led to arrests.33

Beyond the Bolotnaya Case, the June 2012 amendments were immediately put into effect. Protest walks were one attempt to circumvent the new restrictions. As early as 9 June, activists in Voronezh organized two such walks modelled on Moscow’s Control Walk, in one case recruiting the well-known writer and former OMON officer Zakhar Prilepin, who was attending a literary festival there.34 The logic behind the walks was similar to that of the nano-protests, popular since the winter, in which activists placed stuffed animals or toy figurines with protest signs in public squares and documented the police reaction. In both cases, the police had to choose between yielding public space to the protesters and opting for a coercive response that made them appear ridiculous or gratuitously brutal. It was a classic dilemma action, similar to the empty barrels featuring portraits of Milošević that Serbia’s Otpor activists had installed in 2000, filming their ‘arrest’ by the police. Yet in the Russian case coercion soon trumped any fear of ridicule. In Voronezh, the authorities drew on the new law to classify the walks as ‘simultaneous mass presence’. The nano-protests were banned or dispersed in several regions, though in some cases this was due to organizers’ timid decision to notify the authorities of their plans beforehand.35

In addition, the June 2012 amendments allowed judges to retrospectively qualify one-person pickets, exempt from notification requirements under the law, as an assembly if they detect a ‘common intent and organisation’,36 exposing protesters to additional fines. A further amendment, passed in June 2014 with reference to events in Ukraine, introduced even heavier penalties: three infractions within six months now entail fines of up to one million roubles or the defendant’s entire income over 2–3 years – or up to five years of prison or forced labour.37 In 2015 three Moscow-based picketers were indicted under the new law. One of them, Ildar Dadin (born 1982), was sentenced to three years in jail by the notorious Basmanny Court on 7 December 2015; another, veteran protester Vladimir Ionov (born 1939), fled to Ukraine.38 The repressive measures against protesters were supplemented by a whole range of other restrictive laws, such as the Foreign Agents law that decimated and paralysed the NGO scene, as well as a series of homophobic measures. The 6th Duma, whose election had been so hotly contested, became known as a ‘mad printer’ for the breakneck pace at which it passed such laws.

By November 2013, when the Euromaidan began in neighbouring Ukraine, the 2011–13 protest cycle in Russia was history. The fair-elections protests had failed to reach their stated aims, even modest ones such as the dismissal of returning officer Vladimir Churov. Many observers wrote them off as an unmitigated failure, another transitory movement that had failed to build lasting institutions or a fleeting fashion out of touch with social problems relevant to the majority of the population. Indeed grassroots protests on other topics had continued throughout 2012, sometimes keeping their distance from the larger fair-elections protests and sometimes merging with them. After the larger fair-elections wave died down, strikes, environmental and car owners’ protests continued, including a countrywide lorry drivers’ movement against new road tolls. So did political protests, most notably in the form of Peace Marches against Russia’s military involvement in Ukraine and commemorative events for opposition politician Boris Nemtsov following his murder in February 2014, even though the occupation of Crimea created new rifts in the extra-parliamentary opposition, both between the political camps and within each of them. These developments are discussed in the conclusion.

Opening the black box of protest

The purpose of this book is to provide a detailed, multi-faceted account of the protest wave that takes seriously the experiences and perceptions of its participants (as well as the whole range of research on them across disciplines) and goes beyond reductionist and misleading narratives about a confrontation between regime and opposition, civil and uncivil society, cosmopolitan Moscow and apathetic provincial Russia, or a conservative majority and a liberal urban middle class. It tries to do so without falling into the trap of either viewing Russia as no more than a specific case of some generic authoritarian type, or treating it as unique and incomparable. Before we can engage in meaningful comparison with protests and social movements elsewhere, we need a sound empirical basis that is not limited to quantitative data.

This is, perhaps above all, an historical book. In writing it, I have tried to use as wide a range of sources as possible, to let individual cases speak for themselves instead of marshalling them to illustrate a grand theory, and to pay attention to the effects of narrative. One of the reasons that pushed the historian in me to write this book is that many of the relevant sources exist only in fleeting online format. By the time I started working on the revised English edition, quite a few of them – local forums used to organize protest events, blog posts, news items not repeated in print media – had disappeared. While some of them have been saved in Internet archives and databases such as my own PEPS (Protest Events, Photos and Slogans; see below), others have vanished, not least due to a partial clampdown on protest-related groups in vk.39

Yet this is also a sociological analysis, and as a sociologist, my overriding concern is that we take protest at face value.

Far too often, protest events in Russia (and elsewhere) have been treated as black boxes. On the input side, they are discussed as dependent variables expressing some underlying reality: social inequality, the growth of a middle class or activist networks, conflict and competition between political elites. On this view, to understand protest is to correlate, say, large bodies of statistically representative data about the number of protest events, or the number of participants, to numbers that reflect variation in regional economies or governors’ political orientation, or to the income, party preferences, motivations or attitudes of protesters as expressed in quantitative surveys. Alternatively, it can mean a focus on the strategies of opposition parties, social movements and other formalized collective actors, for whom structural developments in the political system or key events such as elections provide opportunities to achieve their goals. Finally, the black box perspective can mean treating protest as signifying the growth of something like a ‘civil society’ or social trust. In all these cases, what is of interest is not protest itself but what it stands for.

On the output side, protests are judged by their structural outcomes. Have they had a measurable effect on the political system? Have the grievances they voiced been redressed? In other words, have they been successful? Success is measured either against an external yardstick, such as expectations of democratization, or against the purpose of protest as expressed by its loudest mouthpieces: protest ‘leaders’ or journalists who report on them. Participant numbers are another important measure of success, as is the ability to stand firm in the face of state coercion. Once again, what is of interest here is not so much protest itself as its consequences. Protest is relevant in so far as it is part of a larger strategy or structure.

All of these are valid and important perspectives. It would be strange to write about the Russian fair-elections protests, for example, without discussing participants’ background, looking at the role of political parties, asking whether the protests actually made elections fairer or analysing their overall effects on Russia’s political system. Likewise, it would be silly to dismiss quantitative data about protest events out of hand.

However, such approaches also have severe limitations, as they gloss over what happens during a protest and bracket out aspects whose relevance may not fit prior questions. Whatever made a person stage or join a protest, the actual experiences during the event may prove transformative, creating not just new strategic and tactical perspectives, but new understandings of society, a sense of agency that need not be directly related to what has been achieved, and, perhaps most importantly, new kinds of experiences and new kinds of social interaction and social ties – ranging from what Émile Durkheim (2013 [1912]) called collective effervescence to even greater isolation. Focusing on how events are defined by the media or those identified as protest leaders, or looking only at conflict between organizers, leaves out the often considerable diversity of views and expectations within a crowd. To reduce protest to what fits a deductively formulated hypothesis is to forget that moments of upheaval are prime occasions for experimentation and for inductively generating new questions and hypotheses about society. Social science does not benefit from suppressing these moments of induction and cognitive opportunity in favour of a scientistic narrative of pure hypothesis testing (Goldberg 2015). Thus this book opens the black box of protest: it looks not only at the causes, effects and structural features of protest in Russia, but also at different kinds of interaction between protest participants and at topics such as the cognitive effects of the spaces in which protest takes place. This is not a short-sighted perspective focused only on the here and now: opening the black box and taking protests seriously as events might help us identify developments whose effect may only become clearly visible much later. The legacies of the global protest wave of 1968 illustrate this.

In the rest of this section, I discuss some developments in the study of Russian society, and more largely in the social sciences, that underpin my approach. The following sections place this study in the context of specific debates about the 2011–13 protest wave. Finally I present the sources and methods used and the structure of the book.

Following the break-up of the Soviet Union, much of the debate about contemporary Russia in Anglophone academia was dominated by normative, political science-centred approaches and more or less implicit comparison with Western democracies. Transitology, which posited that post-communist countries were in ‘transition to democracy’, was the most systematic expression of that idea (Linz and Stepan 1996). Although it is fanciful, to say the least, to call Yeltsin’s Russia democratic, it took Putin’s ascent to the presidency to realize that its path was not predetermined. Critics eventually proclaimed ‘the end of the transition paradigm’ (Carothers 2002) and went on to study open-ended political transformation.40 Since then, much theoretical sophistication has gone into making points that may seem unsurprising in hindsight: that not every country can be assumed to be on its way to Western-style democracy, that democracy cannot be reduced to elections, that most political systems combine elements of authoritarianism and competitiveness, and that democratization has a lot to do with ties to the West, competition between political elites and the strength or weakness of the central state and its ruling party (Levitsky and Way 2010).