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| 1 |
ID:
136928
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| Summary/Abstract |
The puzzle that we address in this essay is the extreme unevenness in the way the Russian public protests against authoritarianism and demands political reforms. Between 2000 and 2013 there were numerous local protests demanding specific actions by municipal or regional officials (for example, to prevent local factory bankruptcy, to stop construction, and to expel migrants). There were also protests demanding better public goods and services such as education, healthcare, and transport, to stop welfare reforms, or against the reorganisation of scientific funding. However, when it comes to protests concerning demands for political reforms such as free and fair elections, the protection of human rights, and for institutionalised democracy, most of the activity was limited to Moscow and other very large cities (Robinson 2013). Elsewhere, the scope of pro-democracy action remained much more limited. A 2012 opinion poll by the Levada Centre has shown that only around 20% of Russians (mostly residents of the largest cities) support the idea of in-depth political reforms, leaving the remaining 80% either against democratic reforms or indifferent to the idea. Furthermore, based on demographic covariates, Levada Centre analysts forecast that this 20–80 breakdown on the issue is set to persist for the foreseeable future.1
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| 2 |
ID:
136930
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| Summary/Abstract |
Following the events that ensued after the December 2011 Russian parliamentary elections, the study of civic activity in Russia became highly topical. We can make two immediate observations on the nature and methodology of research on Russian civil society. First, the media and some academic critics tend to equate Russia's civil society with the liberal opposition to Putin's government. While liberal oppositional movements undeniably have a civic character and represent a significant part of Russia's civil society, much of Western analysis tends to appropriate this opposition's narrative for the purpose of narrating Russia's entire civic activism. Hence, these critics often focus on what they see as suitable, relevant, and reflective of the political and philosophical consensus prevalent in the West. As a result, those movements, personalities, and ideas that mirror core European political values receive wide analytical and media focus, while others that fall beyond the bounds of the existing liberal consensus are shelved, considered irrelevant or even plain erroneous. Yet, those ideas, which may appear at first glance to be at odds with the contemporary Western context, may prove upon close examination to be of the most immediate political significance for Russia.
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| 3 |
ID:
136933
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| Summary/Abstract |
The post-Soviet period in Russia has reached the quarter of a century milestone. The identity crisis widely acknowledged in post-Soviet research in its first two decades opened the way for policies aimed at the consolidation of an encompassing all-Russian (rossiiskaya) national identity1 as a source of nation-building. Contention over political separatism and various regional scenarios of the politics of identity2 are being superseded by the ‘Russian (russkii) question’. Meanwhile strengthening ethnic identities look up to religious, language and cultural landmarks as reference points. The nation-building agenda is thus having to take in different repertoires of contention, and bridging cleavages within Russian society is not only and not primarily a question of elite-tailored politics of identity. It is about the formation and assertion of inclusive identities innate both to the Russian cultural tradition and to the needs of a community confronting the challenges of modernisation.
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| 4 |
ID:
136929
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| Summary/Abstract |
Russia was among many countries hit by protest mobilisations in the aftermath of the Great Recession. Changes in the patterns of political mobilisation seemed to go hand-in-hand with attitude change and shifts in the social structure, such as the emergence of a mass urban middle class. These developments stimulated a lively academic debate on the relationships between the patterns of protest, the nature of the political regime, attitude change and social modernisation. Economic success does not preclude the expansion of protest activity; for example, in China since 1994 the annual number of protest events has grown even faster than per capita Gross Domestic Product and in 25 years increased by a factor of 20.1 Mature liberal democracies also seem to be conducive to protest mobilisations, which allowed Meyer et al. (1998) to define them as ‘movement’ societies. In a recent study of 283 mobilisation episodes from 1900 to 2012, Beissinger and Putnam (2014) conclude that revolutions have become more frequent and have given rise to a new urban model centring on civic purposes rather than goals of social transformation. This model assumes a transition to different tactics (from rural-based rebellions to mass protests in urban spaces) and a different class composition of protesters (from peasants and workers to the urban middle class).
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| 5 |
ID:
136931
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| Summary/Abstract |
In December 2011, ‘a volcano of social activism that had long been dormant started to erupt in Russia’ (Petrov 2012). A tidal wave of mass protest movements swept through the capital and then engulfed scores of Russia's regions. These demonstrations came as a great shock to the Russian leadership. After decades of the passive acceptance of the status quo it appeared that civil society was at last wakening up, and that it was members of a rising middle class which were at the forefront of the protests against the regime. As Aron observed, ‘No longer burdened with providing for the basic needs of their families and now enjoying perhaps unprecedented, for Russia, personal freedoms and prosperity, the middle class's more socially active members appear to believe they are entitled to become stakeholders in a functioning, fair, and less corrupt state’ (Aron 2012, p. 4).
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| 6 |
ID:
136932
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| Summary/Abstract |
In the winter of 2011–2012 in Russia, tens of thousands of citizens attended protest demonstrations in Moscow and other Russian cities after anger erupted over electoral manipulation in the December 2011 parliamentary elections. In response, the state organised a large number of loyalists to participate in street rallies to support the regime. Similar to other events of mass protest from Occupy Wall Street in the United States (US) to the Los Indignados movement in Spain to the Arab Uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, new media played a significant role in the mobilisation of protest in Russia. Yet, the role of new media and the precise mechanisms that link new media use and protest decisions remain the subject of some debate across all of these protest events.
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| 7 |
ID:
136934
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| Summary/Abstract |
Large-scale social and political protest has characterised political development in a number of post-communist and other transition countries over the last two decades. The colour revolutions in Kyrgyzstan, Georgia, Ukraine, and Serbia, and, most recently, the 2013–2014 protests in Ukraine, have demonstrated the potency of mass action in toppling undemocratic or unpopular regimes, or else in forcing political change. Citizen uprisings in the Middle East had also shattered the dual myths of popular passivity and stability of authoritarian polities in the region. Yet, as Graeme Robertson (2007) rightly notes, according to ‘conventional wisdom’, until 2011–2013 Russia has remained puzzlingly immune to large-scale mass protests despite a growing tide of authoritarianism, rampant corruption, and socio-economic disparities—the cocktail of factors contributing to the recent wave of anti-authoritarian mobilisations in other parts of the world.
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| 8 |
ID:
136926
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| Summary/Abstract |
In the mid-2000s, the decline of opposition politics in Russia was so sharp and undisputed that the title of an article I wrote at the time, ‘Political Opposition in Russia: A Dying Species?’ (Gel'man 2005) met with little objection. At that time, the impact of the opposition was peripheral at best. The ‘party of power’, United Russia (Edinaya Rossiya—UR), dominated both nationwide (Remington 2008) and sub-national (Ross 2011) legislatures, and the few representatives of the opposition exerted almost no influence on decision making. The share of votes for the opposition parties (in far from ‘free and fair’ elections) was rather limited (Gel'man 2008; Golosov 2011). Even against the background of the rise of social movements in Russia, anti-regime political protests were only able to gather a minority of 100 or so participants, while environmental or cultural protection activists deliberately avoided any connections with the political opposition, justly considering being labelled ‘opposition’ as an obstacle to achieving positive results (Gladarev & Lonkila 2013; Clement 2013). In other words, political opposition in Russia was driven into very narrow ‘niches’ (Greene 2007), if not into ghettos, and spectators were rather gloomy about the chances of its rebirth.
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| 9 |
ID:
136927
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| Summary/Abstract |
The Putin system is based on control and the ‘manual’ management of political processes. In part this was a response to what was perceived to be the ‘anarcho-democracy’ of the 1990s, but it was also an attempt to find a way of dealing with more immediate challenges of societal and political management. The regime devised a whole series of strategies for dealing with opposition, ranging from cooptation to coercion. The ideological framework was a distinctive form of neo-Soviet depoliticisation based on an inclusive ‘centrism’. This model of political management was challenged during the 2011–2012 electoral cycle by a mass protest movement and a degree of intra-elite political contestation. This was accompanied by the radicalisation of a traditionalist counter-movement accompanied by a revanchist spirit at the heart of Putin's centrist coalition, which spawned a range of restrictive legislation in the Sixth Duma from 2012.
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| 10 |
ID:
136925
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| Summary/Abstract |
The wave of protests that shook the Russian capital and scores of Russian cities over the period 2011 to 2013 came as a great shock to the political establishment in the Kremlin. After decades of the passive acceptance of the status quo it appeared that civil society was at last wakening up. As Jensen notes, ‘after years of apathy, a new social force—the Russian middle class—seemed to be emerging, with a message that included not only a political, but also a moral and emotional rejection of the corrupt authoritarian state that developed during the Putin era’ (Jensen 2013, p. 1). However, by July 2013 the steam seemed to have run out of the protest movement. As Treisman notes, ‘Whether one uses police figures (almost certainly too low) or those of the opposition (probably too high), the number demonstrating in Moscow each month [fell] sharply—from 210,000 in December 2011 to 5,500 in July 2013 (according to opposition reports), or 57,500 to 2,000 (according to the authorities)’ (Treisman 2013, p. 256). This collection examines these momentous developments which shook the political establishment over the period 2011 to 2013 in the Kremlin and it charts the rise and decline of the non-systemic opposition in Russia at both the national and regional levels.
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