Protest in Putin’s Russia Open Access

The photograph in Mischa Gabowitsch’s book Protest in Putin’s Russia is telling: a male protester standing on a street in Novosibirsk in his fur hat, looking dissatisfied. A protest sign on his chest says in Russian: ‘Hipsters of Siberia for fair elections!’ The slogan is clearly ironic, referring to the protests of 2011–2013 labelled as middle class – indeed even as hipster – by media reports. The picture and its obvious contradiction is one key to reading the entire volume. Protest in Putin’s Russia is a book that takes another, more careful, look at what the Russian protest wave was actually about, and questions the often-repeated ‘truths’ concerning it.

Following alleged ballot-rigging in Russian parliamentary elections in December 2011, the country faced its biggest protest wave since Perestroika. People took to the streets, many of them for the first time in their lives, to protest against Vladimir Putin and the leading party, United Russia. In Moscow, over 100,000 people gathered in Bolotnaya Square. Three months later, in March 2012, Putin’s return to the presidency provoked further protest. The March of Millions in Moscow on 6 May, the day before his inauguration, attracted participants from across the country. About 650 protesters were arrested, some facing harsh sentences.

Protest in Putin’s Russia concentrates on the long and eventful year of 2012 more or less chronologically. The protests were labelled by Russian media, politicians, and even researchers as a middle-class Muscovite phenomenon; however, what Gabowitsch carefully demonstrates is that this label should be questioned. Rather than identifying as middle class, what united the protesters was above all their dissatisfaction with state politics as well as sheer curiosity for the moment, as Gabowitsch points out. Furthermore, protests were not taking place only in Moscow and St. Petersburg, as most of the media coverage suggests, but in fact, people were marching in 100 different cities in Russia and abroad. Indeed, some calculations suggest that the largest demonstrations in proportion to local population took place in northwestern Russia and in western Siberia (p. 79).

Protests are often viewed as black boxes, Gabowitsch notes, meaning that their success is mainly analysed afterwards based on the number of participants or the overall outcomes. Gabowitsch goes on to set himself a deeper goal: he aims to open the black box of Russian protest in order to dive beyond numbers and outcomes. His aim is to show the variety of interactions between protest participants and to unveil different meanings given to the events. Gabowitsch accomplishes his goals beautifully by painting a vivid picture of the whole spectrum of protest and giving it a human face. The book is based on extensive research material that consists of rich Internet data of protest events, pictures, and slogans, as well as about 60 interviews with protesters from different parts of Russia.

What was it that made Russians around the country, known (or at least frequently blamed) for their political cynicism, to join the protests in the 2010 and not earlier, even though election-rigging had already become a norm across Russia by the mid-2000 (p. 89)? The explanation Gabowitsch gives in Chapter 3 lies in the domestic election observation movement. Having witnessed striking fraud first-hand, people around the country, some of them fierce Putin supporters, were ready to do a political turnabout. As Gabowitsch suggests, online social networks played a decisive role in what followed: people were able to share and read vivid accounts of pressure straight from the polling stations on social media. These accounts had a strong impact because they were written and shared by acquaintances, not just abstract organisations. As Gabowitsch shows, this is particularly crucial in the Russian context, where close face-to-face contacts have played a focal role since Soviet times.

One of the most intriguing blind spots about the protest Gabowitsch illuminates is connected with the view that the protest wave had its actual roots in various provincial grievances – whether brutal treatment of local election officers or disputes over local sites such as forests or historic buildings. But even if many of the grievances of the protests were local in nature, they were still soon addressed to President Putin himself and became part of the larger protest. This can be partly understood, as Gabowitsch shows, by reference to ‘manual management’ – the president’s strong role in decision-making on all levels, also locally, that Putin has strengthened since he was first elected president.

In Chapters 4 and 5, Gabowitsch unwinds the internal dynamics of the protest. He carefully goes through different groups that took part in it – political parties, extra-parliamentary opposition groups, and unaffiliated civic protesters, as well as grassroots social protesters – to show the large variety of grievances the different participants brought with them when joining the protest. Despite having very different goals, protesters were able to unite under the slogan ‘for fair elections’ in order to fight a common enemy: Putin and his political party, United Russia. However, they had a hard time finding more specific common demands.

Again, in forming the protest front, the strength of the media (whether old or new) revealed itself: individuals already familiar to the masses, such as blogger Aleksei Navalny and TV hostess Ksenia Sobchak, soon became self-declared leaders of the protest. They and others like them with good media skills took the stage and were able to define what the protest was about. But as individuals they remained without the backup of organisations or parties, and this, Gabowitsch points out, was one of the challenges in forming a united front. The central problem of the protest and the reason why it can be viewed as having failed was, according to the author, the inability to recognise what and whom the protesters actually represented. This raises the intriguing question of whether the protests might have turned out differently, had the protest management also recognised the local concerns of many of the protesters, and not let them be drowned out by more general claims. The very image of the protests as an opposition movement of middle-class Muscovites was in some ways the result of struggles over strategy and representation, Gabowitsch sums up.

The book grows even more captivating in the chapters that follow. Chapter 7 zooms into the spatial dimensions of the protest. It suggests that actually the most lasting legacy of the protest wave was in creating temporary spaces of experimentation. According to Gabowitsch, most participants experienced the demonstrations as moments of self-discovery, newfound agency and interesting acquaintance – as ‘eventful protest’ (Della Porta 2008) rather than as strategic opportunities for regime change. Exploration and a new sense of community are indeed factors, Gabowitsch suggests, common to the global protest wave of 2010 in a more general sense, including the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement, Turkey’s Gezi Park protest and Ukraine’s Euromaidan. The Russian protests were

Compared to the protests taking place simultaneously elsewhere, the Russian protests attracted much less international interest. However, there was one particular protest event that did draw attention abroad: the case of Pussy Riot. The group’s Punk Prayer video, filmed in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, was heralded in western countries, but in Russia, attitudes towards Pussy Riot were mixed and often sceptical. The case, and all the publicity it received, provoked unease among protesters, many of whom felt that the group was stealing attention from more important issues of protests. Gabowitsch notes that it is exactly the ambiguity of the Russian reactions to Pussy Riot that make the case worth studying. As Protest in Putin’s Russia suggests, the case is intriguing from the point of view of the sociology of protest in general – more than any other event during the protest cycle, it acted as a gauge for what could be counted as protest in Putin’s Russia.

Gabowitsch illuminates the changes in the protesters’ tool kit through the Pussy Riot case. Since the 2000, the emphasis in Russian protest has turned gradually to artistic protest and expression, often colliding with the Russian Orthodox Church and its views. Pussy Riot, Gabowitsch highlights, is a continuation of a vibrant tradition of performance art and related countercultural experiments in Russia that are seeking wider social and political relevance. What is intriguing is that even the conservative protesters of the Orthodox Church, clashing regularly with feminist and LGBTIQ activists, have at times applied some of these performative protest methods. This shows the popularity of art-related protest across different activist camps at a time when traditional demonstration and street protests are losing their edge among many Russians because of the numerous legal limitations and fines connected with them. Furthermore, the case of Pussy Riot sheds light on another crucial issue, Russian feminism, which had, by the time the protest wave started in 2011, evolved into a public project, albeit under very challenging conditions. The protest wave of 2011–2013 led to further policing of protest space, and in his conclusion, Gabowitsch explains some of the coercive means adopted in order to further restrict the freedom of assembly in Russia. He also illuminates the moral turn taken by Putin’s regime with politics that strongly demonise internal others, such as LGBTIQ and other minorities, as a threat to the morals of the country.

Mischa Gabowitsch’s book is a very thorough account of the protest events and meanings given to them by the Russian protesters from Voronezh to Chelyabinsk. What is refreshing, among many other things, is the stance Gabowitsch takes in relation to regional studies. He openly avoids exoticising Russia and presenting it as something beyond comparison, while, at the same time, introducing the protest events skilfully through local specificity. With numerous events and actors, it would have been helpful to have a graphic timeline showing how the events followed one another in order to help the reader get an overall picture of the eventful years of protest in Russia.

The grassroots protest that partly overlapped with the larger fair-elections protests in Russia has continued after 2013, focusing on much the same topics as before, Gabowitsch points out. Many protesters politicised by the fair-election movement have joined these local struggles. Protest in Putin’s Russia offers new perspectives, particularly from the viewpoint of these local roots of protest and their possible future significance. Gabowitsch proposes that these local and place-bound factors should be considered more carefully when looking at future protest and politicisation in Russia and beyond. Indeed, he remarks that they may have more explanatory power in bringing protesters together than, for example, belonging to a certain social class. As Gabowitsch sums up, people have a thirst for togetherness and solidarity that materialises in the local concerns that unite them.