Protest in Putin's Russia

Abstract

According to conventional wisdom, demonstrations following the 2011 Russian Duma and the 2012 presidential elections were the result of an ineffectual, mainly middle-class protest movement against electoral fraud confined to Moscow. Mischa Gabowitsch's exhaustive Protest in Putin's Russia demonstrates conclusively that the movement encompassed a far broader range of participants, that it extended geographically well beyond Moscow and St Petersburg and that protesters’ complaints were many and varied, even if electoral fraud was the proximate reason for the demonstrations. The author makes use of the copious social media and online sources that were widely available to protesters, and of interviews that he conducted with them. Each of the thematic chapters begins with a narrative account of some aspect of the protests derived from these interviews and online sources. Above all, however, this is a sociological analysis, and each chapter is also heavy on theory. Gabowitsch argues that what he calls Russia's ‘snow revolution’ was part of the ‘global protest season which, between late 2010 and early 2014, included the Arab spring, the Occupy movement, European anti-austerity protests, as well as Turkey's Gezi Park protests and Ukraine's Euromaidan’ (p. 8). This enables him to make occasional comparisons with other protest movements. In one chapter he also compares the demonstrations to previous political and social protests in Russia. In the main, however, this is a detailed study of the 2011–13 protests from the grassroots level up.