S'opposer par le droit : vulgarisation et usages politiques du droit de la copropriété en Russie postcommuniste

Abstract

In the early 1990s, a law was passed in the framework of a new, supposedly democratic round of Russian economic privatization authorizing the legal occupants of state-owned apartments to convert their renters’ rights into title deeds. At the time, the law of co-ownership became an object of political and activist involvement alike. The diverse forms taken by this involvement can be seen via an analysis of the legal popularization brochures that have been collected in the offices of Housing Solidarity, a Muscovite movement created by a diverse variety of groups to combat the new Housing Code of 2005. Some members of this movement sought to do away with the Code’s liberal bent by reviving the political tradition of “self-governance” at the level of the apartment bloc. Other members, closer to the parliamentary opposition, held that the creation of legal expertise would allow users to be supplied with personalized advice while leaving it up to the legal system to translate the demands it received into jurisprudential progress. The study of these divergent views of the proper use of the law opens the way for an examination of the more or less legitimate forms of political opposition in contemporary Russia.