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The four big challenges in studying Russia since 2022

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A Birmingham sculpture. Credit: Oosoom – Self-photographed, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=7042851

I just returned from the annual conference of the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies where I discussed my book and also chaired a session on the Hidden Pillars of the Soviet Economy. But in this post, I want to summarise some interesting discussions about the challenges of doing research on Russia since 2022. I am going to decontextualize the discussions here, so as not to identify individual who may not want to be identified. There aren’t really just ‘four big challenges’, but just overlapping methodological, conceptual, practical and ethical ones.

Self-censorship in media and social media

People kind of assume a continuity of media self-censorship from early in the 2000s, but it’s important to remember that it is only recently that the practices of the periphery in Russia – complete journalistic obfuscation and avoidance – returned to the core (the colonial boomerang again!). This was a drip-drip process and it’s also important therefore to realise that if one wants to think about reliability of media sources one also needs to contextualize and historicize the degree and nature of self-censorship. This is a major challenge because so often our ‘Kremlinological’ tendencies – where ‘information’ about elites is filtered through multiple invisible sources – can mean we forget that so many accepted truths are open to question. In fact, when this discussion was going on, I was reminded of some of the very well-respected work on ‘oligarchs’ from the early 2000s which now look rather naïve and dated when one considers how researchers got access to the narratives they then relatively uncritically transmitted to Western audiences in their scholarship. Will we look back on scholarship about the war in 10 years time in the same way and ask ourselves – how could we rely on this narrow perspective? How could we seriously believe this?

Having said that, there’s also a related problem of ‘presentism’ and exaggeration of the issue of self-censorship, in that in many ways, difficult topics still get discussion in the Russian media and press and that we shouldn’t project on to 2010, or even 2018 our assumptions that heavy self-censorship now defeats the purpose of relying on journalists’ reports or perspectives even from ‘late Putinism’ prior to 2022.

‘You can’t go there!’

We talked a little about how major misconceptions about the risks to researchers and field-based research have always been present. Even fifteen years ago to some there was a perception that fieldwork in Russia was somehow too ‘dangerous’ for Western-based researchers and that this has led to incredulity towards those who chose to carry on doing ‘normal’ fieldwork with interviews etc. While not downplaying how much contact and travel is now off limits, we reflected on how difficult it has become to communicate the irreplaceable value of ‘being in the field’ and how much the loss of these embedded perspectives – even if just containing informal contact with interlocutors – leads to impoverishing sociological, political and other attempts to grasp what’s going on. We agreed that fieldwork is indispensable in challenging group think among researchers who may get more seduced by their paradigms as a result of loss of contact with ‘reality’ via the field.

Media and social media are increasingly fractured and unrepresentative snapshots

One interesting point made by a digital media researcher was about VPNs. If media is used as data in research then there needs to be careful appreciation that – for example – if it concerns material that Russians can only access via a VPN then that will mean that such data will become increasingly unrepresentative of the general population as only a particularly tuned-in minority will be willing to pay for VPNs that work well. This might mean we need to focus a lot less on ‘opinions’ and more just on how information circulates in the Ru-internet spaces and beyond.

It is impossible to anticipate ethical problems

Both in ‘my’ panel and in others the problem of unforeseen ethical dilemmas for field researchers arose. Some may well choose to stop doing any kind of ‘ordinary’ field-based research because they cannot anticipate harms to interlocutors and we should respect that. Having said that, the biggest ethical issue is field researchers ceding the right to speak on behalf of Russian people to unethical expert-entrepreneurs who may propose themselves as experts on Russia society without speaking Russian or having been to Russia in many years or ever. This reminded me of a post I wrote just before 2022.

A big question then, given the difficulties of field-based research is: who is authorized to know and to speak about what’s happening in Russia? Non-access is transforming the field and we should be reflecting on this much more.

More briefly, here are some other topics:

The problem of perception among potential interlocutors about journalists and scholars who ‘left’ Russia.

Acknowledging the loss of our expertise over time because of loss of the field. This can lead to woolly schematic thinking as well as normative (what we’d like to see) or even wishful thinking because of the loss of granularity.

Should we be making more use of autoethnography, not because we have something to say about Russia, but because this moment too will pass and this autoethnography will help us process things like the dangers of schematic thinking?

Normative thinking as a danger also pertains to those studying ‘activism’. Finding what’s going on ‘out there’ in terms of politically active people is in danger of getting subsumed by the restrictive frames of the ‘political’ and the ‘civic’. One participant certainly shared my views when she said: ‘what even is an activist in Russia now during war?’ Are we expecting actives to effect positive change in Russia? Of course not. Does that mean we should ignore them, write them off, or – even worse – look for a mythical revolutionary subject in the person of a charismatic leader? The heavy burden of social movement theory can be a hindrance to foregrounding and documenting what ‘is out there’ – which might well be 3-4 anti-regime people doing things in a city of 100,000 people.

Is the legacy of social movement theory a hindrance to those who wish to build theory in the area of civicness and opposition under harsh repression? This is a bigger methodological and conceptual issue than many seem willing to admit. Among the harshly and hardly surviving committed activists in Russia who remain, there is a growing resentment of the opposition abroad, of the Western governments in general and even a recognition of things in common with people who seem to be superficially ‘pro-war’. When the war ends, political oppositionists will ‘have to live with the majority’, whether they like it or not. Acknowledging certain structural feelings like anger at the double-standards of the global core and the way events like Iran and Gaza contribute to a sense of defensive consolidation within Russia and the idea of long-term isolation are things that anti-regime actives in Russia are considering now.

There were many other thought-provoking topics which came up in the course of these discussions, but this post is long enough already.

“What is Everyday Politics when you’re speaking about Russia?” The Eurasian Knot podcast. Part I.

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Listen to the whole one-hour conversation here: https://www.euraknot.org/everyday-politics-in-russia/

But for those who would prefer to read or skim, here’s a lightly edited version of the first half of the conversation with the two hosts.

If you can, please support the podcast in a time when humanities and social sciences are being defunded in the US. https://www.patreon.com/euraknot

And of course, the first question I have is, what is Everyday Politics when you’re speaking about Russia?

Well, I originally wanted to use the term “micropolitics” but the publisher didn’t like that. So I compromised, but I figure it’s a good compromise. Everyday politics is a way of drawing attention to the way that it’s not just electoral politics, it’s not just NGOs that do politics, it’s not just politicians that do politics. It’s a way of really grounding the term and trying to give voice to people who may themselves say that they’re not interested in politics, that they’re alienated from politics, but by interacting with them, listening to them, talking to them, you kind of tease out what the content of their everyday life is, that is still political. What they’re unhappy with, what they’re satisfied with, their attitude towards what’s going on in the life of their country, even if they don’t recognize that as political.

I have asked, given that you brought up a challenge, maybe this is because I’ve been reading your blog for a long time, your social media interactions, but reading this book, I feel it comes from a sense of frustration on your part, in the way that politics, however we frame it, or the Russian people are understood. And it sounds like you’re trying to push back against a lot of our assumptions and tropes that we use, like around, you know, atomization and the apolitical and these types of things. Am I right with that sense?

We need to remember that most of what we read about most places in the world that are not the US, you know, they’re filtered through multiple layers. They’re filtered through the way the media decides to cover things, but even when it comes to scholarly research, there’s also a filter, you know, there’s kinds of truths, you said tropes, but we could also call them paradigms or truths that are widely accepted, particularly in political science, which is the big daddy of ways of looking at Russia. Although, you know, my book also responds, and tries to engage in dialogue with the dominant paradigms as they have been promulgated in anglophone political science. But absolutely, I’m also frustrated because, as I said, the whole reason for choosing the term everyday politics is that most of what gets heard and what gets visibility is this very top level of politics.

“Let’s try and work out what Putin is thinking, who has his ear, who he talks to in his bunker during COVID, was that why he started the war”;  it can get to a point where it’s as if he’s the only political actor in the country, and obviously that’s not true, that’s kind of almost a caricature, but, you know, if you want to get a book published, you’ve got to have Putin in the title, and obviously I didn’t want to do that. On the other hand, obviously, there’s maybe an unhealthy obsession with the most visible liberal political opposition actors, including the late Alexei Navalny, who I have a lot of respect for, what he did, and I write about this in the book, but again, it is a bit unhealthy because it tends to crowd out other grassroots activities.

These things may not appear overtly political, but of course are. If I am sitting in my little town, deindustrializing town, my Rust Belt town, thousands of kilometers from Moscow, and some oligarchic forces in Moscow want to make money from dumping trash in my neighborhood illegally, and I approach my elected representatives, and I get pushed back, you know, the grassroots organization of opposition to that, which is also part of what I write about in the book, is political, and is generally neglected in the way that journalists and researchers write about the political in Russia, which is all the more surprising because, very often, these kind of local actions are successful because the whole political atmosphere in Russia is very brittle and febrile, and actually quite often elected politicians, if there is pushback, there is some kind of compromise or backing down for various reasons, which maybe we won’t get into now,

But there’s all kinds of political stuff going on in Russia, and then we can actually find out something that is surprising perhaps to some people, which is that even as the Russia state becomes more and more repressive, and tries to control all kinds of different things going on, you know, from what messaging app you use in your phone, to what kind of on-demand video you access, despite all of these things, people are not passive, and that’s a problem, again, if we talk about the word “trope”, there is an unhelpful, and I would say unhealthy trope even in scholarship, that is, Russians are depoliticised, atomised, and passive. Of course, there is something about that that’s true: people are quite scared often to get toe-to-toe with the powers that be because they have a huge coercive apparatus. But at the same time, that leads us down some dangerous pathways in assuming that Russians are not just coerced, but conformist, and coopted into supporting the war on Ukraine.

 So let’s dispel some of those myths, and go down to the local level. You already mentioned the successful story, but at Archangelsk and the trash scandal, and people’s pushback against it, there was of course kind of couched in this, like, as an environmental issue, but we could say that it’s also a political, deeply political issue. Could you tell us some more of these successful stories? I just want to feel better about today.

This is really frustrating because I was pitching an article, to an American journal, of political science, and they were like, well, there isn’t really anything going on, you know, no protest is possible. And then I just opened a social media feed, and I see that in the Far East, there’s street protests by local residents in a small city against the local authorities because the local authorities are allegedly poisoning stray dogs. So again, is that political? Well, yes, it is because although it’s a little bit like your example of environmentalism in Arkhangelsk protecting the local environment there; maybe it’s a moral objection to what’s going on, but it is also inherently political because it’s showing that people are not only unhappy with what their local authority is doing, they are willing to publicly show up and express their political subjectivity. We might believe that we have very little say when it comes to elections and the cross that we put on our ballot paper may or may not make any difference. We’re not necessarily interested in a wholesale change of elected officials at national level, you know, you very rarely get people say, oh, well, you know, I want the whole system to collapse, right? Because the system, the system has offered relative economic and social stability.

If I then link it to my own work, so I mainly focus on two small towns in the Kaluga region and I pseudonymise them, I obscure exactly where they are, but it’s a little bit like the our Arkhangelsk case, but on a smaller scale, a trash disposal site was located in a very small village in a protected environmental area, close to a national park, and that was successfully fought against by local people. And that was relatively recent. That was less than 6 years ago, but that really culminated in them being able to use legal, protest, organisational, social media, social network, ways and means to push back And the private company and the Moscow government

that was backing the private company, they backed off. Not before trying to use the security services and the police to intimidate these local people. We’re not saying it’s all, you know, ideal and wonderful; it just shows that political power, sometimes we call it associative and structural political power, is there, even if it’s not visible, even if many Russians themselves don’t believe that they can do this. But once it starts, once they get involved, they often feel empowered by this and then go on to become much more politically radicalised. And that, again, doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re massively anti-regime, but they become politically aware and politically empowered in ways that they weren’t before.

So, do you think that the invisibility of everyday politics in Russia is a result of certain, say, expectations coming from political science or Western observers more generally that say, politics or political action comes in this form, say, like a street protest or showing up at elections. So, I guess what I’m trying to ask is that, do you think that scholars and wider audiences sort of try to cast political action and the forms that are expected or are usual to them onto a different space and that’s where the invisibility is coming from? Or is it just a result of stereotypes about Russians as passive, more general?

I think that’s part of it. I mean, it’s multi-layered and that’s the problem with it because you start talking about this and people are like, well, you know, Russians don’t do this or Russians don’t do that. So, it’s multi-faceted, unfortunately, cultural stereotypes, pernicious cultural stereotypes of which I’ve mentioned, you know, passivity and atomization. And again, we should say that the protests in 2022 against the invasion of Ukraine were unprecedented. This is extremely repressive authoritarian regime and yet people still risked a lot to come out. And a lot of people were arrested and their lives were ruined as a result. And that then leads into these impossible expectations that we in the West often impose on Russians, taking a cue rightly from the extremely courageous and successful protests in Ukraine in 2004 and then 2013, 2014.

It’s almost like, you know, Russian society is almost the victim of Ukraine’s success in that, you know, the Ukrainians were able to do it. Why can’t the Russians do it? Well, you know, the Russians did what they could. And they live in a much more [repressive environment] even in 2022, even in 2014, even in 2004. They lived in a state which had a much higher coercive capacity. And yet, there are still protests going on. We won’t call them protests. They’re actions. They’re anti-war actions going on. They have to be clandestine. And that’s the next point, the third point, if you like.

The problem is with political science and just the media in general’s coverage of all processes. It needs something really visible and sound-biteable and newsworthy. So somebody risking it all to go out, night after night and graffiti, “I love Ukraine”, in their local environment. Okay, that might not mean very much to Ukrainians and I totally accept that. And they might say that’s totally inadequate. And I understand that. But it’s still political and it’s still something that is really important to maintaining a sense of purpose and solidarity among the many, many, many millions of people in Russia that do not support the war and feel a strong sense of shame and emotional hurt for what is being done in their names to Ukraine.

So there’s all kinds of stuff going on. Also, like I said, it’s not avertly about the war, but for example, these protests against dogs being euthanized. A lot of that just gets completely ignored. And I was saying just the other day when I was in Russia to an activist and I just was like, yeah, is anybody in Russia doing this collating and collecting this data and they’re like, “no, it’s up to you”. And I’m like, well, are we doing it? And no, we’re not. There’s not really as far as I’m aware, a good protest database.

And this then leads into the next point, which is researchers are really lazy. And I mean, I know journalists are lazy because they tell me that as well. And maybe researchers are almost as lazy as journalists in that they want a quick win. They want an off-the-shelf database or they want a pre-existing survey. Maybe if they get grant money, they’ll pay for a survey. But again, it’s also like, we’ve got these things set up to quickly gather data. So we can quickly gather data about this favourite subject of political scientists, “do Russians support the war?”

Something that I’ve kind of hooked on several years ago. And that is our as outsiders, and maybe even within Russia itself, but as outsiders, a lot of us, particularly those who have problems or against the Putin system, Putin regime, we’re looking for a revolutionary subject. We’re searching for that individual or social group that’s going to tip the scales against this system. And I remember just in my years of observing Russian politics, it was the middle class, and then it was the youth, and then it was…, it’s this constant, searching and searching and searching. And I think that’s another reason why we missed the trees for the forest, maybe, or however to put it.

 I agree. And again, we can’t help here, but like call back to the life and death of Navalny, and how, as I said, I’ve got respect for what he did, especially the building of capacity and the training of activists. But his personality, again, was an example of that, you know, people pinned their hopes on him, as this revolutionary subject. And then that bias and that unhelpful kind of blinkeredness in coverage extends to these other figures.

Yeah, so let’s talk about these characters other than Navalny and Putin, other than the protagonist and then antagonist of this drama. Let’s talk about your interlocutors

[tbc…]

Introducing Everyday Russian Politics: 1. Entangled Activism and Agonism

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A very unlikely and unnoticed (by the media and scholars) mobilization by untypical activists against the expansion of a polluting factory

In a series of narrowly-focused posts I will talk about three aspects of my new book – 1., the use of up-close methods of long immersion – I argue there’s analytical power in ethnography to show the broader significance of neglected aspects of Russian social and political reality, 2., the part of my argument where bring together three interacting concepts: ressentiment, defensive consolidation and social striving. And 3., the evidence in the book of deep and enduring political engagement and practices which are underappreciated in a lot of coverage on Russia. In the last four chapters of the book, but also in my coverage of municipal politicians earlier on, I make claims relating to the idea of micropolitical content as it emerges in articulations and actions on the ground, and largely aside electoral politics (in a parallel relationship). (The relationship to ‘the political’ of Chantal Mouffe’s work, I defer to the end of this post as most readers are less interested in the theory stuff).

This post, though, is mostly about ‘activists’ and broadly from around 2018 to the present.

One claim is about a particular form of learning and reorientation by self-consciously ‘politically-active’ people, but also by people who deny they are political, and yet engage in ‘civicness’ nonetheless. The continual reinvention and recasting of activism is like different forms of movement – movement from electoralism to environmentalism, from in-person to online, from parties and groups to cells. This is maybe one of the most interesting ‘lessons’ of the ‘Russian case’.  Without longitudinal ethnography (which after all is just a form of immersive process tracing) it’s easy to accept the common sense that the centre has defeated nearly all forms of politically conscious actions not under its control. And I reject that. Why? Because in my book and elsewhere, I show that the gains of electoral organizing by people who were inspired by people like Navalny (but also by others) are not lost, but even now have been transformed several times over. This transformation occurs when they come into contact with new causes like environmental degradation, new conjunctural situations like military mobilization, and new situations of repressiveness, and that includes economic exploitation.

Just to unpack for a moment, I can give the example from my interviews of how Navalnyite electoral administrative ‘capacity’, for want of a better word, even after 2020, was partly resynthesized by people interested in more agitational orientation in labour activism: picketing tactics, political education through literature distribution and even just online ‘slacktivism’. People internalized lessons from one context and applied them in another. Or, more typically, the lessons ‘transmutated’ themselves. Another time this meant lessons drawn from ecological actions relating to tactical victories like Shiyes – the opposition of garbage transport to the north – were carried over into anti-war activism (decentered and devolved tasks with precautions taken to protect those on the edge and firewall them from hardcore activists).

This unpredictable and dynamic process was also shaped by the authoritarian push to remove activists from public space. As personal, but also semi-public Telegram channels and many group chats, became the only fora available for the discussion of causes, this repressive escalation actually did activists favours because it attracted a broader ‘insulted and injured’ audience, and enabled reflection and discussion on a wider range of political causes and possibilities. The irony is that ‘flattening’ the public sphere in Russia actually facilitated more intense and more fruitful sharing of experience among political actives – albeit online and in private.

But what is private? People I talked to often spoke of living the struggle as ‘more real’ even in the virtual sphere because it was experienced more intensely and with more solidarity and less loneliness. Over time this online response to repression then translated into better organized, more mobile, and more targeted and strategically-considered action – from the aforementioned Shiyes, to anti-war stickering, to small-cell sabotage (full disclosure – I have NO informants who do this nor knowledge of them).

Using my own fieldwork interviews with diverse activists, most of whom remain in Russia, I build on the empirical work by other researchers like Tereshina, Slabinski and Kuzmina. They emphasise how Shyies 2018-2020 heralded a shift towards more affective connection – catalysed by exclusion from electoral and public protest in cities. A mobilizational imperative that drew a broader group of activists together from across the country and across the political spectrum. Looser politics, yet affectively closer-knit, became a widely experienced paradox. I call this ‘experiential entanglement’ and I started to explore it in my previous co-edited book with Regina Smyth and Andrei Semenov.

One of my own case studies relates to a modest campaign of opposition to rubbish dumping in Kaluga region. But in terms of organizing, and also in terms of affective connections between activists of different stripes, people reference the lessons of Shiyes, and of the success of Navalny’s electoral clusters to train and bring together activists. They even refer to Shiyes as a kind of Russian Maidan – but more narrowly in terms of how it showed to activists a glimpse of the horizontalist, accretionist, triangulatory forms of contention – and here I purposely avoid the normal terminology of political opportunity structure. At the same time, I remain mindful of the lessons from political science of how dynamic the mechanisms of contention can be. Activists are not just subjects of collective action, but the products of unpredictable combinations.

It’s worth quoting at length a rather rambling talk from the field to show the complexity of what I mean by unpredictably combinations. Polina is speaking in 2022:

As this post is already long, here I want to return to the use of the term ‘the political’. This term for me levels the ground to look at the political content of people’s lives as equal in significance to just ‘politics’. And how I use this term relates to Chantal Mouffe’s criticism of overly narrow conceptions of political relations. If ‘politics’ is institutional practices and discourses – realms from which almost all Russians are excluded, ‘the political’ is a dimension of antagonism inherent in all human society. The war on Ukraine only makes more intense Russians’ deliberations about what kind of ‘good’ society can be imagined. ‘Political’ discussions about the good are part of everyday experience, even in ‘post-democracies’, even in militarized dictatorships. Like Pierre Clastres’ (1977) classic critique of Western notions of politics, I insist that contention and negotiation, along with conflicts about the meaning of the ‘good’, can be grasped beyond the normative frames of formal politics in the public sphere. Politics exist beyond a narrow idea of ‘hierarchical subordination’ of the individual to power.

If you recall my recent review of Denys Gorbach’s work, I agree with him that an updating, or correction, of Mouffe’s concept needs to ground ‘everyday politics’ in material processes – like the experience of workplace exploitation, the broken infrastructure of towns, the way economic rents are now extracted directly from citizens via utility bills, the learning experience of people engaging with the state’s monetary offering for soldiers. From these experiences, many demands remain unsatisfied, and a chain of equivalence can be traced towards populist politics from everyday politics. Whether critical of Mouffe or not, most agree that her work should be read as a call to look more carefully and seriously at the construction of counter-hegemonic politics, and its potential for building left populism. Furthermore, Mouffe’s contribution should be a cornerstone of any critique of depoliticization, whether in the USA or Russia.

In the case of Russia, most scholars referencing Mouffe do so from the assumption that the hegemonic project of ‘strong Russia’ above all, is the successful culmination of the first two Putin terms. Nonetheless, even among those few who think seriously about the discursive construction of the new Russia note how ambiguous it is in practice: ‘shot through with intense doubts and misgivings about the very possibility of a strong Russia’ (Müller 2009). Olga Baysha implies (albeit indirectly) that discursive domination in Russia comes up against hard material limits in the miserable lived experience of so many millions of citizens and the ‘loyalty’ of citizens was mainly based of fear of losing minimal benefits rather than positive identification. In other words, like in Ukraine to 2014, the complete ‘normalization’ and naturalization of the regime remained quite weak. The liberal opposition undermined itself in 2012 when it pursued an exclusivist progressive discourse in the electoral protests against Putin (Baysha’s point, which I agree with). They were afraid of popular mobilization, not in favour of it. On the stability of the hegemonic order since 2012, people tend to forget that while the Russian constitutional arrangement has been successful in acting as if the interests and values of diverse parts of Russian society have been rationally reconciled, massive social conflicts simmer away on so many backburners that the roles of ‘chefs de partie’ (regional governors) are now a pretty thankless political posting in the Russian Federation. Too many pots are boiling over and the restaurant kitchen is open-plan. The point of my book is to say we should look at the various pots and why and how they’re simmering, rather than just looking at the rotating chefs.

Russia: a natural experiment in the limits of decentralized resistance and activism

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Moscow, October 2022. Graffiti on fence reads: 'There is always a choice'.

Moscow, October 2022. Graffiti on fence reads: ‘There is always a choice’.

A curious fact: the most demotivated and depressed of all those opposed to Putin’s regime are among the formerly most politically-engaged activists. These are the people who devoted their lives to causes like labour rights, environmentalism, and socialist alternatives. The people I talk to for my latest book project.

I talk to them, in person, or now more likely on Telegram and they say things like: ‘Russia is now a fascist, or proto-fascist state. The only option is emigration. We lost the country.’ Most of all they fear not mobilization, although there is evidence forced mobilization is happening of oppositionists and that it has a high chance of resulting in death. They most of all fear the long prison sentences for anti-war speech and see no point in sacrificing their lives futilely.

Why are they so pessimistic? They believe public space is completely closed off. They feel risks now are too high ‘we are being hunted’, one said, and deleted me from their contact list. Perhaps most significantly, they believe they lost their networks – built up over decades of nomadic opposition. So much has been written about the potential of internet and smart-phone technology to facilitate social movements and change, but with the fast learning of the Russian techno-security apparatus (partly thanks to Covid – Galina Orlova and I wrote about it here), activists are often so paranoid they break all electronic contact with each other.

Delicate webs? Easily broken? But until the invasion of Ukraine they had survived the depredations of Putin’s securitizing efforts to break them. The open war against activists can be traced back to the authorities’ abuse of Article 228 of Russia’s Criminal Code to imprison journalists and activists. This anti-narcotics law was an undisguised weapon to imprison opponents. It is even known as ‘the people’s article’ because so many young people are imprisoned under it. Some examples here. But before the war, threats like arrest on planted drugs charges did not break activists. In my experience is was only after repeated arrests for protests that some activists stepped back, but even then they carried on in other ways.

So people are scared and demotivated. But broken networks are actually a sign of the relative success previously of decentralized and horizontal connections between people opposed to Putin; people who maybe met in person once a year could successful collaborate in opposition despite being thousands of kilometres from each other in Nizhnii and Piter, for example. I write about one case like this in a forthcoming book on activism, co-edited with my colleagues Andrei Semenov and Regina Smyth. Also, ‘weak’ netness, but strong ‘catness’ (strongly shared opposition) can mean that, like in the brain after damage, connections can spontaneously repair and reform. Everyone strongly anti-regime knows the half-dozen activists who were active in the places I did my research. They can find each other again – if they didn’t leave Russia. If they can come back. If they won’t be sent to prison. It’s easier to imagine the end of the world right now, than the end of Putinism. But we have to try. These are some of the questions my book project on micropolitics engages with – what happens when everything except the most micro of politics is impossible? How does netness sustain itself? How and why are Russian activists ‘nomadic’? Yes the nod to Deleuze is intentional.

Russian activism through a micro-scale and social media lens

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still from Vestnik Buri’s video on Sergei Guriev “An Apostle of the Free Market”

When I was writing recently here and here and here about Navalny, what was at the front of my mind, but mainly left unsaid in those pieces was the vibrant activism of the far less visible Left in Russia. So, to try to restore balance in this blog, I’ll say a little bit about my scholarly turn of attention to left-activism. After all, this blog is supposed to reflect my core research agenda – which is the micro-scale and the ‘everyday’ experience in society that is often overlooked in work on Russia, but which, I would argue is a good barometer of social change itself.  

The Belarus protests are a good example of how we can focus too much on the visible elite actions (and here Navalny is an ‘elite’, if I may) and not enough on the interplay between, dare I say it, structure and ‘ordinary’ agency. I was also interested in the Belarus case because of the possibility of coalitions between different parts of Belarus society. The jury appears to still be out, but Volodia Artiukh’s piece from late last summer shows some potential futures and pathways. I engaged with Artiukh and others because my hunch is that like in Russia small successes of ‘political’ unions can have an outsize indirect effect on worker-militancy more widely and on ‘traditional’ unions themselves (who start feeling they have to up game). But I don’t really know much about Belarus. Update here from an interview with activist group ZabastovkaBY from March 2021 that mentions the importance of informal associations of workers.

Late summer 2020 I also started writing about left activists and the Moscow food courier strike. My main argument was that there is clear evidence of ‘learning’ by activists in ‘political’ unions that this learning can be transferred to completely new terrain (the gig/service economy). Not a very original argument, but again, not something many scholars are working in Russia, so why not build a case study around it. One of the left activists I studied for the courier protests got arrested around the time of the recent Navalny protests. However, this was a clear political punishment not related to Navalny, but because of the union organiser’s solidarity action in support of Azat Miftakhov – an anarchist student stitched up because of his expressive eyebrows.  Subsequently, the union organiser made a very detailed and evocative youtube interview on his experience in a ‘spetspriemnik’ (holding jail for administrative prisoners).

The effective use of social media resources – both for organising, but also then reflecting on the experience of arrest and providing practical advice to future arrestees – reflects another aspect of my interest in this case.  In parallel to the attention Navalny gets as a smooth media operator (perhaps too smooth), anticapitalist Russian YouTube has undergone a real breakthrough (as far as anticapitalist media can be said to breakthrough at all!). That’s not really the main subject of my writing, but in passing I reflect on the advantages of a loose affiliational model of activism sustained by ‘transverse’ online communication. That is to say – one way of hanging on in the hostile (to leftists) environment of social media/journalistic circles is the proliferation of different leftist mini-media projects that might look like isolated corals in a sea of liberal smirk, but which actually exchange direct (and offline) communication, personnel, and experience, online. This is based on the ‘streamer’ model – on platforms like Twitch gamers build (million-strong) subscriber bases for their live streams of video games by engaging in small yet constant acts of solidarity, mutual aid, cooperation, collaboration, and promotion of like-minded others. I hope to come back to this topic again, but in the meantime, spare a thought for the many, many activists (of different stripes) who take great personal risks, but get little attention.