This unaltered story [1] was originally published on OpenDemocracy.org.
License [2]: Creative Commons 4.0 - Attributions/No Derivities/Int'l.
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What’s new about Russia’s new protests?
By: []
Date: 2021-08
Earlier this year, opposition leader Alexey Navalny’s return to Russia provoked a political crisis and mass unsanctioned rallies. It seemed that Russia’s protest movement had reached a new level: a large number of new protesters, mass participation in cities and towns across the country, and, finally, new slogans, themes and emotions – all this pointed to a new development in the country’s democratic movement.
But the latest unsanctioned protests, held in Russian cities on 21 April, seemed to blur the novelty and scale of the new protest wave. This protest took on a new, angrier mood – anger against Russian law enforcement responsible for violently dispersing protesters and the elite’s luxury lifestyle mixed into a blend of class hatred. For many, it felt if the protest’s new ideas and emotions, which a few months ago had appeared a guarantee of the movement’s further development, had disappeared somewhere. Many, it seems, experienced a feeling of disappointment in the aftermath of spring 2021.
New research allows us to look at Russia’s latest protests differently – without unnecessary pessimism or excessive optimism. Together with the Monitoring of Contemporary Folklore, Public Sociology Laboratory, an independent research initiative, conducted 89 interviews at rallies on 21 April in defence of Alexey Navalny both inside and outside the country. These interviews made us ask the question: is what’s new about these protests really so new?
As we show, the rallies on 21 April alluded to the main parameters of Russia’s protest movement – the mix of existing protest structures from the last major protest wave in 2011-13, and the new elements that could change the protest movement in the future.
Russia’s new people
Quantitative polls conducted at three rallies – two in January 2021 and one in April – by two organisations, Monitoring of Actual Folklore (MAF) and White Counter, showed that many people who had not previously protested came out to the 2021 protests.
For example, in Moscow, at the rallies on 23 and 31 January, immediately after Navalny’s return and arrest, ‘new’ protesters made up 42% and 38%, respectively, of the crowd. These numbers allowed analysts to speculate that discontent had grown, affecting new segments of Russian society.
Qualitative interviews with protest participants, however, revealed that the ‘newcomers’ at these rallies were not new to protest politics in general: their protest sentiments and sympathy for Navalny emerged at least several years before 2021.
Just over a third of the protesters we interviewed at the rallies on 21 April 2021 began to attend rallies for the first time this year. However, only a few of them can be called ‘new protesters’ in the full sense of the word: they were not actively involved in Russia’s protest agenda and were not planning to attend protests until Navalny was poisoned in autumn 2020 or even imprisoned in January 2021.
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