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Moscow in Movement is the first exhaustive study of social movements, protest, and the state-society relationship in Vladimir Putin's Russia. Beginning in 2005 and running through the summer of 2013, the book traces the evolution of the relationship between citizens and their state through a series of in-depth case studies, explaining how Russians mobilized to defend human and civil rights, the environment, and individual and group interests: a process that culminated in the dramatic election protests of 2011–2012 and their aftermath. To understand where this surprising mobilization came from, and what it might mean for Russia's political future, the author looks beyond blanket arguments about the impact of low levels of trust, the weight of the Soviet legacy, or authoritarian repression, and finds an active and boisterous citizenry that nevertheless struggles to gain traction against a ruling elite that would prefer to ignore them.
On a broader level, the core argument of this volume is that political elites, by structuring the political arena, exert a decisive influence on the patterns of collective behavior that make up civil society—and the author seeks to test this theory by applying it to observable facts in historical and comparative perspective.
Moscow in Movement will be of interest to anyone looking for a bottom-up, citizens' eye view of recent Russian history, and especially to scholars and students of contemporary Russian politics and society, comparative politics, and sociology.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780804792448 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Stanford University Press |
| Publication date: | 08/20/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 296 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Moscow in Movement
Power and Opposition in Putin's Russia
By Samuel A. Greene
STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior UniversityAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-9244-8
CHAPTER 1
The Puzzle of Russian Civil Society
An Introduction
On Saturday, July 15, 2006, as the leaders of the Group of Eight industrialized democracies gathered in St. Petersburg for their annual summit, attended by aides and throngs of journalists, the city itself was disturbingly quiet. Along the city's elegant main avenue, Nevsky Prospekt, squadrons of riot police in full battle gear stood on every second street corner. Police buses and armored personnel carriers idled on the side streets. There was not a hint of the antiglobalization riots that had plagued other cities unlucky enough to host G8 summits, but the police were ready nonetheless.
On that same morning, three metro stops to the north of Nevsky Prospekt, Petersburgers lazily spilled out of the underground onto Krestovsky Island, one of the city's most beloved parks, occupying almost an entire island in the delta where the Neva River flows into the Gulf of Finland. Jugglers, clowns, and balloon twisters amused children; a small marching band played Strauss; teenagers lounged on benches or skated down the alleyways; and everyone went about the business of enjoying St. Petersburg's short but glorious summer.
Some of those leaving the metro, however, walked straight through the park, the entire length of the island, until they reached the city's old football stadium at the far end. They made their way into a small tent, received a green name tag, and filed through a metal detector to get into the stadium complex. There, they joined several hundred protestors—almost all Russian—who had gathered to show the world that they were not part of the show the Kremlin was putting on for the G8. They wanted nothing to do with a regime that fixed elections, shuttered independent media outlets, jailed political opponents, and continued to call itself a democracy. The Russia that President Vladimir Putin was showing his colleagues from the vantage of a lavishly restored tsarist palace was not their Russia. Theirs was an "Other Russia," a concept born only days earlier at a meeting in an equally lavish Moscow hotel, bringing together opposition leaders from across the political spectrum.
Of those who had been present in Moscow, only one—the longtime human rights activist Lev Ponomarev—came to St. Petersburg. Many of the activists from around the country who had planned to come never made it, having been pulled from planes, trains, and buses along the way. Some had their internal passports confiscated. Others were barricaded in their apartments. Those who did make it to the stadium found themselves surrounded by the Gulf of Finland on three sides and a long, high fence guarded by riot police on the other, with only one gate. The city authorities had banned a planned march from the stadium through the city to the cruiser Aurora, the ship that had launched the 1917 Revolution when it fired on the Winter Palace. Small groups of participants attempted to stage running protests in the city center but were followed by the police as they left the stadium and detained as soon as they emerged from the metro anywhere near Nevsky Prospekt. They would not be a part of the Kremlin's show, but the Kremlin ensured there would be no other.
As the day wore on, the organizers in the stadium gathered the remaining participants to discuss what to do. A few television cameras—all of them foreign—were present and ready to report on whatever the protestors did, if only they could decide on a plan of action. Holding an unsanctioned march was clearly impossible; the police would never let them out of the stadium. Eventually, two proposals were put up for a vote. The first was to march in circles around the stadium track ten times, in a symbolic show of futility. The second was to stage a sit-in at the gates of the stadium in the hopes that the image of sitting protestors behind the iron bars of the fence and surrounded by police would garner at least some publicity. In the end, the protestors selected the second option, climbed out of the stadium, and made their way to the fence. There, they sat down, placards in hand, and began shouting, "Rights aren't given; rights are taken!" and "We need another Russia!"
Bit by bit, the crowd began to dissipate, protestors filing back through the metal detector, pulling off their green name tags, and heading back through the park to the metro. Many of those who forgot to remove the name tags were detained when they reemerged elsewhere in the city, just as a precaution. Pictures of the protest were broadcast in Germany, France, and Italy. In Russia, however, no one noticed. In the park on Krestovsky Island, where the band was still playing Strauss when the last protesters left, a boy asked his father why there were so many police down by the stadium.
"Must be a football game," the father answered. "The police have to keep an eye on the hooligans."
* * *
Until tens and then hundreds of thousands of Russians poured onto the streets of Moscow in December 2011 to protest what they perceived to be a rigged parliamentary election, the foregoing picture was the predominant view of Russian social and political mobilization. Indeed, the idea of the weakness of Russian civil society remains well established and widely accepted. Russians, on the whole, do not organize and are difficult to mobilize, and they do not tend to join movements or participate in public protests (see, for example, Fish 1995; Domrin 2003; McFaul and Treyger 2004). Understanding why something does not occur, however, is perhaps the most difficult task in the social sciences. Some attempts have been made to explain the void of civic mobilization in Russia, predominantly by pointing either to macrolevel social phenomena (low levels of trust and social capital, for example) or macrolevel political phenomena (the resource curse or repression).
When nonlinear events occur—events that our prior conceptions did not allow us to predict, events that seem to be "out of the blue"—the natural tendency is to focus our analysis entirely on the future, to assume that at the moment of the departure from the norm something inherently unforeseeable happened to shift the narrative, and to seek to understand the "new world" in which we have evidently arrived. Indeed, much of what has been written about the Russian protest wave of 2011 and 2012 pointed to purportedly new phenomena—new communication media, new leaders, new wealth, a new global context—as the proximate cause of what prior wisdom had failed to envisage.
Truly understanding where we are, however, requires correcting our understanding of where we were. Even as we look to the future and try to understand what it holds in store, we must ask what recent events tell us about the past. Before we accept the idea that the present condition is entirely novel, we should at least consider the notion that it has roots in what came before, roots which we, for whatever reason, failed as social scientists to notice, or at least to deem important. Such a reevalutation may, we can hope, reduce the magnitude of the analytical mistakes we will make in the future.
As with all rules, there are and always were exceptions to the blanket explanations put forward for the failure of civil society in Russia. Along the margins, in unexpected corners and pockets of society, there has been throughout Putin's rule activism and engagement, and it was often sustained and sometimes fruitful. These exceptions are the focus of this volume, which asks whether the rare instances in which Russian civil society does succeed can shed some light on the question of why, in the vast majority of cases, it does not.
Russia, by most accounts, has spent most of the twenty-first century to date institutionalizing the middle ground between democratic and authoritarian governance. In that respect, Russia resembles what Marina Ottaway (2003) termed a "semi-authoritarian regime," or what Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way (2010) called "competitive authoritarianism" and a "hybrid regime." There is a large degree of individual freedom in Russia, as well as significant (though diminishing) freedom of speech, association, and assembly—all of which are typically cited as the prerequisites of a "democratic" civil society. There has also been significant (though diminishing) funding available for a large (though shrinking) number of initiatives, likewise a widely recognized pillar of organized civic activity. However, whereas Soviet dissident groups relied on networks of dedicated volunteers, who were able to exert pinpointed pressure on the government and frequently achieved their goals (whether freedom of emigration, tighter ecological controls, or the clandestine distribution of articles), civil society in twenty-first-century Russia has broadly failed to match up in all of these categories. Thus, if we judge by the ability to mobilize public opinion and support and achieve defined goals (other than the attraction of grant money), civil society in Putin's Russia has in some ways been less effective at achieving its aims than it was during the Soviet Union, when none of the previously mentioned freedoms existed. That, surely, appears to be a paradox.
From the perspective of the social scientist, this paradox is exacerbated by the lack of useful theory. The broadest studies of democracy, in order to achieve generalized relevance, take their definitions and categorizations to a level of abstraction that is scarcely useful to someone trying to understand why a particular country falters. Given its narrower focus and emphasis on dynamic processes, the specific study of democratic transition is often more useful. Transitology, however, also has its limits, a common criticism being that it "may be too 'political' a framework, in the sense that it ignores how underlying economic and social structures may persist despite 'democratic change' and thus subvert political outcomes" (Kubicek 2000). And yet even the most recent political economy studies of democratization have been unable to identify causal variables that go beyond the traditional triumvirate of economic modernization, political history, and culture/religion, none of which is particularly helpful in applied analysis of country cases or small-N comparisons (Borooah and Paldam 2007).
The even narrower field of postcommunist studies has yielded some valuable insights, particularly regarding the development of formal institutions, including political parties and infrastructure underpinning privatized economies. It is argued with increasing force and frequency that Russian citizens suffer from a postcommunist syndrome, of which all of the previously mentioned pathologies are common symptoms. Public initiative of the kind generally associated with civil society is seen to be considerably lower in the former Soviet Union and Central and Eastern Europe than in other regions of the world (see, most prominently, Howard 2003). More broadly put, the entire postcommunist space—even in those countries that have created the most open political systems—appears to suffer from a deficit of democratic participation (see, for example, Anderson, Fish, et al. 2001; Grzymala-Busse and Luong 2002; Innes 2002). The most common explanation put forward for this generally centers on the problem of trust: Russians and other postcommunist denizens are inclined to distrust both their neighbors and themselves (Rose 1994; Sztompka 1998; Lovell 2001).
But the identification of postcommunist commonalities also has the unfortunate effect of obscuring important differences. And nowhere has this been more the case than in the study of civil society, where supposedly low levels of trust and social capital are cited as a blanket explanation for the regionwide weakness of civic initiative (Howard 2003). The issue of trust notwithstanding, there is significant variation in the level and nature of civil–societal activity both within countries and from one postcommunist country to another that cannot be easily accounted for by discrepancies in the degree of trust.
While the bulk of the literature on civil society tends to focus on broad, society-based explanations such as trust, some of the literature on transition—both within and outside the transitology tradition—has begun to focus more attention on the behavior of elites as the source of civic weakness and atomization, with particular reference to Russia. Thus, both McFaul and Treyger (2004) and Kitschelt and Smyth (2002) suggest that the withdrawn and self-centered nature of elite competition in many postcommunist countries, driven by the peculiarities of their political economies, effectively pulls the rug out from under potential civic initiatives. Indeed, while contemporary civil society theory tends to look in other directions, there is significant support for such considerations in social movement theory, where Tarrow places the behavior of elites as a central element in forming the opportunity structure of potential civic initiative (Tarrow 1998). What is missing from these arguments, however, is a detailed study of the specific processes and mechanisms that link one to the other.
What We Know about Russian Civil Society
Beyond the general categorizations mentioned earlier of Russian civil society as weak, what do we really know about the processes that weaken it? By now, most analysts have abandoned notions that the political changes occurring since 1991 have constituted a democratizing revolution. The views on why democratization has failed are varied, and although they are dealt with more fully in Chapter 3, they can be generally summed up as follows. In one camp, Peter Reddaway and Dmitri Glinski, joined by Marshall Goldman, blame undemocratic elites for capturing and perverting a process of reform, subjugating political democratization to economic liberalization (Reddaway and Glinski 2001; Goldman 2003a). To this, others add structural elements, such as the "resource curse" of oil, gas, and mineral wealth, which stymied true economic liberalization and discouraged the development of parliamentary democracy (Fish 2005). Still others blame Russia's democrats themselves for being insufficiently determined, organized, and unified (Garcelon 2005).
All regimes need a power base, which is simultaneously the source of its support, the object of its control, and the group with which it will most intensely interact. In a Soviet Communist regime, although the classical conception has been that the regime's power base was the Party, the desire of the regime to maintain comprehensive control over all aspects of economic, political, and social life means effectively that its power base was the entire population. Support for the regime did not have to be active; the way things were arranged, the mundane acts of participation in everyday life were all that was required. In the words of Vaclav Havel, the Soviet state "occupies and swallows everyone, so that all should become integrated within it, at least through their silence" (Havel 1988: 390). As the Kadarists said in Hungary, if you're not against us, you're with us. This engagement with the whole of the population—which is the hallmark of any truly totalitarian regime—leaves open the possibility that the population at large can become a source of opposition, embodied in civil society; this is, arguably, what occurred in 1989 throughout much of Central and Eastern Europe.
In Putin's Russia, political competition exists, but it is closed, not so much in the sense of barriers to entry (though these obtain) as in the sense that the state organizes politics in such a way as to prevent competitors from creating a power base that draws support from outside the limited sphere of "administrative resources." Thus, in a limited authoritarian regime like post-Soviet Russia, the regime's power base is considerably narrower than it was during the Soviet period. It derives its support not from the broad participation of the population in a highly centralized economic system but from the subordination (through regulatory, forceful, or clientelistic relations) of crucial groups, such as the oligarchy, regional strongmen, or the security establishment. The population remains a resource, but one on which the state depends only indirectly, insofar as the oligarchy, for example, may depend on it for labor. One result is a dispersal of the potential targets of blame and protest for mass dissatisfaction. In the Russian context, this arrangement is particularly effective at insulating elites from the public and thus creating room for state autonomy, because the primary resources on which the oligarchy depends are natural, and thus even they depend on the population only indirectly. Civil society, then, finds itself doubly removed from access to power. A fundamental result of this arrangement is that the contemporary Russian state does not engage society at large. Indeed, it actively works to exclude the public from the processes of government, not so much to control the public as to prevent uncontrollable elements—such as a mass-based movement—from entering the political arena. Thus, if we conceive of civil society as a mediator between state and individual, the almost total disregard of one for the other might seem to obviate this function.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Moscow in Movement by Samuel A. Greene. Copyright © 2014 Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. Excerpted by permission of STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
Contents
List of Illustrations,Acknowledgments,
1. The Puzzle of Russian Civil Society: An Introduction,
2. Perspectives on Civil Society,
3. Russia's Potemkin Revolution,
4. Civil Society in Russia: What We Do and Do Not Know,
5. Private Brutality and Public Verdicts: Defending Human Rights in Russia,
6. Our Home Is Russia: Russia's Housing-Rights Movements,
7. Road Rage: Russia's Automotive Rebellion,
8. Seizing the Moment,
9. Conclusions,
Notes,
Works Cited,
Index,